Stealing Light
Page 15
‘I know it must have been a hard decision for you, in agreeing to work with Freeholders,’ Arbenz continued smoothly. The two Mansell brothers watched, stony-faced, with arms folded. Corso had a pretty good idea of the thoughts going through their heads, and if Arbenz had any sense, he’d keep them and Oorthaus apart. ‘But I gather you weren’t a part of what happened on Redstone.’
‘No, I can be grateful for that.’
‘Yet here you are,’ Arbenz continued, ‘a machine-head again. Forgive me, but I must ask, was it really so terrible losing those head-implants the first time round?’
She hesitated a moment. ‘I . . .’As she looked around, Corso had the sense she hadn’t spent a lot of time around other people. ‘It was difficult, yes. A lot of machine-heads . . .’ She paused and shook her head.
‘Committed suicide?’ Udo Mansell supplied in a deep rumble. An awkward silence followed. Out of sight of the woman, Gardner shot the two bodyguards an angry glance.
Arbenz turned to the two men. ‘Udo, Kieran, I want you to double-check those inventories. I’ll see you later.’
As the two men left, Corso felt himself relax a little. ‘I’m sorry about that, Miss Oorthaus, but the brothers lost family during the war.’
‘That’s OK,’ Oorthaus replied. ‘As long as they don’t try to get in my way.’
Arbenz smiled as if appreciating a point well made. ‘They won’t, of course, but they’re here as shipboard security, so you’ll be expected to work with them.’
‘Look, Senator—’
‘Gregor, please.’
‘Senator Arbenz, do you want me to do this job or not? If I have to deal with people hostile towards me because of what I am, that’s going to compromise the safety of your ship and of your expedition.’
‘Mr Gardner’—Corso noticed, as he spoke, how the Senator briefly caught the other man’s eye—‘has a longstanding relationship with Josef Marados. I trust David Gardner, he trusts Josef, and Josef in turn trusts you. You, therefore, can also trust me. Udo and Kieran work for me, and they won’t do anything to compromise the survey. A large part of the Freehold’s remaining funds will go towards paying the Shoal a truly exorbitant price in exchange for taking one of their coreships on a detour in order to drop us off at this new system. You can imagine how eager we are to get this just right.’
‘But the way Josef put it,’ Oorthaus continued, ‘you stand to become very, very rich if and when the Shoal make this new system a permanent part of one of the new cross-galactic trade routes they’re planning for their coreships.’ She made a pretence of thinking hard for a moment. ‘Are you sure you’re paying me enough?’ Again, Corso had to struggle not to grin openly.
—
Just hearing her craft’s familiar machine tones made Dakota feel more secure.
She was alone on the Hyperion’s bridge, surrounded by the lotus-like petals of the interface chair. Once inside the chair, she was blind, deaf and dumb in terms of her normal senses, but the Hyperion constantly funnelled a torrent of information into her mind via her Ghost. She ‘saw’ the holos and viewscreens around the bridge spiking bright white, one after the other, as the Piri Reis simultaneously and covertly ransacked the frigate’s data stacks.
How long till we rendezvous with the coreship ?
After she’d had her new Ghost implants installed, Dakota had spent a year serving aboard a coreship very like the one they were now approaching. There were entire branches of human science devoted to studying the vast spacecraft despite the Shoal’s strict limitations on such observations. Tiny probes would scan their drive spines, measuring and recording the exotic energies the coreships left in their wake, across every possible wavelength and spectrum. These Shoal craft truly were worlds unto themselves, enormous environments in which a dozen different species could be contained at once, yet kept entirely separate in their own carefully constructed habitats.
Piri reported.
How many people are currently on board the Hyperion? Dakota asked.
We’re going to have to find a vacant slot to put you in.
And, she wondered, could she really be sure of stowing her ship in the cargo bay without anyone finding it?
Piri, have you managed to scan the current contents of the cargo bay yet?
Meaning asteroids, Dakota concluded.
Then make sure your encryption is even better, and find yourself a good hiding place while you’re at it.
—
Dakota’s next stop was the airlock complex located towards the aft. As she crossed the Hyperion, her Ghost generated a mental image of the coreship with which they would be rendezvousing. Intense bursts of radiation indicated where the alien craft had emerged outside of Neptune’s orbit, signifying a mortal clash between normal space-time and the complex multi-brane spatial geometries the craft was believed to generate in order to jump across light years.
Dakota entered an airlock and shed all her clothes, placing them in a satchel before slinging it over her bare shoulders. Her filmsuit then emerged and coated her flesh. Once it had sealed her lungs, anus, vagina and nasal cavities, she began to run the depressurization cycle. A few moments later a deep silence fell, then the external door swung open to reveal the vast emptiness beyond the Hyperion’s hull.
Protective molecular niters formed themselves out of the filmsuit and coalesced over her irises, momentarily magnifying the distant bright mass of faraway Mesa Verde until surface details stood out in near-hallucinatory detail before they balanced out. The stars looked like a fine dusting of diamonds across the universe.
Dakota took a firm hold on an exterior rung and swung herself out and onto the surface of the hull itself. She pushed herself off, glimpsing the airlock door silently cycle shut once more. Floating free of the Hyperion, she began moving further and further away with every passing second.
When she was thirty or forty metres distant, Dakota reached inside her satchel and withdrew a kinetic pistol, taking care to wrap a thick cable that extruded from its grip around both of her wrists.
Ready, she informed Piri.
She then aimed the pistol towards the behemoth bulk of the frigate, both hands firm on its grip. Several seconds passed in silence.
She squeezed the trigger. The pistol jerked in her grip, and bright flame jetted from its wide nozzle. Suddenly the Hyperion started to move away at an increasing rate.
OK. Did anybody pick that up?
What about the Hyperion?
What does the Hyperion think you are? Dakota queried.
I’m aware of that.
Dakota waited several long, tense minutes until she picked out a course-correction flare from the approaching Piri Reis, stars winking out of view as they were occluded by its dark bulk. Dakota herself was now some distance from the Hyperion, moving towards the rendezvous point with her old ship.
The Piri made its final velocity-matching corrections: now it was moving at exactly the same speed as the Hyperion, both craft thereby appearing stationary in relation to each other. Dakota then boosted herself over to the Piri’s airlock.
Information flowed in a cascade between Dakota and the two ships, the murmur of data transfer like a distant waterfall in her thoughts, but one where she could still pick out the sound of every droplet as it tumbled.
A fat chunk of her initial payment from the Freehold had gone into reacquiring the Piri from the salvage firm it had been sold to, and then paying the necessary bribes to make sure the transaction stayed off the official records. The counter-intelligence ordnance on board the Piri Reis being superior to the sum total carried by the Hyperion, the Piri Reis was to all intents and purposes invisible, slipping past the Freehold ship’s detection systems like an unseen wraith passing through a wall.
Dakota swam into the heart of the Piri Reis, the lights low and the air warm.
Take us in, Piri.
Heavy doors rumbled apart just fore of the Hyperion’s engines. The Piri Reis slipped through them like a minnow catching a ride in a whale’s belly.
From the inside, the cargo bay area formed a hexagonal tube extending almost a third of the way into the hull’s interior. Shield generators and massive docking frames of strengthened alloy were arrayed at regular spaces, half of them already occupied by equipment crates. The Piri Reis manoeuvred itself into an empty slot and field generators flickered on automatically, binding it against the cargo bay’s interior wall.
Dakota waited. She really expected alarms and flashing lights, but there was only empty silence.
—
Reactivating her filmsuit, she exited her ship again, and entered the depressurized space of the cargo bay. Her implants meanwhile twisted the data topography of the Hyperion’s surveillance systems into knots, rendering her undetectable to any cameras or detection systems. She next floated into an airlock, letting her filmsuit evaporate before unslinging the satchel and hurriedly pulling her clothes out of it, as soon as the airlock had repressurized.
A few moments later there was a ping, and a door swung open to reveal a corridor with signs pointing towards the engine maintenance systems. Inhaling deeply, she pulled her now empty satchel back over her shoulder and stepped out into the corridor.
Against all rationality, she’d almost convinced herself someone would be waiting for her there. Surely someone must have spotted her, and would have figured out what she was up to. Instead it looked like she was completely alone.
Dakota leant her forehead against the cool metal of the wall and forced herself to relax, taking slow, deep breaths. She started to laugh, but it came out more like a half-sob. She was clearly letting her worst fears get to her.
Eleven
Trans-Jovian Space
Gregor Arbenz studied the projection floating a few centimetres in front of his nose, but failed to make any sense of it whatsoever. Numbers and decimal points fluttered like brightly lit confetti in the air above the conference table. But the one thing he did understand -that the projection now ably demonstrated—was the degree of control that the machine-head had over their ship. For the Senator, it made for less than comfortable viewing.
He didn’t look up when both Kieran and Udo Mansell entered, moving towards seats at the far end of the table. Instead he continued to stare intently at the display, imagining he might come to a greater understanding of the Hyperion’s highly complex systems if he simply looked long enough.
But in truth, there were other things currently on his mind.
Udo, in his typical pig-headed and insolent way, swung his feet on to the table as he sat down. Really, if it were not for Kieran’s controlling influence, Arbenz would have found a way of losing Udo in some challenge years ago. The security man was unpredictable, volatile and prone to irrational tempers.
His brother Kieran, by contrast, was calm, calculating, and by far the more dangerous of the two. He sat with his hands clasped before him, a knowing half-smile on his face. It was a smile that seemed to imply a commonality between Kieran and the Senator, a shared world-view born of experience, of having honourable blood on their hands, and of being forced to deal with an equal share of idiots. Kieran glanced towards Udo before shrugging at the Senator as if to say, What can you do?
Arbenz struggled to control his contempt. He could not be sure either one of the brothers was not secretly reporting to other members of the pro-war faction back on Redstone. Senator Abigail Muller, for one, resented his leadership, and she had openly voiced her disagreement to the way he was handling the retrieval of the derelict.
The time would come when Senator Muller would have to suffer an accident, but that would need to wait until his triumphant return to Redstone aboard a functioning starship.
‘I’m concerned about this woman Oorthaus,’ said Kieran in his typical clipped tones. ‘Something doesn’t feel right about her.’
Gregor shook his head and waved a hand dismissively, before turning the display off. ‘That’s it? That’s your report?’
Kieran shot him a dark look. ‘It’s nothing I can put my finger on, but she’s keeping something from us. I’m sure of it.’
‘Another one of your “feelings”, Kieran? And she’s a machine-head, remember, so of course she’s keeping something from us. It’s called maintaining a sense of self-preservation. Or are you talking about something more significant?’
‘I’m talking about us allowing her so much control—’
‘No, Kieran,’ Gregor cut him off abruptly, ‘we’ve been over this and it’s not your decision.’
‘But you are supervising this expedition,’ Mansell reminded him. ‘That gives you some leeway, depending on circumstances.’
‘Enough, Kieran, unless you can give me something more concrete.’
Udo swung his feet off the table and leaned forward dramatically. ‘We only have this man Marados’s word for it that she is who she says she is.’ His sibling nodded emphatically in agreement.
‘More than just his word,’ Arbenz argued, addressing Kieran. ‘Everything checks out. You did some of the checking, as I recall.’
‘Yes, but one way or another, ultimately everything we need to know about her comes through channels of information controlled by Marados’s company. Remember, Black Rock just about owns Mesa Verde, so this is an unacceptable risk.’
‘Yes, I’m aware of that, but there aren’t any alternatives—not given our current time frame. We’re taking a chance that the Shoal, or anyone else, won’t stumble on our secret. We’re also taking a chance that the Uchidans won’t attempt to disrupt our survey. If they or anyone else cause us problems, we’re going to need Oorthaus to do the job she thinks we hired her for to help defend us. So unless you can find much more solid ground for your concerns, I don’t want to hear any more about this. Is that understood?’
Udo remained silent, but his lips were pursed in anger. ‘We’ll keep our eyes and ears open,’ Kieran said at length, nodding gravely.
Yes, you will, thought Arbenz, and felt something very like a flash of pity for Oorthaus. If there were anything irregular in her history, anything that might negatively affect the outcome of this expedition, the Mansells would be particularly vicious when it came to dealing with her.
Even by the standards of a society that selected its voting citizens through the challenge system or from the active military, the two brothers’ mu
tual taste for violence was unpalatable. Now the Senate had been battered by defeat after defeat in the Freehold’s war of attrition with the Uchidans, more liberal voices were speaking out. Several, like Senator Corso, had dared speak openly against the challenge system itself.
Arbenz had long ago decided that Freehold was in danger of absolute collapse unless he and Abigail Muller and the other members of the pro-war faction reestablished absolute moral authority back home—and recovering this derelict alien craft would surely represent an enormous step towards reversing those fortunes. With luck, the Freehold could become infinitely more powerful than its founding members ever dared to dream.
The Mansells’ death squads had certainly helped hold back the rot, but the brothers had started to become careless. There had been witnesses to some of their recent atrocities, and Arbenz and his supporters were not yet strong enough to survive any proven link between themselves and the recent wave of brutal arrests and assassinations. But at least out here, so far from home, he could keep an eye on the two brothers.
‘All right,’ said Arbenz, moving on to the next item of business. ‘You told me you had some information on our friend Mr Gardner.’
Kieran nodded, leaning forward. ‘We’ve looked a little deeper into his previous dealings, and there may be some connection between him and Alexander Bourdain, and therefore with whatever destroyed that asteroid.’
Arbenz nodded, impressed by this news. Spectacular footage of that boosted world disintegrating had been playing non-stop for weeks across every media platform imaginable. ‘Now that is interesting.’
Kieran continued: ‘His family’s been closely tied into the Mars-Jupiter mining industries since the 2100s. So we’re talking old, old money here. But that took a hard knock when the Shoal turned up. The Gardners are still wealthy, still highly respected in the business community and in the Consortium, but over time their fortunes have been dropping lower and lower. I believe Mr Gardner’s been recently trying to revive those fortunes in ways he’s neglected to mention to us.’