by Gary Gibson
‘But that chair was torn apart by the derelict, the same time it attacked you. I saw the recordings.’
‘That’s one reason I said “hypothetically”. And, for what it’s worth, every time a team has gone back on board the derelict following previous attacks, they found that any pieces of equipment left behind were still completely intact. The Hyperion doesn’t appear to recognize inanimate objects like interface chairs as hostile, possibly because they’re inorganic. Technically, you could set up a direct chair-to-chair link from the bridge and control the derelict that way.’
‘So what are you saying?’ she asked him excitedly. ‘We could just... fly it out from under Arbenz’s nose?’
He frowned. ‘Whether it’s practical or possible is another matter. And even if we could somehow pull it off, there are other things we’d have to think about, such as what to do with the derelict if we got away with it? And that’s not even taking into account the fact we’d still need to get ourselves on board the derelict in order to make an escape. And we already know that it can be lethally dangerous, even at the best of times.’
Dakota’s eyes gleamed with the possibilities. ‘I don’t have to be inside the bridge interface chair to control the Hyperion, you know.’
Corso looked confused. ‘You don’t?’
‘Look, there are good reasons for using interface chairs. If anyone with the appropriate implants is able to control a ship without resorting to its interface chair, then you’re faced with the risk of an enemy machine -head slipping on board and taking it over instantly. So the chairs are there as a kind of security measure, to prevent that happening. But that’s not to say one can’t be bypassed. However, the only one who has the necessary stack permissions to do that is a ship’s designated pilot.’
‘Which is you.’
‘Which is me.’
‘And that way you can control the Hyperion without actually being anywhere near the bridge?’
‘More than that. If I can run the Hyperion from elsewhere, it means that once I have a ship-to-ship link set up from the bridge, I might be able to run the derelict remotely as well.’
Corso laughed and shook his head in wonder.
‘Things have come a long way since the Hyperion was built,’ she explained. ‘The interface chairs we have now are a lot newer and more advanced than anything else originally existing on the bridge. We can take advantage of that fact.’
‘OK,’ he said, thinking ahead. ‘That still doesn’t get us on board the derelict without risking another attack from it, though.’
She’d already managed to think of this problem in a sudden blaze of creativity. ‘The Piri is tiny next to the derelict. Why not secure the Piri to the derelict’s hull before we use it to make a transluminal jump? There are buckytube cables on board for securing it to small asteroids, or to the surface of larger ones. No reason I couldn’t do the same, in this case.’
‘But that’s not all we’d have to do,’ he argued. ‘Even if you manage all this, and create an uplink with the derelict, it doesn’t matter how stealthed the Piri Reis is, because everyone on the Agartha, on the Hyperion and on Theona will soon know what you’re doing. And that doesn’t even take into account how the alien hiding in the Hyperion’s stacks would react. Or the fact you’ll still have to be physically on the bridge and in the chair before you can create the uplink in the first place, and that means somehow getting past the crew.’
Corso had momentarily forgotten the incongruity of the situation: the two of them discussing life and death matters while floating naked together in a fur-lined spaceship. Dakota took his face in her hands, an almost feral expression of glee on her own.
‘You’re altogether too much of a defeatist. If we induce a general systems failure in the Hyperion’s stacks, same as the one I had to deal with just after I got on board, every sensor, every security system and every piece of recording equipment on the Hyperion is going to have a brainstorm. The Shoal-member would be deaf, dumb and blind for at least a couple of minutes, while the stacks were down. That would give us just enough time to create a cloaked uplink before the Hyperion’s systems have time to reboot.’
‘You’re still taking a hell of a risk,’ Corso argued, trying to sound calm and reasonable but in fact clearly more stressed with each passing second. ‘You still haven’t told me how you’ll get past the crew.’
‘There’s no reason they wouldn’t assume I was just doing my job if I got in that chair.’
She sat back and studied Corso’s glum expression. He wasn’t happy—but she knew she’d won this one.
—
Dakota could feel the Shoal-member’s presence as she found her way back into the main body of the Hyperion, navigating a central drop shaft running the entire length of the ship’s spine on her way to the bridge.
‘You,’ she said quietly to the empty air, ‘have got something to hide.’
‘Blunt accusations, much foaming of water,’ the reply boomed through hidden speakers in the walls of the shaft. ‘To accuse is to diminish within eye of beholder fish.’
She grabbed hold of a rung and made a right-angle turn, letting herself drop at a steady, graceful pace down another shaft until she snagged a convenient handhold with one foot.
She wondered if the crew could hear the alien speaking to her over the comms system, and why he would therefore choose to announce his presence in this way. If they could hear him, they’d probably be panicking by now, which meant she’d find it that much harder to slip by them. She began to really wish she’d kept her mouth shut.
‘You know, I think you’re trying too hard. Care to answer a riddle?’ she asked, adrenalin pumping through her head. She felt like she could climb outside the hull and run sprint marathons around its circumference. But she was terrified beyond words.
‘Riddles, yes? A conundrum to while away eternity’s hours,’ came the answer.
‘Two riddles, really. Here’s the first one. There’s been very little real contact with individual members of the Shoal since we first encountered your species—probably no more than a couple of dozen times in all. Everything pivotal that’s ever happened in the history of the Consortium, there’s been one of your kind present, almost as if you’re somehow making things happen.’
It was a popular conspiracy theory, and not one Dakota might normally subscribe to. However, under the present circumstances, she found herself prepared to entertain wilder ideas than she might do otherwise.
‘First you boot the Uchidans off their homeworld without explanation. Then they land on Redstone and try to throw the Freehold off theirs, something I’d have thought way beneath your interest. Yet one of your people was present, for some reason, in the Central Command ring the day before the massacres at Port Gabriel.’
She continued: ‘Then the next time I see one of you, it’s on Bourdain’s Rock, and people want to blame me for what happened there. And now, suddenly, here we are almost literally in the middle of fucking nowhere, a derelict but viable alien starship under our feet, and . . . big surprise, here you are, too. It was you every time, wasn’t it?’
‘Enquiry to elucidate, with pleasure?’
Dakota gritted her teeth. The alien’s word games were really beginning to get on her nerves. ‘You’re the one that calls himself Trader. You were there on Redstone, and then Bourdain’s Rock, and now you’re here, like a bad shadow following me everywhere. What’s your full name again?’
She already knew it, but somehow she needed to hear the creature repeat it. ‘Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals,’ he replied. ‘And you are correct.’
‘You know,’ she said, relishing the opportunity to give vent, ‘it really gives some indication of how little you regard us as a species that the name you use when you’re around us is a seriously tasteless joke.’
‘This one is forced to point out that circumstances remain unaltered from present: vis-à-vis relationship you and I, no change. Agreed?’
She was almost at the brid
ge by now. She slowed her progress, taking her time in case she ran into any of Arbenz’s skeleton crew. She had no idea what she was going to say to them when the time came, but could see no reason for them to keep her from the interface chair. If she was wrong about that. . . well, she’d just have to deal with it when the time came.
‘What happened to the race that built the derelict?’ she asked, realizing the creature was baiting her. ‘Where are they now? It has a transluminal drive dating from long before your species were supposed to have developed the technology, so just what are you trying to hide here?’
A secure link via her Ghost allowed her to observe Corso’s handiwork as he covertly hacked away at the Hyperion’s stacks from inside the Piri Reis. She had to hand it to him: he knew exactly what he was doing. Any lingering concerns faded regarding his expertise with computer systems.
Trader refused to be drawn, though. Instead of answering, he continued blithely, as if anything she had to say was of little or no concern to him.
But then she reminded herself that the alien very much had the advantage. Everything she and Corso had planned for the next few minutes depended on him not picking up on their attempt to take control of the derelict.
‘Of highest tantamount importance in approaching task of cataclysmic destruction is appreciation that the object of our concern, in order to be rendered nonexistent, cannot be destroyed by means conventional. Ergo, consideration of alternatives is necessitated.’
Dakota reached the gravity wheel and pulled herself up a series of rungs, feeling the tug of centrifugal force from the rotation of the Hyperion’s wheel segment, the higher she got. She climbed into a corridor in the wheel’s inner rim whose floor curved out of sight.
‘Who built the derelict, Trader? You’re holding all the cards. Why not just tell me?’
‘Please regard that derelict in question rests—chance and circumstance be thanked—upon the very precipice of a mighty abyss. A most advantageous and opportunistic means of destruction is thereby presented: to be sent tumbling into welcoming and bottomless embrace of mother ocean, is also to be squeezed and squeezed until boom! Derelict is at an end. How so, therefore, to reach accomplishment of this mighty and noble task? Placing of explosives conventional, certainly. Or activation of secondary propulsion systems, to allow such an unfortunate event to most merrily happenstance. All to be considered by this one called Dakota. Rescued, recall, please, from certain blackness of death aboard space-bound asteroid by this one. Surely, to indicate refusal in our current concern is equivalent to expression of churlishness, given my life-saving kindness?’
Keep him talking. Anything, to divert the majority of his consciousness away from Corso’s hacking.
As it turned out, she had little to worry her, once she entered the bridge. The crew were dead.
It was unusual in itself to find the emergency seal on the entrance to the bridge activated when she got there. She reached up and deactivated it by hand, using a panel on the wall.
When the seal slid back, revealing the bridge’s interior, she stared at the scene before her with numb horror.
It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that Trader must have locked the crew into the bridge deck, sealed the emergency exits, and then voided the life-giving atmosphere.
By the looks of things, two of the crewmembers had made a concerted effort to open the emergency seals from the inside. They lay just inside the doorway, staring sightlessly upwards, their tongues protruding from their mouths.
At least I have my filmsuit. Trader couldn’t possibly know about that. Even if he did, he’d still have to be a lot more inventive than this if he chose to hurt her.
She slowly picked her way past the two corpses. The other four crewmembers were all huddled by an open floor panel. Dakota averted her gaze from their faces, frozen in terror, guessing they’d been desperately trying to access bypass circuits as they’d died.
‘An unfortunate matter, but necessary,’ the alien’s voice boomed from the bridge’s comms system. ‘For them to be allowed interference in requisite destruction of derelict would be unforgivably remiss.’
Dakota nodded, still unable to find her voice. Her throat felt like something large and heavy had been lodged halfway down it, and she had a particularly nasty taste in the back of her mouth.
She watched as the petals of the interface chair began to unfold, unbidden.
‘Look, they’ll know by now, on the Agartha. and down on the moon, that the crew are dead. I’ll never be allowed to get as far as the derelict and do what you want. And you know I can’t do anything from up here.’
‘Interface, contrary to clear untruth, awaits your embrace, and is linked in readiness to identical device aboard derelict. Sufficient control for destruction may be manifested from here.’
Her heart sank as she realized the alien was a step ahead of them. ‘And what happens when Arbenz comes back up here? Who do you think he’s going to blame for . . . for this carnage?’
Of course.
She was being set up—had been set up, ever since Bourdain’s Rock.
The alien was covering its tracks, so that it would appear only she was responsible for the destruction of the derelict and the murder of the Hyperion’s crew: a wake of death and destruction, indeed. Corso hadn’t been so far off the mark then.
‘In order to achieve maximized disaster,’ the creature continued, ‘and to prevent immediate discorporation of Dakota most delightful, absolute cooperation is presently necessitated.’
Her Ghost flagged up a message from Corso. But before she had a chance to read it, she felt something pressing in on her thoughts . . .
She shook her head, feeling dizzy. She looked up and saw a computer-generated image of Trader, floating in the screens arranged all around the bridge.
‘My life won’t be worth shit if I do what you want. I. . .’
She stopped. There was something she had to do, something very urgent. She –
– was standing next to the open interface chair, one hand resting on the folded shape of a steel and plastic petal. She couldn’t even remember having crossed the bridge to reach the chair.
There was another message from Corso now, this one marked highest priority. She faltered, and there it was again, pressing in on her thoughts —
—she found herself in darkness.
Dakota reeled, and realized she was seated inside the activated interface chair, with no memory of having climbed inside it or of the petals enfolding her. She gasped with the shock of this sudden dislocation. It felt like being buried alive.
More, she was mind-linked into the second interface, the one on board the derelict. For a moment it lay wide open to her, a universe of data waiting to be pored over –
And then it was gone.
She gasped as the connection was suddenly, deliberately cut.
I’m not sure. I. . . I just blacked out for a second, or something. The Shoal-member was talking to me from inside the stacks. The crew are all dead.
Nothing to do with me, I assure you.
No. But I will now.
They’ve probably come looking for the crew. I don’t even know how long they’ve been dead.
There. Barely a thought and the derelict was now linked directly into the Piri Reis, without first passing through the Hyperion. In data
terms it was like turning a tap and getting a trickle compared to the ocean of data she’d just tasted for one mesmerizing moment. It was a bare snatch of what she’d experienced while on board the derelict itself.
Even so, she reached out with her senses, and felt the control data from the interface chair aboard the derelict smoothly mesh with her Ghost. It felt like gaining a new set of limbs—but limbs that felt numb and weak and sluggish in their response.
But she still had control of the derelict.
It’s done, Lucas. The uplink is in place.
Except, against all her expectations, nothing felt different. Instead of feeling victorious, Dakota felt mildly disappointed.
The chair’s petals unfolded from around her. The image of Trader had gone. Overhead displays and status lights around the bridge had fallen into grey, unresponsive dullness. Pale red emergency lighting lent an awful, surreal quality to the horror and carnage that surrounded her.
Are you serious?
At that moment, she sensed the Hyperion’s few still-active systems disappearing out of reach of her Ghost.
She gripped the arms of the interface chair in shock.
Well, it’s nice to know you believed me in the first place.
I can’t be sure, Dakota replied. It feels. . . different.
Shut up, Lucas. I can . . .
Dakota closed her eyes and concentrated on the uplink: a long and fragile chain of communication.
The derelict became like an immense presence, brooding and dark, like a haunted house waiting to be explored. Immense energies flowed through it, yet it responded only sluggishly to her mental queries.