Empire of Light

'Three, two, one,' Nancy counted aloud, and a second later Ty felt his heart and lungs press up against his spine while a seemingly enormous force flattened his head back against his seat. The asteroid's surface disappeared out of his peripheral view as the launcher blasted away from it.

Thirty seconds. Nancy hit a second button and cut off the burn. The intense pressure lifted from Ty's body and they were weightless once more. He twisted around and saw how the asteroid had already shrunk into the distance. Even as he watched, something slammed into it for a third time, cleaving it like a lump of dried clay smashed with a hammer.

'Jesus and Buddha,' Nancy swore, sounding like she was on the verge of crying with relief. 'They can hear us again! I've got a cha

'Are they ready to jump out of the system?' asked Ty.

'I seriously fucking hope so. They're under attack, but no direct hits so far. Deceleration burn in ten, so get ready.'

Ty grabbed hold of his armrests as the launcher swivelled round in a slow, graceful arc until it was facing back the way they had come. No direct hits. He stared at the expanding cloud of debris that was now all that remained of the asteroid. If the Mjollnir had been hit by anything like that, there would be nothing left of it.

'Here we go,' said Nancy. 'In three… two… one.'

The launcher had not been built with comfort in mind. When the rockets cut out half a minute later, Ty twisted around to see the dirty-grey and black exterior of the Freehold starship fast expanding towards them. He could also make out a faint blue shimmer around the frigate's drive spines. More split-second bursts decelerated the launcher yet further, and soon the yawning mouth of a forward bay swallowed them up.

The bay doors slid shut over their heads and grappling arms reached out from the deck, locking on to the launcher and drawing it down into a cradle. Ty started to unstrap himself.

A deep thrumming sound rapidly resolved itself into a rush of air, but Ty waited until his suit gave him the signal before he pulled his helmet off, tasting welded metal and sweat as he sucked in a breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to get out of his suit. As he kicked away from the launcher and grabbed a handhold on the wall of the bay, he glanced across at Nancy, also with her helmet off, her face drenched in sweat.

'I'm sorry about Cesar,' was all he could say to her.

She shrugged, staring away across the bay. 'If it wasn't for him, we'd never have got that thing into the launcher.' She met his eyes. 'But if that thing's body isn't as valuable as you seem to think it is, he might have died for nothing. Can you live with that thought?'

He returned her gaze. 'Whatever it is the swarm's after, it's inside that Atn,' he replied. 'I promise you.'

Chapter Eleven

Several days after Dakota's encounter with Trader, the Magi ship that had resurrected her delivered her to the world known to humans as Derinkuyu, a major Skelite colony twenty-three light-years beyond the Consortium's borders.

The Skelites carved entire cities out of the deep bedrock of their worlds, creating warrens that extended far below the surface. Before the departure of the Shoal, the complex in which Dakota now found herself had been home to a small population of a few thousand human beings plus a smattering of Bandati and even, to her surprise, one or two Rafters drifting in their pressurized tanks. With the arrival of coreship refugees, the population had quadrupled overnight, spreading out to take up every last available inch of spare room in what Dakota suspected would be a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.

She wandered through a long, echoing concourse, its high arched ceiling supported by fluted stone pillars also carved directly out of the rock. Somewhere in the maze of shanty dwellings here was the Magi navigator who had agreed to act as her liaison.

Most of the dwellings she passed were constructed from scraps of plastic and metal, and even rough slabs of precariously balanced stone that looked like all they needed was a good hard push to send them tumbling onto their occupants with deadly results. Light came from a combination of glow-globes and what she suspected was a bioluminescent fungus spread in dense patches across the ceiling and upper parts of the towering pillars. Her nose was tickled by the varied smells from the dozens of cooking fires that splashed pale flickering light across the lower reaches of the pillars, carrying the scent of spices and blackened meat. She wondered if any of the people sleeping and talking and eating all around her really believed that the rescue they were almost certainly hoping for would ever come.

'Miss Merrick?'

She turned to see a figure looming out of the darkness, and knew immediately this was the man she was looking for. The figure resolved into an impossibly tall black man in his late twenties, with the ubiquitous shaved skull of a machine-head.

'Miss Merrick,' he repeated, now taking her hand with a smile. 'Leroy Rivers. It's wonderful to meet you at last.'

'I should be thanking you,' she replied. 'I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way around this place without help.'

'Nobody else knows you're here?' There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.

She shook her head. 'You're the only one I've told.'

Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. 'We should not delay. It's not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.'

She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. 'You're part of the relief operation?' she asked.

He laughed. 'That is the idea, but it's like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we've managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.'

'I see.'

'There is not enough room for all the refugees,' he continued, climbing into the driver's seat. 'We really need to expand into newer tu

'Why not?'

'They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,' he explained. 'That's their basic condition before they'll enter into any kind of negotiation.'

Dakota nodded. 'Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don't want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.'

She climbed into the passenger's seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. 'I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someone I've never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean's Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn't take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there's another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.'

It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers's hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Leroy Rivers scattered over an area of space so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.

She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing ma