Empire of Light

When he spoke, the familiar tones of his synthesized voice seemed to fill that dank underwater space.

'Once again, mellifluous greetings,' he said. 'Did you enjoy your trip to the Maker? And don't say I didn't warn you.'

'F…' She cleared her throat with some difficulty, and dug her fingernails into her palms, then tried again. 'Fuck you, too, Trader,' she finally managed to say, and touched her throat with nervous fingers.

'I congratulate you on having survived your encounter, Dakota. Few ever do.'

She stared back at the alien and felt a familiar seething anger well up inside her. It was easier to give in to the feelings of the old Dakota – the real Dakota, as some treacherous part of her mind insisted on thinking of her.

'Yes, Trader. I survived, and I got your message. Now tell me how you know so much about what I found out there.'

'The Consortium is an open book to those with the means to decrypt its most secure transmissions.'

'Not good enough. I was only ever in contact with other machine-head navigators.'

'The Shoal could not have brought about the deaths of the original Magi navigators without having the means to intercept their communications traffic, a skill that remains with us. You can be assured, however, that the coordinates you recovered from the Maker stay a secret with me. Even the Shoal Hegemony remains unaware of the expedition.'

'What expedition?'

'The expedition your friend Lucas Corso recently sent out towards the coordinates associated with the Mos Hadroch, of course, Dakota.'

She nodded mutely, and realized she had no idea just how much time had passed since the red giant had turned nova. It might have been days, or weeks, or much more.

'I don't know what it is you want, Trader, but there are a thousand reasons why I shouldn't listen to anything you have to say.'

'And yet here you are.'

I didn't ask to come here, damn you. 'The last time I saw you was on Morgan's World. You already knew about the Mos Hadroch, didn't you?'

'In this I must confess my guilt,' Trader replied smoothly.

'You could have just told me, and then I never would have needed to go out there.'

'But I had little more than a name at that time, Dakota. You found out more than I ever did when I myself visited the swarm long ago. You even managed to find a possible location.'

Dakota felt her hands twitch with barely suppressed anger. 'If I could, I'd kill you, Trader. I'd…'

Her heart was hammering, and she felt on the verge of a panic attack. Too much was happening too soon.

She slumped down on the slick black glass extending underfoot, and listened to the wet slap of water against the platform's edge. 'Why here?' she asked, looking briefly around. 'I mean, what is this place?'

'This world?' Trader turned slowly within his sphere of water, glancing from side to side. 'Its occupants have long since passed on, as you may have guessed. There was a time when the civilization that built these towers strode amid the stars. They had an empire of a kind that stretched across thousands of light-years. Their name for themselves might be loosely translated as "Meridians".'

'So what happened to them?'

Trader's manipulators wriggled under his body. 'They never discovered a Maker cache until it was much too late and their culture had become terminally fragmented. Before that, they learned the secret of exceptionally long life and journeyed aboard ships that crawled between the stars at sublight speeds. One branch of the species became aquatic, while the rest remained air-breathers; the reasons why remain unknown. These towers are emblematic of happier times, when the two sides coexisted relatively peacefully, but eventually they tore themselves apart. They could not destroy stars as effectively as you or I might, but they certainly had the means to shatter worlds. If they had survived to face the Shoal Hegemony, they would have presented us with a formidable challenge.'

'So does that have anything to do with why you chose this place?'

'They left behind weapons of the most remarkable power. Weapons that we will need, Miss Merrick, when we begin our journey.'

Dakota stared up at the alien. '"Journey"?'

'First, my dear Dakota, let me recount to you the full tale of the origin of the Mos Hadroch, as far as it is known. It is said to have been created by a species who were forerunners to the Magi, and who saw several of their own worlds destroyed in the early centuries of the nova war that set the Greater Magellanic Cloud ablaze. This vanished race developed the Mos Hadroch as a means to counter the dangers inherent within the Maker caches, but were themselves destroyed before it could be implemented. The Mos Hadroch itself vanished for ever and, for lack of evidence that it ever existed, it became little more than a phantasm, a fable that gained credence through the simple accumulation of age.'

Beyond Trader, Dakota saw dark shapes with wide ragged fins passing slowly by the tower, bioluminescent algae making their skin glow with sinuous patterns of green and yellow.

'But you thought it was real enough to go after the Maker swarm yourself,' she said.

'Before you departed, I told you of my own journey to the Maker. Although ultimately disastrous, it was not entirely a failure. I came away with the knowledge that the Mos Hadroch was of paramount importance to the swarm. After the Maker turned on my fleets, I remained locked in time-stopped stasis for decades until rescuers found me cast adrift in a cloud of wreckage. All I retained for my efforts was that single sliver of knowledge, that somewhere out there existed a weapon that might be used to prevent the nova wars the swarms are programmed to provoke with their caches. But its location has remained elusive – until now.'

'There must be a reason why we're here talking, and you haven't just gone to get it for yourself.'

'Precisely, Miss Merrick! And in that simple statement lies the proof of your intellect.' The alien drifted a little closer. 'You see, it is one thing to have a weapon, but another to know how to pull the trigger.'

Dakota cocked her head. 'I don't understand.'

'Precisely how would you suggest the Mos Hadroch is activated and implemented?'

Dakota stared at him, mystified. 'I couldn't begin to guess until we actually find the damn thing, whatever it is.'

'Indeed,' Trader was saying. 'Beyond a name, you do not even know what it is we are looking for. You know that it has a location, and your own people have discovered that some connection exists between the race that created it and an isolated Atn clade. But you do not know its dimensions, its size, or whether it even has a material shape.'

'But if all you yourself managed to find out is its name, then you're no better off than we are.'

Trader's manipulators wriggled suddenly with what Dakota suspected might be delight. 'On the contrary, the means of operating the Mos Hadroch has been available to me for a very long time. I acquired that knowledge long ago, on a journey to the Magellanic Clouds. A most sorrowful place it is, too: a graveyard of stars, one might say. There is life there, though sparse, living amongst the ruins of dead empires whose descendants can barely perceive the heights to which they once aspired. How ironic that the weapon I travelled so far to find should turn out to be so close to our own territory.'

'You mentioned something about a "journey". But a journey to where?'

'Why, to the heart of the Emissary empire, of course. In order to implement the Mos Hadroch in the way for which it was designed, we must penetrate the Maker cache from which they have derived the majority of their power.'