Authors: Gary Gibson
‘Because I’ll be able to find out what’s happening from the new navigators, once they take charge of their ships,’ she replied. ‘And because Colonel Leidner, his staff and the entire Consortium Legislate are scared of what else I might do.’
‘So maybe they’ll call your bluff? What do you do then, blow up another star as a lesson? And what if
that
isn’t enough?’
‘I can only figure this out dealing with one thing at a time.’
‘I don’t want to have to do it.’
She smiled. ‘Just like me.’
‘To hell with you, Dakota!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t play games with
me. Why the hell should I run your fantasy of tin soldiers for you? What the hell makes you think I’m
qualified
to?’
‘Well, for one, you don’t want the job, which some people might take for a good sign. For another, you’re an asshole, but at least you’re an
honest
asshole. Enjoy some responsibility for a change.’
‘I guess there isn’t anyone else you could give the job to, is there?’ he muttered.
‘No, there isn’t. And you know that means you’ll do it.’
His face darkened, but after a moment a small smile flickered across his face, as if he’d just enjoyed a private joke. ‘And you? How long before you’re back from meeting your Maker?’
‘Funny’
‘Tragic would be more like it, Dakota.’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, and went to stand by the door. ‘Where I’ll be going is a long way away from here, and after a quarter of a million years there might not
be
anything there to find.’
‘Before you go. A question I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
She eyed him expectantly.
‘The Emissaries brought this ship we’re on and an entire Immortal Light fleet to Ocean’s Deep, and then turned on Immortal Light almost as soon as they were out of the Godkiller.’ He shook his head. ‘Why? I mean, at first, I thought
I
might be responsible.’
‘How so?’
‘Immortal Light took my incomplete protocols and managed to create a full working version of them in very little time.’ He shrugged. ‘But the protocols apparently didn’t work and, no matter how I look at it, that doesn’t seem enough of a setback for the Emissaries to suddenly turn around and destroy first Immortal Light’s fleet, then the entire Night’s End system.’
‘I wondered about that too,’ Dakota replied. ‘At first we all assumed the Emissaries were here to discover how to build nova weapons, except it turned out they already had a pretty good idea of how to do that, right?’ Corso nodded. ‘I didn’t manage to get as deep inside the Godkiller as I would have liked, but I found enough to make some educated guesses.’
‘Go on.’
‘They destroyed Immortal Light not just because of what the derelict carried within it, but also because your protocols could grant them the same kind of power. They were just stringing Immortal Light along until they could be sure. They don’t want other species competing with them directly any more than the Shoal do.’
When she smiled wryly, Corso knew how appalled he must look. Just then the door slid open again to reveal the three men still arguing in the corridor outside. All three halted abruptly, and turned to stare at them.
‘Thanks,’ Corso whispered, ‘for saving my life. I know I didn’t get myself in that medbox on my own.’
She merely nodded, the door sliding shut after her as she stepped out of the room. He’d half expected her to vanish in a puff of green smoke.
For a long time, Corso sat staring down at his slate. Then he shook his head angrily and deleted the single line of text he’d managed to produce.
He had other things to take care of now.
Over the following weeks, the surviving crews of the Darkening Skies fleet gradually subdued the rich jungles of the orbital station and set about repairing its crumbling towers. Dakota, meanwhile, was frequently to be seen moving from meeting to meeting within ships belonging to both Bandati and human. And wherever she went, she went unchallenged. She was discreetly – or less discreetly – followed at every turn, the faces of her fellow humans now distrusting or angry or hateful, or frequently some combination of all three.
There were further meetings and conferences, many more of them; there were endless attempts to cajole, threaten, bribe or merely persuade her, but Dakota’s position remained unchanged. The Magi ships would be coming to the Ocean’s Deep system only; the arrival of the spreading shockwave from the destruction of Night’s End was still years off, and here there were no fragile ecospheres to be damaged, no vast populations prone to attack – only lifeless worlds, a space station, and the growing fleet of Magi ships.
Every now and then she would direct her attention towards Ocean’s Deep’s star, which had been burning for more than seven billion years, a bright and serene presence in the night skies of other populated worlds far, far away. Now it seemed impermanent, even fragile; something that could be destroyed on a whim, or else sacrificed in the name of political or military expediency.
Lucas Corso’s life was becoming busier than he could have imagined. A third Magi ship soon arrived, and then a fourth, and a fifth. The second to turn up – now piloted by Langley – left shortly for the Consortium territories, taking with it most of the
Casseia Andris’s
crew, and returning with a cargo ship and a fresh complement of military staff, bureaucrats, negotiators, engineers and politicians. The crews of the Darkening Skies fleet meanwhile took the orbital station for their own Hive. One ring of it was secured for the exclusive use of the Consortium, and Corso moved to private quarters there.
Almost a fortnight after Corso’s conversation with Dakota in the medical bay, there occurred the first of several concerted efforts to kill both her and himself. It failed utterly, mostly thanks to Dakota.
A covert team that included at least one demolitions expert had arrived incognito, mixed in with a fresh detachment of Consortium peacekeepers who had just arrived from Galileo. All six members of the team had been transferred into the detachment at the last minute, and once positioned at the orbital station they hadn’t wasted any time in laying explosive charges at key points so as to cause the maximum damage to the already weakened station. Their apparent intention was to destroy the colony while both Dakota and Corso were engaged in talks with senior Consortium representatives, all such negotiations having now been shifted to the station itself from the
Casseia Andris.
Something apparently went wrong, though, for when the report on the incident finally arrived, Lucas found that the remote detonators for the explosives had all failed mysteriously. Within minutes, joint Consortium and Darkening Skies security teams had been able to track down most members of the assassination team, after their cover identities and current whereabouts had been revealed anonymously. It was, of course, far from difficult to detect Dakota’s own hand in arranging this last detail.
Two of the would-be assassins made a last stand in a loading bay, apparently preferring death to capture. They turned out to be Freeholders who had previously worked as mercenaries for the Consortium Legislate’s special security services.
As for who had recruited them, and why, that remained a mystery. Those responsible had gone out of their way to avoid leaving any kind of electronic paper trail that could link them to the squad-members. There was, however, no lack of potential suspects.
Over the next several days, there were two more failed attempts on Dakota’s life. One involved an engineering consultant called Gloria Kjel, whose father had been working for Legislate business concerns in Darkwater’s human quarter when the Night’s End system had been destroyed. By the time Kjel had been apprehended, again thanks to an anonymous tip-off, Dakota’s idea of going away for a while was starting to seem like a pretty good idea to Corso.
The other assassination attempt was nastier. Tracking down machine-heads to enrol as navigator-candidates presented its own unique set of hurdles, since the machine-head tech in itself was still illegal, presenting difficulties for any potential candidate wanting to make himself publicly known. Dakota herself, with an extensive criminal career behind her, would have had difficulty qualifying according to the tangled mess of regulations and specifications being hammered out by committees day and night. Yet the fact remained that, without navigators able to fly the superluminal Magi ships, the Consortium could not hope to survive as a cohesive entity.
One such candidate was a man called Jim Krieger, a Bellhavenite like Dakota, who’d also gone underground shortly after the Redstone massacres. By the time he found his way to Ocean’s Deep more than a dozen Magi ships had arrived there, with new navigators currently being trained for each.
Krieger got close enough to Dakota to slash at her with a knife on their first meeting. Subsequent interrogation showed that he was being blackmailed over his young daughter, who’d been taken hostage by someone determined to destroy Dakota’s plans. Krieger’s child turned up dead less than a week later, in a Bellhaven city called Morningside.
The report of the incident, when it finally made its way into Corso’s hands, made for heartbreaking reading. And security was tightened yet again.
But at least there were no more attempts made on either of their lives. The commanders of the new military detachments recently arrived at Ocean’s Deep made the decision to provide each of the navigators-in-training with armed escorts. These individuals soon found themselves enjoying a unique mixture of instant fame, opprobrium and hatred.
Corso meanwhile returned to a seemingly endless round of talks during which he listened, argued, and attempted to cajole men and women from every stratum of the Consortium Legislate. One popular suggestion, on the part of many of the politicians he met, was that responsibility for electing new machine-head navigators should be shared with the Consortium.
Dakota’s answer to this and other possible compromises was always firmly no.
Although she had sufficient political acumen not to say it outright to the Consortium’s delegates, Corso knew Dakota was unwavering in her desire for the Peacekeeper fleet to be an entity entirely independent of the Consortium. And, as more weeks passed and the days and nights blurred into one seamless, artificially-lit stream of conferences and discussions, Corso surprised himself by increasingly siding with her way of seeing things.
So few of the politicians and policy-makers he was forced to deal with were interested in much more than short-term goals.
Everybody wants to protect their little bit of turf
he found himself thinking more than once. They didn’t seem to understand something was coming that could burn their little worlds to ashes.
Then, one particular morning, Corso opened the door of his quarters only to find a phalanx of Consortium Special Security troopers waiting for him, armed with concussion bolts and holstered batons. He was taken – protesting and still exhausted after the previous night’s debates – to a command frigate that had recently docked with the Leviathan’s Fall station.
At first he’d thought he might be under arrest – that the Consortium was attempting to wrest control from Dakota, as he’d feared it might do – but instead he found himself thrust inside a crowded lounge area on board the frigate, with Dakota herself standing at a portable lectern at one end.
Corso looked around at the muttering faces of the audience. Most of them were wearing military uniforms or the traditional dark-grey civilian attire of senior politicians and their administrative staff.
They were all staring resentfully at Dakota as if she’d chained them to their seats and was forcing them to watch her eat live babies.
‘I’d thank you all for coming,’ she said as the hubbub began to fade, ‘but very few of you have had any choice but to be here. So I’ll keep this simple and short. I won’t accept any more attempts at stopping potential navigators from making their way to Ocean’s Deep. Neither will I tolerate attempts at blackmailing them or threatening their families. Believe me when I say you need these people on your side. Any more such attempts will prove utterly futile.’
She scanned the room, from side to side. ‘I have ambitious goals, as you know, in order to save our civilization, and the creation of a superluminal fleet is only one of them. I can’t make this happen without your cooperation, but far too many of you seem intent on blocking me at every turn, while there’s a large, vocal minority which doesn’t appear to be interested in listening to reason of any kind.’
The screen on the wall behind her flickered into life, displaying a series of names, faces, and personal information. ‘Most of this stuff is highly classified,’ Dakota continued. She smiled. ‘The kind of information people like me aren’t supposedly meant to know.’
Corso instantly recognized the faces as the members of the assassination team who had recently tried to blow the colony to pieces.
‘The information currently on the screen has just been transmitted to all of your data-sheets,’ she explained to her audience. ‘You’ll find details there on how those members of the bomb squad were recruited, who did the recruiting, who ordered the mission – along with the planetary governments responsible for putting the plan into action.’
Corso pulled out his own data-sheet and studied the files that had just appeared on it. He glanced around and saw that most of the audience were also staring at their data-sheets. One individual in particular was gripping his sheet so hard his hands were shaking.
‘I’m introducing a temporary embargo against all those governments responsible for that attempted atrocity. Temporary, that is, until the new Authority decides otherwise. The colonies identified will not be allowed to continue participating in any negotiations, nor to elect their representatives to the Authority, and no ships of the Peacekeeper fleet will travel to their worlds until further notice.’
She stared around the gathered delegates, her hands gripping the lectern like she expected them to rush her. ‘Consider this a warning. Goodbye.’