'Myself and the other machine-heads will be custodians of the technology, Lucas. The Consortium, the Bandati, whoever they'll have to come to us. We'll lease out the technology, but we'll always control it and protect it.'

Lucas snorted and shook his head. 'This is like some wet dream of absolute power. You're no better than the Shoal.'

'You've seen what happens when a bunch of different power groups came close enough to getting their hands on a prize like this. It's just too dangerous to entrust any of them with it.'

Corso looked away from her. 'There are people out there who think you're responsible for what happened to Night's End. An entire civilization was wiped out.'

'That wasn't me.'

'You're hardly lacking for a motive, are you? They locked you up, tortured you. You already killed thousands of them when you made a Magi ship self-destruct.'

'It wasn't me. me.'

He looked back up at her. 'Then you're going to have to deal with the fact that nothing you do is necessarily going to make you popular, Dakota. It's not like they're lining up to give you medals or the keys to the city, even as it is.'

'No. No, they aren't,' she agreed, swinging her feet back down to the floor. 'But I just can't think what else to do.'

'And that's what you want me to tell the Consortium?'

'No.' Her voice grew quieter again. 'I want you to take charge, Lucas.'

'What?' He gaped at her, thunderstruck.

'I'm going away for a while not just yet, but eventually. The Magi weren't just looking for the caches; they were also looking for the creatures that created them in the first place the Makers. They were close to getting the answers when the Shoal wiped them out.' She shrugged. 'Now I want to get those answers myself, if I can. But somebody needs to take care of things back here while I'm gone just to organize, set up the network to bind the Consortium together. We can use the Leviathan's Fall station for a temporary base, since there are no habitable worlds here for us to endanger by our presence.'

's.h.i.t, Dakota. I don't know what you expect me me to do. I don't know how to organize anything like this, or where to even start. I mean' he raised his hands in bewilderment 'how do you know they won't take it all away from me as soon as you're gone?' to do. I don't know how to organize anything like this, or where to even start. I mean' he raised his hands in bewilderment 'how do you know they won't take it all away from me as soon as you're gone?'

'Because I'll be able to find out what's happening from the new navigators, once they take charge of their ships,' she replied. 'And because Colonel Leidner, his staff and the entire Consortium Legislate are scared of what else I might do.'

'So maybe they'll call your bluff? What do you do then, blow up another star as a lesson? And what if that that isn't enough?' isn't enough?'

'I can only figure this out dealing with one thing at a time.'

'I don't want to have to do it.'

She smiled. 'Just like me.'

'To h.e.l.l with you, Dakota!' he yelled. 'Don't play games with me. Why the h.e.l.l should I run your fantasy of tin soldiers for you? What the h.e.l.l makes you think I'm qualified qualified to?' to?'

'Well, for one, you don't want the job, which some people might take for a good sign. For another, you're an a.s.shole, but at least you're an honest honest a.s.shole. Enjoy some responsibility for a change.' a.s.shole. Enjoy some responsibility for a change.'

'I guess there isn't anyone else you could give the job to, is there?' he muttered.

'No, there isn't. And you know that means you'll do it.'

His face darkened, but after a moment a small smile flickered across his face, as if he'd just enjoyed a private joke. 'And you? How long before you're back from meeting your Maker?'

'Funny'

'Tragic would be more like it, Dakota.'

'I don't know,' she replied, and went to stand by the door. 'Where I'll be going is a long way away from here, and after a quarter of a million years there might not be be anything there to find.' anything there to find.'

'Before you go. A question I've been meaning to ask you.'

She eyed him expectantly.

'The Emissaries brought this ship we're on and an entire Immortal Light fleet to Ocean's Deep, and then turned on Immortal Light almost as soon as they were out of the G.o.dkiller.' He shook his head. 'Why? I mean, at first, I thought I I might be responsible.' might be responsible.'

'How so?'

'Immortal Light took my incomplete protocols and managed to create a full working version of them in very little time.' He shrugged. 'But the protocols apparently didn't work and, no matter how I look at it, that doesn't seem enough of a setback for the Emissaries to suddenly turn around and destroy first Immortal Light's fleet, then the entire Night's End system.'

'I wondered about that too,' Dakota replied. 'At first we all a.s.sumed the Emissaries were here to discover how to build nova weapons, except it turned out they already had a pretty good idea of how to do that, right?' Corso nodded. 'I didn't manage to get as deep inside the G.o.dkiller as I would have liked, but I found enough to make some educated guesses.'

'Go on.'

'They destroyed Immortal Light not just because of what the derelict carried within it, but also because your protocols could grant them the same kind of power. They were just stringing Immortal Light along until they could be sure. They don't want other species competing with them directly any more than the Shoal do.'

When she smiled wryly, Corso knew how appalled he must look. Just then the door slid open again to reveal the three men still arguing in the corridor outside. All three halted abruptly, and turned to stare at them.

'Thanks,' Corso whispered, 'for saving my life. I know I didn't get myself in that medbox on my own.'

She merely nodded, the door sliding shut after her as she stepped out of the room. He'd half expected her to vanish in a puff of green smoke.

For a long time, Corso sat staring down at his slate. Then he shook his head angrily and deleted the single line of text he'd managed to produce.

He had other things to take care of now.

Over the following weeks, the surviving crews of the Darkening Skies fleet gradually subdued the rich jungles of the orbital station and set about repairing its crumbling towers. Dakota, meanwhile, was frequently to be seen moving from meeting to meeting within ships belonging to both Bandati and human. And wherever she went, she went unchallenged. She was discreetly or less discreetly followed at every turn, the faces of her fellow humans now distrusting or angry or hateful, or frequently some combination of all three.

There were further meetings and conferences, many more of them; there were endless attempts to cajole, threaten, bribe or merely persuade her, but Dakota's position remained unchanged. The Magi ships would be coming to the Ocean's Deep system only; the arrival of the spreading shockwave from the destruction of Night's End was still years off, and here there were no fragile ecospheres to be damaged, no vast populations p.r.o.ne to attack only lifeless worlds, a s.p.a.ce station, and the growing fleet of Magi ships.

Every now and then she would direct her attention towards Ocean's Deep's star, which had been burning for more than seven billion years, a bright and serene presence in the night skies of other populated worlds far, far away. Now it seemed impermanent, even fragile; something that could be destroyed on a whim, or else sacrificed in the name of political or military expediency.

Lucas Corso's life was becoming busier than he could have imagined. A third Magi ship soon arrived, and then a fourth, and a fifth. The second to turn up now piloted by Langley left shortly for the Consortium territories, taking with it most of the Ca.s.seia Andris's Ca.s.seia Andris's crew, and returning with a cargo ship and a fresh complement of military staff, bureaucrats, negotiators, engineers and politicians. The crews of the Darkening Skies fleet meanwhile took the orbital station for their own Hive. One ring of it was secured for the exclusive use of the Consortium, and Corso moved to private quarters there. crew, and returning with a cargo ship and a fresh complement of military staff, bureaucrats, negotiators, engineers and politicians. The crews of the Darkening Skies fleet meanwhile took the orbital station for their own Hive. One ring of it was secured for the exclusive use of the Consortium, and Corso moved to private quarters there.

Almost a fortnight after Corso's conversation with Dakota in the medical bay, there occurred the first of several concerted efforts to kill both her and himself. It failed utterly, mostly thanks to Dakota.

A covert team that included at least one demolitions expert had arrived incognito, mixed in with a fresh detachment of Consortium peacekeepers who had just arrived from Galileo. All six members of the team had been transferred into the detachment at the last minute, and once positioned at the orbital station they hadn't wasted any time in laying explosive charges at key points so as to cause the maximum damage to the already weakened station. Their apparent intention was to destroy the colony while both Dakota and Corso were engaged in talks with senior Consortium representatives, all such negotiations having now been shifted to the station itself from the Ca.s.seia Andris. Ca.s.seia Andris.

Something apparently went wrong, though, for when the report on the incident finally arrived, Lucas found that the remote detonators for the explosives had all failed mysteriously. Within minutes, joint Consortium and Darkening Skies security teams had been able to track down most members of the a.s.sa.s.sination team, after their cover ident.i.ties and current whereabouts had been revealed anonymously. It was, of course, far from difficult to detect Dakota's own hand in arranging this last detail.

Two of the would-be a.s.sa.s.sins made a last stand in a loading bay, apparently preferring death to capture. They turned out to be Freeholders who had previously worked as mercenaries for the Consortium Legislate's special security services.

As for who had recruited them, and why, that remained a mystery. Those responsible had gone out of their way to avoid leaving any kind of electronic paper trail that could link them to the squad-members. There was, however, no lack of potential suspects.

Over the next several days, there were two more failed attempts on Dakota's life. One involved an engineering consultant called Gloria Kjel, whose father had been working for Legislate business concerns in Darkwater's human quarter when the Night's End system had been destroyed. By the time Kjel had been apprehended, again thanks to an anonymous tip-off, Dakota's idea of going away for a while was starting to seem like a pretty good idea to Corso.

The other a.s.sa.s.sination attempt was nastier. Tracking down machine-heads to enrol as navigator-candidates presented its own unique set of hurdles, since the machine-head tech in itself was still illegal, presenting difficulties for any potential candidate wanting to make himself publicly known. Dakota herself, with an extensive criminal career behind her, would have had difficulty qualifying according to the tangled mess of regulations and specifications being hammered out by committees day and night. Yet the fact remained that, without navigators able to fly the superluminal Magi ships, the Consortium could not hope to survive as a cohesive ent.i.ty.

One such candidate was a man called Jim Krieger, a Bellhavenite like Dakota, who'd also gone underground shortly after the Redstone ma.s.sacres. By the time he found his way to Ocean's Deep more than a dozen Magi ships had arrived there, with new navigators currently being trained for each.

Krieger got close enough to Dakota to slash at her with a knife on their first meeting. Subsequent interrogation showed that he was being blackmailed over his young daughter, who'd been taken hostage by someone determined to destroy Dakota's plans. Krieger's child turned up dead less than a week later, in a Bellhaven city called Morningside.

The report of the incident, when it finally made its way into Corso's hands, made for heartbreaking reading. And security was tightened yet again.

But at least there were no more attempts made on either of their lives. The commanders of the new military detachments recently arrived at Ocean's Deep made the decision to provide each of the navigators-in-training with armed escorts. These individuals soon found themselves enjoying a unique mixture of instant fame, opprobrium and hatred.

Corso meanwhile returned to a seemingly endless round of talks during which he listened, argued, and attempted to cajole men and women from every stratum of the Consortium Legislate. One popular suggestion, on the part of many of the politicians he met, was that responsibility for electing new machine-head navigators should be shared with the Consortium.

Dakota's answer to this and other possible compromises was always firmly no.

Although she had sufficient political ac.u.men not to say it outright to the Consortium's delegates, Corso knew Dakota was unwavering in her desire for the Peacekeeper fleet to be an ent.i.ty entirely independent of the Consortium. And, as more weeks pa.s.sed and the days and nights blurred into one seamless, artificially-lit stream of conferences and discussions, Corso surprised himself by increasingly siding with her way of seeing things.

So few of the politicians and policy-makers he was forced to deal with were interested in much more than short-term goals. Everybody wants to protect their little bit of turf Everybody wants to protect their little bit of turf he found himself thinking more than once. They didn't seem to understand something was coming that could burn their little worlds to ashes. he found himself thinking more than once. They didn't seem to understand something was coming that could burn their little worlds to ashes.

Then, one particular morning, Corso opened the door of his quarters only to find a phalanx of Consortium Special Security troopers waiting for him, armed with concussion bolts and holstered batons. He was taken protesting and still exhausted after the previous night's debates to a command frigate that had recently docked with the Leviathan's Fall station.

At first he'd thought he might be under arrest that the Consortium was attempting to wrest control from Dakota, as he'd feared it might do but instead he found himself thrust inside a crowded lounge area on board the frigate, with Dakota herself standing at a portable lectern at one end.

Corso looked around at the muttering faces of the audience. Most of them were wearing military uniforms or the traditional dark-grey civilian attire of senior politicians and their administrative staff.

They were all staring resentfully at Dakota as if she'd chained them to their seats and was forcing them to watch her eat live babies.

'I'd thank you all for coming,' she said as the hubbub began to fade, 'but very few of you have had any choice but to be here. So I'll keep this simple and short. I won't accept any more attempts at stopping potential navigators from making their way to Ocean's Deep. Neither will I tolerate attempts at blackmailing them or threatening their families. Believe me when I say you need these people on your side. Any more such attempts will prove utterly futile.'

She scanned the room, from side to side. 'I have ambitious goals, as you know, in order to save our civilization, and the creation of a superluminal fleet is only one of them. I can't make this happen without your cooperation, but far too many of you seem intent on blocking me at every turn, while there's a large, vocal minority which doesn't appear to be interested in listening to reason of any kind.'

The screen on the wall behind her flickered into life, displaying a series of names, faces, and personal information. 'Most of this stuff is highly cla.s.sified,' Dakota continued. She smiled. 'The kind of information people like me aren't supposedly meant to know.'

Corso instantly recognized the faces as the members of the a.s.sa.s.sination team who had recently tried to blow the colony to pieces.

'The information currently on the screen has just been transmitted to all of your data-sheets,' she explained to her audience. 'You'll find details there on how those members of the bomb squad were recruited, who did the recruiting, who ordered the mission along with the planetary governments responsible for putting the plan into action.'

Corso pulled out his own data-sheet and studied the files that had just appeared on it. He glanced around and saw that most of the audience were also staring at their data-sheets. One individual in particular was gripping his sheet so hard his hands were shaking.

'I'm introducing a temporary embargo against all those governments responsible for that attempted atrocity. Temporary, that is, until the new Authority decides otherwise. The colonies identified will not be allowed to continue partic.i.p.ating in any negotiations, nor to elect their representatives to the Authority, and no ships of the Peacekeeper fleet will travel to their worlds until further notice.'

She stared around the gathered delegates, her hands gripping the lectern like she expected them to rush her. 'Consider this a warning. Goodbye.'

She strode out of the room to a roar of unanswered questions, escorted by a security contingent.

Corso stared after her, wondering if this was really the same woman he'd encountered just a few weeks before: battered, uncertain and vulnerable.

But then he remembered what she'd told him on several occasions, how time wasn't the same when you were linked into a Magi ship how you could live virtual lifetimes.

Corso had one last encounter with Dakota before she departed.

Back on Redstone, and free from the threat of immediate Consortium intervention, the Uchidans and the Freehold had renewed their conflict. On other colony worlds, a dozen similar internecine struggles till now suppressed by the overwhelming military authority of the Consortium were either on the verge of breaking out into open war, or had already done so. And set against all this strife was a greater conflict, so far away still that it would be millennia before evidence of it appeared in the night sky . . .

The Long War.

Ever since Dakota had asked him to make public certain details of the Shoal-Emissary war, the tach-net news networks had been rife with speculation that the Long War was nothing more than propaganda invented to fuel support for the Peacekeeper Authority. Once again, Dakota's criminal background was pored over in endless detail, as was her partic.i.p.ation in one of Redstone's bloodiest tragedies.

There was no doubt she made an unlikely saviour.

Dakota, meanwhile, had been true to her word: the Aleis system, fifty light-years from Earth, was the first to be shut out of any future discussions. The handful of representatives it had sent to Ocean's Deep were placed under house arrest until it was decided whether or not they'd been directly involved in attempted sabotage.

In the meantime, Corso was left to manage a dozen staff who were busy juggling endless requests for meetings, clarifications, decisions and the occasional, inevitable threat. But at least his movements were no longer restricted, and he could now go where he pleased, escorted by a carefully vetted armed guard called Leo.

And so it went, on and on and on: meetings were held, arguments were made, positions were stated. Fist-fights were far from unusual. And during it all, Dakota seemed to fade into the background, rarely seen but always easily in touch.

As Corso became busier, he relied increasingly on proxies to handle the meetings he couldn't attend. Thus the Peacekeeper Authority was finally taking shape, achieving the kind of solidity Corso hadn't really believed possible when Dakota had first suggested it.

Machine-head candidates were still trickling into the system, but there were surely many more still too wary of risking public exposure, reprisals, or the unpleasant fate of Jim Krieger. Also, medical and technical facilities, donated by Bellhaven, were being built in order to create new new machine-heads for the first time in many years. Such candidates had to each undergo a severe psychological grilling to ensure they had no suicidal urges that might prompt them to fly their craft into a star. machine-heads for the first time in many years. Such candidates had to each undergo a severe psychological grilling to ensure they had no suicidal urges that might prompt them to fly their craft into a star.

And even though Dakota's increasingly prolonged absences grew harder for him to explain away, Corso started to notice a shift in att.i.tudes among those previously forced to report to him a grudging respect that gradually became less grudging as further weeks pa.s.sed.

Almost three months after the battle with the Emissaries, Corso woke with the realization he wasn't alone. He sat up with a start to see a figure perched on the edge of his office couch, on which he'd fallen asleep.

He blinked in confusion, the silhouette leaning forward until the dim light from a still-active slate on the desk illuminated her features.

'Dakota?'

She smiled. 'Sorry for waking you.'

He pulled himself upright and reached up to rub at his tired eyes.

'So are they still complaining that too many of the navigators are coming from Bellhaven?' she asked.

Like you don't know everything about that already. 'Not as much as before,' he confirmed unnecessarily. 'You've been pretty scarce around here just lately' 'Not as much as before,' he confirmed unnecessarily. 'You've been pretty scarce around here just lately'

She laughed. 'True, it's been . . . it's been a while.' Something in her expression when she said it's been a while it's been a while sent a shiver down his back. 'I've been very busy. I'm leaving, within the hour. I don't know when I'll be back, Lucas. Maybe never, if things don't work out.' sent a shiver down his back. 'I've been very busy. I'm leaving, within the hour. I don't know when I'll be back, Lucas. Maybe never, if things don't work out.'

'Oh.' He leaned back, shocked.

'It's hardly unexpected,' she said. 'Is something particularly worrying you?'

'One of the main things working to the Authority's advantage is that so many of the people we deal with are scared of you. You're like a bogeyman for the post-Shoal generation, flying into suns and destroying anyone who crosses you.' He shrugged. 'Without you around, it'll be harder to keep them scared.'

'Gee, thanks.'

Corso flashed her a placatory grin.

'There's some things we have to discuss before I leave,' she said. 'For one, I don't know if the Shoal are ever likely to return, but if they do, it's certainly not going to be on friendly terms, so you're going to have to disabuse Greeley and Maknamuri and the rest of those idiots who think otherwise. All we are to the Shoal is a potential rival, especially once we start building our own drives. But meanwhile, as long as they're caught up in this escalating war with the Emissaries, and as long as they realize what I could do to them, they might keep their distance.'

'What can can you do them?' He shook his head groggily. 'Apart from the obvious, I mean.' you do them?' He shook his head groggily. 'Apart from the obvious, I mean.'