Empire of Light s-3

by Gary Gibson

  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 moved 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 agains
t 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 wants 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?'

  '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.'