Empire of Light

'What?'

'Even if a Magi ship was available, it's going to have to tow a ship with enough room for an expeditionary crew. There aren't any big enough, apart from the Mjollnir, and she already has her own superluminal drive. But, as you know, she's being prepped for a relief expedition to Ascension.'

'Really?' Corso thought hard for a moment. 'Put her up there, Ted.'

Lamoureaux complied, the galaxy fading to be replaced by an image of the Mjollnir, a colony-class frigate belonging to the Freehold. She was similar in appearance and construction to her sister-ships Agartha and Hyperion, both long since destroyed within the Nova Arctis system. She was also one of the few vessels in existence with the capacity to carry a significant proportion of Ascension's trapped population to safety, a task for which she was currently being readied at Ocean's Deep. Her maiden faster-than-light voyage had brought her here from Redstone to be refitted just for that purpose.

'The Mjollnir could do it, then?' said Corso, staring up at the floating image. 'How long before she's ready?'

'She's ready now,' Lamoureaux replied. 'Senator… at the very least, you'd need to get the authority of the Consortium's Central Trade Council as well as the Freehold Senate. And the fact is, they're not going to give it to us. If you think things are looking shaky for us now, I don't even want to think about what's going to happen if we commandeered the Mjollnir.'

'Screw the CTC,' Corso replied. 'And the Senate. I don't need to ask anyone's permission to commandeer her.'

Lamoureaux looked doubtful. 'How does that come about?'

'There are specific clauses relating to overriding emergencies. Just look them up. I think that beating Dakota's swarm to the Mos Hadroch, assuming that's really where it's headed, fits anyone's definition of an emergency.'

'It's going to break the Fleet Authority's back, if you do this,' Lamoureaux warned.

'Let me worry about that. How soon could we reach those coordinates with the Mjollnir?

Lamoureaux made a resigned sound. 'Two weeks there, more or less. And the same again to get back home.'

Corso stared back at him, thunderstruck. 'That fast? It's taken Dakota, what, two years to get seventeen thousand light-years?'

Lamoureaux shrugged. 'She didn't go in a straight line, Senator, because she had to hunt far and wide to find the Maker's trail. We've been sourcing data from the Magi ships that's helped us greatly increase the efficiency and reach of the drives coming out of the Tierra cache.'

'Then there's no other recourse. Who's in charge of the Mjollnir?'

'Eduard Martinez.'

Corso nodded, recognizing the name. 'I've met him,' he replied. 'Good, that might make things easier.' Martinez was very much a progressive in Freehold politics, which meant Corso might not have to replace him in command.

'But the Ascension relief operation?' Lamoureaux reminded him. 'The Mjollnir 's scheduled to be going there in the next couple of days. How are you going to square that with the Legislate?'

'It's a short-term loss for a long-term gain,' Corso replied.

Lamoureaux gave him a strange look, and Corso realized just how cold-hearted he'd sounded. 'If we save some people at Ascension instead of heading straight out to those coordinates, we might lose something that could save us all from the Emissaries,' he explained. 'If the Legislate doesn't want to think ahead, then I'm going to have to do it for them. Get hold of Martinez for me, and set up a secure, one-on-one tach-net link to Akiyama at the Office of Representatives while you're at it, and route it to my quarters. Flag it urgent and top-priority.'

'Senator, with the very greatest of respect, do you really think we can pull this off?'

Corso glanced back at Lamoureaux, as he headed for the door. 'You'd better hope we can, Ted. Because if we can't, we're screwed.'

Chapter Nine

The sun was low on the horizon. Cool wind teased her dark hair, while saltwater foamed and splashed over her bare toes where she sat at the water's edge, her baggy cotton trousers rolled up above her ankles. She knew, without looking, that further up the beach behind her stood a single-storey cabin on stilts, with tatami mats scattered welcomingly on its floor and a futon rolled up in one corner.

None of it was real, of course, but she didn't know who she was, so it hardly mattered. She knew something had been threatening her because, when she tried to remember where she'd been before the beach, all that came to her was a sense of unease and foreboding.

In the meantime, she knew she could happily wait here on the beach for ever.

Sometimes she glanced down at her arms and legs and didn't recognize them. The knowledge that something was missing – that some essential part of her had been lost for ever – slowly formed in the back of her mind, but somehow she didn't seem to feel anything about it: no anger, remorse or bitterness. Only the awareness that something that should have been there, now wasn't.

After a long while she remembered a star, angry and red, reaching out to swallow her. She remembered there had been machines like dark metal locusts filling the universe like a plague.

A little while later, she remembered dying. What might have been hours or days or years later, her name came back to her: Dakota. She formed the sound with her lips, working her jaws around it in ways that felt unfamiliar, as if trying the vowels out for size.

She turned, seeing that a bamboo table laden with fresh fruit stood near the cabin, and in that instant it was as if a switch was thrown inside her. Sudden hunger overwhelmed her, and she stood and walked over. Once she'd eaten her fill, she crawled inside the cabin, unrolled the futon and went to sleep.

She dreamed she was a little girl again. The cabin's open doorway and the strip of beach it framed became a tall window looking out on cobbled streets lined with buildings made of brick and steel. She lay with her head in her mother's lap, listening to the gentle rhythms of her parent's voice, while flakes of snow drifted down from out of a sky so pale it was almost white. The next time Dakota opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

She knelt naked on a rocky shore entirely unlike the one she had found herself on before. Faces and places that should have been familiar to her spun through her mind like pieces of a shredded book flung into the heart of a whirlwind. She was incomplete, an unfinished puzzle with missing pieces.

The air had a strange, coppery taste to it, and when she turned to look behind her, instead of a beach hut and table she saw only forbidding-looking cliffs topped with tangled blue-green flora. The roofs of buildings like gold-plated tombstones rose above the jungle, while the distant peaks of mountains were visible further inland.

She looked out to sea, and saw massive towers like minarets rising out of the ocean, several kilometres out from the shore. Something about them made her sure they were very, very old.

A Magi ship rested on the shore, looking as if it had been beached there. It dwarfed the nearby cliffs and towered far above her, its bulbous body angled upwards as it rested on its drive spines. Waves lapped against the curve of its partially submerged hull.

That was when Dakota realized the Magi ships were never going to let her die. She stood and stared up and down the beach, cold prickling her bare skin, and tried to remember what her mother's face had looked like. Nothing came to her except the memory of gazing out on to a snow-laden street. It seemed much of her life on Bellhaven had been reduced to that one sliver of memory; the rest was gone for ever.

Somehow, whatever essence – whatever fundamental core of self-identity – she had carried within her had been transported across the light-years and used to rebuild her. Her memories of a beach and a hut had been part of the process of integration, as they had started to put her fragmented memory back together. It shouldn't have worked, of course: she should have become a stumbling Frankenstein mess, a lopsided thing only half-alive, and yet here she was.