'Lucas.' Corso turned to see Langley was addressing him. 'I'd like to know how Dakota was the last time you saw her. I… knew her, some years ago.'
Corso found it hard to stop his gaze wandering back to the trooper's mangled corpse. All around them, people were barking instructions either at each other or into radios and T-net transceivers. 'She's fine, I guess,' Corso replied, not quite sure what else to say.
He glanced over at Honeydew, who alone apparently hadn't moved. People raced all around, manning the pulse-cannons on the back of the remaining transport, or finding defensive positions and then training their weapons on the dense foliage at the hill's base.
Corso walked over to the alien and stared into its face. 'You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?'
'I did not, Mr Corso. The Emissaries appear to have betrayed us all.'
'And your Queen? What the hell is she going to do about it?'
'It is with great shame I am forced to admit my Queen may be somewhat out of her depth in terms of the current situation. I'm sorry for the way things turned out, Lucas. I wish things might have been different.'
All around them, people were shouting… and then something between a trumpet and a roar blared through the foliage at the foot of the hill. The sudden return to reality was jarring. One moment Dakota had been staring down at the shadowy Librarian, and now Her senses rushed outwards yet again, but this time the fear was gone. She felt, instead, a burning sensation somewhere deep within her skull.
The Emissary drones made a last dash towards the scout-ship. Something reached out from inside of Dakota, penetrating their communications networks and slipping inside their machine brains.
Less than four seconds after Dakota found herself back in the scout-ship, the Emissary drones had run emergency deactivation procedures and shut themselves down for ever. They drifted, cold and inert, while the scout-ship continued on its way safe and unharmed.
Dakota felt her mind continue to expand outwards until her consciousness encompassed all of the fleets converging on Leviathan's Fall. She felt as if she were on the verge of splintering into a thousand pieces, as fragments of her consciousness were scattered across tens of thousands of computers and stacks all across Ocean's Deep. She finally worked out how to rein herself in, and to focus her consciousness on the scout-ship.
And only when she was ready did she reach back out again.
Roses was now saying something to her, but his words were like a distant whisper on the very edge of her awareness.
There.
She then came across Hugh Moss, piloting a craft that looked like nothing ever built within the Consortium. He was almost at the station, his ship decelerating hard. The Librarian had shown her what he really was – a twisted experiment desperate for revenge.
He was clearly going to reach the station ahead of her, which made it virtually certain she was going to have to confront him. She reached out and tried to tweak his ship's engines and life-support, but pulled back when she found endless booby-traps and fail-safes awaiting her.
At this point she lost control, her consciousness swept away. It was like being caught in a flood and struggling to reach air. Security alerts cascaded on board ships and vessels all across the system, as her consciousness touched on every one of them, boosted by the now unrestrained power of the derelict.
She opened her eyes to see the scout-ship's tiny cabin, and forced herself to take several deep, steady breaths. Her hands were shaking badly, and there was a persistent throbbing in her temples that wouldn't go away. Roses had apparently given up trying to get her to respond to his questions, and was now more focused on negotiating the colony's automated docking protocols displayed on a screen facing him.
They were still on course – still on their way to a meeting that was millennia overdue.
Dakota closed her eyes, and extended her mind outwards yet again, but this time she controlled the expansion, like a rider reining in a horse.
She became aware of the coreship, now mere billions of kilometres distant and, as she focused on it more fully, it exploded into a tangled nightmare of trillions of interdependent primary and secondary systems and mechanisms.
She dived in amongst them like a pearl diver plunging into cool deep waters, all the while plundering the Shoal vessel's data stacks, and leaving a storm of priority alerts in her wake. Electronic doors came slamming down in front of her, only to slide open again moments later.
Dakota fell into depths as startling as the very real waters buried deep beneath the coreship's outer surface.
She could see them alclass="underline" species and civilizations she could never have dreamed of, each stuffed into its separate controlled environment within the enormous starship. None of them had any idea which system they were actually in, and all were unaware of the drama unfolding around them that would change the galaxy for ever.
Dakota pulled back with infinite care and next turned her attention to Immortal Light's secret colony, a huge multi-ringed station displayed on several screens within the scout-ship's cabin. Its entire history was laid out before her as the derelict penetrated its computer networks.
She was surprised to discover that the Piri Reis was already there at the station, apparently having been offloaded from an Emissary ship. More Emissary vessels were arriving, either landing inside station bays or drilling their way inside the rings.
There were trillions of conduits now open to Dakota's mind, and she was afraid of what might happen if she let her consciousness spread out among them too thinly. It was as if she'd been living all her life in one tiny darkened corner of a vast arena with only a candle to light her way, but had stumbled across a master switch that expelled the darkness and brought to light a plethora of wonders she couldn't even have imagined existed.
She turned her attention outwards, to the stars beyond the Ocean's Deep system. She felt a powerful sense of elation – as if she could let her mind simply expand until it encompassed the galaxy. There were a thousand more Magi ships hidden throughout this same local spiral arm, and they had been waiting patiently for a long, long time. She tapped into their encrypted and long-dormant communications network, and fired out a greeting via the Ocean's Deep derelict's transceivers. Acknowledgement signals came bouncing back almost at once, even as the network began to wake from its long sleep – a sentient matrix spread over thousands of light-years.
It had once been – in fact, still was – a fleet in the grandest sense of the word.
On Dakota's command, the first of these ancient ships began to rise from under the ancient dust that had covered it while it slept. It would be long months before it might reach the Ocean's Deep system, but there were others only a few light-years distant, and it would take no more than another couple of days for the first of these to arrive.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Dakota felt a sense of real purpose take hold of her. She glanced over at Roses, and smiled at him when he turned to face her.
The entire remaining Magi fleet was now on its way to Ocean's Deep; and they were going to need navigators – hundreds of them. Twenty-five Pandemonium reigned as an Emissary came charging out of a patch of dense foliage and thundered up the side of the hill, heading straight for the remaining ground transport. As 'First Contact' scenarios went, this was far from ideal.
Both Briggs and Hua were fortunate enough to possess personal shaped-field generators, but nobody else there had the benefit of that particular technology. The troopers went on instant defensive, firing round after round into the monster stampeding towards them.
Corso hit the ground and watched as a field flickered on and off around the Emissary. He glanced up at the long windows high overhead on the ring's ceiling, and saw bright beams and explosions that indicated a full-fledged battle was taking place in the station's immediate vicinity.