Nova War

Trader drifted a little closer. 'Tell me something,' he asked, 'have you ever even been to see the Deep Dreamers? It's a remarkable experience, the chance to see all the possible futures open to our kind. Do you know what the galaxy would have become if we hadn't killed the last of the Magi? We'd have been just another client race, nothing more, begging for scraps at their table.'

'And that would have been so bad?'

Trader's fins stiffened in anger. 'Reduced to servility in the shadow of another species? Listen to yourself! That was never to be our future.'

'We were seduced by the Deep Dreamers, Trader.' Swimmer had carefully studied the interior layout of the coreship's command centre before departing his own ship. 'They gave us our first taste of empire, but in reality we serve them, not the other way round. Your slavish devotion to their predictions is pathetic.'

'I have no delusions about the Dreamers' limitations, nor do I have the time for wishful thinking and fantasies. Don't you even want to know why I brought you here?'

Swimmer in Turbulent Currents made a show of looking around him. 'Why, to kill me, of course – far out of view of the Hegemony and our masters. Try anything, however, and my ship will destroy this building with both of us inside it.'

'I wanted you here not because I think you're a fool I can talk round, but because you can make others listen to you,' Trader continued, more quietly this time. 'That makes you dangerous. Choose to believe what you wish, Swimmer, but the Emissaries have no interest in compromise, regardless of what their servants might have told you.'

'And yet the Emissaries are winning, Trader. They just keep coming, and we keep getting pushed back.'

'Precisely! So we must use our nova weapons to-'

'To what?' Swimmer's amusement was mixed with disgust. 'To destroy not just the Emissaries with the one weapon we said we'd never use, but the entire galaxy as well?'

'Listen to me.' Trader's tone became more urgent. 'I'm offering you a chance-'

'I already know what you want: a first strike against the Emissaries, to disable them. But how could that do anything but accelerate their own research into constructing their own nova weapons? How long before they realize they'd possessed the capacity to construct them all along?'

'We'll be overrun if we don't act immediately.'

'No, Trader, we won't. We can still survive, even if we lose our Hegemony. Anything else would bring only untold trillions of deaths.'

'We will engineer the war so that the Hegemony will survive.'

'To rule what?' Swimmer scornfully demanded. 'The ashes of dead stars? I reject your offer, because to do otherwise would be to make myself as much a criminal as you are. I would rather die.'

Swimmer's yacht informed him that other field-bubbles were now approaching the command centre. Long-dead power systems throughout the building were beginning to power up, demonstrating evidence of recent repair.

'Listen to me, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, and listen as you never have before. You betrayed us, and you were found out. It's true that I was sent here to kill you, but I now have other uses for you.'

Go feed the Dreamers, Swimmer thought, and ordered his yacht to destroy the command centre.

Nothing happened.

Swimmer tried to bolt for an exit, but found to his horror he couldn't move; his field-bubble refused to shift more than a metre or two in any direction, while Trader remained where he had been, studying him thoughtfully.

Swimmer panicked, slamming into the wall of his field-bubble as if he could push through it and into the vacuum beyond.

It took him a moment before he realized what Trader had done.

He noticed for the first time that a ring of shaped-field generators had been set into the ceiling directly above them both; more of them had been set into the floor. And the gentle shimmer of his own field-bubble had hidden from him a second, larger field enclosing them both.

'Trader, it doesn't have to be this way. The Emissaries say they are willing to share a common border, in exchange for a sharing of resources and access to our client species. I can-'

'You can atone for your sins,' said Trader grimly.

Further field-bubbles emerged from several entrances behind Trader, each one carrying a Shoal-member inside it. Some of these bubbles had the distinctive colouring that marked their occupants as priest-geneticists, the secretive fanatics who tended to the Deep Dreamers, for generation after generation.

Trader addressed him again. 'You should be aware that our superiors met to pass judgement on you. On my advice, their sentence is one of Involuntary Re-Speciation.'

Swimmer in Turbulent Currents trembled with rage. 'This is an outrage! You there!' He barked at one of the priests. 'I am a representative of the Hegemony Council! You will-'

'The Hegemony is a long way off,' the priest replied, then directed his next words at Trader. 'Sir, we've managed to salvage some surgical units from the coreship, and we've supplemented them with our own, more up-to-date equipment. I should say, however, that it's been a long time since an operation of this magnitude has been carried out-'

'You have all the equipment and materials you'll need for the Re-Speciation,' Trader replied. 'Besides, I'll be most interested to see what you come up with.'

'I must admit,' the priest replied, now totally regardless of Swimmer's presence, 'I'm fascinated by the challenge.'

Swimmer listened aghast to this exchange, his fins stiff with terror. Re-Speciation was something out of the Shoal's dim and distant past, a relic of much less civilized times. He slammed his personal field-bubble desperately against the much larger one surrounding both him and Trader, even though he knew he was trapped.

'Re-Speciation is… is a damnable barbarism, an insult to all sanity and reason,' he cried. 'For pity's sake, Trader, the practice has been outlawed for tens of millennia! I refuse to believe you would-'

'Oh, but I would, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, I would,' Trader replied. 'Re-Speciation doesn't seem to have done the Bandati too much harm in the long run, although that was admittedly an entire species rather than a single individual. And as for legalities… well, I think we both gave up much concern over that a long time ago, didn't we? Part of the job, and all that.'

'Trader.' Swimmer tried adopting a more reasonable tone. 'There's no possible way for you to profit from something like this. There's no… no reason for it. In the name of the great Mother, kill me if you must. But to threaten something so obscene is beneath you.'

'Yet necessary,' Trader answered.

The priest who had addressed Trader earlier now moved closer, clutching a weapon resembling a spear-gun in his manipulators.

'I need to set an example for anyone who might entertain similarly idiotic ideas in future,' Trader explained. 'I want them to be filled with terror when they hear your name spoken. I want them to know exactly what would become of them.'

The larger fields surrounding both Trader and Swimmer snapped off suddenly. The priest moved forward quickly, intersecting his own field-bubble with Swimmer's and shooting him with a dart from his weapon before Swimmer could react.

A freezing numbness began to envelop Swimmer's thoughts.

'After all, it's true there are worse things than death,' Trader continued, twisting his manipulators together with sick glee. Swimmer barely heard his following words before consciousness finally abandoned him: 'Being human, for instance.' Hugh Moss stepped out from the tug and onto an airless plain on the surface of Blackflower. This plain was ringed by jagged mountains that delineated the outline of an ancient impact crater.

He was protected from the harsh vacuum of space by a shaped field-bubble that had a minute but perceptible effect on the local gravitational field. Tiny energy spikes at different points in the sphere could impel it in a particular direction; so he now caused it to float towards the low foothills fringing the nearest peak, quickly picking up speed. They operated on Swimmer in Turbulent Currents for several weeks continuously. First, they placed him in an artificially induced coma, then suspended his piscine form within a nutrient-rich soup of highly engineered bacteria that ate away first at his outer epithelial layers before attacking specific types of differentiated tissue.