Empire of Light by Gary Gibson

look behind her, instead of a beach hut and table she saw only forbidding-looking cliffs topped with tangled blue-green flora. The roofs of buildings like gold-plated tombstones rose above the jungle, while the distant peaks of mountains were visible further inland.
    She looked out to sea, and saw massive towers like minarets rising out of the ocean, several kilometres out from the shore. Something about them made her sure they were very, very old.
    A Magi ship rested on the shore, looking as if it had been beached there. It dwarfed the nearby cliffs and towered far above her, its bulbous body angled upwards as it rested on its drive spines. Waves lapped against the curve of its partially submerged hull.
    That was when Dakota realized the Magi ships were never going to let her die.
    She stood and stared up and down the beach, cold prickling her bare skin, and tried to remember what her mother’s face had looked like. Nothing came to her except the memory of gazing out on to a snow-laden street. It seemed much of her life on Bellhaven had been reduced to that one sliver of memory; the rest was gone for ever.
    Somehow, whatever essence – whatever fundamental core of self-identity – she had carried within her had been transported across the light-years and used to rebuild her. Her memories of a beach and a hut had been part of the process of integration, as they had started to put her fragmented memory back together. It shouldn’t have worked, of course: she should have become a stumbling Frankenstein mess, a lopsided thing only half-alive, and yet here she was.
    She heard whispering voices all around her, as if the beach or the waves or the sand itself had suddenly become conscious. It took her a moment to realize they were coming through her implants.
    We had to make do with what we found, they announced.
    The minds of the Magi ship, she realized. Not the same one that had carried her to the Maker; that was gone, turned to superheated dust and scattered across the cosmos, along with the original Dakota.
    ‘But you didn’t do it to help me,’ she moaned. ‘You brought me back because you wanted me to lead you to the Mos Hadroch.’
    It had to be done, they replied. We want to help you, Dakota. You don’t ever have to die if you don’t want to, not really. Not any more. We made you whole again – or as whole as we could make you.
    She wanted to wade out into the water, to let herself sink as soon as she could no longer feel anything solid beneath her feet, but soon realized she didn’t have the strength or the will to do it. And even if she could, she knew the ship would just resurrect her again.
    A bundle of what at first appeared to be rags lay close by but, when she stepped over, Dakota found they were clothes, identical to the ones she’d worn when she’d left Ocean’s Deep a few years before. She picked them up, thinking that at least she wouldn’t freeze to death if the nights here were as cold as the day was warm.
    As she dressed, she glanced up at the curved underbelly of the Magi ship, and imagined it giving birth to her here on the shore, spitting the clothes out after her and watching over her until she blinked her eyes open for the first time.
    She pulled the jacket around her shoulders. ‘Why am I here?’ she asked the air.
    There was a message, the voices whispered in reply. It used Shoal protocols, and was directed to Ocean’s Deep. Indecipherable to all but you.
    They fed the message to her: a stream of data encoded using encryption techniques developed jointly by the Shoal and Magi – before one had committed genocide against the other.
    The message was from Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, and it concerned the Mos Hadroch. It detailed a rendezvous here on this world’s shore, where dull grey waters lapped against broken shale.
    What am I made of? Dakota wondered, panicked by the thought. She reached down and pinched the flesh of her forearm between thumb and forefinger. It felt like