Empire of Light

He glanced back up at the projected starscape. The Magi ship that had brought Dakota to the frigate was slipping out of range. It was also begi

Her eyelids trembled, then opened on to nothing.

'What is it, Lucas?' she asked, the sound of her own voice close and flat within the confined space.

Your ship, what's happening to it?

'I don't have any choice,' she replied in a half-whisper.

Don't have any choice about what?

'About leaving it behind.'

Chapter Seventeen

Even as she locked into the Mjollnir 's sensory data-space, Dakota could still hear the Mos Hadroch whispering to her.

It was so close to the edge of perception that she might have dismissed it as only her imagination had she not been able to filter it through the rapidly receding Magi ship. There was something alive nestling within the carapace of the dead Atn – and it, in turn, could sense her.

Until that first moment of contact, as she made her way across the empty space that had separated the now rapidly receding starship from the frigate, she had assumed the Mos Hadroch would prove to be some inert device, a tool and nothing more.

But instead she was begi

Dakota closed her eyes tightly, sensing faint tendrils of enquiry from the dead minds that lived inside the Magi ship. So far, she was pretty sure they had no inkling of the act of betrayal she was about to commit. There had been a time when she had been greatly worried about their ability to see inside her mind, but since those early days she had learned how to mask her thought processes from their attention.

We've got fresh contacts, she heard Perez say, panic edging into his voice. Missiles. Approaching fast, launched from the surface. I'm reading a hundred and eighty seconds to impact.

She had seen them already. She felt her subjective experience of time shift, so that seconds seemed to take minutes to pass, as she locked completely into the Mjollnir 's data-space.

There was none of the pain or confusion she had endured in every attempt to interface with the Magi ship at anything more than a very low level following her resurrection. The frigate's data-space was tragically primitive by comparison… but it worked.

The Meridian drones had emerged in their hundreds from the Magi ship, and now some of them darted towards the missiles which were accelerating towards the frigate at more than twenty gee. The drones blazed with intense heat in the instant just before they sent out a pulse of fire bright enough to be visible from the planet surface below.

Alarms blared throughout the Mjollnir as this flash of energy overwhelmed its external sensor arrays. Down on the surface of Redstone, technicians and officers in both the Freehold and Uchidan territories were roused from their sleep inside armoured subsurface bunkers, as early-warning systems mistook the sudden flash for an attack.

The missiles meanwhile were reduced to spatters of molten metal that registered on the bridge's overhead display as fuzzy-edged splashes of colour rapidly fading from white to orange.

Dakota opened her eyes and let her breath out slowly.

She had saved their skins, and she had not needed the Magi ship to do it. The Meridian drones had responded to her commands with deadly efficiency, whispering to her of attack and defence, strike and counter-strike.

For the first time, she began to believe they might actually be able to take on the Emissaries.

Dakota

The air inside the petals tasted warm and slightly metallic. She sat motionless, alone in the darkness, and enjoyed a brief moment of silence.

Dakota can you

She let the last of the air out of her nostrils and waited for her heart to stop thumping. hear me?

'Dakota! I…'

Corso paused in mid-sentence as the chair's petals folded back down. Dakota surveyed the bridge, full of light and sound and motion.

'I took care of it,' she said, slowly lifting herself out of the interface chair and stepping carefully down from the dais. 'There won't be any more missiles.'

'How?' Corso demanded, his face damp with sweat. 'I mean, I saw it on the overhead. It was incredible. But… how?'

She looked past his shoulder to see a man she didn't recognize standing by one console. He studied the data scrolling in front of him so intently it was obvious he was deliberately trying not to look at her.

'I told you,' she said. 'I got my hands on some weapons – very old, very powerful weapons left behind by a dead civilization.'

'We're being hailed from the ground, Senator.'

Corso turned to the man by the console and nodded distractedly. 'Any news?'

'There are more missiles on their way. They say they won't pull them back unless we stop and surrender.'

Dakota walked past Corso to join the other man sitting at the console. 'What's your name?' she asked.

'Dan Perez.'

She nodded to the console. 'Please.'

He shrugged and stepped aside. She studied the data displayed there and frowned.

'These missiles aren't tacticals,' she a

'Why not?' asked Perez, still standing beside her.

'Because they've lost,' she replied. 'There's nothing to be gained in destroying the frigate.'

'You haven't spent a lot of time around Freeholders, have you, Ma'am?' suggested Perez. 'Apart from the Senator here, that is.'

She turned to face him. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Just that if you had, you'd know they'd rather blow the frigate out of the sky than let her escape. The consequences don't matter. To them it's all about honour.'

She glanced at Corso, who affected a weary shrug. 'He's right, Dakota.'

She shook her head in irritation. 'Then they're a bunch of fucking idiots. All right, we could hang around here and take all those missiles out with the drones, but we'd just be wasting valuable time.' She headed over to the interface chair. 'I'm going to jump us out of here now.'

'The drive batteries are low,' warned Corso. 'It's not enough to even get us out of this system.'

'We're not going to jump out of this system,' she replied, pulling herself back into the chair's embrace. 'Remember I said I wanted to make a premature jump? Well, we're going to take a hop and a skip, just a couple of million kilometres here or there. It doesn't really matter where we come out, as long as it puts some distance between us and Redstone.'

Corso had followed her back over, and Perez watched them carefully as Corso stepped up on to the dais and gripped the side of the chair.

'How sure are you that you know what you're doing?' he demanded, keeping his voice low. 'You disappeared for a hell of a long time, and I can't tell you how difficult that made things for me. And what the hell's going on with your own ship?'

'I am frequently very far indeed from knowing just what I'm doing, Lucas. I just take each minute as it comes. And as for my ship,' she added, 'just wait and see.'

She closed her eyes, shutting out the bridge and dipping back into the data-space. The new batch of missiles – built for hard acceleration and tipped with antimatter warheads – wouldn't get in range of the frigate for at least another thousand seconds.