Empire of Light

After a minute she looked up and gave him a questioning look.

'I think it's the meds,' he muttered, embarrassed.

She gave him a look of careful appraisal, as if she wasn't sure whether to believe him or not, then wordlessly lifted herself up and off him, before dropping down beside him, and pressing up close. The heat of her skin felt like a furnace against his own.

'If you had that performance planned, I hope you warned the staff to give us some privacy,' he muttered.

'I don't think we're likely to be disturbed.' She reached up to stroke a finger along his jaw line. 'That man Breisch, who is he?'

'He taught me how to fight.'

She raised herself on one elbow and gazed down at him. 'What happened to you, Lucas? I saw the whole thing, and you killed that guy in cold blood. It was… brutal. I thought you stood against that kind of thing.'

Corso shrugged. 'Seems it's the only way to get anyone here to listen to me. A lot of people want me dead, and the rest won't take me seriously unless I play them at their own game.'

'But that doesn't mean you had to-'

'It does,' he retorted. 'Things got a lot harder once you were gone, Dakota. The Fleet's lost most of its power, we're a spent force – and the Freehold isn't the only one desperate to undermine us at every opportunity.'

'But you had it in your power to place sanctions against uncooperative worlds.'

'Yes, but not the moral authority, and their governments knew it. The only people who were getting hurt by the sanctions were refugees dumped on worlds without the resources to deal with them. Too many people were dying, Dakota. We had to give in, especially once some of the navigators broke ranks.'

She bristled. 'But we were only taking on navigators if we were sure we could trust them.'

'There's only so many old-school machine-heads available, so of course we had to take in navigator candidates whose backgrounds we couldn't always check and loyalties we could never be sure of. Most of the first batch of navigators, like Lamoureaux, were on our side, but two thirds have burned out for some reason we don't understand. As it is, we're barely maintaining the lines of physical communication that hold the Consortium together.'

'It's that bad?'

'After you left, I split my time between Ocean's Deep and Redstone, trying to stop things falling apart here after the coup. At first I got treated like a returning hero, but it wasn't long before I realized I'd made a lot of enemies without really trying. They were practically lining up to call me out with challenges. I learned to fight because I couldn't see any way out of that, not if I was to have any hope of retaining some influence. I wanted to show them I could meet them on their own terms and still beat them. But instead things just went from bad to worse.'

'But now we know the Mos Hadroch is real.' She again traced the curve of his jaw with a fingertip. 'You found it and you brought it back? Now you know what it is, am I right?' There was an intensity in her expression, a touch of avarice to the gleam of her eyes.

'No, it's still locked away on board the ship that carried it back here. That's the reason the contest took place – Jarret wanted control of that ship and whatever it brought back with it.'

He saw shock alternating with anger in her expression, as she replied. 'Things haven't really changed so much while I've been away, have they?'

'I'm afraid not, no.'

'All right, so what do we know about the Mos Hadroch?'

'Nothing, really. It's not even certain we did find it. What we found was the body of an Atn sealed up inside a hidden passageway on an abandoned clade-world. And…'

He had been on the verge of saying Whitecloud's real name. The sedatives were making it hard to think straight.

'It's possible what we're looking for is locked away inside the Atn's body,' he continued quickly. 'Except, as soon as it was brought on board the Mjollnir, it was locked away under Senate orders. The Legislate's arranged a secret deal to have the thing's remains shipped to Sol as soon as some essential repairs are finished.'

Dakota was staring at him open-mouthed. 'I… I didn't know any of this,' she said finally. 'We can't just leave it in the hands of people who don't know what they've got. Not if you've really found the Mos Hadroch.'

He glanced past her towards the window. Dawn's first light was reddening the horizon. 'Jarret's death means I can't be challenged over the Mjollnir any more, but there are people in the Senate who'll do almost anything, I reckon, to stop us getting hold of what Driscoll found.'

Dakota pushed herself up on one elbow and gazed down at him with a determined expression. 'Then obviously we need to get on board before that happens,' she said. 'We have to take the Mos Hadroch somewhere else.'

'Where?'

'Deep into the heart of Emissary territory,' she told him. A long, long way away.'

'Take it into Emissary territory.' Corso stared at her, slack-jawed. 'You have to be kidding me.'

'We need to head for a cache located deep inside their territory, which has certain unique vulnerabilities the Mos Hadroch is designed to exploit. We'll have backup, though: alien weapons, hundreds of them. If it comes down to a confrontation – and it almost certainly will – we should have a good chance of surviving.'

'And I suppose if I asked where you found these "weapons", you'd tell me?'

She smiled faintly. 'Not just yet.'

He groaned and started to haul himself out of the bed.

'Are you sure you should be doing that?' Dakota asked.

'Fuck it, it's been, what – two days now?' He winced as he lowered his feet to the floor. 'I don't know what the hell might have been happening in the meantime.'

He padded naked over to a locker, grunting in satisfaction when he found his clothes neatly pressed and waiting for him.

Corso started to get dressed, moving slowly and carefully, and clearly still in a great deal of pain. 'Here's the way I see it, Dakota. I sent a frigate, which also happens to be one of the Freehold's few assets of any value, out to a remote location on your say-so. That challenge I just barely survived the other day is one consequence of that decision. Now you're talking about flying into the heart of a deeply inimical, wildly hostile and considerably more advanced civilization, and attacking what I'd guess to be one of their primary resources. To be frank, it sounds like suicide.'

'I know how it sounds, but it's the only way to get the Mos Hadroch to function the way it's intended to.'

'And just what is that?' he asked, stepping closer. 'You mentioned something about a "vulnerability".'

In that moment Dakota herself looked as small, frail and vulnerable as he'd ever seen her. 'It's difficult to explain.'

'I just killed a man, and risked the crew of our flagship on an expedition halfway across the galaxy to track this thing down, and that's the best you can say?'

'Let me remind you of the facts,' she replied, her tone defiant. 'The Emissaries are already on their way. The swarm is still out there somewhere, looking for the Mos Hadroch. You're just going to have to take me on trust for now, because I'm pretty much working out things as I go along.'

'Assuming we really have found the Mos Hadroch,' he pointed out, 'and not just an alien corpse.'

She was silent as he finished buttoning his shirt up. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, thinking hard, before turning to her again.

'Who else knows you're here on Redstone?'

'Nobody apart from you and Ted Lamoureaux.'

'Good, let's keep it that way.'

'Why keep it a secret?'

'Because the more I think about it, the more I think things are going to get very nasty. If my enemies even suspected you were here, they might consider it de facto proof that I was planning an attack on the frigate.'