'They're getting ready to fire on us,' Perez retorted, growing visibly angrier and stepping out from behind the console, with bunched fists. 'They're letting us see their targeting systems to make sure we know exactly what they're intending. Senator, if we don't signal them now and agree-'
Perez stopped abruptly at a sudden bright flare of light from the overhead display. Corso looked up to see that several pale spheres had now appeared between the frigate and the two approaching corvettes.
Except the corvettes weren't there anymore.
'What-?' Perez stopped and turned back to the console, staring down at its softly glowing surface as if he couldn't believe his eyes. 'They just… hang on.'
Perez replayed what had just happened. They both watched as bright beams of light flickered out from the spheres, tearing the two ships apart.
Dakota entered the bridge at that same moment, looking breathless. Perez stared up again at the overhead display, then at her, clearly putting two and two together.
'Tell me everything I need to know,' she said, stopping briefly to draw breath at the edge of the dais supporting the interface chair.
'We're breaking orbit,' Corso told her. She dropped her bag on the floor next to the dais and pulled herself up and into the interface chair. 'But it's taking too long,' he warned.
Dakota nodded, and Corso watched the intense way her small white fists gripped the chair's armrests.
She closed her eyes and for a few moments fought to steady her breathing, then nodded tightly. 'I'm going to ramp the drive up for a premature jump. If we can get out of range of the orbital defence systems, we might be able to take our time before making a longer jump.'
Corso watched as the petals surrounding the interface chair began to fold up around it, surrounding Dakota in silent darkness. He could feel the frigate's acceleration beginning to bite. Much like the Mjollnir's sister-ships, its centrifuge could be spun down during periods in which it was performing an extended hard burn, when each of the living spaces contained within it rotated on massive hydraulics so that the acceleration provided a comfortable level of gravity. When the acceleration ceased and zero gee returned, the centrifuge could once again be spun up.
He glanced back up at the projected starscape. The Magi ship that had brought Dakota to the frigate was slipping out of range. It was also beginning to slowly spin as if out of control, edging towards the delicate filigree of the orbital dock the Mjollnir had now left behind. Something was wrong. Dakota.
Her eyelids trembled, then opened on to nothing.
'What is it, Lucas?' she asked, the sound of her own voice close and flat within the confined space.
Your ship, what's happening to it?
'I don't have any choice,' she replied in a half-whisper.
Don't have any choice about what?
'About leaving it behind.'
Chapter Seventeen
Even as she locked into the Mjollnir 's sensory data-space, Dakota could still hear the Mos Hadroch whispering to her.
It was so close to the edge of perception that she might have dismissed it as only her imagination had she not been able to filter it through the rapidly receding Magi ship. There was something alive nestling within the carapace of the dead Atn – and it, in turn, could sense her.
Until that first moment of contact, as she made her way across the empty space that had separated the now rapidly receding starship from the frigate, she had assumed the Mos Hadroch would prove to be some inert device, a tool and nothing more.
But instead she was beginning to suspect it was something much more akin to the Magi's highest levels of technological achievement, so that to say it was merely sentient would be to do it a severe injustice. What she was now picking up through her enhanced senses was more akin to an artificial god, though not much bigger than a human skull, and fashioned to one very specific purpose.
Dakota closed her eyes tightly, sensing faint tendrils of enquiry from the dead minds that lived inside the Magi ship. So far, she was pretty sure they had no inkling of the act of betrayal she was about to commit. There had been a time when she had been greatly worried about their ability to see inside her mind, but since those early days she had learned how to mask her thought processes from their attention.
We've got fresh contacts, she heard Perez say, panic edging into his voice. Missiles. Approaching fast, launched from the surface. I'm reading a hundred and eighty seconds to impact.
She had seen them already. She felt her subjective experience of time shift, so that seconds seemed to take minutes to pass, as she locked completely into the Mjollnir 's data-space.
There was none of the pain or confusion she had endured in every attempt to interface with the Magi ship at anything more than a very low level following her resurrection. The frigate's data-space was tragically primitive by comparison… but it worked.
The Meridian drones had emerged in their hundreds from the Magi ship, and now some of them darted towards the missiles which were accelerating towards the frigate at more than twenty gee. The drones blazed with intense heat in the instant just before they sent out a pulse of fire bright enough to be visible from the planet surface below.
Alarms blared throughout the Mjollnir as this flash of energy overwhelmed its external sensor arrays. Down on the surface of Redstone, technicians and officers in both the Freehold and Uchidan territories were roused from their sleep inside armoured subsurface bunkers, as early-warning systems mistook the sudden flash for an attack.
The missiles meanwhile were reduced to spatters of molten metal that registered on the bridge's overhead display as fuzzy-edged splashes of colour rapidly fading from white to orange.
Dakota opened her eyes and let her breath out slowly.
She had saved their skins, and she had not needed the Magi ship to do it. The Meridian drones had responded to her commands with deadly efficiency, whispering to her of attack and defence, strike and counter-strike.
For the first time, she began to believe they might actually be able to take on the Emissaries.
Dakota
The air inside the petals tasted warm and slightly metallic. She sat motionless, alone in the darkness, and enjoyed a brief moment of silence.
Dakota can you
She let the last of the air out of her nostrils and waited for her heart to stop thumping. hear me?
'Dakota! I…'
Corso paused in mid-sentence as the chair's petals folded back down. Dakota surveyed the bridge, full of light and sound and motion.
'I took care of it,' she said, slowly lifting herself out of the interface chair and stepping carefully down from the dais. 'There won't be any more missiles.'
'How?' Corso demanded, his face damp with sweat. 'I mean, I saw it on the overhead. It was incredible. But… how?'
She looked past his shoulder to see a man she didn't recognize standing by one console. He studied the data scrolling in front of him so intently it was obvious he was deliberately trying not to look at her.
'I told you,' she said. 'I got my hands on some weapons – very old, very powerful weapons left behind by a dead civilization.'
'We're being hailed from the ground, Senator.'
Corso turned to the man by the console and nodded distractedly. 'Any news?'
'There are more missiles on their way. They say they won't pull them back unless we stop and surrender.'
Dakota walked past Corso to join the other man sitting at the console. 'What's your name?' she asked.
'Dan Perez.'
She nodded to the console. 'Please.'
He shrugged and stepped aside. She studied the data displayed there and frowned.