Empire of Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Mr Driscoll, if the swarm gets here before we leave, it isn’t going to matter a damn whether you find anything behind that wall or not.’

  ‘I know that, sir,’ Ty replied carefully. ‘But all I really need is a couple of hours. You know how important this is.’

  The background hiss faded for a moment, and Ty guessed Martinez was consulting with Dan Perez, one of his senior officers.

  ‘Okay, here’s what I propose,’ said Martinez when he came back online. ‘The instant the swarm appears, the Mjollnir jumps straight out of this system regardless of whether you’re still on that rock or not. The same goes for everyone else who stays there, and the choice is strictly voluntary. I have to think of the crew.’

  ‘Nobody’s under any obligation to stay here and help me if they don’t want to,’ Ty replied, glancing over at Nancy and Curtis, ‘but I know I can do it a hell of a lot quicker if I have some help.’

  ‘What about the spiders?’ asked Martinez. ‘Have you considered whether you could run the entire operation from the bridge?’

  ‘No,’ Ty said straight away. ‘Look, the spiders help a lot, but they’re no good for fast, delicate work. They’re far too slow and clumsy for what we need to do here, and it’ll end up taking much longer than it should, if we have do the entire thing by tele-operation.’

  ‘Nathan’s right,’ Ty heard Nancy say. ‘The spiders are fine for this kind of work only if there’s no time constraint.’

  ‘Yeah, I agree,’ said Curtis. ‘The more of us down here who know what we’re doing, the faster we get everything done and get back out. The last of the detectors is now in place, so we should be able to pick up a video feed straight away.’

  ‘That’s fine, Curtis,’ Martinez replied. ‘But every analysis says we don’t need more than two people down there, so I want you and Anton back here on the frigate. Nancy and Nathan, I spoke to Cesar. He’s going to remain on the surface with a fast launcher. Just don’t take one second longer than you have to.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Martinez cut the connection.

  ‘Detectors?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Muon detectors,’ Curtis explained. ‘We stuck them around the surface of the asteroid. They pick up traces of decaying cosmic-ray particles, so we can build up a picture of whatever’s inside there.’

  Ty nodded. ‘Did you bring the screens?’

  Curtis passed a rolled-up video monitor over to Ty, who opened and smoothed it against one wall, holding it flat there while Curtis retrieved a hammer from a spider’s toolbox and nailed the monitor to the stone at all four corners.

  Ty stepped back and studied the chiaroscuro of greys that appeared on the monitor a few moments later, quickly resolving into a map of the asteroid’s tunnels and chambers.

  ‘There,’ Ty said excitedly, pointing one gloved finger at a shape like a fat grey worm. ‘That’s our passageway, right there.’

  Nancy stepped up beside him and peered at the shifting image. ‘There really is something behind that wall, isn’t there?’ she murmured, clearly fascinated.

  Curtis leaned in beside them and touched the screen with one gloved finger. ‘There are some dark shapes on the other side. Can you see them?’

  Ty felt a burst of elation and fought to stay calm. ‘I see them, yes, and I don’t think this is going to be as difficult as I thought.’ Glancing at Curtis, he said, ‘Martinez is expecting you and Anton back at the Mjollnir. You’d better get going.’

  Curtis nodded, and Ty could see the other’s desire to remain there warring with his fear of the approaching alien threat. Assuming they got out of this alive, they’d all of them have stories to tell for the rest of their lives.

  Curtis nodded with resignation and stepped back. ‘Nathan, Nancy – good luck to both of you. I’ll see you back on the ship.’

  Ty nodded and watched for a moment as Curtis retreated back down the passageway, before turning his attention to the drill rig. He touched a button, and the drill’s bit began to cut into the wall in total silence. All he really had to do now was set the parameters, step back, and let the machine perform.

  It did not take long before the passageway around them began to fill with clouds of grey-black dust as the device did its work. Ty watched the drill’s readout, indicating how deep it was penetrating; it had cut through nearly fifty centimetres of rock before it signalled that it was no longer encountering resistance. Nancy watched as he pulled the drill free, and together they stepped up to the narrow opening left behind.

  Nancy withdrew a long, narrow silver tube from a suit pocket and carefully slid it inside the freshly drilled hole. After a couple of seconds she pulled it back again.

  The tube had contained a mobile security device modelled on a terrestrial insect, complete with a minuscule propulsion system optimized for zero-gee. After she’d repocketed the now empty tube, Nancy pushed a couple of high-intensity glow-sticks through the hole until they slid through into the other side, falling slowly under the asteroid’s minimal gravity.

  ‘Okay,’ Nancy said breezily, stepping over to the screen. ‘Let’s see what we’ll see.’

  She now reset the screen to show whatever the insect-machine’s lenses were picking up on the other side of the wall. After a few moments they saw a huddled shape about fifteen metres from the false partition. Other than that, the other side looked deserted.

  ‘That’s it?’ murmured Nancy, unable to mask her dismay.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Ty, fighting back his own growing doubt. ‘There’s still something back there valuable enough that someone wanted to seal it up for a very long time.’

  Nancy peered at the screen. ‘I can’t be sure, but it looks like it might be the body of another Atn.’

  A warning light blinked up inside both their visors and a priority transmission came through from Martinez. ‘Nathan, Nancy; the gravity flux readings just about went off the chart during the past couple of minutes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Ty, baffled.

  ‘It means there are even more swarm-components than we thought. Hundreds of the damn things. You should seriously reconsider returning to the ship now.’

  ‘No way. There’s definitely something here, but it’s going to take time to get to it. You need to hold on until then.’

  ‘I thought you might say that. I already talked to Cesar, and he’s going to stay topside for at least the next hour. Any longer than that, and every risk analysis the ship can come up with says our chances of getting out of here alive drop off dramatically. Good luck.’

  Martinez signed off and Ty let out a slow, steady breath. ‘You’re okay with that?’

  Nancy shrugged, and a faint smile tugged the corners of her mouth upwards. ‘I guess I’ll have to be.’

  Under normal circumstances, Ty might have spent days meticulously scanning the sealed-off corridor before carefully and laboriously dismantling the false intervening wall. The present circumstances required a more direct approach, for which purpose shaped charges had already been spidered over from the Mjollnir.

  They first drilled several more holes at different points on the rock wall. Meanwhile a computer feed from the Mjollnir ’s bridge hovered in one corner of Ty’s visor, showing a schematic of the system, along with a constantly updated animation based on the estimated location of the swarm.

  Every time one of the alien machines jumped through super-luminal space, it sent a faint ripple rushing through the super-luminal continuum like an undulation moving across the still surface of a pond. The Mjollnir ’s defensive systems mapped these ripples as they occurred in real time, and it was immediately clear that the swarm was spreading out to cover the whole system. Ty thought of the sheer volume of space they were trying to encompass, and wondered if the swarm really had a chance of finding them any time soon.

  Once the drilling was finished, Ty carefully slid the charges into place, one to each hole, then followed Nancy back towards the relative safety of the main shaft. The spiders m
oved ahead of them, spreading out into the shaft beyond.

  Ty and Nancy then moved to either side of the passageway’s mouth. He tried to ignore the trickle of sweat he could feel rolling down one cheek, and glanced over at her spacesuited figure.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked, one finger hovering above an arm-mounted control.

  Ty nodded.

  ‘Okay Three, two, one, boom.’

  There was no sound, of course, but Ty’s imagination filled it in all the same. Seismic taps on the surface immediately fed details of the resulting tremor back to him through his suit’s readout. Barely a moment later, a thick column of grey smoke and grit came billowing out of the mouth of the passageway, spreading into the main shaft.

  Nancy was now barely visible through the dust and swirling grit. ‘Can’t see anything on the visuals,’ he heard her say.

  ‘Too much debris for that,’ he replied. ‘Let’s go see if it worked.’

  They sent a couple of spiders in first, in case there were any really big chunks of debris still bouncing around inside the passageway, then both followed it in, moving carefully.

  The explosives had worked better than Ty might have hoped, and yet the passageway immediately beyond what remained of the false wall differed little from the section that preceded it. The threat of disappointment lurked like a leaden weight in the pit of his stomach. But they finally got a good look at what they’d previously glimpsed only as an indistinct grey shadow.

  It was indeed the body of a single Atn – but nothing else.

  ‘Are you getting this?’ Nancy asked. Ty looked round to see her turning her head slowly from side to side as she moved through the opened-up section of the passageway. He assumed she was transmitting live video to the Mjollnir’s bridge.

  Ty kneeled by the Atn’s bulky corpse and brought his suit’s light up close to it, studying the intricate, stylized whorls and sigils engraved into its carapace. As far as he could see, there was nothing whatsoever unusual about it.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s it,’ he heard Nancy announce over the general comms link. ‘This is all there is.’

  ‘Just hold on a minute,’ Ty snapped irritably. ‘We’ve barely had a chance to look around yet.’

  ‘Come on, Nathan, there’s nothing here. Let’s face it, we tried and we failed.’

  Ty struggled to control the quiver in his voice. ‘Nothing here except for an Atn that the rest of its clade went to such enormous time and trouble to hide. Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply a burial chamber, and this was one of their leaders. That would explain the story of the Mos Hadroch, wouldn’t it? Maybe that thing’s what the Atn regarded as a king or hive-queen?’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Ty snapped, running one gloved hand along the creature’s carapace. And also you’re over-anthropomorphizing them. Besides, the Atn are entirely non-hierarchical. And if this place is nothing more than a burial chamber, then explain to me why a swarm of alien machines just turned up searching for this asteroid.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what I see here,’ Nancy insisted, and he could tell he’d sounded too harsh. ‘A dead Atn, that’s it.’

  Ty stood up and looked around. All he could see were smooth, unblemished rock walls, entirely devoid of glyphs, amid swirling dust. ‘All the evidence points right here,’ Ty reaffirmed, thinking out loud.

  ‘All right, and maybe it’s a deliberate red herring set up to misdirect anyone coming looking for the Mos Hadroch, and we fell for it.’

  The same thought had already occurred to Ty, but he didn’t care to admit to it.

  Commander Martinez’s icon blinked back into life at the bottom of Ty’s visor. ‘We just picked up a mass of gravity-traces located no more than three or four AUs from here,’ he informed them. ‘Whatever you think you have, grab it and get out, or you risk being left behind.’

  Ty could feel the blood pounding in his head, and he felt suddenly sick with anxiety. He leaned forward, again shining sharp-edged light on the dead alien’s carapace markings, while he studied it for long seconds.

  Think, he told himself. All they had so far was a name . . . they had no idea what the Mos Hadroch might look like, how big it was, or how small . . .

  A sudden sense of excitement gripped him and he pinged Nancy with a request for a secure one-on-one link, at the same moment he severed his comms link with the Mjollnir ’s bridge.

  Nancy accepted the link, and her voice came through a moment later. ‘What the hell, Ty?’ she asked. ‘Why did you just cut off the ship? Martinez’ll throw a fit.’

  ‘We can’t go back yet.’

  Her shoulders slumped, her expression more puzzled than angry.

  ‘Look around you,’ he demanded. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘An empty passageway – and a dead alien.’

  The Atn were a cyborg species, and only part organic, of course; that much was well known. Not that anyone had ever managed to prove it, but the general consensus was that their long-term memories and any other data stored in their brains could be passed from one individual to the next. That way you got creatures whose individual identities constantly shifted and changed, as they each accumulated the experiences of their brethren. What if he wondered, the Mos Hadroch was nothing more than some form of information, carefully hidden inside some dormant circuitry located somewhere inside what passed for this creature’s brain?

  Ty shook his head, thinking hard and fast. No, that couldn’t be it. If that had been the case, they’d have done as well to hide the actual stack-discs here, too, rather than destroy them in their storage chamber.

  He let out a snarl of exasperation and squatted on his haunches. ‘X marks the spot,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything points to here,’ he said, unable to contain his exasperation. ‘The records I found way back when, the spiral texts we discovered here, and even this Atn.’

  Nancy said nothing, simply stood there waiting, while he stared at the Atn’s metal carapace. They were hardly elegant creatures: slow and ponderous, the size of a small car. There was, he suddenly thought, a lot of room in there.

  He bent down again to read more closely at the creature. There was something, he was sure, wrong with its head. He put both hands under it and tried to lift it. It moved with surprising ease, as if it were nothing more than an empty casing.

  He stood up again. ‘It’s in there,’ he declared, flushed with sudden and overwhelming certainty.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The smashed discs, the walled-off passageway . . . none of it makes sense unless there’s something inside the body.’

  He stared at Nancy, his eyes bright, while she gazed back at him in mystified, thin-lipped silence. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Frankly, I can’t. There’s just nowhere else it could be. Nobody’s been in here since that false wall was put up, so it has to be inside that thing.’

  ‘We don’t have time to break it open,’ Nancy replied decisively. ‘We’d need cutting tools for that, which means we’re going to have to get it back to the Mjollnir.’

  Ty nodded. ‘Tell Martinez we’re coming out.’

  The Atn lay with its head pointing in the direction of the main shaft, the bulk of its massive body pushed up against the wall on one side. Deciding to move it was one thing, but managing it was another. Ty got in touch with Cesar and told him what he was planning, while Nancy reopened the link with the Mjollnir and fielded Martinez’s angry demands.

  Ty glanced down at the image of the swarm’s movements projected on the interior of his visor, and saw that some of its members were converging on the Mjollnir’s location a lot sooner than he had expected.

  Nancy signed off and just stood there, looking tense and angry. ‘How long did Martinez give us?’ he asked her.

  ‘Thirty minutes, that’s it. And then they jump without us.’

  ‘I just talked to Cesar,’ Ty explained, ‘and he’s got an idea he wan
ts to try.’

  ‘Fine. In the meantime, let’s get this thing hooked up to the spiders, then haul it the hell out of here.’

  Some of the spiders were equipped with additional bits of equipment, among them a powerful oxyacetylene torch and several winches that spooled out super-strong cable. While he talked with Cesar over the comms, Ty unwound the cable from one of the spiders and fixed the carabiner lock attached to it around the dead alien’s neck like a noose. Nancy did the same with another, and after a few minutes’ work they’d secured the body to three separate cables.

  ‘We’re going to have to set them all to maximum burn,’ Nancy muttered, surveying their work. ‘But at that rate they’ve only got fuel for thirty seconds.’

  ‘Is that going to be enough?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe. I think we should set them up for two separate burns, of fifteen seconds each.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case we don’t get it moving the first time, or if something goes wrong, we’ll still have a second chance. And if this works the first time, that leaves us with extra fuel.’ She gave him a steady look. ‘But that only gets it out into the shaft, not up to the surface, or into the launcher.’

  ‘Cesar’s moved the launcher over the shaft mouth. He’s also taken a winch off one of the other spiders, and by the time we’ve got our friend here out into the shaft itself, he’ll have lowered that cable from the launcher, and we can just winch the damn thing up to the surface.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ she admitted, but her tone gave away her doubt. ‘But we might be cutting this far too close, Nathan.’

  ‘We can do this,’ he insisted.

  ‘Yeah, well, I just hope you’re right.’

  The spiders were soon in place, all facing towards the shaft entrance almost a hundred metres away, their cables now knotted tightly around the alien’s body. As Ty got into position behind the body along with Nancy, he glanced at her and saw her lips set in a thin, hard line behind her visor, her gaze fixed on the far end of the passageway.

  ‘Fifteen seconds, with an initial three-second delay,’ he reminded her. ‘Ready?’