Empire of Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Fixing a problem,’ she replied, before closing her eyes and ignoring him.

  The petals began to fold around her once more, and Corso began yelling and cursing as he moved out of their way. She knew he wouldn’t meanwhile try to take control of the frigate away from her; if he did, he’d only be making it into an easy target.

  Once the petals had enclosed her, she opened her eyes to see the universe unfold around her.

  She could feel the different parts of the frigate as if they were parts of her own body. The mass of electronics and machinery linking the frigate’s drive-core to the external drive-spines was a tangled nightmare, but at least it was functional.

  Dakota took one last glance at the Magi ship. It was now spinning out of control, its drive-spines shattered, unable to leap out of local space. She queried it tentatively, but there was no reply.

  The drones struck again. They finished the job, and the Magi ship began to descend towards the upper reaches of Redstone’s atmosphere, where it would start to burn up. Hot salt tears ran down her face, and she gripped the armrests so hard she thought she might break them.

  The drones were already racing back towards the Mjollnir. She waited until they got nearer, drew them close against the hull and activated the drive-core.

  Redstone vanished instantly from the overhead display. They had crossed more than sixty-five million kilometres in a fraction of a second.

  It was going to take time to power the drive up for the next, hopefully much longer, jump, but for the moment they were far away enough to be safe.

  She let the petals fold back down, and slumped forward in her chair. The sweat was literally dripping from her. She found Corso waiting for her, his expression furious.

  ‘What the fuck just happened there?’ he demanded.

  ‘There are things I know,’ she replied, ‘that you don’t, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet.’

  ‘You destroyed your own ship and you don’t feel like talking about it right now?’ he bellowed.

  Perez sat tight-mouthed, and clearly unsure of what was going on. Dakota stared back defiantly at Corso. ‘We’re out of range of Redstone, and we’re going to jump again in a couple of hours. That’s all you need to know right now.’

  ‘And what happens when we get within range of the Emissaries?’ he grated through clenched teeth. ‘What the fuck are we supposed to do without your Magi ship? How are we going to get past their defences—?’

  ‘We’ll do fine with the weapons I brought with me,’ she snapped. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  She met his eyes and saw for the first time how frightened he was. She nodded towards Perez. ‘Who else is on the ship?’

  Corso glanced over his shoulder at Perez before replying. ‘Eight of us came on board, but one got wounded when we tried to take control of the bridge. He’s currently in the med-bay. We also brought an Atn specialist who seems to know something about the Mos Hadroch. He went with some others to make sure it was still on board. It is.’

  ‘I spoke to Ted on the way in, but what happened to him? He was there one second, then gone. Is he all right?’

  ‘He’s in the med-bay too. Whatever it is that’s been happening to other machine-heads, it finally got him, too.’

  As Corso started to step down from the dais, Dakota reached out and touched his elbow. He paused, looking back at her.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the Magi ship, even if I wanted to, Lucas. It’s not like it was before, when I had real control over it. That’s all gone for me now, and it will be for Ted, too. The ship was more like a prison at the end, and destroying it was the only way I could get free of it.’

  Corso shook his head as if in disbelief, and headed over to the bridge entrance.

  ‘I think it’s about time,’ he said, turning back to her, ‘to head down to the labs and see just what it is we went through all this for. But first we’re going to the med-bay.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Once they had exited through the hub, they stopped frequently so that Corso could consult the map-projections that hovered over major intersections. Localized micro-relay systems, tied into the frigate’s central stacks, showed Dakota exactly where they were at every step, yet one look at Corso’s grim expression made her reluctant to point this out.

  He pushed ahead of her without looking back once, and she wondered if he had experienced the same powerful sense of déjà vu she herself had felt from the moment she had boarded the frigate. It seemed very much like being back on board the Hyperion, except this time they were the ones in charge. It was a strange feeling because so very much had changed since then, but perhaps nothing quite so much as Corso and herself.

  They boarded a car at a transport station, and sat in uncomfortable silence for several minutes until Corso finally broke his silence. He leaned towards her, his face red and angry.

  ‘Why did you wait this long, before just appearing out of nowhere?’ he demanded. ‘Did you have all this planned before you turned up on Redstone?’

  She cleared her throat before replying. ‘Some of it,’ she admitted.

  ‘But you just couldn’t be bothered letting me in on it.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she replied.

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because . . . I was afraid you might try to stop me.’

  He waited several more seconds, clearly expecting her to continue. When she didn’t, he just shook his head in disgust and stared away from her until they reached their destination less than a minute later. Corso took the lead again once they disembarked.

  The med-bay was much more up-to-date than the Hyperion’s had been. Even though the Mjollnir had been constructed centuries ago, she had clearly undergone a thorough refit.

  Dakota gazed down at Lamoureaux through the transparent lid of a medbox. Another medbox nearby contained a distinguished-looking man in late middle-age.

  She heard a soft hum and looked over to see that Corso had activated the examination table. Its bottom edge slowly tilted towards the deck, while a tangle of ceiling-mounted diagnostic equipment whirred and clicked as it dropped into place above the table’s headrest.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Dakota.

  ‘That’s Eduard Martinez, who led the expedition to find the Mos Hadroch. On the table, please, Dakota. I want to run a full scan on you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we can’t afford you keeling over the way Ted Lamoureaux did.’

  ‘You don’t actually need a machine-head navigator to make a superluminal jump,’ she pointed out. ‘You could just set the parameters yourself

  ‘Yes, but we still need you to tell us which way we’re heading, and you can’t do that if you wind up in a coma or worse.’

  Conceding this point, Dakota reluctantly climbed up on to the examination table and lay back, sliding her fingers around thick moulded plastic handholds on either side. She watched the diagnostic gear move slowly down the length of her body, imaging her internal organs while simultaneously mapping her nervous system.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a real doctor anywhere on this ship?’

  Corso didn’t reply, instead pushing himself away from the table and towards the desk and chair that formed the nurse’s station. He grabbed hold of the back of the chair as he studied whatever analysis the med-bay’s computers were now coming up with.

  ‘Okay, Dakota.’ He turned and glanced at her. ‘I think it’s time we talked. What did you mean when you said you destroyed your ship to get free?’

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t ready to—’

  ‘Bullshit. You just don’t want to talk about it, full stop. I don’t care, but I want an explanation. I deserve an explanation.’ He nodded towards the two occupied medboxes. ‘Those two wouldn’t be in there if they didn’t believe in what we’ve been trying to achieve over the last couple of years. People got killed when we boarded this frigate. Most of them weren’t bad people either, Dakota. They were just doing the
ir job, and now they’re dead. So don’t try and feed me any more crap about not being ready.’

  Dakota realized that the corners of her eyes were damp, and blinked the incipient tears away. ‘I told you things were different after the Magi brought me back from the dead.’

  ‘Different in what way?’

  ‘In that now I only ever go where the Magi ships want me to go. I don’t get to have a say any more, not since I was resurrected. They made me, rebuilt me, and that makes me part of them. But I’m still useful to them, whether I like it or not.’

  ‘So you decided to do something about it.’

  ‘The thing you have to understand,’ she said, ‘is that the Magi ships are hardwired to track down and destroy caches, and to find the entity that made those caches – the entity we know as the Maker. Right?’

  Corso nodded.

  ‘Hardwired, Lucas. That means finding the Maker has a higher priority than anything else where the Magi ships are concerned, even higher than obeying their navigators.’

  ‘So their original navigators weren’t really in charge of their ships either?’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that. The original navigators were bred to their purpose, and because of that they shared the same obsessive goal as their ships did – there could never be a conflict of interest. But they were all wiped out, and when we came along, instead of making everything better again, it presented the Magi ships with a conflict. On the one hand they’re programmed to obey our orders, but on the other they’re overwhelmingly programmed to track down and destroy any caches and ultimately find the Maker.’

  ‘So what can they do?’

  ‘They can try to change their human navigators: remould them into something more compatible with their own mission. Except, instead, it’s turning them into vegetables or – if they’re lucky – just leaving them with permanent brain damage.’

  ‘Jesus and Buddha,’ Corso exclaimed. ‘You’re talking about the bends?’

  There was a soft electronic chime and then the whirring diagnostic equipment slid back up towards the ceiling and fell silent. Dakota pulled herself upright and clasped her hands over her knees.

  Corso glanced towards Lamoureaux’s medbox, then back again, with an appalled expression on his face. ‘You’re seriously telling me the Magi ships are trying to turn our navigators into something that isn’t human?’

  ‘Trader once told me he didn’t regard me as human anymore. I didn’t really believe him at the time, but I understand what he meant a lot better now.’

  She could see Corso was still struggling with this revelation. ‘But it’s not working, is it?’ He nodded at Lamoureaux.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she admitted. ‘At least not for most of us. But I can’t say for certain they haven’t already succeeded in turning other machine-heads into the image of their original navigators. Maybe we won’t find out until something happens.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘I think their first priority would probably be to destroy the cache at Tierra.’

  She watched Corso try to assimilate this. ‘What?’

  ‘Remember their original mission, apart from tracking down the Maker, was to destroy caches wherever they could find them. They don’t make exceptions.’

  ‘But the Magi ships don’t have weapons,’ he pointed out. ‘How could they . . . ?’

  She smiled as Corso reached the obvious conclusion on his own, his eyes widening in horror. ‘By destroying whichever star the cache is orbiting, of course,’ she said, finally pushing herself off the examination table.

  ‘We have to warn them,’ he said, in a half-croak.

  ‘Sure, you could,’ she replied, stepping over to the screen to study the details of her diagnostics, noticing the dark patches inside her skull where her implants were located. ‘But think about it, Lucas. I heard the news about Consortium forces moving in and taking over the Tierra cache by force. They’re not going to listen to anything you have to say. But, if it came to the worst and we did lose the Tierra system altogether, there are other caches out there, and we still have other ships we can use to find them.’

  She watched him think this over. He’d try to warn them anyway, she had no doubt, because that was the kind of man he was: endlessly drawn to hopeless causes.

  ‘So you destroyed your ship . . . ?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t trust it any more.’

  Corso gaped at her, dumbfounded.

  There was another chime, and the diagnostics display flashed a couple of times.

  ‘What does it say?’ she asked.

  ‘That there are lesions in your brain,’ Corso told her. ‘The med-bay thinks you’ve suffered a grand mal seizure.’ He reached out and touched the screen, and more information appeared. ‘It’s the same thing as Ted,’ he observed.

  ‘I feel okay. And whatever changes the Magi made to my brain or Ted’s, your med-bay isn’t programmed to factor them in.’

  ‘Well, one way or another, there are changes.’

  ‘Will Ted be okay?’

  Corso shrugged. ‘We won’t know until the medbox is finished with him. How are you feeling?’ he asked, looking at her with a curious expression.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I know you were . . .’he struggled to find the right word ‘. . . attached to your ship; to the experience of being joined with it.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’m not going to crack up like I did before.’ She nodded towards the med-bay entrance. ‘You said we should take a look at what we’ve gone to all this effort for. How about now?’

  Ty Whitecloud looked up at the sound of the lab’s airlock cycling, and realized he still had no idea if the Senator’s plan to hijack the frigate had been successful. He sat at the lab’s primary console, sudden tension knotting the muscles of his back.

  The inner airlock door finally sighed open and Senator Corso entered the lab in the company of a woman he felt certain he had never seen before, but who looked familiar. After another moment, he recognized her from news archives as Dakota Merrick.

  Her eyes were wide and dark, and she hardly seemed to blink. Her hair stood up in spiked tufts, giving the impression of someone who didn’t get much sleep, and she was attractive, in a half-starved-looking sort of way. Had she, he wondered, already been on board the frigate when they arrived?

  ‘Dakota, this is Nathan Driscoll,’ said Corso, fixing Ty with a peculiar stare, as if to put particular emphasis on Ty’s nom de guerre. Corso had so far spoken to Ty only when absolutely necessary, and as on those occasions the Senator’s distaste for him remained entirely evident. ‘Nathan’s responsible for the original research that led us to the Mos Hadroch. Without his help, we wouldn’t have got this far.’

  Ty nodded wordlessly to Dakota, and crossed his hands on his lap so that the ring he had been given by the Consortium agent, and which he wore on his right hand, was hidden under the left palm.

  He heard that high-pitched static-like sound again, but it rapidly increased in pitch until it passed beyond his ability to hear it. He saw Merrick wince in that same moment, pressing the fingers of one hand against her temple.

  She heard it too, he realized. A glance at the Senator confirmed that he appeared unaware of her distress.

  ‘I think it’s time we had a look at exactly what we came here for,’ said Corso. ‘Mr Driscoll?’

  Ty nodded and stood up. ‘This way,’ he said.

  They passed through another room, then came to the isolation chamber containing the Atn’s remains.

  Ty tapped some commands into a terminal mounted next to a sheet of polycarbonate armoured glass, through which the alien remains were visible. A moment later a long robot arm slid out from a recess in the chamber’s ceiling, turning this way and that as it reached downwards, its machine-fingers spreading wide, each one of them tipped with a different kind of probe or instrument. It came to a halt just a few inches above the dead alien’s carapace.

  Ty inhaled deep
ly and stared at the alien body through the glass. I’ve waited a long time for this, he thought, then he exhaled slowly.

  He quickly typed more commands into the terminal, and in response the upper right corner of the window darkened to show an image of the Atn’s remains as seen from directly above. After another moment, this image was replaced by a series of vague outlines rendered in grey, which constantly shifted and altered.

  Ty pointed to the monochrome images. ‘This is from a multisystem scan I managed to run on the thing’s body before they locked me out of the lab,’ he explained. ‘X-ray, muon, the works. Look here.’ He pointed to a black shadow at the core of the image. ‘There’s something lodged inside the Atn’s carapace, but it’s completely opaque to everything I can throw at it.’

  ‘And that’s the Mos Hadroch?’ asked Corso.

  ‘I’m rather hoping it is, yes,’ Ty replied, glancing at the Senator.

  Merrick was frowning, clearly distracted by something. ‘It’s the Mos Hadroch, all right,’ she said. ‘It’s been scanning me from the moment we walked into this lab.’

  The two men stared at her.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she continued. Her eyes lost focus for a moment, and Ty thought she might faint. ‘I think it’s trying to find information about the swarm.’

  ‘Maybe bringing you here wasn’t such a good idea.’ Corso began moving towards her.

  She put up a hand. ‘Wait, Lucas.’

  ‘What does it want to know?’ asked Ty, deeply fascinated.

  She moved back against one wall, pressing a hand against the bulkhead behind her. ‘The swarm’s purpose,’ she replied. ‘Its reason for being.’

  ‘Do you actually know that?’ Corso asked, just beating White-cloud to it.

  ‘Sure.’ She shrugged. ‘There are millions of swarms scattered all across the face of the universe, all in long-range contact with each other via tach-comms. They want to manipulate the underlying structure of reality.’

  Corso laughed dismissively. ‘Come on, that’s ridiculous. Who ever—?’

  ‘It’s not ridiculous,’ Ty interrupted him. ‘Not if they’re Wheeler-Korsh engines.’