Keeper was clearly scandalized by this suggestion, but Trader blithely continued: ‘Instead the Dreamers give us clues vague enough to appear to mean one thing, then turn out to have a wildly different interpretation once it’s too late to influence the course of events. Keeper, I think we rely on them too much. They’re just a convenience the Hegemony can point to so they can abdicate all responsibility for their own actions. Look, they just say the Deep Dreamers predicted this, and the outcome was inevitable, whatever they might have done.’

Trader flicked his tentacles in a shrug. ‘So ultimately that means an unfortunate few like myself are forced to take on responsibility for what must be done, and divert the flow of history.’

‘Perhaps, but it must be…’ Keeper hesitated.

‘Continue.’

‘I’m afraid of speaking out of turn.’

‘You have my permission.’

‘It strikes me as a lonely and thankless occupation,’ Keeper-Of-Secrets continued. ‘So few are permitted to know that such as yourself must manipulate events throughout the galaxy for the general benefit of our species. Yet, since such manipulations are based on the Dreamer’s own predictions, and you appear not to think highly of the Dreamers…’

‘I couldn’t live with myself, if I thought any inaction on my part led to our destruction,’ Trader replied. ‘So, you see, to act is morally unavoidable, whatever the source of the intelligence.’

They had by now almost reached the first of the Dreaming Temples-a hovering robot submarine that granted the privileged few the means to interface directly with the Dreamers.

Trader made his farewells to his new partners in murder before finally slipping into the wet embrace of the Temple. The machine’s innards opened up automatically at his approach, mechanical mandibles reaching out and securing his field bubble, which merged on contact with the Temple’s own energy fields.

Trader found himself in absolute darkness, greater even than that prevailing beyond the Temple’s hull. This hiatus lasted only seconds, however, before the Temple made contact with the Dreamer’s collective consciousness.

Trader felt as if his mind had expanded to encompass the entire galaxy within a matter of seconds. Powerful images and sensations assailed his mind, far stronger than those faint intimations he had sensed on his journey here. He witnessed a hundred stars blossoming in deadly fire across the greater night of the Milky Way, a wave of bright destruction unparalleled in all of Shoal history, outside of the Great Expulsion.

Trader felt sickening despair. This was the worst possible outcome: a seething wave of carnage sweeping the Shoal Hegemony into dusty history. To become a had-been and never-would-be-again civilization, forgotten in the annals of the greater history of the cosmos.

Yet hope could still be detected even in the face of apparently unavoidable doom. Over the next few hours, working within the Temple, Trader was able to identify potential key factors: individuals, places and dates that might well influence the initiation of the conflict.

And even if war could not be prevented, it might still be reduced in the scale of its destructive impact. With gentle manipulation, it might even be contained, rendered harmless: turned into a historical footnote rather than a final chapter.

Sometimes, Trader had found, fate really did lie in the hands of a few sentients such as himself.

He began to make plans to ensure he would always be present in the right places to witness-and influence-these pivotal events. And perhaps even divert them away from an astonishingly destructive war that otherwise threatened to erase life from the galaxy.

Trans-Jovian Space, Sol System

The Present

Warm, naked, her muscles tense with anticipation, Dakota floated in the cocoon warmth of the Piri Reis and waited for the inevitable.

Ever since she’d departed Sant’Arcangelo, the ship had gone crazy at precise thirteen-hour intervals: lights dimmed, communications systems scrambled and rebooted, and even her Ghost circuits suffered a brief dose of amnesia, while heavy, bulkhead-rattling vibrations rolled through the hull.

Every incidence was worse than the last. And every time it happened, Dakota thought of jettisoning the unknown contents of her cargo hold, only to end up reminding herself just why that was a really bad idea.

Twenty seconds to go. She put down her rehydrated black bean soup and flicked a glance in the direction of the main console. Streams of numbers and graphs appeared in the air, along with the image of a clock counting down the last few seconds. She stared at the numbers, feeling the same flood of despair she’d felt every other time this disruption had happened.

Deliver the cargo. Ignore any alerts. Don’t interfere with either the cargo bay or its contents. That’s what Dakota had been instructed, and that was exactly what she intended to do.

Absolutely.

‘Piri,’ she said aloud, ‘tell me what’s causing this.’

‹I’m afraid I can’t›, the ship replied in tireless response to a question she’d already asked a dozen times, ‹without violating the terms of your current contract. Would you like me to analyse the contents of the cargo bay anyway? ›

Yes. ‘No.’ This wasn’t the way her life was meant to work out. ‘Just leave it.’

The clock hit zero, and a sonorous, grating vibration rolled through the cabin. Floating ‘alert’ messages stained the air red. Meanwhile her Ghost implants made it eminently clear the source of the vibrations was the cargo bay. ‘Alerts off,’ she snapped.

Everything went dark.

Piri?

No answer.

Oh crap. Dakota waited several more seconds, feeling a rush of cold up her spine. She tried calling out to the ship again, but it didn’t respond.

She felt her way across the command module in absolute darkness, guided by the technological intuition her Ghost implants granted her, pulling herself along solely by her hands, while her feet floated out behind her. The bulkheads and surfaces were all covered with smooth velvet and fur that was easy to grip. Cushions, meal containers and pieces of discarded clothing whirled in eddies created by her passage, colliding with her suddenly and unavoidably in the darkness.

The only sound Dakota could hear was her own panicked breathing, matched by the adrenaline thud of her heart. Convinced the life support was about to collapse, she activated her filmsuit. It spilled out of her skin from dozens of artificial pores, a flood of black ink that cocooned and protected her inside her own liquid spacesuit, growing transparent over her eyes so as to display the darkened space around her in infrared.

Instrument panels glowed eerily with residual heat, and she saw hotspots where her naked flesh had touched heat-retaining surfaces, making it easier for her mind to wander into fantasies of being trapped on a deserted, haunted ship.

She found herself at the rear of the command module. Three metres behind her lay its cramped sleeping quarters, two metres to the right, the head. Nine metres in any direction, the infinity of space beyond the hull. She ducked aft, into the narrow access tube leading to the overrides.