Empire of Light

She forced a faltering smile. 'You'll recall how the swarm had gathered close by a red giant. Well, it blew – turned nova. At first I thought it was just the natural end of the star's life, but I can't help wondering if the swarm helped it along.'

'But you jumped to safety before the star turned nova?'

She shook her head. 'No.'

'Then… I don't understand.'

'The next thing I knew, I was most of my way back home. The ship had reduced me to information just before it was destroyed, and used the very last of its power reserves to transmit all of that to another Magi ship, located not much more than a few days out from here.' She gave him a ghost of a smile. 'They'd rebuilt me, except it seems something was lost during the transmission.'

Corso stared at her in mute shock, as she continued. 'I can feel there's a lot missing. Sometimes I try to remember something, and there's only a little fragment, a picture or a face or something I can't even make out properly, and that's all.' Her expression became hopeless. 'It's like there's now this yawning hole where a lot of my life used to be.'

Corso struggled to find an adequate response. 'But you're here, you're alive, aren't you? At least-'

'No,' she cut him off abruptly. 'I remember dying, Lucas. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about that.'

'Dakota, if one of those Magi ships did what you say it did, then that's… that's incredible. That makes you just about one of the luckiest people alive.'

She shook her head. 'But I'm not me. The real me died.'

'You know, some people would say that's just semantics.'

She looked at him sharply. 'So if someone made an exact copy of you and it tried to murder you, that would be okay because it's got all your thoughts and emotions and memories, even your sense of self-identity? Would you – the real you, that is – be any less dead?'

Corso opened his mouth, then hesitated. 'No,' he said, a little reluctantly. 'No, I guess I wouldn't be. But if I knew I was going to die, I think I'd feel a lot better knowing I'd still be carrying on in some way.'

Dakota's voice took on a harder edge. 'But you'd still be dead, either way. And the copy would still only be a copy… I've been thinking about this a lot.'

I can tell, thought Corso, but kept silent.

'There's a part of me,' Dakota continued, 'that thought it meant I was free of my former responsibilities. That I could just fly away and not give a damn about the Long War or the Emissaries or anything like that. This version of me wasn't in Nova Arctis or Night's End, no matter what my memories may say. So I don't have to care about any of this.'

'All right,' he replied. 'So why even bother coming here?'

'I wasn't given a choice.'

He took a moment to process this statement. 'I don't understand.'

'The Magi ships are all hardwired to stop the Maker. Even if I wanted to disappear, the one that brought me back from the dead would never let me.'

'But you're its navigator, of course you can-'

'No, I can't,' she interrupted. 'Not any more.'

'Why?'

She sighed. 'Let's just say there's been a fundamental change in my relationship with the Magi ships, since I was brought back. I'd tell you more, but this really isn't the right time.'

'Why not?'

She had slipped her jacket off as he spoke, revealing bare shoulders poking above an armless vest. 'Because I don't want to think about that right now,' she answered.

Corso fell silent, watching as she pulled the vest up over her head before dropping it to the floor. His mouth become instantly dry as he studied her smooth belly and small firm breasts.

'I ought to warn you I'm not in the best of shape right now,' he said.

'Just tell me if it hurts,' she answered, quickly unzipping her boots and throwing them to one side. Her trousers and underwear followed a moment later.

Corso stared at her in the dark, feeling his body respond instinctively despite his injuries and the medication, and he was suddenly reluctant to recall just how long it was since he'd last been with a woman. There'd been no time for anything but work over the past few years.

She pulled the blanket to one side and slid on top of him, straddling his hips. Without thinking, Corso slid his hands up the taut surface of her belly. She quickly manoeuvred him inside her, and then reached down with both hands to grip his sides, taking care to avoid touching him where the caterpillar-like creature knitted his flesh together. Before long she was rocking her hips back and forth in a steady rolling motion that shot spikes of pleasure up his spine.

He started to thrust, raising his hips from the mattress, but she shook her head. 'No. Stay still.'

He watched her for the next several minutes, with no small pleasure, as her breath started to emerge in short sharp gasps, her head tipping back as she came closer and closer to climax. He reached up, sliding his hands further up and gently cupping her small breasts again. Her flesh felt so supple and smooth, and entirely human, that he found it impossible to believe her story. She still felt completely real.

The look of intense concentration on her face made him remember other times, first on board Hyperion and later in a Bandati tower on a distant world long since wiped out. He wondered again about her story: if she really had been recreated somehow, reborn from the flesh of one of those alien starships…

That killed it for him.

He felt his ardour rapidly drain away, but a few seconds later Dakota gripped him painfully hard, before letting her forehead drop against his chest.

After a minute she looked up and gave him a questioning look.

'I think it's the meds,' he muttered, embarrassed.

She gave him a look of careful appraisal, as if she wasn't sure whether to believe him or not, then wordlessly lifted herself up and off him, before dropping down beside him, and pressing up close. The heat of her skin felt like a furnace against his own.

'If you had that performance pla

'I don't think we're likely to be disturbed.' She reached up to stroke a finger along his jaw line. 'That man Breisch, who is he?'

'He taught me how to fight.'

She raised herself on one elbow and gazed down at him. 'What happened to you, Lucas? I saw the whole thing, and you killed that guy in cold blood. It was… brutal. I thought you stood against that kind of thing.'

Corso shrugged. 'Seems it's the only way to get anyone here to listen to me. A lot of people want me dead, and the rest won't take me seriously unless I play them at their own game.'

'But that doesn't mean you had to-'

'It does,' he retorted. 'Things got a lot harder once you were gone, Dakota. The Fleet's lost most of its power, we're a spent force – and the Freehold isn't the only one desperate to undermine us at every opportunity.'

'But you had it in your power to place sanctions against uncooperative worlds.'

'Yes, but not the moral authority, and their governments knew it. The only people who were getting hurt by the sanctions were refugees dumped on worlds without the resources to deal with them. Too many people were dying, Dakota. We had to give in, especially once some of the navigators broke ranks.'

She bristled. 'But we were only taking on navigators if we were sure we could trust them.'

'There's only so many old-school machine-heads available, so of course we had to take in navigator candidates whose backgrounds we couldn't always check and loyalties we could never be sure of. Most of the first batch of navigators, like Lamoureaux, were on our side, but two thirds have burned out for some reason we don't understand. As it is, we're barely maintaining the lines of physical communication that hold the Consortium together.'