Empire of Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ she muttered.

  Ty braced himself, knees bent, the soles of his boots pressed hard against the scuffed stone floor, and then he initiated the first burn.

  Moments later, the thrusters of all three spiders flared in unison, and Ty’s visor quickly darkened in response. Seeing the winch-lines draw taut, he put his shoulder against the Atn’s inert form and pushed with all his strength. His feet almost slipped out from under him and he quickly sought fresh purchase, wondering if he’d been a fool to think something like this might actually work.

  Just as time seemed to run out, the Atn started to slide forward, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. It scraped against the stone floor and then collided with the facing wall. They stumbled after it, using their hands to try and steer it away from either side.

  As the spiders finished their programmed burn, the Atn kept moving forward under its own momentum, dead limbs flailing as it drifted up from the floor and towards the ceiling, turning slowly as it went.

  ‘Don’t let it get turned around too far!’ Nancy yelled. ‘If it gets wrapped up in the cables, it’ll pull the spiders in towards it.’

  The Atn smashed into the ceiling and lost some of its momentum. At least, Ty thought, they had it moving in the right direction. It scraped grit and dust from one wall as it drifted onwards.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ty. ‘Second burn, now.’

  He tapped at his arm console and triggered the second blast of energy. The spiders shot towards the mouth of the shaft, drawing the cables taut once more, and dragging the Atn’s lifeless form after them.

  The second burn seemed to last for ever.

  The spiders finally ran out of fuel, and the cables grew slack once more as the Atn drifted forward, colliding with the three spiders and grinding one of them to pieces against a hard surface. Smashed components and delicate robot arms were sent flying, but it was heading in the right direction. A few seconds later the alien’s body finally sailed out into the main shaft, spinning slowly and followed by a hail of fresh debris and machine parts.

  Several spiders had been hovering nearby, and their programmed sense of self-preservation made them scatter like fish disturbed by a shark as the Atn went crashing into the main shaft’s opposite wall. It then rebounded at a fraction of its original velocity, tangled in cables, from the spiders still tethered to it.

  Ty looked up along the shaft towards the external entrance and saw a ring of stars surrounding the bulky silhouette of the fast launcher. A cable extended down from it, its tip swaying just a few metres above them.

  He grinned: Cesar had clearly been hard at work. Ty pushed himself towards the cable and grabbed hold of it.

  The Atn kept rotating slowly, more or less hanging in the centre of the shaft. Ty managed to cling to one of its legs long enough to secure the cable to it. He pulled himself on top of the Atn, then opened a link to Cesar.

  ‘Nathan,’ came the response. ‘How’s it going down there? Are we ready to move?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ty replied. ‘Start pulling it in right now.’

  ‘Sure thing.’ The cable drew taut, causing the Atn’s body to twist around a little faster, swinging from side to side like a huge ungainly pendulum. Ty kicked himself away from its bulk, and landed against the shaft wall just a moment later.

  He felt a powerful tremor rumble through his gloved fingertips the moment they came into contact with the shaft wall. More dust began to slowly billow out from the passageway entrance, as well as from the other passageways both above and below. He noticed a moment later that Cesar’s icon had blinked out. He tried to hail him, but didn’t get an answer.

  ‘That had to be something big hitting the asteroid,’ said Nancy, sounding panicky. ‘Get to the surface, Nathan, now.’

  Ty didn’t bother answering. He summoned a spider and grabbed its handholds. The passageway began to drop out of sight as the machine carried him back to the surface.

  Looking upwards, he realized that the launcher’s attitudinal systems were having to fight to keep it in place over the mouth of the shaft. Whatever had slammed into the asteroid might have done so hard enough to increase its otherwise barely perceptible rotation, and the Atn’s inert form swinging about inside the shaft wasn’t helping either. It was then he noticed one of the launcher’s fuel nozzles was firing only sporadically.

  ‘Cesar? Cesar, can you hear me?’ Ty yelled into his comms, but the other man’s life-support icon stayed dark. Next he tried pinging the Mjollnir, and felt a chill sweat spring up between his shoulder blades when there was no response. He started to wonder just what they were going to find waiting for them up on the asteroid’s surface.

  It was possible, of course, that the frigate’s crew were under attack and too busy to reply. It was just as possible that they had already jumped out of the system, and abandoned the outside team. Worse, the frigate might have been destroyed by whatever had hit the asteroid.

  He glanced down at Nancy, who was also being carried upwards by a spider, and tried to think of something he could say that might make both of them feel better. He drew a blank.

  ‘Nancy, if something’s happened to Cesar, I don’t know how to fly the launcher.’

  ‘Let me worry about that.’

  Ty glanced at his visor’s life-support indicators. They each had about half an hour’s oxygen supply left.

  The Atn was finally drawn inside the rear cargo hatch of the launcher, the craft veering to one side as the Atn crashed into its interior bay. Its boosters cut out a moment later.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Nancy said quickly. ‘I just took control of the launcher.’

  Ty released the spider’s handholds, letting his own momentum carry him towards a set of rungs fixed to the launcher’s exterior.

  ‘Get up front and strap yourself in,’ Nancy shouted, already pulling herself up the other side of the launcher. ‘Move it, Nathan.’

  The launcher was entirely open to vacuum, and was little more than a computer-controlled rocket platform with two pairs of seats mounted on its nose. At the rear, four primary nozzles angled outwards from the cargo bay that comprised most of the craft’s volume. As Ty got into his seat, he glanced up and felt relief wash over him like a tide. The Mjollnir was still right where it should be.

  A dense cloud of dust was rising from some point just around the curve of the asteroid’s narrow horizon. A fog of ice and grit now covered its surface. Whatever had struck it must have been big.

  ‘What about Cesar?’ he asked.

  Nancy was already strapped in and stabbing at the launcher’s control console. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘He should have been here at the controls.’

  ‘We abandoned some equipment at the camp, remember. All I can think is he must have left the launcher running on automatic, and tried to salvage some of that.’ Nancy peered at the panel. ‘Shit, one of the thrusters is out of action. I’m going to have to shut it off and hope I can compensate with the rest. But I’m getting close-to-fail readings on the others, so cross your fingers and hope they don’t turn us into a fireball before we get back to the ship.’

  ‘Thanks for that thought,’ Ty replied.

  ‘Just strap in and get ready. This is going to be a rough ride.’

  Ty then caught sight of a suited figure drifting close to the asteroid’s surface, partially obscured by the clouds of grit and ice. It took a few moments before he realized with a shock that the lower half of Cesar’s body was missing. He pointed this out to Nancy and she cursed. ‘He should have stayed with the damn launcher.’

  ‘I guess he must have been hit by debris. We’re lucky the launcher wasn’t wiped out the same way.’

  ‘Right now, I just want to get the hell out of here before we wind up like him.’

  Something flashed out of the sky and the asteroid was struck a second time. A fresh plume of grey dust and ice shot up from its surface.

  ‘I’m going to perform a fast burn,’ a
nnounced Nancy, her voice taking on a hysterical edge. Ty twisted around to look at her, but all he could see was the side of her helmet. Suddenly it seemed important to be able to see her face. ‘Then I’m going to decelerate for thirty seconds,’ she added. ‘Got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  If I were the swarm, he thought, I’d collect chunks of rock from somewhere and accelerate them close to the speed of light. All it would take was a simple railgun technology; the rocks didn’t even need to be very big to cause a lot of damage once they had reached relativistic speeds.

  ‘Three, two, one,’ Nancy counted aloud, and a second later Ty felt his heart and lungs press up against his spine while a seemingly enormous force flattened his head back against his seat. The asteroid’s surface disappeared out of his peripheral view as the launcher blasted away from it.

  Thirty seconds. Nancy hit a second button and cut off the burn. The intense pressure lifted from Ty’s body and they were weightless once more. He twisted around and saw how the asteroid had already shrunk into the distance. Even as he watched, something slammed into it for a third time, cleaving it like a lump of dried clay smashed with a hammer.

  ‘Jesus and Buddha,’ Nancy swore, sounding like she was on the verge of crying with relief. ‘They can hear us again! I’ve got a channel open to the Mjollnir, Nathan. I think we’re going to make it.’

  ‘Are they ready to jump out of the system?’ asked Ty.

  ‘I seriously fucking hope so. They’re under attack, but no direct hits so far. Deceleration burn in ten, so get ready.’

  Ty grabbed hold of his armrests as the launcher swivelled round in a slow, graceful arc until it was facing back the way they had come. No direct hits. He stared at the expanding cloud of debris that was now all that remained of the asteroid. If the Mjollnir had been hit by anything like that, there would be nothing left of it.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Nancy. ‘In three . . . two . . . one.’

  The launcher had not been built with comfort in mind. When the rockets cut out half a minute later, Ty twisted around to see the dirty-grey and black exterior of the Freehold starship fast expanding towards them. He could also make out a faint blue shimmer around the frigate’s drive spines. More split-second bursts decelerated the launcher yet further, and soon the yawning mouth of a forward bay swallowed them up.

  The bay doors slid shut over their heads and grappling arms reached out from the deck, locking on to the launcher and drawing it down into a cradle. Ty started to unstrap himself.

  A deep thrumming sound rapidly resolved itself into a rush of air, but Ty waited until his suit gave him the signal before he pulled his helmet off, tasting welded metal and sweat as he sucked in a breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to get out of his suit. As he kicked away from the launcher and grabbed a handhold on the wall of the bay, he glanced across at Nancy, also with her helmet off, her face drenched in sweat.

  ‘I’m sorry about Cesar,’ was all he could say to her.

  She shrugged, staring away across the bay. ‘If it wasn’t for him, we’d never have got that thing into the launcher.’ She met his eyes. ‘But if that thing’s body isn’t as valuable as you seem to think it is, he might have died for nothing. Can you live with that thought?’

  He returned her gaze. ‘Whatever it is the swarm’s after, it’s inside that Atn,’ he replied. ‘I promise you.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Several days after Dakota’s encounter with Trader, the Magi ship that had resurrected her delivered her to the world known to humans as Derinkuyu, a major Skelite colony twenty-three light-years beyond the Consortium’s borders.

  The Skelites carved entire cities out of the deep bedrock of their worlds, creating warrens that extended far below the surface. Before the departure of the Shoal, the complex in which Dakota now found herself had been home to a small population of a few thousand human beings plus a smattering of Bandati and even, to her surprise, one or two Rafters drifting in their pressurized tanks. With the arrival of coreship refugees, the population had quadrupled overnight, spreading out to take up every last available inch of spare room in what Dakota suspected would be a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare.

  She wandered through a long, echoing concourse, its high arched ceiling supported by fluted stone pillars also carved directly out of the rock. Somewhere in the maze of shanty dwellings here was the Magi navigator who had agreed to act as her liaison.

  Most of the dwellings she passed were constructed from scraps of plastic and metal, and even rough slabs of precariously balanced stone that looked like all they needed was a good hard push to send them tumbling onto their occupants with deadly results. Light came from a combination of glow-globes and what she suspected was a bioluminescent fungus spread in dense patches across the ceiling and upper parts of the towering pillars. Her nose was tickled by the varied smells from the dozens of cooking fires that splashed pale flickering light across the lower reaches of the pillars, carrying the scent of spices and blackened meat. She wondered if any of the people sleeping and talking and eating all around her really believed that the rescue they were almost certainly hoping for would ever come.

  ‘Miss Merrick?’

  She turned to see a figure looming out of the darkness, and knew immediately this was the man she was looking for. The figure resolved into an impossibly tall black man in his late twenties, with the ubiquitous shaved skull of a machine-head.

  ‘Miss Merrick,’ he repeated, now taking her hand with a smile. ‘Leroy Rivers. It’s wonderful to meet you at last.’

  ‘I should be thanking you,’ she replied. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way around this place without help.’

  ‘Nobody else knows you’re here?’ There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.

  She shook her head. ‘You’re the only one I’ve told.’

  Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. ‘We should not delay. It’s not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.’

  She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. ‘You’re part of the relief operation?’ she asked.

  He laughed. ‘That is the idea, but it’s like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we’ve managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There is not enough room for all the refugees,’ he continued, climbing into the driver’s seat. ‘We really need to expand into newer tunnels, but that means further negotiations with the Skelites, which is proving difficult, I’m afraid. There’s been a lot of clashes between the original settlers and the refugees, but the Skelites refuse to open up more space.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,’ he explained. ‘That’s their basic condition before they’ll enter into any kind of negotiation.’

  Dakota nodded. ‘Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don’t want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.’

  She climbed into the passenger’s seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. ‘I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someone I’ve never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean’s Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn’t take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there’s another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.’

  It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers’s hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Le
roy Rivers scattered over an area of space so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.

  She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing manner. ‘I can’t make any promises, Mr Rivers, because things are bad all over. But I’ll see what I can do when I get back to Ocean’s Deep.’

  Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. ‘Thank you for telling me that.’ He reached down and activated a switch, and the car’s treads ground noisily.

  She studied him. ‘You didn’t believe a word of what I just said, did you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, with a broad grin. ‘Not a word. But I still had to ask.’

  Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.

  ‘Something for you,’ he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.

  He passed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.

  ‘The weapon is modular,’ Rivers explained. ‘All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things “ratcatchers”. A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it’s the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you’re going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.’

  She gave him a doubtful look. ‘Wrong, how?’

  ‘The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypasses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.’

  She stared at him. ‘And this is seriously the best you could get?’

  ‘Weapons of any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren’t exactly lacking in armaments, but they’re less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.’

  ‘So they’re all home-made efforts like this?’ she asked, emptying the bag’s contents on the seat between her knees.