Empire of Light

'Dakota, no.'

'For God's sake, Ted! I need to do this. I need to put an end to it all.' She could feel tears prickling the corners of her eyes.

'We should wait for the others to get here. Besides…' He shook his head. 'No, this is beyond just crazy. Even if you're determined to go down there on your own, nobody's going to be mad enough to let you.'

Her expression became icy calm. 'Don't get in my way, Ted, or I'll shut down the drones. The frigate would be left totally defenceless.'

He swallowed. 'I'd reactivate them.'

'But it might take you too long. There are already things out there trying to burrow their way through the hull.'

'I don't think you'd-'

'Try me, Ted.'

She watched him studying her, trying to make up his mind whether she was serious.

'You're out of your mind,' he said eventually. 'That's what they've all been saying, and I defended you. But they were right, Dakota. You're out of your fucking mind.'

'Don't let anyone come after me. Do you understand me?'

He stared back at her in silence, filled with impotent fury, as she turned and ran down the passageway. Trader's yacht had utilized a maximum-evasion pattern as it descended towards the surface of the cache-world, but it had still suffered enormous damage from the ground-based defences. Once his ship had dropped into the cache's main shaft and begun its descent deep below the planet's surface, however, the shooting stopped.

Thousands of passageways had been cut into the rock all the way down the shaft. Before very long, Trader guided his yacht to a landing in one specific passageway where he knew he would find the cache's drive-forge. Once he had exited his ship, he took a moment to approach the lip of the passageway, in order to gaze down into the abyssal depths below.

Rows of lights descended the shaft's smooth walls, all the way down to where they appeared to converge tens of kilometres below his vantage point. On the far side of the shaft he saw a city-sized factory complex imbued with that same ineluctable air of decay and abandonment.

The walls around him had a half-melted look, with more ruined machinery lying abandoned. It didn't require a great deal of conjecture to realize it had been a very long time since any new drive-cores had been manufactured here.

The Emissaries, despite the advance warning, had clearly not expected the cache itself to be targeted. That they had then chosen to destroy the entire system made it clear they had finally recognized their error, even if much too late.

Trader swivelled in his field-bubble, then guided it deeper into the gently curving passageway, dodging past the blackened hulks of dead technology. 'I don't give a damn what she said!' Corso screamed. 'We have to go after her!'

'You want to go after her, fine,' said Lamoureaux, 'but I'm not willing to call her bluff. She looked crazy enough to do it.'

'It's too late anyway,' said Martinez, from across the bridge. 'She's already boarded the lander and taken it out. She must have sneaked right past you and Dan while you were on your way here.'

'We got a distress call,' explained Perez. 'That's why we came back here as fast as we could.'

'Ship-wide or direct to your helmets?' asked Lamoureaux.

'Direct,' Perez replied. 'Not…' He fell silent mid-sentence.

Lamoureaux nodded. 'She faked that alert.'

Perez rubbed his face with both hands and dropped into a nearby seat. 'I knew we should have stayed with the lander.'

'Here's the thing I don't understand,' Corso growled, moving closer to Lamoureaux. 'You could have warned us – and you didn't even try to stop her. Why?'

Lamoureaux's nostrils flared angrily. 'I already told you. She threatened to shut the drones down, and leave us defenceless. What did you expect me to do?'

Corso shook his head vehemently. 'I refuse to believe she'd make a threat like that, let alone follow through on it.'

'She did make a threat like that,' Lamoureaux yelled. 'Maybe, Lucas, you don't know her nearly as goddamn well as you think you do.'

Corso punched him in the nose.

Lamoureaux staggered back, then stumbled, collapsing to the deck. Corso loomed over him, his expression furious.

Strong hands pulled Corso away. A moment later he was pushed into a chair and found himself face to face with Martinez, the Commander's hand planted firmly against his chest.

'I was on the bridge when all of this happened,' said Martinez. 'Now, I didn't hear what Dakota and Ted were saying to each other, but the responsibility is still with me. So if you want to take a swing at anyone, try me.'

Lamoureaux wiped blood away from his nose and glared at Corso. 'Want to know what else she told me, Lucas? She's the reason the Emissaries knew where to find us.'

Corso stared at him. 'What?'

Lamoureaux laughed, and then coughed. 'That's exactly what she told me. The Emissaries are tracking her, not the frigate. That's all I can tell you.'

'He's telling the truth.' Martinez nodded towards the overhead display, which still tracked the ongoing engagement. 'The scouts are breaking away and going after the lander.'

Corso stared up at it, too, with a stricken expression. 'She'll never make it.'

Lamoureaux staggered upright and pulled himself back into the interface chair.

Martinez let go of Corso and stepped over to Lamoureaux, handing him a handkerchief. Ted took it from him with mumbled thanks.

'Dan, keep an eye on Mr Corso here. If he tries taking a swing at anyone else, find somewhere to lock him up. Meanwhile, Mr Lamoureaux, I want you to do some calculations. Work out how long you think we have left before the star blows, and how much power we'll need to jump out of the vicinity in time, before it does.'

'She's abandoned us,' Corso muttered, half to himself.

'Don't be so sure,' said Martinez. 'I'd say she's given us some breathing room. Ted, put her current trajectory and location on the overhead.'

An image of the cache-world and its star appeared overhead, complete with outsized representations of both the Mjollnir and the lander, the latter already fast approaching the planet's surface.

Lamoureaux's reply was muffled by the handkerchief pressed to his face. 'If she can stay alive long enough, she should reach the cache itself in about fifteen minutes.' The lander received a direct hit that sent it spi

Prior to this, dozens of direct hits and near-misses had finally overwhelmed one of the two field-generators attached to the lander. Apart from her filmsuit, the only thing between her and certain death was a couple of Meridian drones she had peeled away from the main pack. She had been worried Lamoureaux might not allow her control over them, but in the end he hadn't tried to stop her.

On the screen, she could see the cache growing bigger as she dropped towards it. According to the signal she was still picking up from Trader's yacht, he was more than thirty kilometres directly down the throat of the shaft.

Something about the thought of descending into that bottomless hole made her skin prickle with terror.

Down, down, down she went, the cache expanding towards Dakota like a wide and hungry mouth.

More pulse-beam fire blasted out from defensive structures scattered around the mouth of the cache. The lander spun under another direct hit, and alert messages flared across her screens.

She caught one brief glimpse of vast fields of slag and rubble around the mouth of the shaft, before the lander began to drop down into limitless darkness. Faraway lights, mounted on the sides of the shaft, illuminated what looked like abandoned cities or factories clinging to the walls.