Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Gardner, and my piloting skills are the best. But you’re going to have to tell me just what it is you need me to do.’

  ‘You are familiar with colonial surveys?’

  Ah, that was it.

  Because humanity, in the form of the Consortium, was restricted by the Shoal to travel only within a bubble of space a few hundred light years across, potentially habitable worlds within that bubble were becoming a precious and dwindling resource. In fact, most of the systems to be found within that bubble of space did not contain any Earth-like worlds. In those systems that did, few of the worlds were life-bearing, and even fewer of those were capable of supporting human beings unaided.

  Competition for such limited resources was subsequently extremely fierce—and occasionally deadly.

  It was not unknown for claim-jumping to take place. Rival groups chasing after the gradually dwindling number of colonial contracts could separately find their way to a promising system via coreship and, by the force of arms, prevent another colony from being set up there. The Shoal appeared to care little whether such armies were carried across space in the Shoal coreships so long as they themselves were not threatened.

  Most such incidents of colonial rivalry ended in decades of litigation, while Consortium warships remained in orbit above those barely habitable worlds until such time as the courts decided who should get which contract. The origins of the Consortium itself lay in arbitrating such conflicts: disparate private enterprises had been merged under a general UN charter, and an administrative Council set up to oversee exploration and exploitation in an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic interstellar land-rush.

  The precursors to such contracts were colonial surveys, whereby the potential colonists could raise funds to send ships and survey teams to assess the likely costs and time-scales for establishing viable settlements. Such expeditions were particularly prone to piracy.

  ‘I’ve never taken part in a colonial survey, but. . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Gardner raised his eyebrows.

  Careful, thought Dakota: she’d almost mentioned Redstone. She had been there, but Mala hadn’t.

  ‘But I’m more than aware of the dangers involved. Particularly after the Freehold-Uchidan conflict.’

  ‘So can I assume you’re at least familiar with events on Redstone?’

  Another quick glance at Josef, but his face was impossible to read. She looked back to Gardner. ‘It would be extremely hard to be a machine-head and not be familiar with what happened there, Mr Gardner.’

  Gardner smiled, looking pleased. ‘Quite right, quite right. The reason I’m here involves the Freehold, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘It does?’ A trickle of ice began gliding down the length of Dakota’s spine.

  ‘Yes. But anything I tell you from now is on the condition that you have agreed to take on this job. Josef here can assure you the money you’ll be paid is very, very generous.’

  She glanced to one side and saw Josef’s head bob energetically.

  ‘As I understand it so far, you’re surveying a new system, and you need a machine-head pilot who knows how to keep her mouth shut,’ Dakota announced flatly. ‘That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

  Gardner nodded. ‘That about sums it up. Now tell me if you want the job.’

  Dakota nodded tightly, trying hard not to let Gardner see the emotional turmoil she was in. ‘I do, Mr Gardner. You have a pilot. But what I don’t understand is why the Freehold would specifically want to hire a machine-head? What do they need me for—target practice?’

  Gardner just stared at her.

  ‘Easy, Mala,’ Josef muttered. ‘It took a lot to set this up, and you owe me.’

  ‘Miss Oorthaus, you weren’t on Redstone when the tragedy at Port Gabriel took place. There’s still a lot of bad feeling there, that’s true, but the Freehold Senate understands that the machine-heads present on Redstone were . . . subverted? Is that the right word?’

  ‘Good enough,’ Dakota replied.

  ‘The truth is the Freehold are losing their war with the Uchidans. Because of this, the Freehold are in the market for a new homeworld, and they currently have a new charter up for consideration by the Consortium. The system in question is already under survey, but the Freehold’s military resources have been badly stretched by the war on Redstone. They lost a lot of their capability during the Port Gabriel fiasco, and a good deal since. They have only three orbital warships left, all centuries old, and they need this colonial charter because, frankly, they’re history without it.’

  ‘You’re saying these ships are old enough they’re still set up for navigation by machine-head pilots, right? Aren’t they worried the Uchidans could pull the same trick again if I was allowed to pilot one of their ships?’

  ‘It’s a good question, but they don’t actually consider the Uchidans a major threat to the survey expedition. If it proved successful, and the Freehold won themselves a new colonial contract, the Uchidans would end up getting Redstone all to themselves. The main worry involves other, outside interests—other colonies, potential or real, prepared to go to war over an uninhabited world. Plus, the Freehold can’t pilot their ships as well as a machine-head could. The frigate they’ll be sending to this system would be at a disadvantage if it encountered any opposition unafraid of hiring someone like yourself. You’d be an essential part of their inventory, regardless of the past.’

  Dakota leaned back, thinking hard. ‘I hope that money you mentioned is really, really good.’

  ‘Better than good.’ Josef laughed and shook his head. ‘The kind of money they’re offering, you or I could find a rock and stick a planet engine in it and call it home. Let your Ghost talk to the Black Rock systems and see if it isn’t true.’

  Dakota’s Ghost instantaneously flashed up the details of the pending financial transaction, and the arcane financial trickery that was meant to disguise where it had come from and who exactly was going to benefit from it. Half the money, for both Josef and Dakota, had already been deposited. But even with that first payment alone, she was already set to be very, very rich.

  Gardner smiled. ‘You can’t deny it’s generous.’

  Dakota felt dizzy, and tried hard to keep her face impassive at the sheer number of zeroes she’d just seen marching across her mind’s eye.

  ‘And what about you, Mr Gardner? What do you get out of this? You’re not part of the Freehold, are you?’

  ‘No, but I represent outside investments that allow this expedition to happen at all. A business can make a great deal out of a successful colony, if it invests in it early.’

  Good enough, Dakota decided. Good enough because there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

  —

  ‘If you’re screwing me over, Josef, I’d appreciate knowing just how much before I jump in the fire. What exactly did you tell him about me?’

  Josef carefully placed a hand over Dakota’s, where it had balled up around a fistful of his shirt just before shoving him up against a wall. Gardner had left them a few minutes before.

  ‘Let go, Dakota,’ Josef said, adopting a reasonable tone.

  ‘You’re asking me to stick myself inside a locked steel box for maybe several months, among a bunch of people with every reason to want to see someone like me dead. So if you’re missing anything out, anything at all, I swear the last thing that pretty face of yours will ever see will be me pulling the trigger right before I blow your head off.’

  Josef coughed out a horrified laugh, and Dakota released the pressure a little. ‘Dakota, you came to me, remember? You asked for my help. Or maybe’—his voice took on a more accusatory tone—‘it’s more convenient for you to forget that.’

  ‘I didn’t forget,’ Dakota mumbled, and finally let him go. ‘I just hate being in any situation where I don’t feel in control.’

  She slumped back on Josef’s couch, and a few moments later felt him place a hand on her shoulder as he stepped up behind
her. ‘Once this is all over, you’ll be right back on top. You’ll have the money to do what you like—or even not do anything at all for the rest of your life.’

  Dakota cast him a dubious look.

  ‘This is a routine operation,’ Josef insisted. ‘I’m not saying Gardner’s an angel, but the money’s real enough, and I’ve dealt with him in the past. But, while we’re at it, there is one other thing I wanted to bring up with you, and you’re probably not going to like it.’

  Dakota stroked her brow with one hand. ‘Thanks for leaving it till last,’ she deadpanned.

  ‘You’re going to have to leave your ship behind.’

  Dakota’s eyes snapped open, staring at Josef in disbelief. ‘You mean in storage?’

  He sighed and sat down next to her. ‘Dakota, right now that ship of yours is like a big glowing arrow pointing at your head saying “dangerous criminal here”. Anyone who wants to find you just needs to look for your ship. Yourself you can disguise, but not the . . . what’s it called?’

  ‘The Piri Reis.’

  ‘Yeah, that. I set tracer systems on the Piri, to keep an eye on it, and it responded by attacking our databases. Where the hell did you get that ship?’

  ‘It’s a very valuable piece of hardware, Josef, and that’s all you need to know. That, and the fact there’s absolutely no way I’m going to leave it in storage. I can stow it in the cargo hold of whatever ship I’m piloting to this Freehold system.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Josef shook his head. ‘In case I wasn’t sufficiently clear, I mean you have to destroy it, Dak.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘And fuck you too,’ Josef echoed back at her. ‘You’ll leave it here, and it’s going straight to scrap. Stop!’ he yelled, as Dakota pulled herself up, her mouth open to argue. ‘Just think for once in your life. Right now you’re public enemy number one—and I mean that literally. Right now I’m the only bridge you haven’t completely burned, and the Piri Reis is going to lead everyone straight to you. You take that ship along with you, when you’ll be spending probably weeks on board a coreship, that’s plenty of time for Bourdain and the Consortium to set their bloodhounds on your trail. And believe me, every coreship leaving this system for months to come is going to be filled with agents looking for you.’

  Dakota stood up and pulled on her coat. ‘I don’t like it,’ she protested weakly.

  Josef shrugged and spread his hands. ‘I’m open to alternative suggestions.’

  Dakota responded with silence.

  —

  Several hours later, when she found herself back on board the Piri Reis, it felt like attending a wake.

  She had Piri knock together something warm and alcoholic for her in the kitchenette, something loaded with the kind of neuro-adjusters she normally derived from her implants. As the shaking she had felt build up in her hands edged off, she began to feel better.

  Here’s to you, Piri, she toasted.

  The possibility that she might have to ditch her ship after the destruction of Bourdain’s Rock had always been there in her mind. But she felt like a hermit forced to leave her cave after a lifetime of solitude—and ever since Port Gabriel, the Piri Reis had been a pretty good substitute for a hermit’s cave.

  She curled up against the warm fur inlay that coated the interior of her ship and felt like an agoraphobic who’d just woken to find someone had strapped a parachute to her back and thrown her out of an aircraft.

  ‘Dakota?’ She heard the effigy calling her name softly. She stood up and walked through into the welcome darkness of her sleeping quarters, and let the effigy slide its warm, flesh-like arms around her. Its fingers pried at her clothes, gently peeling them away before tugging her downwards and planting soft, dry kisses on her belly and breasts.

  She stroked the smooth, hairless dome of its head as it pulled itself up and slid her arms around its shoulders, feeling its weight press down on her. All the while she couldn’t help thinking that there had to be a way to get around Josef’s demands.

  It was her they were hunting for, not the Piri Reis.

  When the solution finally came to her, she had to wonder why it took her so long to think of it.

  Nine

  Redstone Colony

  Consortium Standard Date: 01.06.2538

  3 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

  An arrhythmic thump beat a tattoo inside Dakota’s head, and she closed her eyes until its migraine-like effect passed. It was still the middle of the night, but the street lighting beyond the window projected dappled stripes through the blinds of her quarters, painting them across the wall opposite.

  Chris Severn shifted beside her. ‘What’s up?’ he asked sleepily, shifting naked beside her in the narrow cot. She watched fascinated as the tattoos covering his back twisted like something alive, animated by the shifting of the muscles beneath. Along with a lot of the other machine-heads, they had been put up in a building originally intended to house the maintenance staff for the skyhook. ‘Headache again?’

  Dakota nodded, unwilling to speak in case it brought back the pain. It felt like a bad hangover, except she hadn’t been drinking.

  It was obvious from the pained look on his face that Severn was suffering in precisely the same way. This worried her, even though that kind of synchronicity between machine-heads wasn’t so unusual: get enough machine-heads together in one room, and it was like being stuck in the middle of an electronic shouting match. Their Ghosts remained in continuous intercommunication, even when they themselves were asleep. This constant sharing of information and data sometimes manifested as shared minor tics or physical reactions amongst machine-heads in close proximity.

  But one advantage lay in the fact that whatever one of them learned, pretty much all the rest would know, or could be granted access to. It was the development of technologies such as these that had helped make Bellhaven—and a man like Howard Banville—so very essential to the Consortium.

  And if Severn was suffering in the same way as she was, it was reasonable to conjecture that everyone else in the building would be too.

  Dakota was about to slide back down alongside his lithe nakedness when she heard voices from somewhere outside. So instead she slid out of the cot and stepped over to the window, whereupon Severn grunted in annoyance and twisted around until he faced the wall, burying his head in a pillow.

  From the outside their building was an unremarkable grey concrete block set in a radial street a kilometre or so from the skyhook’s main base. Peering out, she saw two groups of men standing together at the junction with a side street about fifty metres away. Something about their gestures made it clear they were involved in some kind of argument with each other.

  ‘They’re crazy, you know,’ muttered Severn from somewhere behind her, his voice muffled by the pillow. ‘Totally fucking nuts.’

  ‘How do you know it’s Freeholders out there?’

  ‘Who the fuck else is it going to be?’ he mumbled.

  Dakota scanned the network of active Ghost circuits throughout the town and noted that the Consortium security services were already aware of the gathering. She’d been initially worried about Uchidan infiltrators, and had immediately glanced round to locate her side-arm, but it looked like this disturbance was something relatively innocuous.

  She watched as one man from each group stepped forward, until the pair of them stood face to face. They gesticulated wildly, faces distorted with fury. Their compatriots meanwhile stood in a loose circle around them under the street lights, wearing the heavy gear essential to surviving the freezing cold.

  Dakota watched as one of the two men at the heart of the exchange slapped the other hard across the face, dislodging his breather mask. The sound of mocking laughter reached her ears.

  Severn finally got up out of the cot. With an exaggerated sigh, he leant his chin on her shoulder, following her gaze. ‘You can see why Commander Marados doesn’t want the Freehold involved in this operation at all, can’t you?’

 
; Dakota nodded, only half-listening to him. She’d heard about the death-matches the Freehold favoured. The whole notion was simultaneously barbaric and ludicrous, and it was a reminder of just why their bizarre society had been shuffled from port to port before finding its way here.

  ‘What’s the point in all this fighting?’ she asked. ‘They’ve already got an enemy to contend with.’

  Severn pressed himself up behind her, his hands sliding around her waist and up towards her breasts, making her smile. But, despite what she thought were her better instincts, she wanted to see what might happen outside. If this was more than some minor street brawl—if this really was a challenge, as she suspected (hoped?), what would happen?

  Dakota was shocked to discover her throat was dry with the anticipation of bloodshed.

  Severn’s fingers began to drift downwards, but Dakota failed to respond. After a few more seconds he finally got the message and pulled back with another sigh.

  ‘Bloodthirsty, ain’tcha?’ he said, patting her on the shoulder.

  Her skin prickled with the cold. Everywhere on Redstone was cold. She suspected that in some warped way it was a reason why the Freeholders wanted to live here. They didn’t seem the kind of people who would thrive in a tropical, sunny environment.

  ‘Hey, not bloodthirsty. Just curious.’

  The Freehold was scheduled to lead an assault on Cardinal Point, a highly fortified Uchidan settlement about two thousand kilometres north-west of the skyhook, where it was believed Banville was currently being held captive. The Consortium were technically present here in a purely advisory role, but the Freeholder troops would be flown in aboard Consortium craft, piloted by Consortium military staff, with orbital reconnaissance and support from the Consortium also.

  Less than three days from now, Dakota would be piloting one of a dozen dropships in towards Cardinal Point for the rescue attempt.

  Over the past several days they’d received an intensive briefing on the nature of the conflict. Because Dakota came from the same world as Banville, a lot of it was old news to her but, even so, she hadn’t been aware of much of the historical background.