You can't be serious.
He waited while she checked the readings from her own ship's sensors. When she came back, he could feel her panic surging across the connection between them in bright hot waves.
But why? They can't possibly know about the artefact. Can they?
‹Perhaps Hugh Moss knew about the Mos Hadroch. If so, he may have passed the information on to the Emissaries.›
I told Moss you had a way to stop the war. I thought he might…
‹Listen to reason?›
Go to hell.
‹A most infelicitous disclosure, Dakota. Certainly enough for him to infer the existence of something approaching the nature of the artefact.›
But why blow the whole damn system up?
‹It is in the Emissaries' nature to lay waste all around them. If the sun detonates before I can implement the Mos Hadroch, the cache will be destroyed, and with it any chance of stopping them. They are, after all, not lacking for other caches in other parts of their empire. Do not attempt to take over my yacht again, Dakota. Not if you value our purpose in being here.›
Trader! Wait-
But once again, he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-six
As some of the field-generators were finally overwhelmed, scouts began to whip in towards the frigate's hull, their blades and cutting implements slicing through the thick armoured plates. The Meridian drones were meanwhile dying, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the scouts.
Dakota watched it all with a growing sense of frustration and panic. The scouts were attacking the Mjollnir because of herself, specifically because of whatever it was Moss had put inside her.
It was time for something drastic.
A minute or two later she sensed Lamoureaux entering the bridge. Indecision froze her for a moment, then she forced herself to stand, the chair's petals folding back around the base of the dais in response.
Martinez was still on the bridge, crouching over a console, talking to Perez over a comms link. He was paying no attention to either Ted or Dakota.
She stepped down and seized Lamoureaux by the arm, as he approached her, pulling him instead towards the exit. Her voice was just above a whisper as she spoke.
'I need your help, Ted. Things just went from bad to worse.'
'What do you mean?'
'Take a look,' she said, transferring the neutrino flux data to him via a link.
His eyes became momentarily unfocused, and his jaw flopped open. 'How long have we got?' he exclaimed, once he had recovered.
'Quiet!' she hissed, nodding towards Martinez, but the Commander was still talking to Perez, still oblivious to the pair of them. 'We've got maybe twelve hours maximum before this whole system goes up.'
Ted looked befuddled, glancing quickly at Martinez and then back again. 'And you want to keep this a secret?'
'No, just… wait for twenty minutes before telling them.'
He eyed her with increasing suspicion. 'Dakota, what the hell are you up to?'
'Here.' She linked with him again and transferred over the command structure for the Meridian drones. 'You can handle them just as well as I can.'
Over Lamoureaux's shoulder, she saw Martinez glance up and study them for a few seconds, then look away again.
She nodded silently towards the passageway outside the bridge. He picked up the hint and followed her.
'Take the chair and run the drones for me,' she told him once they were outside.
'Why can't you do it yourself?'
The ship's data-space informed her that Corso and Perez were on their way back from the hold. One of the landers was hooked up to an airlock and ready for launch.
'Do you remember what I said earlier, that there was something on board this ship that was leading the Emissaries straight towards us?'
He nodded.
'That something is me, Ted. I don't know what it is or how he did it, but a man called Hugh Moss planted something on me. Not even my Magi ship realized it was there. While you're running the drones, I'm going to get on board that lander and use it to draw the scouts away from the frigate. That way you'll have a better way of staying alive, while I can go after Trader. Nobody else needs to be down there at the cache but me, anyway.'
'Dakota, no.'
'For God's sake, Ted! I need to do this. I need to put an end to it all.' She could feel tears prickling the corners of her eyes.
'We should wait for the others to get here. Besides…' He shook his head. 'No, this is beyond just crazy. Even if you're determined to go down there on your own, nobody's going to be mad enough to let you.'
Her expression became icy calm. 'Don't get in my way, Ted, or I'll shut down the drones. The frigate would be left totally defenceless.'
He swallowed. 'I'd reactivate them.'
'But it might take you too long. There are already things out there trying to burrow their way through the hull.'
'I don't think you'd-'
'Try me, Ted.'
She watched him studying her, trying to make up his mind whether she was serious.
'You're out of your mind,' he said eventually. 'That's what they've all been saying, and I defended you. But they were right, Dakota. You're out of your fucking mind.'
'Don't let anyone come after me. Do you understand me?'
He stared back at her in silence, filled with impotent fury, as she turned and ran down the passageway. Trader's yacht had utilized a maximum-evasion pattern as it descended towards the surface of the cache-world, but it had still suffered enormous damage from the ground-based defences. Once his ship had dropped into the cache's main shaft and begun its descent deep below the planet's surface, however, the shooting stopped.
Thousands of passageways had been cut into the rock all the way down the shaft. Before very long, Trader guided his yacht to a landing in one specific passageway where he knew he would find the cache's drive-forge. Once he had exited his ship, he took a moment to approach the lip of the passageway, in order to gaze down into the abyssal depths below.
Rows of lights descended the shaft's smooth walls, all the way down to where they appeared to converge tens of kilometres below his vantage point. On the far side of the shaft he saw a city-sized factory complex imbued with that same ineluctable air of decay and abandonment.
The walls around him had a half-melted look, with more ruined machinery lying abandoned. It didn't require a great deal of conjecture to realize it had been a very long time since any new drive-cores had been manufactured here.
The Emissaries, despite the advance warning, had clearly not expected the cache itself to be targeted. That they had then chosen to destroy the entire system made it clear they had finally recognized their error, even if much too late.
Trader swivelled in his field-bubble, then guided it deeper into the gently curving passageway, dodging past the blackened hulks of dead technology. 'I don't give a damn what she said!' Corso screamed. 'We have to go after her!'
'You want to go after her, fine,' said Lamoureaux, 'but I'm not willing to call her bluff. She looked crazy enough to do it.'
'It's too late anyway,' said Martinez, from across the bridge. 'She's already boarded the lander and taken it out. She must have sneaked right past you and Dan while you were on your way here.'
'We got a distress call,' explained Perez. 'That's why we came back here as fast as we could.'
'Ship-wide or direct to your helmets?' asked Lamoureaux.
'Direct,' Perez replied. 'Not…' He fell silent mid-sentence.
Lamoureaux nodded. 'She faked that alert.'
Perez rubbed his face with both hands and dropped into a nearby seat. 'I knew we should have stayed with the lander.'
'Here's the thing I don't understand,' Corso growled, moving closer to Lamoureaux. 'You could have warned us – and you didn't even try to stop her. Why?'