Empire of Light

Corso sat close behind Dakota, while Nancy, Ray and Nathan were still outside working on the drive-spines. Martinez was not expected out of the med-bay for another couple of days, Olivarri was asleep in his quarters, and Perez was somewhere halfway across the ship, checking over the plasma conduit systems and prepping the onboard fabricators to produce replacement drive-spines.

'Ted, can you put up that information I gave you about our first target system?' asked Dakota.

'No,' said Corso from behind, his tone hostile. He had barely spoken to her since she had told him about Trader. 'That can wait a minute. Ted, you said you had secured some updates on the war.'

Ted flashed Dakota an apologetic glance before he nodded assent to Corso. Moments later dozens of bright red points appeared in clusters along one edge of the Orion Arm, with a few scattered deeper within it.

'These are the current confirmed sightings of Emissary forces,' Lamoureaux explained. A few dozen more points now appeared, coloured yellow. 'And these,' he continued, 'are stars that have gone nova since the war escalated. You can see they're mostly centred on the region of the Long War, but there's been more detonations deeper inside our arm, and getting closer to Consortium territory.'

'Any word from Ocean's Deep?' asked Corso.

'They're in total disarray, Senator. The Legislate's taken up a large military presence in the orbital station and rounded up a lot of the key Authority staff for questioning. Most of this news comes through Bandati contacts, rather than from our own people. It's the same at Tierra – no news coming in or out.'

'I think,' declared Corso, 'it's time everyone stopped calling me "Senator". From now on "Lucas" will do just fine, don't you think?'

'Then I guess you'd all better start calling me "Eduard".'

They all turned to see Martinez standing at the entrance to the bridge. Corso started to rise, but Martinez gestured him to sit back down.

'I'm fine. Leave me be,' Martinez insisted, shuffling forward. He was walking with a stick, Dakota noticed. He stopped when he spotted her, staring at her like she was a ghost.

'Sir, are you absolutely certain you're ready to be out of treatment?'

'Why, yes I am, Lucas,' Martinez replied, still without taking his eyes off her. 'I just have to go easy. Maybe spend another night in the medbox to speed up the healing.'

He moved closer to her. 'So you're Dakota Merrick. When the hell did you get on board? And where the hell were you when we were getting ready to…'

'Commander,' Corso interrupted. He had come to Martinez's side and put a hand on his shoulder. 'As soon as we're finished here, we'll go to your quarters and I'll explain everything.' He gestured towards a couch. 'Please.'

Martinez looked like he was struggling to control his temper. 'Then you'd better make your reasons good,' he replied tautly, and headed for the seat.

A priority comms icon appeared, floating just to one side of the galaxy simulation. Corso reached up to his ear and spoke quietly into the air for a few moments.

'Nancy just reported in,' he explained, once he had finished. 'If we're going to make a significant jump any time during the next couple of days, we're going to have to leave up to a quarter of the drive-spines offline.'

'That's not good,' said Martinez.

Corso shrugged. 'Not much we can do about it. The engineers hadn't finished work on the hull when we boarded. Dan's ready to start ru

He paused for a moment, then turned to face Dakota, with visible reluctance. 'How many jumps do we need to reach our first destination?'

Martinez frowned, looking back and forth between them. 'First destination?'

Of course, Dakota realized, he didn't know about Trader yet.

'We're taking a detour,' Dakota explained, 'so we can salvage weapons systems left behind by an extinct alien race. It means stopping off at another star system on the way.'

Martinez regarded her warily before turning back to Corso. 'And you concur with this?'

'We're just one ship, so we're going to need every advantage we can get. A couple of days' detour shouldn't make any difference in the long run.'

Martinez nodded wearily and looked back at Dakota. 'Lucas asked you how many jumps to get there.'

'At least three,' Dakota replied. 'Possibly more, given the issue with the drive-spines.' She stood up and nodded to Lamoureaux. 'Ted, if you don't mind, maybe I'd better run the next part myself.'

'Sure.' Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair, moving with elaborate care. Dakota felt his implant-mediated senses brush against hers.

'Okay.' She climbed into the chair and locked on to the ship's data-space. A moment later the great swirl of the galaxy faded, to be replaced by a model of a single star system.

'This is where we're headed next,' she explained. 'You're looking at a star towards the cooler end of the main sequence. It has eleven planets altogether, but our main point of interest is coming up in a moment.'

The system expanded rapidly until they had a view of a lifeless world no more than a few thousand kilometres in diameter, its surface dotted with ancient impact craters. A broad, artificially flat plain, at odds with the surrounding landscape, surrounded what seemed at first to be just another crater.

'That's the cache entrance you can see there,' Dakota continued. A cutaway view of the planetoid now appeared next to its photorealistic image. 'Same layout as the Tierra cache, in fact and, like the Tierra cache – and every other cache in existence, from what I gather – it's located on a dwarf planet too small to be geologically active.'

The cutaway showed that the cache primarily consisted of a borehole extending more than thirty kilometres beneath the surface, with hundreds of passageways of varying length extending out from this central shaft and into the remaining body of the planetoid.

'How the hell could you know all this?' asked Martinez, switching his gaze between her and Corso.

'This all comes from a renegade Shoal-member-'

'A renegade what?' said Martinez, looking like he was about to throw his walking stick at her.

'Eduard,' intervened Corso, 'as soon as we're done here. I swear.' He nodded to Dakota for her to continue.

Martinez looked far from happy, but held his silence.

'It's a dead cache,' Dakota continued. 'I learned that it was discovered by a race called the Meridians, who're long gone. They had a colony here, but they wiped themselves out while fighting over it. The physical structure is still there, but everything inside was destroyed. If we get the opportunity or the time, I think it would be a very good idea to take a look down inside the cache. Apart from the fact I want to see what it looks like, it'll give us a much better idea of exactly what we're going to be facing once we reach our final destination.'

'And these weapons we're looking for,' said Corso. 'They're inside the cache?'

Dakota tilted the interface chair a few degrees upright so she could see his face more clearly. 'No, but apparently they're close to the mouth of the cache,' she explained. 'And, strictly speaking, they're not weapons. They're a form of field technology – same idea as our own field-generators but whole orders of magnitude more powerful – according to…' according to Trader, she almost said, until she caught Corso's eye.

'The point is,' said Corso, now picking up the thread, 'there's something there that can give us an even better fighting chance against the Emissaries.'

'According to who?' asked Martinez. 'Some… Shoal-member?'

'I think maybe we should go and have that talk,' said Corso, looking as if he would rather do almost anything else. 'And maybe a good stiff drink, if your meds will allow it.'