Empire of Light

Corso felt a sudden tightness in his throat. 'I won't allow this. There's always a way.'

Goodbye, Lucas. I'm glad we had a chance to know each other. She cut the co

The artefact pulsed with light, all around her, inside her, even entwined with her. She had since lost all sense of her own body. She seemed to see the floor and walls of the chamber from a dozen different points of view simultaneously. Her mind was being unravelled like a piece of cloth slowly teased apart into disparate threads.

She slipped in and out of consciousness, as the hours passed like minutes. The artefact occasionally fed her glimpses of the Mjollnir, which had already started taking incremental jumps away from the cache, making the most of its remaining drive-spines. Hordes of scouts followed her, diving towards the frigate in a strategy all too reminiscent of the swarm's tactics. She could see that the frigate was taking heavy damage.

She sensed the artefact was begi

They had lived through hours of endless terror since their last communication with Dakota. The scouts had chased them throughout the night, tearing and hacking at the hull wherever the field-generators failed. The frigate had already executed more than half a dozen short-range jumps, but every time the scouts caught up eventually, materializing all around and diving inwards towards them with the mindless efficiency of machines. The star system might be doomed, but the Emissaries clearly weren't going to let them escape.

Martinez was sweating profusely, still being careful with his injured arm. A scout had reached as far as the bridge before being taken out by Perez and Martinez, both armed with pulse-rifles. The air still smelled of burnt wires and plastic.

'Do it anyway,' said Martinez. 'I don't want to have to stay-'

'Wait. Wait a second,' interrupted Lamoureaux.

The machine-head gripped the arms of the interface chair, staring at some point far beyond the bridge as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

'What?' said Corso, speaking for the first time since the scout had tried to cut its way in. Ever since they had successfully repelled it, he had remained collapsed in a seat, too weary and shell-shocked to say or do anything.

'Look,' Lamoureaux stuttered, pointing to the overhead display. 'Just look.'

They all stared up and saw the Emissary scouts were self-destructing.

'Perhaps it's just local,' Martinez mumbled.

'No,' insisted Lamoureaux vehemently. 'The last godkiller – it's burning.'

'It's Dakota,' Corso yelled, standing up at last. 'It has to be!'

Lamoureaux didn't say anything to that. He just stared past them all, like a blind man seeing visions, with sweat breaking out on his forehead.

'Ted,' asked Perez, 'what is it?'

Lamoureaux seemed at last to remember they were there. 'We've got bigger worries now,' he said gravely. 'I just picked up a second neutrino flux. The sun just went nova.' The nova mine had been in close orbit around the star for over fifteen hundred years. Before receiving its activation signal, it had drifted insensate and silent, outwardly little different from any other piece of random junk caught in a similar orbit, betraying its purposefulness only on those occasions when it activated dormant guidance systems in order to guide it away from any imminent collision.

There had been others before it, spread out over the mille

The activation signal had triggered ancient protocols and, within an hour, light had begun to build up around each of its drive-spines, reaching a crescendo in the moment before it briefly vanished from the visible universe.

It rematerialized less than a hundred kilometres from the star's core. In the few brief nanoseconds before it was vaporized, a chain reaction deep within its drive caused a bubble of false vacuum to form, expanding outwards at the speed of light before collapsing within seconds.

Billion-kilometre tongues of fire rose up from the star's surface like fiery wreaths, and over the next few hours it began to shrink in size. Its heart had been cut out, and its remaining lifetime was now numbered in hours.

When the star finally exploded, the shockwave reached the cache-world within minutes, sending rivers of molten fire pouring down the narrow valleys between the tiny planet's mountains.

Tidally locked until now, it began to spin for the first time in a billion years, the light of a million dawns creeping slowly towards the mouth of the cache itself.

But it was already too late. The Mos Hadroch, the 'Judgement of Worlds', had sent out a signal that propagated itself across the galaxy instantaneously.

The last thing Dakota saw was a brilliant light, almost liquid in its intensity, surging in through the entrance to the chamber housing the drive-forge. 'Explain this to me again,' Commander of Shoals demanded, swimming across the command-chamber of a coreship located some tens of thousands of light-years away.

'I can't explain it,' the aide stammered, instinctively darting closer to one wall as Commander of Shoals bore down upon him. 'But something's happening to the Emissary fleet. It's… it's self-destructing. There are no other words. Look.'

The aide's stubby little tentacles, reflected Commander of Shoals, had never been used in combat, had never been used to slash an enemy's belly open, or to tear away that same enemy's fins. These were the soft appendages of a civilian, with no place on board this world-sized warship.

They were deep within the ruins of a star system whose population had numbered in the billions until it had been destroyed, more than a year before, by the Emissaries. This was the first time the General had returned here since that awful day. He and the forces he commanded had done their utmost to prevent that particular tragedy, but the Emissary ships had continued to fill the skies, intent on carrying out surgical strikes against the defensive installations on all the system's worlds – while one single enemy drone had found its way past their coreships and dived into the living heart of the system's star.

The Shoal's forces had rescued pitifully few in those last frantic hours before the star detonated. Even if there had been enough coreships to carry away every last one of the system's inhabitants, the basic logistics of such a mission would have rendered their efforts almost pointless. It would have taken the better part of a year to transport all of them safely away from the various planetary bodies.

Instead, they had a scant few hours to save what and whom they could.

And therein lay the terrible tragedy of the nova war: those left behind had no choice but to wait for the end as the departing coreships jumped to safety. It was a scenario that had been repeated in so many other systems that he could not even bring himself to contemplate their number.

They had now returned to retrieve certain items of value from the wreck of a coreship partially destroyed by that nova, but had themselves been ambushed by a cloud of Emissary scouts hidden within the tangled smoke of the newborn nebula. A godkiller had unexpectedly appeared, drawn there by the scouts, jumping to a point less than a light-minute distant and then quickly vectoring inwards to deliver the final death-blow.