Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Did they have a name?’ asked Dakota, as they came to a fork in the corridor where another screen had been inserted into a hole ripped in the corridor wall.

  ‘Not that we’ve been able to discover, no,’ Corso replied. ‘But we’ve been calling them the Magi.’ He glanced at the screen and turned right: the rest of them followed.

  Dakota’s skin prickled in anticipation of the unexpected.

  They came to a stop at an intersection where Corso raised his hand. Directions had been scrawled on cards epoxied to the walls. Dakota saw rounded doorways, which looked more melted than constructed, leading into interior spaces.

  ‘This is where we managed to tap into a major control subsystem,’ Corso explained, nodding to one of the doorways. Dakota could see tools scattered by the entrance.

  Corso turned to Arbenz. ‘From here on in, it’s new territory. I can’t guarantee there’ll be no unexpected problems if we go any further than this.’

  Kieran nodded. ‘The derelict has already proved it can kill, Senator. Perhaps it would be best if you turned back for now.’

  Arbenz shook his head. ‘If something was going to go wrong, experience shows it would have happened by now. Besides, this part of the derelict is secure, isn’t it, Kieran?’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Kieran nodded. ‘This area is code blue, so we believe it’s safe. But there are no firm guarantees.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me. Mr Corso, you’ll find the technicians have already installed your updates. The interface chair is ready.’

  Corso nodded hesitantly.

  Arbenz turned to the two station staff that had accompanied them. ‘Lunden, Ivanovich. I want you to make sure the code green areas are safe for the technical teams to enter. Follow standard procedure and, for God’s sake, don’t lose sight of each other like those others did.’

  The two men saluted and moved off. Arbenz next turned to Gardner. ‘David, we have some matters to discuss.’ He turned to Corso last. ‘I want you to test the interface now. We’ll be waiting here.’

  Corso nodded, looking distinctly nonplussed. He motioned to Dakota to follow him. She glanced at Kieran, and realized he’d have no hesitation in hurting her again if she didn’t co-operate.

  She followed Corso into the room, which was wide, with a low ceiling and completely featureless. In the centre of the room stood an interface chair identical to the one on board the Hyperion. Cables led from its underside through gouged-open holes in the floor.

  Corso touched a button on the side of the interface device and its petals folded smoothly down, revealing the seat within.

  ‘I swear on my life you won’t come to any harm,’ Corso assured her, glancing back towards the doorway as he did so. ‘I’ve run tests again and again. This thing—the derelict, that is—it’s designed specially to be operated by a machine-head. Or at least something very like it.’

  Dakota touched her hand to one of the chair’s folding petals and nodded.

  ‘You don’t look surprised,’ said Corso.

  ‘An alien equivalent of a machine-head, is what you mean.’

  In truth, she wasn’t surprised. She’d already guessed there was some kind of commonality between her and whatever had originally piloted this craft. It was the only explanation for the sensations she’d been experiencing ever since they’d landed.

  ‘Right.’ Corso looked at her strangely.

  She began to climb into the chair, then hesitated. ‘What’s to stop me flying away with this thing, right now, if I can control it?’

  She watched as Corso blinked a couple of times. ‘There’s a . . . failsafe installed. Ultimate control devolves to us.’

  She couldn’t be sure if he was telling the truth, but she would have to be very careful when it came to testing the limits of whatever Corso chose to reveal to her.

  She climbed between the steel petals and took her seat. Corso leaned in close to her, making adjustments to the neural cap, his chin hovering close in front of her as he worked. He smelled of cold sweat.

  ‘This . . . place creeps me out,’ she muttered. ‘The way the light comes from everywhere.’

  He finished his adjustments and stepped back. ‘It’s still only a ship, though, just a very old one. Now listen to me,’ he whispered, leaning in again as he stepped around behind the chair and tapped at an open panel. The others were out of sight in the corridor, but she could still hear the murmur of their voices. ‘I saw you studying the Magellanic Clouds back on the bridge of the Hyperion.’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out where this thing derived from originally, and I’ve got good reasons to think that’s exactly where it came from.’

  ‘The Magellanic Clouds?’

  ‘So imagine my surprise when I saw what I saw that time.’

  Dakota twisted her head around to try and see him. ‘I swear, Lucas, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really, really don’t.’

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Lucas,’ she whispered, ‘I mean it.’

  It was obvious he didn’t believe her.

  ‘OK,’ she replied wearily. ‘So you think this thing does date from the same time as the Magellanic Novae?’

  Corso’s expression became wary. ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘If you’re seriously suggesting this thing came all the way from a neighbouring galaxy, it would have taken centuries to get here, transluminal drive or not.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s another reason I more or less discounted it at first. Why come all this way at all? But when I saw . . .’ He glanced at her and sighed again.

  ‘Look, there’s no longer any question what direction it came from. The real question is, how far did it come?’

  ‘But why come all that way in the first place?’ she echoed. ‘What would make them want to . . . oh.’

  ‘Exactly. If they were running away from something, it would have to have been pretty bad to make them put so much distance between them and whatever drove them into leaving.’

  ‘Like a lot of stars blowing up?’ she said.

  He moved back round in front of her and shrugged, apparently satisfied with the minute adjustments he had just made. ‘Until I find out more, it’s still only speculation.’ He stepped back.

  ‘Are they going to let either of us live once we’ve done our jobs?’ she asked. ‘Do you really want a man like Arbenz to get his hands on a working transluminal drive? What makes you think the Shoal won’t just raze your people entirely from the surface of Redstone once they know what you’ve done?’

  ‘There’s a dead man’s handle built into the chair,’ he explained, ignoring her questions. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘If anything unexpected happens, take your fingers off it, and it breaks the connection.’

  ‘Just supposing for a second your failsafe decides not to work and you can’t prevent me suddenly assuming full control of this vessel. What will you do to stop me?’

  ‘Answer one, either the Agartha or the Hyperion would shoot you down before you got up sufficient power, and that’s assuming you can somehow blast your way through a couple of kilometres of ice we’ve still barely managed to scratch the surface of. Two’—he flashed her a sardonic grin—‘nobody, including yourself, actually knows how to operate a transluminal drive.’

  ‘We have to talk, Corso.’ It didn’t take much effort to inject the right degree of urgency into her words. ‘I don’t know what happened to Josef Marados. I swear I had nothing to do with that. Whatever Arbenz has been saying to you, he’s not intending to let either of us live.’

  ‘I already told you, I don’t have any choice in the matter. So you’re telling me Arbenz is lying when he claims someone’s been altering the shipboard records to cover your tracks?’

  Dakota couldn’t find a reply that didn’t sound thoroughly incriminating.

  ‘Fine.’

  She saw Corso’s expression change as his eyes flicked towards the entrance. Dakota glanced over
and saw Kieran had stepped inside.

  ‘All right,’ said Corso, suddenly all business. ‘First we need to run some calibrations.’

  The chair’s petals folded in over Dakota, entombing her and blanking out her senses, so that the only information she received would come directly through her Ghost circuits.

  ‘I’m activating the connection between you and the derelict now.’ Corso’s voice came to her from out of the darkness, his voice hazed by electronic filters. ‘Remember, anything unexpected, any unusual activity or responses of any kind, the inbuilt alarms can shut off the interface. Beyond that, remember all you need to do is let go of the handle and the whole thing shuts down.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  In truth, part of her was excited by what she might now find.

  She sensed the connection being made and . . .

  . . . knowledge rushed in towards her in a great tide, a vast, near-indistinguishable mass out of which only a few clear details could be barely discerned. As if from a great distance she felt her fingers trembling as they gripped the dead man’s handle.

  Sense-impressions slammed through Dakota’s cerebrum, a howling maelstrom of loss and regret. Stars tumbled past, their shape and light twisted and warped through the lens of transluminal space.

  Light filled the sky above an alien shore, a million years of sunshine released in one terrible instant, transforming an ocean to steam while rocks and soil caught fire, all in one consuming wave of carnage. Then more images tumbled past her mind’s eye: other worlds, all imbued with a sense of the very ancient.

  She saw creatures like nothing she could have ever imagined, dead and forgotten for longer than she could comprehend. She experienced memories of places that had fallen to dust countless aeons before. As she watched, worlds that had once been the centres of vast empires were reduced to blackened carbon corpses orbiting the burned-out shells of dead suns.

  Within the confining petals of the interface chair, she struggled to breathe, her chest heaving as if she were drowning.

  Dakota struggled to absorb the tidal wave of information being thrust upon her. Mercifully the myriad impressions began to fade, and the seeping omniscient light of the derelict surrounding her crawled back under her eyelids. The petals of the interface chair had folded down and Corso was leaning in over her, pulling the neural cap away from her skull.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Corso, letting out a shaky breath as he moved out of Dakota’s way. ‘I’d call that a resounding success. Judging by the measurements, you were in full neural lock with the derelict.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she mumbled.

  ‘I don’t know what it was hitting you with, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in half-measures.’

  Dakota glanced over Corso’s shoulder and saw Kieran watching her carefully. She decided not to reveal too much about just what she’d experienced. ‘I’m fine. I just couldn’t make much sense out of anything.’

  ‘What happened?’ Kieran asked Corso, as Dakota slowly lifted herself out of the chair.

  ‘Calibration,’ Corso replied. ‘It means the derelict accepts her input.’

  ‘But she was only in there for a second or two.’

  Corso shrugged. ‘That’s all it takes.’

  ‘So she can fly the ship now?’

  ‘No, not straight away. But in the next few days, hopefully, yes.’

  ‘Let’s say “definitely”,’ Kieran replied tersely.

  Folding her legs under her, Dakota lowered herself down next to the interface chair. ‘It’s like it’s alive,’ she muttered weakly. Her head was still spinning. ‘I don’t know if it’s hostile exactly, but defensive, scared maybe, assuming you want to attribute human emotions to the thing.’

  ‘Did you find anything out? Any information about where it came from, who built it, whether the drive is still functioning?’

  She shook her head. ‘The whole experience was too vague for that.’ She caught his eye. ‘But I think you were right about them running away from something.’

  The Magellanic Novae had occurred in such a relatively small volume of space, and in such a short period of time, that one of the most popular conspiracy theories posited that the stellar detonations had been deliberately induced. This remained no more than a theory partly because no one was in a hurry to give credence to the notion of any interstellar civilization with the technology to destroy entire solar systems.

  Dakota gazed at the pale walls around her, and recalled the fleeting images and sensations she’d endured within the interface chair. A chill, deeper and darker than any she recalled experiencing before, went through her at the thought the Magi might have been capable of such terrible destruction.

  As Arbenz and Gardner also entered, Dakota reflected that none of them had any real idea of the consequences of what they were trying to do. They were like soldiers on the eve of a battle, already celebrating their certain victory over a well-armed militia, when they only had one gun between them.

  If only there were some way for her to steal the derelict out from under the noses of not only the Shoal, but the Freehold as well. But even if she found a way . . . what would be the consequences for the human race, of acquiring such embargoed technology? Would she bring the wrath of the Shoal hegemony down on her entire species?

  A functioning transluminal drive would open up the stars to mankind . . . but the subsequent vengeance of the Shoal might mean the end of the Consortium.

  Yet it was clear there was something more going on here. What Corso had accused her of made no sense: she had not been studying maps of the local galaxy cluster. Shortly after his challenge, she’d had her Ghost scan the bridge records, and found nothing amiss outside her own secret tweaks and alterations.

  But why would Corso lie? She couldn’t help but think back to the many weird glitches occurring since she had first boarded the Hyperion: the way the Freehold vessel had reacted when she tried to scan the alien’s trinket on the imager plate; the almost seamless alterations to the ship’s records that she had assumed until now had been made by Arbenz, or one of his men, for reasons unknown.

  And then there was the way the beta copy of Piri’s mind she’d uploaded to the Hyperion had spoken to her—that curious grammatical inflection so reminiscent of the speech pattern of the Shoal-member she had encountered at Bourdain’s Rock.

  She’d been carefully avoiding thinking about the implications of that impression too much. She might just have imagined it. Anything else filled her with crawling horror.

  She snapped back out of her train of thought to see Corso arguing with Arbenz.

  ‘Senator, we have no idea what kind of infrastructure, what kind of know-how, the Magi used to build either this ship or its propulsive systems. Taking the derelict out of Nova Arctis is one thing. Replicating the technology is something on a whole bigger scale. This is technology millennia ahead of our own. At the moment we just don’t know enough.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ asked Gardner.

  ‘Take our time, years if necessary,’ Corso replied immediately. ‘Pick the derelict apart piece by piece. Establish a permanent research base here as a cover. We were intending to move our entire population to Newfall over the next few decades anyway . . .’

  Arbenz bristled, his anger clearly mounting. ‘We are at war, Mr Corso. We are engaged in a battle for survival. If we can’t take this thing apart and understand how it works, we don’t deserve to keep Redstone, or Newfall either, for that matter.’

  ‘I think,’ Corso replied, obviously choosing his words very carefully, ‘that there are people in the Senate who might see things otherwise. Technically, you require the authority of the full governing board before—’

  ‘They’re not here!’ Arbenz bellowed, his face contorting in rage. ‘This is a God-given opportunity to raise ourselves up. Either we succeed in what we do here, or at the very least we die with honour before the eyes of God.’ Arbenz made an apparent attempt to cool down. ‘That’s final. I won’t tole
rate any further dissent.’

  Dakota had already caught sight of Gardner’s face and wondered, not for the first time, exactly what had driven this businessman to think he could engage in a profitable relationship with Freeholders. At this moment he looked aghast.

  ‘Senator,’ said Gardner suddenly, ‘I’ll ask you, with the greatest respect, to shut the hell up.’

  ‘Gardner . . .’

  It’s falling apart, thought Dakota. They’ve been down here only, what, a couple of hours? And already it’s falling apart.

  Gardner was insistent. ‘Without my financial and technical backup, you have nothing, Senator, nothing. I’m tired of being constantly sidelined because of your petty, parochial political arguments. If there’s any way to exploit or make sense of whatever we find on board this ship, it’ll be my research teams, my contacts that will bring it about. Do you understand me? You don’t have the resources. I do.’

  ‘You may have the resources,’ Arbenz replied acidly, ‘but you do not have the will.’

  ‘This is a joint mission,’ Gardner continued. ‘If anything happens to me, if I fail to get in touch with my business partners at designated times, your chances of being able to either do anything or go anywhere with this ship are nil. You understand that, don’t you?’

  Dakota tensed, waiting to see which way things would swing now. But Arbenz simply smiled as if they were all friends and the past few hours of argument and threats had never happened. There was something very unsettling in that smile.

  ‘I think we’ve seen enough here for today,’ Arbenz said, turning his attention from Gardner to Corso instead. ‘What’s our next move on the technical front?’

  ‘The calibrations check out OK. Now I just need to fine-tune the interface so Mai—so Dakota can work on controlling the derelict. Once we reach that point, we’ve got a good chance of being able to explore the whole of the ship without getting killed.’

  ‘Good work, Mr Corso. Remember, we need to work as fast as possible.’

  Corso looked thoughtful. ‘I can get a lot of work done right away.’