She smiled with sad amusement. ‘Don’t worry, Lucas, I’m not going to hurt you. But you’re not going to lie to me any more.’
She twisted his arm with her other hand, and flipped him over until his face was pressed deep into the velvety fur lining. Keeping one of his arms wrenched painfully back between his shoulder blades, she quickly reached inside his pocket and withdrew the weapon. It was a tiny thing really, but he’d known all along it would be his only real bargaining chip if by some miracle they managed to survive this far.
Dakota suddenly let go of him and he whipped around, glaring at her. She pushed herself back over next to the command console, the slim oblong shape of his weapon in her hand.
‘All right,’ he said, trembling. ‘Exactly how did you know?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’
Corso stared at her in confusion.
She shrugged. ‘I just figured it was likely you’d try something like this. You and me, Lucas, we’ve got different aims in mind for the transluminal drive. All along, you knew something like this had to happen, sooner or later.’
Corso thought over his options, and realized he didn’t have any. ‘All right, fine. I understand what you’re saying. But you have to believe me when I say I wasn’t going to harm you.’
She laughed. ‘You came on board my ship with a gun hidden away, and you weren’t going to harm me, yet the survival of your shitty little planet was at stake?’ She glared back at him.
‘Just let me explain myself.’
She nodded for him to continue.
‘The Consortium is corrupt,’ he explained. ‘You already know that. It’s an empire in everything but name.’
‘You think I’m going to give this derelict to the Consortium?’ She laughed in derision. ‘Don’t you understand? The derelict’s whole purpose is to find booby-traps, caches of alien technology. It’s a weapon for destroying other weapons.’
Corso looked back at her blankly.
‘I was inside that derelict for a long time. Not in objective terms-purely subjective. There used to be Pilots for the Magi ships, creatures utterly unlike us which lived for millennia. Their job was to find Maker caches.’
She saw the look of comprehension that passed briefly over his face. ‘You’ve heard that name before, haven’t you?’ she said excitedly.
‘A progenitor race?’
‘The ones some of the Magi races believed created the universe.’
Corso was staring at her with something like awe, as if he’d only now allowed himself to believe she’d been telling the truth about her experiences on Ikaria.
‘What’s important is that something left caches of high technology scattered throughout their galaxy, and ours, and maybe others. It’s exactly like I said, Lucas. The drive was seeded in this way specifically to entrap fledgling spacefaring cultures like their own. Any race that finds a cache soon figures out the drive’s potential as a weapon. If they’re aggressive, war is inevitable, whether it’s after a hundred years or a hundred thousand. In the process, they wipe out other species, either by accident or deliberately. Destabilize enough stars, and it’s going to wipe out higher life forms throughout the local stellar neighbourhood. The caches are bug traps, high-tech flypaper. The Magi created these ships, the derelicts, to track down those caches and destroy them, and also the knowledge they contained.’
She smiled. ‘Which is pretty ironic, when you consider the only way for them to do that was to use the same drive technology that destroyed their own civilization.’
Corso put his hands to his head. ‘For God’s sake, Dakota! Do you really think knowledge like this would be better off with the Shoal?’
‘I’ve got no love for them. But in all their history there’s never been a war in our galaxy like the one that wiped out the Magi. I’ll give them that much.’
‘As far as you know.’ He grinned nastily. ‘Maybe they’re lying.’
That stalled her. As her lips quivered, he knew she’d been wondering exactly the same thing.
‘I’ll tell you this much, Dakota. Before I even met you, I was terrified of you. I thought you’d be some kind of monster. I realize now you’re not, but you’re way, way out of your depth. How far do you think you can run with something like this, before someone catches up with you? As long as you live, somebody is going to be looking for you, whether you have the derelict or not, just so they can have the information tucked away in your brain. They’ll do whatever they can to get it all out of you, and then they’ll dispose of you.’
‘And what would you do?’ she asked quietly.
‘Look, things are changing in the Freehold.’
He ignored the disbelieving look on her face.
‘I mean it,’ he insisted. ‘The people who founded the Freehold are long gone. With Arbenz dead and his controlling faction out of power, we have a chance now to gain real legal status within the Consortium. Everything will change, but with the transluminal drive, we could be a power player. We won’t be sidelined any longer. And we can protect you, Dakota, seriously. Without our help, I don’t know if you stand a chance.’
‘Nice try.’ She smiled sadly. ‘But I don’t think the human race should have the drive at all.’
‘You’re condemning the whole human race to an eternity of despotism!’ Corso bellowed in frustration. ‘We’ll always remain at the mercy of the Shoal.’
She shook her head. ‘No. That’s not so bad if the alternative is extinction.’
Even as they spoke, Dakota could sense the urgency within the derelict’s thoughts. She could almost feel the near-invulnerable flesh of the ship being abraded away by the constant, high-energy assault of plasma rushing away from Nova Arctis’ core. It was as if it were her own skin being burned away.
The Piri Reis’s engines began to blast intermittently, then fell dark and silent as the last of its fuel was gone. Despite the shelter afforded within the derelict’s spines, its hull was beginning to glow a dull red.
Chunks began tearing away from the hull of the Magi ship. Much of the hull coating had already been eroded from the spines, till they had become entirely skeletal in appearance, like slender bony fingers reaching out to grasp the Piri Reis.
Vast plumes of light began to radiate outwards from the derelict, almost indistinguishable from the burning plasma that roared past on all sides.
They waited in silence while Dakota slid rapidly back into her fugue state. But the moment he so much as twitched a muscle towards her, she became suddenly alert again, the tiny weapon aiming towards him.