Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘But so do you, right? That’s what you said earlier, or have I got that wrong? You’re not on this expedition just because you want to be. You said there were people on Redstone . . .’

  The last few of Severn’s clientele had fled, along with those few of his guards who were still standing. They’d pulled the entrance door closed, and Dakota guessed it was almost certainly now locked. She managed to stagger to her feet with Corso’s help.

  As he took her by the shoulders, she stared dazedly into his frightened eyes. At some point he’d taken the knife from her without her noticing.

  ‘Let’s be clear on this, Mala,’ he croaked. ‘I’d rather kill you than see you renege on your deal with us. Arbenz is nothing better than an opportunist using our war with the Uchidans to make his grab for power. But the fact remains he’s in a position to hurt people I care about, so for the moment I really, really want to give him exactly what he wants. Understand me?’

  She turned away from him and went to kneel down beside Udo. The stricken man’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, but he looked bad. As she peeled back one of his eyelids, the pupil shrank in response to the meagre light illuminating the bar.

  Probably no serious brain damage, she decided. At least, no more than before.

  ‘I think he’ll survive.’ She slumped back on her heels. ‘And I’m not going anywhere, Corso.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘All I want is the truth. The only person who’s come near to providing that is you. Besides, someone’s going to have to tell me eventually—right?’

  Corso swallowed. ‘Fine. It was a standard system reconnaissance, at least at first, but. . . we found something there we didn’t expect to find.’

  ‘Found what exactly?’

  ‘Not here.’ Corso shook his head. He looked frightened.

  A hand brushed against Dakota’s shin and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked down in horror to find Udo’s eyes fixed on her.

  ‘Mala. Oorthaus.’ His voice was dry and cracked, like a desert rock that had suddenly developed the ability to speak. ‘I challenge you. To the death.’

  Dakota started to speak, but Udo shook his head slowly and she fell silent.

  ‘But not yet. For now I will say nothing. But one day I will meet you with equal arms, and I will kill you.’ He coughed with considerable effort. ‘We were attacked by Uchidan agents. That’s our story, do you understand? Betray me, and I betray you.’

  Udo’s head slumped back, a long guttural sigh escaping from his throat as he passed out again.

  ‘You know,’ Dakota said to Corso a moment later, ‘he meant you as well. He’ll kill you if you talk about what you know.’

  ‘And what about you, Dakota? Would you kill me if I told Arbenz what really took place here?’

  She looked away for a moment, caught in indecision.

  The need once again to put her trust in someone reasserted itself. Just holding herself together like this -amid the ineffable loneliness and constant terror of her predicament—was pushing her to the edge of sanity.

  Dead, Lucas Corso would be one less witness. The same went for Udo, now prone on the floor. But if she were the only survivor among these three, who would ever believe her story?

  ‘The man who tried to kill me is called Moss,’ she informed Corso.

  He looked like he was waiting to hear more, but she was saved by the sound of voices shouting in the alley outside. Dakota grabbed Corso’s arm and started to tug him back towards the rear door leading into the anteroom. Perhaps they could find a way out through the rear of the building.

  Corso followed her, apparently in too much of a daze to resist. ‘I don’t know if I can believe anything you say,’ he muttered.

  ‘I don’t know how much I can trust you either but, for what it’s worth, right now I’m probably a lot safer on board the Hyperion than anywhere else.’

  There was a bright burst of light, and the entrance door blew inwards. Smoke started billowing and tall shapes entered the bar. Kieran Mansell stepped out of the smoke first, closely followed by armed men and women wearing Peralta’s colours.

  He surveyed the destruction with a candid eye. ‘Somebody,’ he grated, ‘has one fuck of a lot of explaining to do.’

  —

  The post-mortem interrogations took the better part of two days.

  Arbenz had meanwhile confined everyone to the Hyperion until the ‘nature of the threat’ could be assessed. Whatever presence the Consortium maintained on board the giant coreship remained noticeably quiet. But, from what Corso understood, the local Consortium officers were adept at turning a blind eye to any activities involving Peralta.

  Contrary to his own orders, Arbenz subsequently himself spent a great deal of time away from the Hyperion. Nobody seemed in a hurry to tell Corso what was going on but, from what he gathered, the Senator was busy in some form of negotiations with Peralta, probably by way of damage limitation.

  In the meantime Corso paced around inside his quarters, avoiding Arbenz’s cronies as far as humanly possible. He kept his thoughts from loneliness and frequent bouts of despair by diving deep into his research.

  It was becoming clear that whoever or whatever the Magi had been, they’d been in contact with the Shoal for at least a couple of thousand years before their sudden disappearance. Contained within the codes recovered from the Magi derelict were tantalizing clues, random hints that might finally reveal where the strange craft had originated.

  But so far, these were only hints—barely enough to let Corso make some tentative guesses.

  He discovered that the derelict had, for some reason, been fleeing the Shoal when it had crash-landed on the icy moon of a gas-giant—where it had recently come to light. Had the Magi therefore been rivals to the Shoal, a star-faring race that also shared the secret of faster-than -light travel?

  Anything seemed possible as he explored further, but all Corso really had so far was speculation.

  ‘My brother is under deep sedation,’ Kieran Mansell explained to Corso during a lengthy interrogation in private. Kieran paced constantly, hands folded behind his back, while Corso sat on a low chair that forced him to look up at his questioner. ‘He’ll probably remain in a medbox for a few weeks, as the damage to his nervous system is particularly severe. That means he may not regain full use of his faculties for some time, and he didn’t manage to say much before he went under sedation. But what he did have to say was . . . contradictory. For now, all we have to go on is the joint testimony supplied by you and the woman Mala Oorthaus.’

  Corso had become aware that a large part of Arbenz’s current negotiations with Peralta were over the General’s refusal to allow him access to Severn’s surveillance records.

  ‘Remind me again why you decided to go to that particular establishment.’ Kieran hovered over Corso, violence implicit in his gaze.

  ‘I. . . told you, Mala led us to it. It was because she knew a machine-head she expected to be there.’

  The disbelieving look Kieran gave him went on for ever. ‘Do you know how very easy it is to tell when someone is lying? My brother, my own brother, lied to me. He told me the man who attacked you was a Uchidan agent.’ Kieran pounded his chest with his fist as he yelled the words. ‘You know,’ he screamed, one gloved finger pointed at Corso cowering in his seat, ‘how important this expedition is to us all. Just one deception could bring all this crashing down.’

  Kieran paused and stared at him like he was looking for confirmation.

  ‘If Udo said he was a Uchidan agent. . . then I guess maybe he was,’ Corso stuttered.

  Face turning red, Kieran took a few steps forward and kicked Corso’s chair over, sending the younger man sprawling. Corso yelled as he hit the floor and put up his hands to protect himself. Mansell stood over him, fists knotted, nostrils flaring. Then he seemed to get a hold on himself and righted the chair, before walking to the far end of the room. Arms folded, he st
ood staring at the wall as if answers might spontaneously materialize out of its smooth grey surface.

  ‘Whoever the attacker in that bar turns out to be, it appears his boarding of this coreship was effectively invisible—which implies very powerful contacts. But this . . . incident has already attracted us too much attention. We’ve been noticed.’

  ‘What about Mala? What happens to her?’

  ‘I notice you’re on first-name terms now,’ Kieran sneered, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘What about her? She’s a means to an end, nothing more. But you have your own duty to the Freehold. And to your family.’

  A means to an end. As Corso listened to the words he understood the greater meaning implicit in them. He himself was no more important than Mala was in the Senator’s grand plan to save the Freehold.

  And he knew there was no reason to think either of them would be allowed to live, once their usefulness was gone.

  Fifteen

  In a few days’ time, the coreship would reach what Lucas Corso now knew to be the Nova Arctis system. The great vessel would make the briefest stop to unload them, barely braking as it momentarily dropped out of transluminal space. From that point on, the Hyperion would use up a sizeable fraction of its remaining fuel in the process of decelerating from a significant percentage of the speed of light, until they reached their target.

  Corso had endured sleepless nights, and longer days, sustained only by his work. He fell into a rhythm, leaving his quarters within the Hyperion’s gravity wheel only when absolutely necessary.

  One evening he came across Mala by chance in another part of the ship, and he faltered, unsure what to say to her.

  The best course of action, he’d already decided, following his first interrogation, would be to maintain a discreet and polite distance from her, if humanly possible. Several days after the incident in Severn’s bar, relationships on board the Hyperion were at best tense, at worst edging towards violence.

  She brushed straight by him and—since they were in a part of the ship that didn’t benefit from centrifugal gravity—continued floating down the corridor as if she hadn’t seen him. Corso had no idea what to think of that: part of him felt intensely relieved, but a larger part was annoyed as hell. Surely he deserved a bit more consideration?

  Maybe he was suffering from a crisis of conscience. He’d stood by and watched as his own worst enemies had hired her, an outsider, under false pretences. Did that make himself and Mala allies by default—or, at best, potential co-conspirators?

  Rather than deal with such complex considerations, Corso dived back into his research work: endlessly investigating, teasing information apart, driving himself to understand, to see into the mind of a species so long departed from the galaxy.

  And then the first of two strange events occurred.

  Within the bridge was a planetarium simulator, a piece of equipment a lot more recent than almost anything else on board the ship. Even better, its databases were well up to date. That day he was intending to make use of it to check and double-check the fragments of the drive records aboard the derelict spacecraft which hinted at an extra-galactic origin.

  Corso arrived at the entrance to the bridge only to find Mala already seated in the interface chair, running the same planetarium program. The chair’s petals were neatly folded up at the base of the chair. She was facing away from him, so wouldn’t have seen him enter.

  The program had meanwhile transformed the bridge into a god’s eye view of the Milky Way. Images of star clusters slid past Corso’s nose as they rotated across Dakota’s viewpoint. The images filled the entire chamber.

  As he watched, the Milky Way suddenly shrank, Dakota’s viewpoint zooming outwards, until the two dwarf Magellan galaxies accompanying the Milky Way suddenly hove into view. Corso was startled to see lines of trajectory suddenly flare out from the larger of these dwarf galaxies, multiplying until thousands upon thousands of such lines reached deep into the heart of the Milky Way.

  He stepped forward, fascinated. This wasn’t so far from his own speculations regarding the derelict craft’s origins.

  And yet. . .

  This couldn’t possibly be a coincidence: there was no way Mala could have already discovered the derelict’s existence, or become aware of Corso’s carefully accumulated researches.

  But the evidence was there in front of him, arcing across the curving empty space of the bridge.

  The simulation suddenly shut down, reverting the bridge to all its mundane normality. Corso moved forward around one side of the interface chair, where . . .

  He took a step back.

  Mala lay slumped in the seat, her head lolling against the headrest, her jaw slack and drooling, as if she had completely lost her mind. Her eyes had rolled up in their sockets, apparently seeing nothing. He stared down at her, dumbfounded.

  Then, as her eyes suddenly focused on him, Corso had the eerie sensation that something inhuman was staring back at him. When he had time to think about it later, it was as if some subtle shift had taken place in the way her face muscles moved. As if someone or something else briefly inhabited her skin.

  Of course, he could have merely imagined it, the impression was so fleeting. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the eerie sensation he’d seen something he wasn’t meant to see.

  Then Mala’s eyes cleared and her head straightened up as if she’d just awoken. She blinked and gave him a curious smile, as if pleasantly surprised to find him standing there.

  ‘What were you doing just then?’ Corso asked her, keeping his tone casual. It was the most he’d managed to say to her in several days.

  ‘I . . .’ Her face clouded for a moment as if trying hard to remember. ‘Just routine stuff. I was reconfiguring some of the ship’s systems.’

  ‘And nothing else?’ Corso could feel his heart hammering. ‘What about the planetarium program?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You were running it just now.’

  Mala gave him a blank look. ‘I told you what I’ve been doing. I don’t have time for this. You look like you’re accusing me of something.’

  Corso felt his frustration grow, yet she appeared genuinely to have no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘Does Arbenz know you’re here?’

  Mala looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘Corso, being here is my job. There’s no point in my being on board if I’m not.’

  —

  His second bizarre encounter with her took place a day or two later.

  They were within a few hours of the Hyperion’s departure from the coreship. Arbenz’s frequent trips into Ascension had meanwhile begun to tail off. Kieran Mansell ran continuous, obsessive security checks that required frequent attendance from everyone on board -more for Kieran’s own peace of mind than anything else, Corso suspected.

  Udo, meantime, floated dreamless and insensate within his medbox, as his flesh repaired itself with the help of cloned grafts and neuro-enhancements. The worst part for them all was the waiting. Udo was unpredictable enough already, and Corso had no real idea what the man might say once he regained consciousness. But good sense seemed to prevail in the end, and Mala had been right in suggesting Udo would have too much to lose in speaking out against her.

  Corso finally tired of the claustrophobic confines of his quarters and would go for long tours through the ship, wandering its deserted corridors and drop shafts. Part of the Hyperion’s zero-gee environment, the drop shafts had been transformed into vertical wells by the coreship’s induced gravity. Pulling himself up and down the rungs was hard work, but it served to take his mind off his other worries.

  Ever since he had found Mala in the interface chair surrounded by images of the Magellanic Clouds, Corso had been working hard on all the data assembled, increasingly convinced, no matter how impossible it appeared, that the key to the derelict’s final secrets lay in the images he had seen so briefly there on the bridge.

  During his wanderings, in the final few h
ours before their departure from the coreship, Corso had again found his way aft when he heard the distinctive whine of the airlock servos in operation. He had previously been delivering a verbal progress report to Gardner, the Senator, and Kieran Mansell, so knew that none of them was likely to be down this way.

  Puzzled, he made his way towards the airlocks: they were the same ones they’d used on exiting the Hyperion for their trip into Ascension. But when he got there moments later, he found no one in sight. So what had he heard just a few moments before?

  Then he heard a clang of metal coming from not so far away, and followed the sound fruitlessly down a passageway. He suspected it could only have been caused by Mala, but there was no sign of her.

  By chance he glanced up, and caught sight of her lithe form clambering silently up the rungs of a drop shaft. She swiftly hoisted herself into the corridor of the next level up and disappeared from view.

  ‘Hey!’ Corso shouted.

  Moving fast, he pulled himself up after her, breathing hard by the time he reached the top. He emerged into the same corridor only to catch sight of her rapidly retreating figure.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted again, and began running after her. Dakota kept moving as if she hadn’t heard him.

  He caught up with her and grabbed her arm, pulling her around. She blinked in surprise and seemed to recognize him only after a long moment.

  ‘What? What is it?’ She sounded flustered.

  ‘Where were you?’ Corso gasped. ‘I heard the airlock working, and . . . were you outside the ship?’

  Mala stared at him like he was mad. ‘No, I was right here, checking the manual systems prior to launch.’

  ‘Mala, I heard the airlock closing. That means somebody came in from outside, and you’re the only one around. If it wasn’t you, who was it, then?’

  She shook her head like she was tired of talking. ‘You’re getting paranoid, Lucas. It wasn’t me. Go check the onboard records if you like.’

  When he did so, what he found there was frustrating—and worrying.

  The security logs showed his recent encounter with Mala, but that was all. There was nothing to suggest anyone apart from Arbenz had either entered or departed the Hyperion for days. Mala was clearly shown walking directly from her quarters towards the aft engines and right past the airlocks. Three of the others were already accounted for, while Udo remained lost to the world in his chemically induced sleep within the medical bay.