Stealing Light (31 page)

‘Do you want me to—’

‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘But you should know I won’t be telling the others about this. You’ve got my word on that.’

She nodded mutely in reply, then watched as he pulled his pressure suit back on and re-entered the
Piri’s
tiny airlock.

‘And then you’re coming back?’

He looked at her strangely, but nodded after a moment.

Half of her was sure he would come back, but the other half was even surer he wouldn’t.

—

All dead.

It hadn’t quite sunk in. He knew from past experience—from Cara’s death—just how long that could take.

He considered the possibility that, in a very real way, his life was over. He hadn’t missed the look on Dakota’s face when he’d departed her ship, but if he’d told her what was going through his mind, she might have tried to stop him.

Even worse, he might have let her stop him.

Disregarding some kind of coup, they were still under Senator Arbenz’s thrall so long as they remained within the Nova Arctis system. Yet the fact remained both Corso and Dakota were still essential to Arbenz’s plans.

There was a series of observation bubbles ringing the
Hyperion’s
hull, about halfway along its length. They were tiny clear blisters that looked out on the stars and Theona’s frozen surface far below. These bubbles were the only places aboard the frigate where you could look directly out at the universe beyond the hull and be absolutely, unwaveringly certain that what you were seeing was real, and not—assuming you were sufficiently paranoid to let it concern you—merely a deluge of false information fed through the ultimately fallible conduit of the
Hyperion’s
sensor and communications arrays.

As soon as he was back in the
Hyperion’s
pressurized corridors, Corso made his way immediately to one of the bubbles, letting his mind empty of thoughts, regrets and the pains of loss even as he went.

Despite this, he felt the tears streaming down his cheeks as he made his way down hollowly clanging drop shafts. But the frigate was so vast, there was little chance of running randomly into another human being, even with the half-dozen crewmembers Arbenz had now installed.

Finally he reached one such blister, and pulled himself up a ladder and into a low-ceilinged room with a clear roof that looked out on the stars. He ignored the automated warnings that spoke quietly as he entered. The lights dimmed automatically as the hatch closed beneath him and he let himself slide into the comforting warmth of an observation chair that automatically tilted to better accommodate his view of the universe.

Music played automatically, a soft swelling and ebbing of notes more like the rising and falling of the ride than anything orchestrated by human beings. He couldn’t summon the mental energy even to tell the
Hyperion
to turn the damn noise off.

What he had in mind was very simple.

The observation blister was a weak point in the hull, and the ship was old. The maintenance work done prior to its departure from Redstone had been the bare minimum necessary, given the restrictions of time and funding.

The automated warnings had made it clear that relatively little effort would be involved in destroying the clear blister before him and exposing himself to the vacuum of deep space. A series of switches under a panel within easy reach by the side of the reclining chair gave him control over explosive bolts that could blow the blister clear away from the hull, thus providing an emergency escape route. By the time any alarms could bring the ship’s crew running to the observation blister, it would already be far too late.

He touched a button and the chair dropped a little, giving him a still better view. He got as far as flipping open the panel, tapping in the same default code that most equipment on board still used (Dakota had been right about the appalling lack of appropriate security), and rested his finger on the emergency release button that would blow the bolts.

Then he slowly brought his hand back up and closed the panel.

Even with him dead, there was at least a chance Arbenz could still use the protocols he’d created to negotiate the derelict’s guidance systems and take it out of the Nova Arctis system. Corso knew the work he’d done was flawless. But if the derelict’s assault on both him and Kieran was then a deliberate act of sabotage, who was responsible for it?

He sat beneath the blister’s curving dome, with the lights up, staring up at his own reflection staring back down at him for what felt like a long time. His hand dropped again towards the panel by the side of the chair.

He already knew he wasn’t going to do it. If the Senator could still win even with him dead, that made the whole notion of killing himself pointless.

Sal came into his thoughts. Corso was pretty sure Sal was dead by now, but as is so often the case with people who constitute a large part of your life for enough years, his old friend’s physical presence was far from necessary in order for Corso to have a laborious, albeit primarily silent, imaginary argument with him, as if they sat there together beneath the curving transparent dome.

Sal won, of course. He usually did.

Corso tapped a button and the hatch in the floor next to the chair irised open once more, revealing the ladder. He climbed back down and went looking for Dakota.

—

Arbenz stepped into the moon base’s centre of operations, still feeling foggy from a lack of sleep. Anton Lourekas, the base’s medician, had been giving him shots to keep him awake, but there was only so long before he’d end up losing his grip on events. Things were starting to run out of control badly enough as it was.

He was not pleased to find Gardner waiting for him.

‘What do you mean by telling me I can’t communicate with my partners?’ Gardner nearly shouted in his face. Arbenz winced, too tired to be as angry as he really should be. ‘Your communications staff are downright
refusing
to patch me through the tach-nets—’

‘With good reason,’ Arbenz muttered, pushing past Gardner and nodding a greeting to the three technicians working at the opposite end of the room.

‘Don’t ignore me, Senator. I demand—’

Arbenz turned around. ‘If you continue to make demands in front of my own people, Mr Gardner, I’ll have you permanently confined to quarters on board the
Hyperion.
Do you understand me?’

Gardner looked apoplectic. ‘You can’t.’

‘But I can, David. And if your partners decide they don’t like that, then they can come and find me themselves. Once this is all over.’ He gestured over Gardner’s shoulder to a guard, who stepped forward from his station by the entrance to the ops-centre.

‘Now listen,’ Arbenz continued, softening his voice a little. ‘I believe some form of expeditionary force is on its way here, on board another coreship. That means we have to accept the fact our little secret has been compromised.’

Gardner’s eyes were already bugging out. ‘We have to contact—’

^‘
No,
Mr Gardner. We run silent until they actually get here, otherwise we risk the possibility that they also find out about the derelict, assuming they don’t already know about it.’

‘But they
must know,
if they’re on their way here.’

‘This is all we know: they’re on their way here, and our time is limited. Anything else is just an assumption.’
No need to let him know just yet about the coup on Redstone.
‘So no more demands, Mr Gardner. Is that understood?’

Gardner’s lips trembled, his face so red it looked ready to explode. Then he glanced at the waiting guard nearby, and clearly thought better of any further protest. He turned on his heel and stormed out of the ops-centre.

Arbenz immediately felt more relaxed.

‘Sir?’ He turned to find a technician called Weinmann standing by him. ‘The signal emanating from the derelict. We’ve narrowed down the target.’

‘Go on.’

‘The signal is extremely tightly focused, on a very low-power beam. It’s aimed at this system’s innermost world, sir. Just here.’ Weinmann tapped at the screen before him.

Arbenz leaned in to take a look. ‘But that’s just a ball of rock.’

Ikaria drifted a few bare tens of millions of kilometres from the surface of its sun. So what was there, that the derelict could want to signal?

‘Ikaria has minimal rotation around its axis, as you’d expect from a body that close to its parent. The signal was directional enough for us to isolate a series of valleys that have just emerged into the planet’s dark side. There’s meanwhile been regular transmissions about three thousand seconds apart each. And each of those is being adjusted to match the planet’s rotation.’

‘I would have thought anything down there would have been burned away long ago,’ Arbenz mused.

‘Those valleys are extremely deep. And we’re lucky because they’re just emerging from the terminator line. They’re going to be on the planet’s dark side for a while.’

Arbenz sighed. ‘But do we know what’s down there, in those valleys? Is it possible, perhaps, that we might find other ships like our derelict there?’

Weinmann shook his head, clearly not prepared to speculate.

One of the largest problems they faced with the derelict they’d already found was digging it out of the ice. Excavation had indeed been proceeding ever since they’d discovered the craft, but the sheer scale of the project meant this exercise was taking far, far longer than originally hoped.

But if there was now the chance there were indeed other transluminal ships further in-system, perhaps sitting out in the open and ready for the taking . . .

If action were to be taken, it would have to be soon, before the unknown fleet arrived. Their best bet therefore was to take either the
Hyperion
or the
Agartha
to Ikaria with all due haste, and retrieve whatever they could find—even if it meant abandoning their efforts under Theona’s dense ice.

Time was running out all too quickly.

—

‘I want to know everything,’ Corso said on his return to the
Piri.
‘Everything you haven’t told me.’

‘What makes you think there is anything else?’ Dakota replied, her voice shaky.

He thought she looked like she’d been crying, but he couldn’t be sure. At the very least her eyes were red-rimmed and clouded, her body pushed into a fur-lined nook inside the
Piri Reis.

‘Because there’s too much at stake here for any more bullshit,’ he snapped back. ‘We’re in serious trouble here. If there’s anything else I should know, you tell me now, otherwise I find out later and then you’re on your own. Completely. Do you understand me?’

‘I haven’t gone out of my way to do anything I shouldn’t—’

He laughed. ‘There’s a wake of death and destruction following you wherever you go. I can understand why you’d hate the Senator, and now he doesn’t have a hold over me I’m going to do everything I can to take the transluminal drive away from him, but I know I can’t do that without your help. So start talking, Dakota. I want to know everything. From the beginning.’

He could see the acquiescence in her eyes, in the way her body relaxed. After a moment, she began to talk.

She told him about the Shoal; about Bourdain’s Rock, and the alien’s gift, about the system surge when she’d placed the figurine on the
Hyperion’s
imaging plate. About her conversation with an AI version of the alien, which had apparently penetrated the
Hyperion’s
systems.

It came spilling out in a cathartic rush, as if some mental logjam had finally given way, and a black tide of memory had pushed through like a swollen river spilling into an empty basin. She told him yet more: about the loss of her first set of implants, and the misery and pain that followed; about the alien’s offer to wipe the slate clean if she only agreed to help it destroy the derelict. . .

Corso’s anger gradually faded, and in the end he slumped in a corner facing her, a look of defeat coming across his face. Then suddenly he smiled.

‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded, annoyed he could find anything faintly humorous in their predicament.

‘It would almost be worth it to tell Arbenz all of this, just to see his face, don’t you think?’

‘Funny,’ she scowled.

‘Do you have any idea why this Shoal creature picked you for all this? It seems more than a little fortuitous, don’t you reckon, that it would seek you out on the Rock, hand you this thing just on the off chance . . .’

‘Don’t assume I haven’t thought about it—a lot. But, outside of the Shoal being able to see into the future, your guess is as good as mine.’

‘There’s a lot of unanswered questions, though,’ he continued. ‘For one, the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence is lurking inside the
Hyperion’s
computer systems—I find that hard to believe.’

‘How so?’

He stared at her like she was stupid. ‘Come
on.
The Shoal having the secret knowledge of how to create true artificial intelligence I could accept. But on the
Hyperion’s
computer systems? I guarantee you’d need something far more advanced than you’ll find anywhere within the Consortium. And why wait until now? Why not grab us while we were on their own coreship on the way here, sitting right under their noses?’

Dakota shrugged. ‘I thought about that, too. I think that the Shoal-member I spoke to—the thing inside the
Hyperion’s
stacks—is working alone for some reason. I can’t think of anything else that makes sense.’

She looked up and saw the sceptical look on his face. ‘Corso, everything I’ve told you is true. If you can’t figure that out, you’re a bigger fool than I originally took you for.’

Corso raised his hands in mock defeat. He pulled out his workscreen and held it up before her for a moment as if it were a glittering prize. Then he balanced it on his knee and began tapping at its screen.

‘Since we’re sharing, I’ve been analysing fresh information pulled from the derelict. One of the big questions we need to answer is, what was the relationship between the Shoal and the Magi? Was it a meeting between two species that had separately developed a transluminal drive?