The General twisted his manipulators in assent. 'You needn't worry, Trader. Our secrets remain quite secret here. I'm sure you will agree, given the circumstances, that we appear to be in precisely the kind of crisis that calls for clear minds to take unpleasant but necessary action, regardless of how drastic it might appear to the outside observer.'

'And of course, it would be necessary for the ultimate weight of responsibility to be carried on the fins of one single Shoal-member,' Trader added, the sarcasm clear and sharp in his words.

'We both serve many masters, Trader. They must remain nameless by necessity. Otherwise, there might be speculation about a vast and ancient conspiracy to suppress certain truths from the greater population of the Shoal, which might ultimately destabilize the Hegemony. And that would never do, would it?'

No, damn you, it wouldn't. 'No doubt you've volunteered me for the job.'

'I'd say you've been preparing for this job all your life,' Desire replied. 'You've advocated a pre-emptive strike yourself often enough. Can you think of anyone else who could be trusted with such a task?'

Trader briefly enjoyed a fantasy of the General being tortured by his own interrogators. 'Our goal is to preserve our race, preserve the Hegemony, and preserve the peace.' Trader paused before continuing. 'Regardless of the costs.'

Desire twisted his manipulators in a gesture of grim agreement. 'Regardless of the costs,' he echoed. 'Our secret is finally out, Trader. Therefore our strategy must be swift, retaliatory and brutal. We propose destroying the Emissaries' primary systems along their beachhead in this spiral arm. We would thus set the skies ablaze, but only for a short while.'

And yet, Desire, think of the scale of such destruction. It would be enormous.'

'Indubitably But not sufficient to bring the Shoal to an end -or so the Dreamers say'

A high price for many of our client species to pay, is it not?'

'Of course,' Desire replied. 'But, as I know you'll agree, better them than the Shoal.' Night's End One Dakota Merrick awoke, alone and naked, in a cloud-high tower on an alien world, and wondered for a moment if she was dead.

She gained consciousness slowly, at first only dimly aware of her surroundings, eyes and lips sticky with mucus, breasts and hips pressed against an unyielding and deeply uncomfortable floor. Sunlight stabbed into her eyes as she tried to open them and she winced, turning away from the brightness.

The air smelled wrong, tasted wrong on her tongue. A breeze touched the fuzz on her scalp, and on it was carried a riot of unfamiliar scents. She sneezed and coughed, trying to clear her throat. She reached up with one unsteady hand and touched her head, realizing in that moment that her hair had been recently depilated.

She sat up, blinking and looking around at unfamiliar surroundings. Walls, floor and ceiling were surfaced in a grey metal etched with alien calligraphy, fine tight curls of vermilion or jade running in parallel or entwining tightly in intricate, indecipherable patterns.

The only light came via a door, through which she could see clouds drifting across a blue-green sky that was slowly fading into dusk. Sunlight that wasn't quite the right colour touched the bare skin of one of her legs, sending a sudden warmth into her brain.

The air smelled so strange, a new-world smell, the scent of some exotic faraway place she had never been to before.

The last thing she remembered…

All that came to mind were moments of intense, overwhelming pain interspersed with far longer periods of deep, dreamless sleep that might have lasted a single night or a thousand years.

Before all that, she'd been on her ship the Piri Reis. And they'd…

She shook her head. It felt like her skull was filled with thick, viscous mud that obscured every thought, inducing a turgid heaviness that made her want to just close her eyes and stop… stop trying to remember.

She inspected her body, finding that her hips and upper torso were bruised, the skin yellow and discoloured as she glanced down along her breasts, stomach and legs. She peered between her thighs and saw that the triangle of pubic hair she remembered there had also been reduced to a fine fuzz.

She touched her eyebrows. They felt… thinner. As if they'd only just started growing. She shivered, despite the warmth of the air coming through the door, a few wayward fragments of memory creeping slowly back.

Her name was Dakota Merrick. She was a machine-head – possessor of a rare and illegal technology inside her skull that allowed her to communicate both with machines and with similarly equipped human beings on a level approaching the instinctive. She had been born on a world called Bellhaven. She had…

She had obviously been given something – something that blurred her thoughts, made it hard to think.

She rose up on unsteady legs, and nearly collapsed again.

She touched her head with unsteady fingers and moaned, recalling a flash of her and Corso's frantic escape from, from…

Lucas Corso.

Who was Lucas Corso?

The name was maddeningly familiar.

She carefully walked over to the door, seeing it was nothing more than a vertical opening cut into one wall. She squinted against the fading light, seeing the tops of buildings backlit by the setting sun, though hazy with distance.

There was only air beyond this opening. A lip of metal floor at her feet extended perhaps half a metre beyond the room she'd woken in. It looked like a gangplank made for suicidal midgets.

Dakota wasn't particularly scared of heights, but some instinct made her balk at the idea of getting too close to the vertiginous drop that lay beyond the gap in the wall. She lowered herself onto all fours, the metal floor hard against her knees, and crawled part of the way out of the opening, determined to see just how far away the ground was. At best, maybe there was some way she could climb down, or even…

The ground was at least half a kilometre below her. A long, long way down. Despite her ingrained pilot's training, the combination of her current physical nakedness and the unexpectedness of discovering such a sheer drop brought a rush of vertigo. She retreated back into her chamber – cell? – but not before she had got a good look at an entire series of enormous towers criss-crossing a wide river plain framed by mountains blue with distance.

The towers – each of them rising up considerably higher than her own vantage point – all followed the same basic design. Each had a wide, fluted base that narrowed slightly as it rose, before culminating in a similarly fluted peak. Each edifice was decorated with wide horizontal stripes, pale pink alternating with cream. Many of them also featured intricate glyphs which might be decorations or something far more mundane, but bore a clear resemblance to the etched patterns within her own present quarters.

The river that wound between the towers nearest to her was fed by at least a dozen tributaries, whose courses were etched across a dense urban landscape in sparkling silver lines.

Winged specks kept darting between the towers: she realized they were Bandati, a species whose permitted sphere of influence under the Shoal trade charters directly neighboured humanity's own.

She remembered learning about them… where?

Bellhaven. The world she'd grown up on.

So why were all her memories so hazy?

She spied an extended glitter on the horizon, almost certainly indicating the shores of some distant ocean, the destination for the network of waterways that snaked past far below. Suddenly she remembered brief glimpses of alien faces – wide black eyes gazing at her, impassive and distant – and nightmares, such terrible nightmares.

The wide black eyes, she realized, of Bandati.