Thirty-four

‘So are you going to try and shoot me now?’ Dakota asked mildly. ‘Or are you going to be sensible and wait until we’re out of here?’

Dakota had turned her back on the console, facing him with arms folded across her naked chest. There was something so bizarre about this situation, Corso found it hard not to think it was made some kind of joke. He watched as the filmsuit flowed back out of its hidden recesses and totally coated her body within moments.

‘I don’t know what you’re-’

She punched him with one black-slicked fist, the assault so sudden and so unexpected he simply went reeling away from her. Corso bounced off the opposite bulkhead, then grabbed on to the for there and stared back at her in shock.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘No, Lucas,’ she told him. ‘You listen to me. You were going to try and take the derelict away from me. I won’t be happy if you deny it.’

‘What? No, I…’

She pushed herself away from the console and was across the cabin in a moment, pinning him to the wall with one hand at his throat.

Under other, better circumstances he might have been able to defend himself, but he’d had too little sleep for too many days, and had been put under too much stress. Corso struggled, but was held firmly in place.

‘Listen, I don’t know what you think I was going to do, but for God’s sake…’

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.’