Empire of Light

She left the two drones on guard near the surface. They wouldn't be able to hold off a full-frontal assault for long, but at least she would have some warning if the Emissaries were about to follow her in.

The lander dropped down farther, while the mouth of the cache seemed to grow smaller and smaller, increasingly far overhead.

Trader, I'm not going to let you get away with the artefact. Do you hear me?

Silence.

Either something had happened to him, or he wasn't interested in talking.

Trader? Are you there? It had all been going so well until he had tried to activate the Mos Hadroch.

Trader had placed it in the mouth of the drive-forge, and then accessed the command structure he had retrieved from the Greater Magellanic Cloud so very, very long ago, activating it through a meshlike apparatus woven around two of his secondary manipulators.

The effect had been spectacular.

During his initial experiments, using Whitecloud as his proxy, it had become rapidly clear the artefact was much further beyond his understanding than he had anticipated. Aspects of its operation pointed to a powerful, almost godlike intelligence buried somewhere within its depths.

At first, the device had appeared to unravel, its outer shell peeling open to reveal internal components that defied comprehension. Its shape had mutated rapidly, expanding well beyond the drive-forge, and Trader had felt the presence of that overwhelming intelligence, for the first time, as it ransacked his yacht's onboard systems and even, to his shock, his own mind.

He had turned to flee, recognizing that events were already spi

Chapter Thirty-seven

The lander kept following the signal from Trader's ship, until it dropped down on to a shelf extending out from a darkened side passage no different from the thousands of others she had seen during her long descent. The onboard systems told Dakota there was a protective field placed over the mouth of the passageway that retained a breathable atmosphere.

She exited her craft quickly, a torch in hand, and soon spotted Trader's yacht resting nearby in the gloom, on a bed of shaped fields. Most of its drive-spines were either broken or melted or both. She flicked the torch on, then bounded forward in long, loping strides due to the minimal gravity, manoeuvring her way past cluttered wreckage and abandoned machinery.

After a couple of minutes, Dakota reached a side chamber. When she shone the torch inside it, it was to see a machine she recognized as a drive-forge. As she moved closer, she observed that the Mos Hadroch had been mounted inside it.

A moment later she nearly stumbled over Trader himself.

The tiny field-generators that normally held a protective sphere of briny water around him now lay scattered across the floor of the chamber. His enormous bulk somehow looked much smaller, lying unprotected on the dusty ground. His skin looked grey and cracked, as his manipulators twisted and slithered helplessly across the grey stone underneath him.

‹Dakota.›

Jesus and Buddha. You're alive?

‹For now.›

Trader's movements were growing ever weaker as she watched. She knelt beside him and touched the fingers of one hand to his side. His flesh felt rough, abrasive.

‹It knew everything about me. Secrets buried so long I had forgotten them. But it will not function.›

Let me try, Trader?

The great bulk of his body shuddered one last time, and became still.

She remained kneeling by him for a few more seconds, wondering why she didn't feel anything, not even vindication or triumph. Instead she only felt hollow, as if all this had been an anticlimax.

Finally she stood up and stepped past Trader's inert form and towards the drive-forge.

She had been able to hear the artefact from the moment she entered the chamber: a high-pitched ululation like a thousand amplifiers feeding back all at once, throbbing constantly from low to high. But she had a sense of an underlying order that hinted at something else, something vast and cool and powerful.

She stumbled to a halt just short of the forge, and watched as the artefact flowered open the way she had seen it do on Whitecloud's video recordings. The sound filled her head until she couldn't form a single coherent thought, hammering its way into her brain almost like something physical.

And, just when she thought the worst was over, she felt that same intelligence she had sensed earlier suddenly focus all its attention on her.

She stood again on a snow-blasted highway on Redstone, surrounded by the bodies of the dead. Found herself in a bar called The Wayward Dragon with Lin Liao, waiting for his sister to arrive. Looked across the rooftops of Erki

She was dragged back farther and farther, reliving memories that she thought she had lost for ever half a galaxy away, suddenly as real in that moment as if she were experiencing them for the first time.

The last image that came to her was that single glimpse of a street in winter, and the memory of her mother's hand laid on her head.

But this time, when she looked up, she saw her mother's face clearly.

Dakota came to, some indeterminate time later, to find herself sprawled on the chamber floor.

She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled closer to the drive-forge. The Mos Hadroch had unravelled yet more, like some multidimensional kaleidoscope expanding to surround her, penetrating deep inside her body until she had no idea where she ended and the artefact began.

And in that instant, she discovered the terrible price she was going to have to pay. 'That's another drone gone,' Lamoureaux cried hoarsely. 'And more scouts on the way!'

Corso looked up at the overhead display and saw that only one of the three godkillers guarding the cache remained and, by the looks of it, was charging up for an imminent jump. But now a constellation of pixels showed an enormous number of scouts were heading for the frigate. More than they could possibly fight off.

Lucas.

'Dakota?' Corso spoke out loud, unconsciously reaching up to touch the comms bead in his ear. He ignored the looks he received from the others.

Are you ready to jump out of the system?

'No, not yet. We won't be for some time. There's severe damage to the drive-spines, we've lost functionality in more than three-quarters of them. It's not looking good.'

You can still get away in time if you stick to short incremental jumps. As long as you can stay just ahead of the shockwave, you can gradually build up enough power for a long-range jump -particularly if you can get into the shadow of one of the outer gas giants. What's happening back there?

'The Emissaries' bigger ships are starting to jump out of the system, but I don't see how they can get more than a fraction of them away from here before it's too late. What's happening with the artefact? Did it work?'

I think so, yes.

'What do you mean you think so?'

It's going to be a little while yet before it takes effect.

'Then you need to get back here. Their main ships may be leaving, but we've got a force of their scouts currently on the way. Is the lander still operative?'

Lucas… I'm not coming back.

Corso stared across the bridge with a stu

I'm not coming back. I can't.

'Bullshit, you just told me you activated the damn thing. We won, right? So now we can go home.'

No, Lucas. I have to stay here with the Mos Hadroch. I won't ever be going home. The artefact can't function unless it's merged with a living mind. In the meantime you need to get the Mjollnir as far away from here as possible.