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  ‘With ease. But also note that planet engine fully operational under normal optimal circumstances, such circumstances invalidated by presence of activated GiantKiller. Therefore the Shoal can accept no blame.’

  ‘I should never have done business with your fucking kind,’ Bourdain snarled. ‘Really, outside of your box of magic tricks, all you lot are fucking tubeworms with attitude.’

  ‘Correct surmise,’ the Shoal replied. ‘But very powerful, very wealthy tubeworms. Note also that safety lies within personal protective bubble, as world dissolves like salt. Mr Bourdain advised to make use of such tube-worm technology by way of escape. Should reparations be sought, if still unhappy after conclusion of this sad woeful day, honourable tubeworm suggests further thoughts concerning embarrassment of criminal charges for procuring GiantKiller. Non-loss of species access to leased technologies in the face of such criminal acts might be considered extremely lenient.’

  Bourdain was starting to say something else, but Trader failed to catch it as a vast crack rent the Great Hall totally asunder, rapidly opening out into a chasm below them.

  Trader propelled himself upwards as the roof collapsed, revealing the stars beyond. He left Bourdain to find his own exit, ignoring his continuing protests over their shared comms band.

  Trader’s human bodyguards were long gone in search of safety, and, truth be told, they were only there for show. If Trader had one real skill—beyond subterfuge and deceit—it would be a knack for survival.

  He nimbly skirted a great section of the roof as it tumbled towards him, then navigated past several other sizeable chunks of falling debris as he made his way to safety far from the disintegrating asteroid.

  Light sparkled from far above as the atmosphere’s retaining field vainly attempted to repair itself before finally giving out completely. Now he was well out of danger, Trader glanced down for the rare privilege of watching an entire world—however tiny—disintegrate before its eyes.

  The ambassadorial cruiser had departed the Rock the instant the first signs of catastrophic engine failure had manifested. Any sooner and Trader would have run the risk of arousing suspicion during any subsequent investigation.

  ‘Please to be estimating surviving population of Bourdain’s Rock,’ Trader messaged his human staff aboard the cruiser.

  ‘Of two thousand, two hundred and thirteen individuals, of which two hundred and thirty-five were registered staff, there’s an early estimate of just seventy-five survivors, Ambassador.’

  What would happen next depended on how much Trader chose to trust the information provided by the Deep Dreamers. Prior experience had taught the alien that the chances of someone successfully following a predicted course of action could be improved by narrowing down the alternative options.

  So far, the Dreamers had been entirely accurate in their predictions of key events. In some way as yet unfathomable to Trader, the woman Dakota Merrick now stood at the beginning of a path that, without judicious interference, would lead to the most terrible war the galaxy had ever witnessed.

  Now Trader’s priority task was to make sure of staying with her every step of the way, until the root cause of that impending conflict could be discerned—and then carefully eradicated.

  —

  Before blacking out, the last thing Dakota remembered was a wall of rock rushing straight towards her. As she awoke, she was therefore considerably surprised to find she was still alive.

  She remembered the plaza ripping apart down the middle, with a sound like an army of gods grinding their teeth in unison. She recalled seeing rivers of silver work their way through the ancient exposed rock, as she’d been carried upwards in a rushing tornado of air. Then a chunk of mountain had come flying towards her, lines of silver spreading through that too, before it visibly dissolved into gravel before her eyes.

  The filmsuit, she knew, had kept her alive. She’d been aware that it could absorb kinetic energy to some fantastic degree, but ensuring her survival after colliding with a mountain was on a whole new level of scary

  A section of slowly tumbling debris about the size of a stadium came rushing up towards her. There was no way she could avoid it, but she braced herself nevertheless, hoping against hope.

  She came into contact with the hurtling debris at bowel-emptying speed, yet she felt nothing. For a few moments, her filmsuit glowed a dull red while the rock underfoot began steaming and cracking. It seemed the filmsuit could somehow reflect the enormous kinetic energy of the impact back into itself.

  Dumbfounded at this knowledge, Dakota bent her knees and kicked, pushing herself away from the shattered asteroid fragment. Her filmsuit slowly faded to its usual black, any remaining energy radiating back into space. It was hard to believe the Bandati liquid shield could be capable of so much.

  Gradually she built up a momentum taking her away from Bourdain’s Rock by pushing herself off other chunks of passing debris. Once she was far enough away, she finally took the opportunity to look back. Patches of dying forest were still visible, clinging to shattered asteroid-fragments that spun slowly away from each other or else collided and continued to disintegrate.

  Dakota didn’t even want to think about what had happened to the people left behind.

  As she watched, a huge chunk of the Rock’s shattered horizon split apart in a shower of grey and black dust. Trees and lichens still clung to one segment and, against all the odds, some localized emergency power circuits were still functioning, illuminating the interiors of ripped-open corridors, equipment bays and living quarters. Combined with the glow of sporadic electrical fires here and there, these lights gave the impression of a hellish grotto. She caught glimpses of the flash-frozen corpses of deer and horses floating near by, then they were gone, caught in a disintegrating maelstrom of dust and rock that was likely to grind them down to nothing.

  Piri was feeding her news reports of the disaster, as local ships escaping from the Rock continued firing live feeds into the local tach-nets. Her Ghost subsequently picked out a description of a woman urgently being sought for questioning. A woman carrying illegal machine-head implants.

  But I didn’t do anything, she protested within the safety of her own thoughts. Maybe they were talking about some other machine-head.

  They were going to kill me. I had no choice . . .

  But no choice as to what? She hadn’t followed through on her threat. She’d tried to bluff Moss, and failed pathetically.

  But someone had followed through. She had absolutely no doubt the Rock had been destroyed by the same GiantKiller she’d transported here earlier.

  The appalling notion that she had been set up oozed into Dakota’s thoughts like a pool of coagulating blood. People were looking for her, people who thought she was responsible for this outrage.

  But who could be easier to blame than a machine-head, an illegal?

  Old anger and frustration flared deep inside her thoughts. She remembered all too clearly the day they’d forcibly removed her original Ghost implants, after the fatal flaw in the technology had become clear. Just as vivid was the memory of her subsequent near-suicidal depression, a bleak period that had lasted several months. Then came her decision to acquire some crude black-market clones, furtively installed in a backstreet surgery, before slowly starting to piece her life back together.

  Without doubt she was the perfect scapegoat, for no one really trusted machine-heads. Not after . . .

  For a long moment, Dakota imagined her broken and beaten body being tossed aloft by a jeering mob.

  Come and get me, Piri.

 

  That’s fine, Piri. Just make sure you get here before my filmsuit runs out of juice.

  She was drifting towards a boulder measuring about a hundred metres across. As she got closer,
she recognized the tiles adorning part of its surface: it was a fragment of the Great Hall. Both she and it were moving in the same direction at roughly similar velocities, so she managed to land on it gently. She was about to push away again when she caught sight of a human body floating nearby—a partly naked woman, with the few remaining scraps of an evening dress still straggling from her torso.

  The corpse’s eyes were glassy and frozen, the mouth open in a soundless scream. Dakota recognized her as the avatar of Pope Eliza.

  As Dakota finally pushed off into the darkness her Ghost circuits tugged her gaze in a particular direction, where she saw light glinting from the rapidly approaching shape of the Piri Reis.

  It would take days for her to shake the hideous memory of the avatar’s corpse from her restless dreams.

  The Piri hove closer, changing from a dull silhouette barely visible against the stars to a grey hull comprised of three joined-up sections. From a distance it resembled a fat metallic insect. From the ship’s underbelly, a forest of grapples extended, seeking her out.

  Dakota fell into her ship’s machine embrace, like a swaddled child falling into the arms of its mother. At that moment she became aware of the Shoal’s gift still clutched, by some miracle, in one black-slicked hand.

  Five

  Freehold Democratic State

  Redstone Colony, 82 Eridani

  Lucas Corso blinked, trying to stay alert, and focused again on the bleak landscape beyond the windscreen. He was getting tired after the long drive, the snowy vastness merging into an unending pale void as he aimed the tractor transport at a point midway between two distant volcanic peaks from which thin trails of smoke dribbled.

  Fire Lake was visible to the east, spreading beyond the horizon, its icy foam-topped water crashing against a desolate shore. Canopy trees towered in the near distance, like black umbrellas sprouting from the corpses of buried giants. The largest and oldest of them easily reached fifty or sixty metres into the air. One-wings circled around the high, veined shrouds of the trees, their organic photovoltaic upper-wing surfaces sparkling as they circled in the fading light.

  Corso checked the co-ordinates they’d been given: almost there now.

  Sal was asleep beside him in the passenger seat, arms folded over his chest, head back, occasionally blinking awake and peering around for a few moments as they trundled across the frozen landscape. He’d long since given up arguing with Corso, of trying to prevent him -as Sal put it—from committing suicide.

  ‘Nothing you do will bring Cara back or get your father out of jail,’ Sal had repeated for the hundredth time. ‘Not even murdering Bull Northcutt. God knows I’d like to see the psychotic son of a bitch dead and skewered, but the fact is, if either one of you is going to wind up in a coffin, it’s probably not going to be him.’

  Corso had slammed the wheel with the heel of his hand, angry at Sal, but also with himself for letting Bull manipulate him so transparently. Bull had murdered his fiancée, knowing Lucas would inevitably call him out on a challenge. Lucas Corso, the son of a liberal Senator who’d renounced the whole system of challenges, before expediency and war had forced the Senate to outlaw them anyway.

  Cara had disappeared on her way back from the medical facility in a small mining community south of Fontaine, where she’d been working on loan. A few weeks later, her remains had been found in the burned-out wreck of a short-haul landhopper on the road to Carndyne Valley. Her teeth had been pulled out and her fingers cut off—the trademark of Senator Gregor Arbenz’s death squads. Her face had been so badly mutilated they’d had to identify her from DNA records.

  It was all Corso had been able to think of for a month now, that same floating image imposed between his eyes and the rest of the world: his Cara, not smiling but mutilated, torn, destroyed.

  He couldn’t prove that Bull Northcutt had done it, but Bull liked to boast. And Senator Northcutt’s son was widely known to be in charge of one of the death squads.

  Then one day a few weeks before, Corso had been on his way back from the research library in Carndyne Valley’s East Tent and come across Bull Northcutt lounging outside the hydro farm with several other off-duty police, standing around a couple of tractor vans, getting drunk.

  Corso kept walking, and tried to ignore the leering, grinning faces that turned to follow his progress. There was no one else around. They were here solely because they knew he came this way, every day. They fell silent, while watching him pass.

  ‘By the time it was my turn to stick my dick in her,’ Corso heard Bull say loud and clear, ‘she was pretty good and loose. I don’t think she’d ever been fucked properly in her life. What do you think, Corso?’

  Corso had stopped, fists clenching at his sides, any last remaining scrap of doubt concerning the identity of Cara’s murderer suddenly vanished. That was when he had challenged Bull. They could have easily arrested him there and then: since the Freehold had found a real enemy to fight in the Uchidans, the challenges had been outlawed. Too many soldiers were dying in duels when they were needed on the front.

  But Bull had just kept grinning, and accepted.

  —

  Sal snapped awake as the tractor rolled down and then back up the banks of a stream, before Corso finally hit the brakes.

  ‘Oh shit, I’m still here,’ Sal yawned, blinking sleepily and staring around. ‘Guess that means you’re still going to get yourself killed, huh?’

  Corso shot him a sharp glance, and Sal shrugged, turning to look out at the lakeshore, falling silent again.

  Senator Northcutt, Bull’s father, was in charge of the Senate investigation against Lucas’s father, Senator Corso. Murdering Cara was Senator Northcutt’s way of sending a violent message, not just to Lucas but also to his old man. Witnesses had already been bribed or coerced into claiming Senator Corso had organized secret meetings with the Uchidans; that he’d supplied them with vital military information and worked against the Freehold in order to destroy it; that he’d kidnapped Freehold children, handing them over to the Uchidans for mind-control experiments.

  Men and women, friends and confidants, all frightened, all bruised and bloodied from long, violent hours in Kieran Mansell’s police cells. All had testified against Senator Corso and his supporters, before the assembled Senate.

  Lies, all lies.

  A brief squall of icy rain spattered across the windscreen. Corso peered into the distance, and saw a couple of black dots standing around another tractor, a couple of flares driven into the hard icy soil, marking the site of the challenge by the shores of the lake.

  ‘We’re here,’ Corso muttered, surprised at how calm he sounded.

  —

  Corso pulled on his winter gear before following Sal from the cabin, dropping several metres down the ladder to snow churned up by the tractor’s tracks. He checked the seal around his breather mask one last time, then looked around. They stood on loose shale and rock dotted with tiny green and blue growths that pushed through the permafrost. The cold burned his skin wherever it was exposed, 82 Eridani’s orange-red orb dropping towards the horizon as evening descended on Redstone.

  Corso rubbed at the red fuzz of his beard where it was uncovered by his breather mask. Its protection was essential because the partial pressure of the nitrogen in the air was enough to cause a potentially fatal case of the bends after just a few moments of unaided respiration. It was possible to talk through the mask, which had built-in electronics that processed the voice, but what emerged sounded flat and metallic, like a robot speaking.

  Harsh laughter, faint and distant, carried towards them from the other tractor. Corso clenched his fists tightly, anger reasserting itself under a black tide of adrenalin.

  ‘Lucas. Listen to me. Remember what I suggested? Just walk in there, accept the challenge, and surrender without fighting. Then you can walk away with honour—and with your life. According to the code of conduct he has to accept that or he loses his honour, right?’

  ‘No, Sal, I
need to kill him. If I don’t, they don’t get the message. They’ll go on thinking we’ll never fight back.’

  Sal then lost his temper. ‘For God’s sake, even if you won, that doesn’t make you a Citizen! Challenges are illegal.’

  ‘I’ll present it to the Senate as a fait accompli. They’ll arrest me, sure, but I’ll go on fighting from inside prison until they take notice. Things have got to change here. Arbenz himself wants to re-legalize challenges. If I win and he still refuses to recognize me as a Citizen, he’d be committing political suicide.’

  Sal snorted. ‘Yeah, and either way, you’re committing real suicide.’

  —

  The Freehold was based on ancient ideals. To become a Citizen—to enjoy certain privileges, to be able to vote -you had to be prepared to fight on its behalf. This inherently warlike philosophy had seen the Freehold forced out of colony after colony until the Consortium had relented and granted them a development contract for Redstone. With no actual enemies to fight, at least until the arrival of the Uchidans, and comfortably far from Sol and the bulk of the Consortium, the system of challenges had developed there.

  But times were changing and, increasingly, only extremists like Arbenz and his gang of followers held up the old principles. The fact they were losing the war with the Uchidans, a constant tit-for-tat exchange of guerrilla fighting along a constantly fluctuating border, made the ground on which the old guard stood even less sure.

  Six bright flares shone around a circle demarcated by stones carefully selected from the nearby shore. In the flickering light, Corso noted the same faces he’d seen that day outside the hydro tents when he had issued his challenge. Drunken cheers went up as he and Sal approached the base of the two-storey transport Northcutt and his cronies had arrived in earlier.

  ‘All right,’ Sal said, exhaling long and slow, as if he’d just come to a momentous decision. ‘So you’re really doing this.’

  Corso nodded, without even glancing at his friend. ‘I’m doing this.’