Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Uh.’ A sense of numbness was spreading through Dakota’s body that had nothing to do with the subzero temperatures. A starship? But one, she could only assume, the Shoal knew nothing of.

  It was like finding the Holy Grail—no, better. Transluminal technology, at least, was real.

  As she followed the rest inside the vacated submersible, it was impossible not to think about the kilometres of lightless ocean below her. She took a seat in a cramped circular chamber. There was a control panel at one end of it, replete with displays showing infrared and sonar maps of the mountainous terrain above and below them, but from the craft’s interior layout Dakota guessed this submersible was automated rather than piloted.

  And there it was again: a sense of otherness from somewhere far, far below, in the depths of Theona’s freezing subterranean ocean. It was like finding herself in an empty building, but nonetheless becoming filled with the absolute conviction there was someone or something nearby—but just out of sight. Her Ghost scanned the local comms traffic, but the only detectable signals were the usual low-level automated pings.

  It had to be the derelict communicating, in some way she couldn’t understand, with her Ghost. Something was down there, and it was currently trying to say hello.

  She looked around at the others, irrationally wondering if any of them could feel the same thing. Her skin prickled unpleasantly.

  Corso had again taken a seat next to her. He turned to her and frowned, and she realized she must have looked more worried than she might want to let on.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked softly.

  She almost laughed.

  Something alien is signalling to me, from the depths of a bottomless ocean in a dead system, you stupid bastard. What do you think?

  Instead she said: ‘If you’ve really found some kind of crashed starship, you lot are going to have a ton of shit coming down on your collective heads once the news gets out. Tell me it’s not a Shoal craft, because if it is, I might as well start writing my will right now.’

  ‘It’s not Shoal,’ Corso replied, after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘You’re serious?’ She looked at him and saw he was. ‘So they really aren’t the only species with faster-than-light travel, after all? It was all a big lie?’

  ‘The derelict doesn’t look like any Shoal vessel anyone’s ever seen, but it has a drive mechanism that could probably spit it right across the galaxy. It has the external spine structures typical of known Shoal spacecraft, but that’s about as far as the resemblance goes. Plus, it’s old. Really old?

  ‘How old?’

  ‘I’d say about a hundred and sixty thousand years.’

  ‘A hundred and sixty thousand years,’ she repeated. ‘And we know why that’s significant, right?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Corso pressed her in a low whisper, a peculiar look on his face.

  It was too much information, too quickly. She needed to curl up in the warm dark of the Piri Reis and think about everything she’d seen and experienced.

  ‘Forget it,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I just thought of the Magellanic Novae for some reason.’ That memory of peering through Langley’s telescope, even after so many years and with Bellhaven so far away, was as strong as if it had happened only the day before.

  Corso still had that same intense look on his face. It made her uncomfortable.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the derelict dates from about the same period. But that’s no reason to assume they’re connected with something else that happened in another galaxy.’ She wondered why he was staring at her so hard. ‘Unless you’ve got other ideas?’ he added.

  ‘You’re looking at me like I just tried to bite your nose off.’

  Corso made an exasperated noise and lowered his voice, so he was barely audible over the sound of the submersible’s engines. ‘Mala, I saw you on the bridge of the Hyperion, studying a map of the Magellanic Clouds. You’d drawn lines of trajectory connecting them to this part of the Orion Arm. To as near as damn it to this system, in fact, as makes no difference. Why do that? Do you have some special interest in the novae?’

  ‘I don’t remember doing anything of the kind. Frankly, I’d say you’ve been working too hard. You’re starting to imagine things.’

  He held her gaze for a few seconds more, tight-lipped and angry-looking. Dakota was completely baffled.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

  ‘I. Don’t. Know. What. You’re talking about,’ she hissed.

  ‘Fine.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Forget it.’ He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes for a few moments, taking a deep breath. When he opened them again, he seemed a little calmer.

  ‘Look,’ he continued, ‘before we get to the derelict, a word of warning. There’s some kind of defence systems running on board, and so far we haven’t tried to bring it to the surface in case it activates suicide circuits. It uses artificial gravity fields to mash up anyone or anything it considers a threat, though we’ve managed to get a fair bit of a way inside it, regardless.’

  ‘I appreciate the warning, but I still want to know what’s going to happen to me when we get on board that thing, before I risk my fucking life.’

  ‘I guarantee nothing is going to happen to you, Mala,’ Corso replied.

  The lie was startlingly clear on his face.

  Something broke inside Dakota. ‘Take me back up,’ she demanded, lifting herself out of her seat and making a move towards the control console. ‘Whatever you’re up to here, I didn’t sign on for any of it.’

  Arbenz quickly nodded to Kieran. Mansell stood up, punching her hard in the face. She caught a passing glimpse of Corso’s pale, shocked features as she crumpled. The next thing she knew she was on her knees, and Kieran had one of her arms twisted painfully behind her back while she was forced forward until her face was almost pressed into the deck.

  Something acid and foul twisted deep in her stomach and she resisted the urge to vomit. Kieran put just the tiniest bit of extra pressure on her arm, but it was enough to make it feel like he was trying to wrench it off at the shoulder. She screamed.

  Gardner looked down at her from where he sat, twisting around in his own seat, a mixture of pity and revulsion on his face.

  ‘All this time, Miss Merrick, and you thought we wouldn’t find out what you were up to. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice how badly you wanted to get out of the Sol System, just a day or two after the collapse of Bourdain’s Rock? Or that we wouldn’t figure out that the assassin who tried to kill you, and nearly killed one of the Senator’s own men, worked for Bourdain?’

  Eyes wide, Dakota stared down at the submersible’s deck, millimetres from her nose. Her breathing was sharp and shallow.

  ‘It wasn’t hard to figure out the connections once I knew where to look,’ Gardner continued. ‘Marados was part of the conflict at Port Gabriel. So was Severn. That made it easy to draw conclusions about your own past.

  ‘I believe you killed Josef Marados and then used your remarkable skills to cover your tracks,’ Gardner continued. ‘That way you removed one more inconvenient link between yourself and your past. You removed details of Marados’s death from the stack processors to make sure we didn’t become suspicious. But I have my own lines of enquiry, outside of the official channels.’

  ‘We know you were there at Port Gabriel, Dakota,’ said Kieran, his voice filled with rage. ‘In the eyes of the Freehold you are a foul and bloody murderer—less than vermin.’

  ‘That’s not true, and you know it. I didn’t kill Josef or anyone else,’ Dakota managed to gasp. ‘I don’t know who killed him. I . . .’

  She heard Arbenz mutter something indistinguishable. A moment later her forehead slammed off the deck. The world went white for a few moments, and then the pain hit.

  ‘Careful, we want her conscious,’ she heard Arbenz say through a haze of agony. ‘Dakota?’ His voice sounded closer now, and she guessed he was kneeling beside her.
‘We’re very nearly there. Can you hear me?’

  Dakota moaned, then nodded, tasting bile in the back of her throat. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Gardner and the two men who’d joined them from the surface complex. Gardner stared away from her, his expression stiff and mask-like. The two Freeholder scientists eyed her with curiosity and mild revulsion.

  ‘OK, now here’s the deal. Unfortunately, we still need you and, as much as Kieran would really love otherwise, politics and war often mean compromise. Once you understand exactly what’s going on here -and Mr Corso will fill you in on the details—you might even find you’re on our side.’

  Somehow I really, really don’t think so. But she said nothing.

  ‘We brought you here for a purpose, and you will fulfil that purpose. And just in case you think there’s any chance you can remain defiant, well, Kieran will be constantly available to make sure you understand just how bad an idea that might be.’

  Something sharp dug into her lower spine and Dakota screamed. It was the worst pain in the world, an entire universe of suffering compressed into a few brief seconds. She heard herself, as if from a distance, begging for mercy. A part of her she had thought could never be breached shrivelled under that unendurable agony.

  But Arbenz still hadn’t finished talking. ‘You want to get away from Bourdain. We want the transluminal drive. Help us get it, and you’re free. More, you’ll be a hero, liberating mankind from the oppressive restrictions of the Shoal’s technology embargo. You could be part of something glorious.’

  She realized he was waiting for an answer. While she summoned the strength to speak, the cabin was filled with a silence as deep as the void between the stars.

  ‘You’ll just kill me then,’ she managed to say. ‘You’re Freeholders. So nobody trusts anything any of you say.’

  Arbenz grinned. ‘Then you’ll just have to learn to trust me, Dakota. Whatever you think of us, we do believe in honour. You’re just as much a victim of the Consortium as anyone back on Redstone. The war with the Uchidans would never have happened if the Shoal hadn’t invoked their embargo clause. It hurt you just as bad as it hurt us. The Consortium let the Uchidans steal our world, and they took away the one thing you’d worked all your life towards: your implants.’

  His tone had grown softer and more intimate, which somehow made it sound all the worse. Her thoughts became filled with revenge fantasies of the most exquisite complexity and savagery.

  ‘So when I say you’ll be safe,’ Arbenz finished, ‘I speak as a man of honour—and as a Senator in the Freehold Senate. You have my word, and all you have to do now is help us.’

  Dakota listened to all this without comment. After a moment she felt Kieran’s grip on her relent. She looked up and saw Corso’s silent, appalled expression. Kieran and Arbenz had simply returned to their seats as if nothing had happened.

  She began to get up. Corso tried to help her but she pushed him away. She pulled herself into her seat, fighting back tears of rage and horror and shame. The more she fought the feelings down, the more she hated herself for her own weakness.

  She focused on the backs of her tormentors’ heads and decided she was going to kill them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Corso from beside her.

  ‘What for? You knew all along,’ she whispered.

  ‘I didn’t know any of it until just recently.’ Kieran and Arbenz were once again head to head in conversation with the two surface station staff, while static-racked voices briefly squalled over the comms system. Dakota suspected none of them really cared what either she or Corso now said to each other.

  ‘You’re a spy,’ she hissed at Corso. ‘Your job is to report everything I say and do.’

  ‘No!’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m here to find a way to salvage the derelict. That’s all I’m interested in doing.’

  Something in the throb of the submersible’s engines had changed. They were slowing. The sonar maps on the displays showed a steep precipice that fell off into darkness: they were rapidly approaching the submerged slopes of a mountain. A strange, alien-looking shape was clearly visible dangerously close to the edge of the rocky precipice—not quite near enough for it to tumble over into the depths below, but almost.

  It wasn’t long before the submersible shuddered to a halt. The hatch clanged open and Arbenz and Gardner took the lead, closely followed by the two ground-station staff. Kieran came last, behind Dakota and Corso.

  They entered a steel-walled cylindrical tube immediately beyond the submarine. The sound of their boots clanging on the walkway echoed harshly, and Dakota winced, as if the sound were something physical and sharp driving into the soft tissues of her brain. Intermittent stabbing pains manifested in her shoulder and back, and she dug her nails into the palms of her hands until it hurt.

  A screen bolted onto the wall at the far end of the passageway displayed an enhanced external view of the derelict. In profile the centre part of the craft resembled a fat teardrop, with a series of bumps around its hull, scattered with apparent randomness. There were no visible windows or any external instrumentation. Long curving spines, much longer than the central body, curved upwards and out, and Dakota suspected they were deceptive in their apparent fragility. It looked more like some piece of abstract sculpture than anything she might conceive of as an interstellar vessel. The passageway in which they now stood was also visible as a narrow snake of bolted-together segments connecting the submersible to the derelict itself. In terms of relative size, the submersible looked like a minnow escorting a whale.

  ‘This is your moment, Mr Corso,’ said the Senator, turning to face him. ‘You’re the expert here. Show us what you know.’

  Lucas nodded and waited as the hatch leading into the derelict’s interior slowly swung open. Dakota saw another passageway beyond, but this had pale, mostly featureless walls, apart from long, twisted bands of some material that reminded her of muscles, around which the passageway walls appeared to have been moulded.

  It was, in every way, profoundly alien, but strangely beautiful, too. The only thing marring this impression was an ugly rent torn out of one wall, where clearly human instrumentation had been inserted.

  But the thing that struck her the most, as she followed the others inside, was that even though there was no apparent source of lighting, she could see perfectly well for the entire length of the passageway, up until it twisted out of sight.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Corso moved ahead with a purpose that suggested he was already familiar with his surroundings. Dakota watched with the rest as he brought images up on a screen comprising part of the base staff’s crudely wired-in instrumentation, and saw what she guessed must be a map of the derelict’s interior. It didn’t take much guesswork to realize that the colour-coded corridors and rooms marked there represented only a tiny portion of the derelict’s interior.

  Corso’s expression remained nervous and tense. Something still lurked within these walls, and Dakota could sense its intelligence somewhere deep behind the pale surfaces either side of her. The ubiquitous light made her feel increasingly vulnerable and naked. Without any shadows, where could any of them hide?

  Corso tapped at a panel set below the screen, with expert ease. New images flashed up one after the other, appearing to be closed-circuit views of other parts of the derelict’s interior. Screeds of unreadable gibberish that she guessed were some form of alien language accompanied these images. After a moment her Ghost tentatively identified parts of the text as an archaic form of the Shoal machine language.

  Corso took off his gloves, wiped his bare hands on his gel suit and muttered something to himself. It was already getting too warm for the gel suits: one more sign that the derelict’s main systems were still functioning.

  ‘OK,’ said Corso, pulling something out of his pocket. ‘Moment of truth time.’

  He placed the object—a slender grey box scarcely larger than a human thumb—into a niche just below the screen. A m
oment later a faint but discernible hum filled the air. Dakota half-expected some monster to come rampaging down one of the corridors, angry at being woken from its aeons-long sleep. Instead, nothing happened bar a succession of new images and mostly incomprehensible data flickering across the screen like lightning.

  The map of the derelict’s interior reappeared, except this time new corridors and rooms began appearing, shaded green where the original map was coloured blue. Arbenz and Mansell grinned and shouted in delight, and even Corso managed a shaky grin.

  ‘Good work, Corso,’ said Arbenz, clapping a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do we have access yet to the main deck or the engines?’

  Corso shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t expect to this early, but it’s still a lot more than we could reasonably have expected.’

  Arbenz looked ecstatic regardless. Even Kieran Mansell’s normally stony features retained a satisfied smile.

  ‘Now,’ said the Senator, ‘we need to test the machine-head interface.’

  Dakota stared first at Arbenz, and then at Corso, but he avoided her gaze, a flicker of shame crossing his tight-lipped expression.

  Arbenz’s glee settled back into the more familiar, unctuous smile. ‘Lead on, Lucas.’ He turned to Dakota. ‘I mean it when I say you’re going to like what we’ve got waiting ahead for you. You’re going to fly this thing back to Redstone for us.’

  Dakota merely nodded in a daze.

  Corso filled the silence with a string of nervous patter as he led them further down the passageway and deeper into the belly of the beast. What appeared to be small service robots raced ahead of them, apparently scouting out the intersections and twists ahead.

  ‘Whoever the ship was built by, they definitely weren’t Shoal. But they did have close contact with them. There are translation protocols embedded in the derelict’s operating systems that allow communication between machinery belonging to both species. It’s like a Rosetta Stone, a key to understanding who they are and where they came from.’