Their destination.

Dakota stared at the high-res video that floated in the air between the two acceleration couches. All they had to do was get down to that chasm, find a way on board one of the other derelicts, persuade it not to kill them, figure out how to fly it, and escape this system at light speed before the entire system detonated.

Easy.

She was conscious of Corso saying something to her.

‘… the chasm those other derelicts are in?’ He was pointing at the holo display between them. ‘That thing makes the Vallis Marineris on Mars look like a furrow. Something must have hit that planet hard enough to just about crack it in half.’

Dakota shrugged. ‘So?’

Corso sighed. ‘Look closer.’

He gestured, and a 3D model of Ikaria replaced the video showing the chasm.

Its rotation was slow enough that a day on its surface was longer than one of its years. Sunlight crept over its horizon at a snail’s pace, one hemisphere crisped by its extreme proximity to its parent star, the other dark and frozen until the inevitable arrival of a ferocious sunrise.

‘There are places on the dark side where that trench goes down very, very deep: maybe eight or ten kilometres. We could hide down there if the derelict does blow the star.’

Dakota couldn’t hide her incredulity. ‘Hide?’ She laughed. ‘From a nova) Lucas, we’re practically next door to the star as it is. If you shouted it would probably hear you. Ikaria would be vaporized.’

‘But not immediately.’ As Corso replied, his eyes were bright with an unpleasant mania from the quantities of stimulants he’d been pumping into his blood stream just in order to stay alert. ‘That could take up to a day or two, right? In the meantime we might be able to buy ourselves at least a few extra hours down inside that chasm.’

Dakota tried to frame a suitable reply, but it was getting harder to find the words. Instead, she just shrugged her shoulders and looked away, overwhelmed by a sense of increasing hopelessness. She was at a point where she wasn’t even sure if she really cared whether she lived or died, just so long as events came to some kind of conclusion.

Each of them was turning into a basket case while the other one watched.

Readings showed the incipient transluminal energies crackling around the hull of the Theona derelict, and the possibility had occurred to Dakota that coreships rarely approached the inner part of any system they visited for reasons other than the ones most often assumed. Perhaps the Shoal were simply nervous about getting too close to any star while they were on board a transluminal vessel.

It seemed incredible that something so tiny could cause so much destruction, yet as Dakota sank further and further into the dreamlike thoughtscape of the remaining Magi ships on Ikaria, she found it harder to deny.

Then there was the question of physically landing on the surface of Ikaria. If Corso were not so stressed and so thoroughly doped to the eyeballs, he might have been aware of the obvious problem: the Piri was simply not designed to land on any planetary body; they barely had enough fuel to make the approach into orbit and, even if they could somehow make a landing, the stresses involved would tear the little ship apart.

So they were going to have to think of something else.

Whenever Dakota closed her eyes, instead of darkness, she saw alien starscapes; vast citadels spread across the faces of entire worlds; and great world ships that dwarfed even the Shoal’s own interstellar craft.

‘The derelict!’ Corso shouted hoarsely. ‘It’s gone. It’s off the screens!’

Dakota switched her attention to a tracking view. The Theona derelict was indeed gone from every reading.

The Agartha, however, was still marked on a map of the system by an advancing red line, still shadowing the Piri Reis at every step. It was following them into Ikaria’s dark side, just as she’d expected.

Part Three

Thirty

Nova Arctis was a standard G2 class star, mostly hydrogen and helium and a scattering of trace elements that had been moving in its long, slow orbit around the galactic core, accompanied by the other stars of the Orion Arm, for the better part of three and a half billion years. It might easily have expected to last five or six billion more before entering its red giant phase, at which point it would have slowly expanded to swallow the majority of the rocky worlds that comprised its inner system.

A moment before Corso noticed the Theona derelict was gone, a shell of exotic energy formed around the ancient Magi craft, tearing a hole in the universe, through which it then fell. The translation into transluminal space produced gravitational shock waves that rippled outwards, precisely as if a planetary body had materialized within the inner system and then disappeared again within the space of a single moment.

If the men and women in charge of administrating the Consortium had known what Corso and Dakota now knew, they would have understood that a coreship penetrating this deep into any populated system could only ever represent an act of war.

The Theona derelict rematerialized deep within the core of the star, a swirling mass of fusing hydrogen and helium that burned at fifteen million degrees.

By this point, Trader had stretched subjective time aboard the derelict to its absolute limit. He witnessed the violent plasmas penetrating the hull like bright tentacles, vaporizing the exterior of the craft in a millionth of a second.

From Trader’s accelerated point of view, the superheated plasma moved at a leisurely yet measurable pace. He felt the derelict’s systems shutting down around him as the vessel was reduced to a collection of free component atoms, merging with the violent thermonuclear dance beyond the evaporating hull.

The Shoal AI wondered, in the sliver of eternity before it ceased to exist, if it was the first intelligent creature ever to die directly within the core of a star.

Two millionths of a second after the derelict had materialized within the core of Nova Arctis, a vast burst of neutrinos shot outwards as the core of the craft’s superluminal engines collapsed. Then followed a phase change-a shift in the fundamental properties of the matter immediately surrounding the derelict, which now spread outwards in the form of a devouring black sphere, transforming the fifteen-million-centigrade plasma into something much closer to the primordial energy from which the universe itself had been born.

Yet barely more than a few seconds had passed since the ancient starship had materialized within Nova Arctis. At its point of maximum expansion, the phase-change volume encompassed several tens of thousands of kilometres within the star’s core. It began to collapse as the cosmological constant reasserted itself.