This way was better. She would keep telling herself that. The derelict left a trail of white-hot plasma as it passed through and beyond the upper cloud layers, before beginning its final descent into a sea of liquid metallic hydrogen. Below that lay a dense, rocky core, but the ship would cease to exist long before it got that far.
Dakota maintained contact with the ancient starship for as long as possible, as the force of its passage tore the ship's drive spines away and sent them spinning off into the crushing darkness all around. The enormous atmospheric pressures squeezed the ship's hull until it shattered.
And then, finally, it was over. The dream-city she'd first woken in was gone, as were the vast virtual libraries she'd wandered through, and the long-dead voices of the Librarians who had served her – the very same ones who had laboured to transform her into their new navigator.
All gone. She opened her eyes just as the derelict slipped out of contact for ever, and found she didn't particularly care what happened to herself next. Maybe two, possibly three minutes had passed in the real world. Days of Wine and Roses was still standing nearby, still brandishing his shotgun, but he'd lowered it until the barrel pointed away from her.
He turned away, listening to a long series of clicks that emerged from his interpreter, before turning back to her.
'You did this,' he said. 'You destroyed the derelict. You are responsible.'
She stared up at him. Wasn't he going to kill her now?
'Sure, I was, but it could all have been so much worse.'
'Worse?'
'I could have sent the ship flying into the heart of the sun instead. Don't you remember what I told you?' She shrugged. 'So what are you going to do now? Kill me or let me go?'
'Why would we kill you?'
Dakota felt her temper flare. 'I just destroyed the thing you've all been fighting for, or didn't you notice?'
Pulling his shotgun back before once again swinging it towards her head in a long, low arc, Roses hit her a second time. She saw what was coming and instinctively started to duck, but the alien moved too quickly. The barrel caught her on her chin and she spun away, head over heels, drifting towards the centre of the garden-bubble. Sharp, bright pain blanketed her thoughts once more, and she waited for it to pass, her hands clamped tightly over the lower half of her face. One of her teeth felt loose.
Something hit her again and she wrenched away with a scream, hearing a sound much like dry paper being rubbed between fingers. Small, hard-skinned hands pushed at her, and a few moments later she landed against the opposite side of the garden-bubble.
She curled into a defensive ball and waited long seconds for whatever might come, hyperventilating, her hands clamped over her injured jaw. After a few moments she felt a shadow cross over her.
'In terms of our immediate plans, nothing changes,' said Roses. 'We will be continuing on to our destination. When we get there, you'll do exactly what the Queen of my Hive wants you to do, and answer every question she has. Do you understand me?'
'Yeah, I understand,' Dakota mumbled, feeling her jaw with her fingers to see where it hurt most. She tried swallowing, but it still hurt. A lot.
And then they'll kill me when they finally realize I've taken away the thing they all wanted the most. The fight was over and out of her hands. What use could Corso's protocols be now?
She tried to reach out to the electronic systems all around her, but there was nothing. She was a normal person again; trapped in her own body, confined within the prison of her skull.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Dakota had been unable to imagine life without the constant background hum of her machine-head implants, the extra ghost in the machine that had gradually become an indispensable part of her mind. She had thought it would hurt worse than it actually did.
'You think you understand this situation,' Roses' interpreter rasped at her. 'You understand and are less than nothing. We know who and what you are. You were a thief, and now you are a murderer. This is not over, Miss Merrick, however much you might wish it was.'
Of course it's over, she protested numbly in her own thoughts.
Roses departed once more, swooping away on wide-spread wings, and all she could do was wonder just what he had meant. Thirteen Several hours after the destruction of the Blackflower facility, a small maintenance tug departed what appeared to be a disused refinery complex placed at a marginally higher orbit above the surface of the moon.
By now, salvage crews were already beginning the long and difficult process of finding survivors and recovering what they could from the still-orbiting wreckage. The bright sparks of their fusion drives registered on a series of displays spread out before Hugh Moss, the tug's sole occupant and pilot.
He watched as a series of detonations rippled through the structure of the orbital refinery, destroying the Perfumed Gardens for ever. He took a moment to reflect, and found he didn't regret the loss as much as he might have expected.
It was a shame to destroy what might have been his greatest legacy bar one, but perhaps he'd become too caught up in the business of helping human beings kill each other; perhaps he had become distracted from the one true purpose in his life – destroying the Shoal Hegemony, starting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.
Moss had been more than a little surprised when what appeared to be a Darkening Skies task force kidnapped Dakota in a military operation clearly calculated to cause maximum damage. But when Dakota had to all appearances destroyed the same derelict that had brought her to Night's End, he'd been forced to abandon his plans to take the derelict for himself – as well as grudgingly concede a degree of respect for her.
He had entered Alexander Bourdain's employ some years before because, amongst other things, Bourdain had been in the business of buying and selling information. Moss had hoped to track down the source of rumours that Immortal Light had a secret of enormous value; and what sparse details he managed to glean through Bourdain's network of spies and smuggling contacts slowly filled him with the sense that his long quest for vengeance might actually be nearing fulfilment.
It had been cause enough for him to approach the Queen of Immortal Light and request permission to relocate his Perfumed Gardens research and training facilities to the Night's End system, in the hope of finding further clues regarding what he had at first, mistakenly, suspected to be a Maker cache as yet undiscovered by the Shoal. In fact, as he soon found, Immortal Light had discovered their own Magi derelict thousands of years before, in a nearby system that remained as yet outside the Shoal's coreship routes; and there it had remained ever since, locked into a facility purpose-built for its study.
So when Dakota and her own derelict starship had suddenly appeared in this very system as if out of nowhere, it had appeared to be overwhelmingly fortuitous. His original plan to steal the one derelict Immortal Light had found could safely be put to one side. It had also become necessary to discard Bourdain, who had long since outlived his usefulness: the siege on the restaurant had supplied him with the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Bourdain while appearing blameless in the eyes of Immortal Light. He had slashed the wings of the Bandati agent responsible for tracking Bourdain down, knowing the little alien would discharge his weapon into the worm's tongue, triggering a violent reaction.
Unfortunately, it was not proving so easy to rid himself of Dakota Merrick. Rather than being safely dead and unable to interfere with his plans, she had once again survived – and destroyed the Nova Arctis derelict before he could take it instead.
But no matter: he was nothing if not adaptable. A Magi ship still remained a few light-years distant, in a system whose star the Bandati had named Ocean's Deep. He would have to step up his original plans and travel there forthwith. And, given what he now knew – that Immortal Light had, against all sanity, engaged the aid of the Emissaries – things were clearly about to get interesting.