'Then you're going to have to find a way to keep us safe from those scouts in the meantime.'
'Sure.' She nodded wearily. 'Of course.'
He studied her. 'How are you holding up?'
Dakota laughed weakly. 'Just barely.'
He started moving away, but she reached out to stop him. 'Wait. I need to show you something.'
She put on display the video feeds from the spiders.
'You can see how badly trashed the hold is, but Ted was right: those landers look like they survived pretty much intact.'
Corso nodded and stepped back down from the dais. 'Dan, come with me,' he said to Perez, then stopped, before he left the bridge, to look back at her. 'See what else you or Ted can discover before we arrive there,' he said.
'I'll send a spider out on to the hull to retrieve a couple of field-generators,' she said. 'If we're going to attempt a landing, we're going to need all the protection we can get.'
Corso nodded and left, with Perez following.
Dakota linked into the remaining Meridian drones and prepped them for combat. At the same time, she noticed it was early evening, shipboard-time. She settled back in the chair and wished she had asked Perez for another shot.
Whatever happened after this, she already knew it was going to be the longest night of her life. Trader swam through the dense, pressurized waters that filled his craft. Schools of tiny fish swam around him, and he snatched some up with his tentacles, devouring them as he studied the multicoloured projections all around him. The first jump had brought him within a few light-hours of the target system; subsequent jumps brought him closer to the inner system.
Defensive networks pinged his yacht constantly as it accelerated inwards, but he had obtained automatic response codes, leached from captured Emissary vessels, which fooled the networks into thinking he was one of their own. They would see through it eventually – particularly once he got within range of the cache – but it would meanwhile get him close enough.
He entered the chamber in which he had placed the Mos Hadroch. It hung there in the air, suspended in a series of interlocking shaped fields. Its mass was much greater than might be expected, but of course much of that extra mass was hidden in nonlocal spatial dimensions.
His ship spoke to him: All propulsion systems are currently optimal. The local Emissary population is primarily located aboard habitats orbiting the fourth world. Local comms traffic implies they are engaging in one of their periodic purges.
Trader's fins shivered at the mention of the purges. The Emissaries were bad enough when it came to dealing with other species; they were hardly less harsh on themselves. Every now and then, they would set about destroying their weaker members in orgies of slaughter.
The ship provided him with images of the system's innermost world. He saw enormous machines scattered and apparently abandoned all across its scarred and airless surface. Great holes had been drilled deep into the planet's crust, so that Trader could see manufactories extending deep into the core. Godkillers guarded it, patrolling the volume of space surrounding the star, their hulls black and crystalline, and forbidding in their sheer strangeness.
Even a cursory analysis made it clear that almost everything in this system was old. His yacht was still pulling in data from local data networks which did nothing but assure him of what he already knew, that this system was a backwater, and therefore only lightly guarded by the Emissaries' usual standards. ‹We're coming under fire out here. Can you get them off our tail?›
Working on it, Dakota sent.
She had folded the interface chair's long petals up around her, enveloping her in silence and darkness. She could see the suited figures of Corso and Perez through the eyes of a single spider-mech hovering in the twisted wreckage of the hold. One of them was using a welding torch to cut away wreckage blocking in a lander.
She switched her viewpoint back to the battle taking place all around the Mjollnir. So far, the Meridian drones in conjunction with the field-generators were doing a good job of protecting the frigate but, for all their extraordinary power, they were being pushed to their limit by the onslaught of scouts. Worse, a godkiller had now appeared a couple of light-seconds away, vectoring towards them on an intercept course.
Dakota didn't want to think about what would happen if it got within range before they had a chance to jump.
‹Dakota.› Corso's voice sounded terse and strained. ‹I think something got in here with us.›
She switched her view back to one of the spider-mechs and searched through the shadows until she saw it: the scout that was part hidden in the twisted shadows of wreckage. As she watched, its carapace began to slide apart, revealing a variety of deadly-looking machinery. The hold was now a weak spot, since most of the field-generators meant to protect it had been destroyed during Trader's jump.
The scout began to cut and burn its way through an exposed bulkhead leading to the frigate's interior.
I've got it.
A Meridian drone peeled off from the rest, darting back inside the wreckage and reducing the scout to white-hot slag within moments.
How's it going with that lander?
‹Nearly done,› Perez replied. ‹She'll be good to go just as soon as we've finished mounting the field-generators on her hull.›
One hundred and eighty seconds to the next jump. Get back inside the instant you're done.
‹We'll be done by then.›
Dakota drew the drones back inside the frigate while Corso and Perez retreated through a still-functioning airlock that led into the rest of the ship. Less than three minutes later, the Mjollnir fell once more between the folds of the universe. The frigate dropped back into space less than twenty thousand kilometres from the surface of the cache-world. The system's star now filled the sky, huge and terrifying, while the hull's sensor arrays showed the world itself as a circle of black imposed against this seething light.
New data came in: vast, apparently abandoned craft circled the star in long, eccentric orbits, along with a halo of less easily identifiable junk. The surface of the target world itself, outside of the cache, was pocked with what might have been machinery or habitats of some kind. There were two… no, three godkillers in orbit around the target world.
As she watched, they started to move out of orbit. Because of me, she thought, with no small amount of horror.
A few moments later, Emissary scouts began to materialize all around the frigate.
She picked up Trader's yacht, already dropping down towards the planet's surface. He was being chased by several scouts himself, and automated defences positioned on the surface of the planet were firing on him. Trader became aware of the Mjollnir 's arrival at about the same time his ship warned him that its primary defences were approaching catastrophic failure. The scouts that had been chasing him decelerated almost at once, reversing their thrust and heading back towards the frigate.
Within his yacht, the waters remained dark and cool. Trader studied the data coming in from his hull arrays, but no matter how often he looked he still couldn't quite believe what it was telling him. ‹Dakota. I see that you are still alive.›
Trader?
‹I did not expect you to make it this far.›
What can I say?. I'm tenacious when I'm really fucked off. When we're done, I'm going to take that damn artefact and ram it up your-
‹Dakota, according to my instruments, the Emissaries have just dropped a nova mine into their own star. The neutrino flux is quite unmistakable.›