Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  If I didn’t know better, she told Corso, I’d say something was deliberately trying to block my control of the derelict.

  Corso snarled with exasperation.

  —

  Corso watched as a tsunami of information poured up and into the Piri’s stacks from deep under the moon’s ice. Yet, rather than celebrating, he felt merely haggard, run down and exhausted. The few hours he’d spent asleep, curled up with Dakota, hadn’t been nearly enough. That, plus nearly getting killed on board the derelict—and that following the torture and beating of Dakota herself—conspired to wipe away his remaining ability to concentrate.

  He located the Piri’s autodoc menu and dialled up an amphetamine concoction, hoping it might do the trick for him. Dakota’s little ship could do a hell of a lot on its own, but there were limits to all things. He had to be awake and aware in order to supervise the uplink as long as it lasted.

  The Piri pinged him a minute later. He’d earlier programmed it to let him know if it stumbled across anything particularly interesting, or plain coherent, among the data delivered from the derelict. He touched a screen and scanned the information appearing there. Ah.

  It had found what appeared at first glance to be a narrative: a myth cycle, perhaps, or maybe a simple record of events. It possessed the grandeur of the former, yet the brief, synopsized facts before him now suggested the latter.

  He took a closer look, and what he saw appeared to confirm the Magi had, indeed, originated from a specific section of the Larger Magellanic Cloud.

  Come on, come on. He rubbed his hands impatiently through his hair as he waited. There were gaps of inactivity, lasting seconds long, as the Piri jumped from one set of incoming data to another.

  Corso could discern that whatever was lurking deep within the Hyperion’s data stacks was recovering a lot faster than he could possibly have anticipated. He meanwhile sat at a console, muttering, as he tried to coax the Hyperion’s emergency support systems into accepting his override commands, in an attempt to prevent or at least stall the alien intelligence inside the stacks . . .

  The Piri spasmed. A screech of static lasting perhaps all of a second burst out through the speakers, and the main screen went black for several moments before reasserting itself.

  ‘Piri! Status report!’

  ‘All systems operational,’ came the verbalized reply.

  ‘What just happened? Everything went crazy for a second.’

  ‘All systems operational,’ came the Piri’s reply again. ‘Levels of data being drawn into my stacks are sufficient to cause resource allocation problems. This is forcing periodic outages.’

  Sweat prickled Corso’s skin. The Piri’s primary systems were like nothing they had back on Redstone; its inherent skills of machine deduction and analysis were light years ahead of anything Corso had ever worked with before. It was possible the Piri was having problems with the sheer quantity of data available to it, but somehow he found it all too easy to believe Dakota’s invisible intruder was trying to subvert the Piri.

  ‘Piri! Use the interpretation protocols to grab anything else deemed relevant, download it now, and abort the rest!’

  Better safe than sorry, he had decided, and, besides, time was running out before the alien would regain control of the Hyperion and then realize that the termination point for the current flood of data lay in the cargo bay.

  ‘Cease interface in a maximum of fifteen seconds, no traces. Got that?’

  ‘Understood,’ came the reply.

  Now he just had to wait for Dakota to make it back aboard.

  He cast his eye over the fresh data drawn from the derelict and, as he read it, almost forgot how to breathe.

  —

  Dakota made to exit the bridge, and found Udo Mansell approaching down the corridor towards her. A long scar cut across his forehead, now pink and smooth from an autodoc’s booster treatments. Patches of skin on his face looked new and shiny.

  She gasped in astonishment, taking a step back as he moved in on her.

  ‘When did you—’

  He punched her hard, and she stumbled back in surprise, sprawling across the metal grilles that comprised the deck of the Hyperion’s bridge.

  She rolled on all fours and put a hand to her nose in shock. At least, she thought, it wasn’t bleeding.

  Udo looked unfocused, clearly still fighting off the side-effects of his medication. She guessed that he’d climbed out of his medbox only in the last few minutes. How stupid, exactly, do you think I am?’ he roared, bunching his fists again. ‘How often do you think you can pull off shit like this and get away with it?’

  ‘I haven’t—’

  Udo stepped forward, then swung his leg back and delivered a tremendous kick to Dakota’s ribs. She bounced off a bulkhead, too little air left in her shocked lungs to scream.

  ‘Oh, I’m up to date on everything that’s going on around here, and you can thank my dear brother for that. He came and visited me in the medical bay and we talked. How we talked. He told me of all your deceptions, even your murder of one of your own. Now he’s in the medical bay himself and barely able to stand. So, tell me,’ Udo screamed, ‘where is Corso? Where—the fuck—is—he?’

  ‘I don’t know, Udo,’ she pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, did Kieran tell you to—’

  ‘I don’t need my brother to tell me anything, you implant-ridden whore. Where is Corso?’ Udo bellowed, fists clenched at his sides. ‘He doesn’t appear on the monitoring systems, so where the fuck is he?’

  —

  Corso stepped back from the console, feeling stiff and sore after spending long minutes rigid with shock.

  He rubbed at his eyes, thinking it strange how the woman who owned this ship had started out as his enemy, yet he now felt closer to her—felt more in common with her—than any other human being he’d ever met.

  That was when he noticed the figurine for the first time.

  Dakota was far from being tidy-natured. Anyone moving through the cramped interior of her ship was continually banging into things: small decorative items pinned to the walls, or bizarrely floating on strands of fine filigree. Other mementoes and objects that might be tiny pieces of artwork had been epoxied, apparently at random, to every surface. Others floated free, waiting to smack the unwary in the head when least expected.

  He instantly recognized the figurine as of Uchidan origin, and suddenly recalled Dakota telling him how she had received it on her first encounter with the Shoal-member on Bourdain’s Rock. It was clearly modelled on the famous statue of Belle Trevois.

  Belle Trevois herself had been a thirteen-year-old girl born to a family on Leverrier II during the Diaspora Conflict, more than a century before. Her parents, previously devout members of Moscba Org, lost everything they possessed during the siege on the Hubbard Spaceport, and then converted to the Uchidan faith, which required accepting the Light Of Truth implants central to the Uchidan belief system.

  That could hardly have been an easy decision, considering several other Uchidan converts had already been murdered on Leverrier. It was the height of the war, and Uchidans in general were widely suspected of being spies. Yet their conversion could easily have been an entirely pragmatic decision, since the Uchidans had no involvement in the Org’s conflict, and therefore could obtain free passage into orbit.

  Unfortunately for Belle, her parents made the stunningly inept decision to permit the Uchidan medician-priests to also place implants inside the skull of their daughter. These implants subsequently took control of Belle’s limbic system, generating the same technologically induced sense of perpetual spiritual ecstasy that her parents had already embraced. Word got out, and what had been merely sporadic violence against the Uchidans on Leverrier II escalated exponentially over the following we
eks, fuelled by moral outrage.

  Up to that point, Belle and her family had been taking refuge in an Uchidan temple in the heart of Leverrier’s capital city, Ville d’Aiguille. Consortium-mediated negotiations failed to resolve the political situation and wide-scale rioting broke out. As things turned rapidly ugly, rioters broke into the temple and murdered everyone they found, including Belle and her parents, a few hours before they’d been due to finally be lifted into orbit aboard neutral tugs.

  Overall, it had been an ugly, nasty business and, in the following decades, Uchidans everywhere had raised Belle Trevois to the status of a martyr, a symbol of their repression. Statues of her, with arms flung outwards, could be found in most Uchidan temples throughout the Consortium, or at least in those still allowed to exist. Even Corso, a loyal Freeholder, had to admit that the crimes committed against the Uchidans were far worse than those they were accused of.

  And here she was again, on Dakota’s ship of all places. Belle Trevois, in the form of a simple religious icon . . .

  He stared at the figurine. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘Piri,’ Corso asked aloud, ‘where did Dakota acquire this?’

  ‘On Bourdain’s Rock.’

  ‘Remind me how.’

  ‘It was given to her by one of the Shoal race.’

  Corso exhaled long and slow. ‘Was that interaction recorded in any way? Sight and sound, visuals, anything like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ the ship replied with typical machine-like pedantry.

  ‘Can I see those records?’

  ‘No. Dakota’s direct permission is required.’

  Scratch that then. But so far the ship had supported what Dakota had told him.

  Let me think. Let me think . . . Belle was an involuntary martyr, because she hadn’t chosen her faith. Instead, it had been imposed on her, like a kind of mental rape.

  ‘Port Gabriel,’ said Corso. ‘Dakota was at Port Gabriel, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was a massacre.’

  ‘Correct.’

  Feeling fairly hopeless, Corso tried acting on a hunch. ‘Piri, is there anything at all in that incident pertaining to Belle Trevois?’

  ‘A Uchidan military transport named the Belle Trevois crashed there during the first war with the Freehold, but some years prior to the incident in question.’

  Corso nodded, finally recalling old, half-forgotten history lessons. The Uchidans had long ago placed a small statue of Belle on the exact same spot where their transport had crashed. The statue still stood, even now, having become famous after the massacres. For years afterwards it kept cropping up again and again in news reports and articles about the Port Gabriel incident.

  ‘How about records of when Dakota placed that figurine on the imaging plate in the bridge?’

  ‘Those records have been deleted.’

  He hadn’t expected that. ‘Deleted by whom?’

  ‘By Dakota.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s strange that an alien would give a statue of Belle Trevois, of all people, to a woman whose implants had been forcibly compromised by Uchidan ideology? Why would it do that?’

  ‘This question is not understood.’

  Corso had forgotten he wasn’t talking to a true intelligence, just to a machine. He carried on thinking aloud regardless. ‘None of this would be remarkable except for her telling me she didn’t know what the figurine represented or where it came from. But how could she not know?’

  If there was any one image most commonly associated with the Port Gabriel disaster, it was that statue.

  ‘Piri, is there any way to insert a contact virus into inert matter, something that could get inside a machine-head’s Ghost circuits the same way information can be read through an imager plate?’

  ‘There are research papers on record concerning such speculative technology. However, all attempts at identifying a reliable delivery method, without the use of imaging technology, have proved extremely inconclusive.’

  Corso couldn’t rid his head of the idea that something had got inside Dakota the same way it had wormed its way inside the Hyperion. This felt like an unusually fragile chain of logic, yet it appealed precisely because it made perfect sense of Dakota’s more unusual behaviour.

  —

  Corso pulled the pressure suit back on and headed towards the bridge as fast as he could.

  Even so, as he hurried, he misjudged angles in the zero gee environment, nearly knocking himself out at one point when he cannoned off a bulkhead after launching himself hard down a drop shaft. He’d been locked away in sleepless research in his quarters so long he’d never properly learned how to navigate the gravity-free areas of the Hyperion.

  Crashing against a wall at the far end of yet another drop shaft, he kicked his way into a connecting corridor, then, finally, felt a familiar tug deep in his bones as he pulled himself up into the gravity wheel.

  He heard people yelling as he approached the bridge, and tried to put out of his mind the terrible secret he’d gained from the derelict.

  The sight that confronted him upon his arrival there was so ghastly, so morbid, it belonged in the realm of the surreal. Half a dozen bodies lay scattered in various states of contortion, the expressions on their faces making it clear their deaths had been far from peaceful.

  In the middle of it all stood Udo, panting hard, one fist gripping the lapel of Dakota’s jerkin while she slumped beside him.

  It looked like the man could barely stand. After a moment he turned and saw Corso, staring hard at him for long seconds before raising his other hand and pointing towards him.

  ‘You. You’re next.’ Udo’s extended hand wobbled, his index finger drawing patterns in the air.

  ‘Let go of her,’ yelled Corso. ‘She’s the one shot we have left at recovering the derelict. Arbenz will kill you if you harm her.’

  ‘Fucking machine-head bitch!’ Udo snarled, his lips curling in anger.

  As he turned his attention back to Dakota, his fingers clenched into a fist. Dakota appeared to be awake, but no longer aware of her surroundings. Her blank gaze, surveying the bridge and Corso, was clearly seeing nothing.

  Corso ran forward and tried to pull the girl away from Udo. The other man slammed him to the ground with ease, but in the process he’d let go of her.

  As Corso pulled himself up, he saw Dakota looking straight towards him with that same calm, unfocused expression. Whatever she was seeing now, it was somewhere a long way from the bridge of the Hyperion. It was the same look she’d given him that time near the airlocks.

  ‘We don’t need her at all,’ Udo slurred. ‘She’s better off dead.’

  Dakota suddenly came to life. Moving with inhuman fluidity and speed, she leapt up and spun around to face towards Udo, who barely had time to open his mouth in dazed surprise. Yet her face remained blank, empty of emotion.

  Udo’s knife appeared in his hand as if from nowhere and he swung it towards her, but Dakota slithered out of reach so fast he might as well have been a motionless statue.

  Corso stared, appalled, as she leapt on Udo’s back, gripping his neck between her thighs and wrapping her arms tightly around his head. She twisted around on his shoulders with brutal efficiency in that same moment, and Corso heard a sickening snap.

  Udo hadn’t even had time to reach up towards her. Even in the lower-than-normal artificial gravity of the bridge, the skill and speed with which she had moved was startling.

  Udo jerked violently and his knife fell to the floor. Dakota landed with delicate grace behind him as he collapsed to the deck, his head lolling at a strange angle as his body slumped lifelessly.

  She focused on Corso with bright cold eyes, giving him the unpleasant realization that whatever was now looking at him through her eyes had decided to kill him next.

  Suddenly her attention snapped away from Corso, to a point immediately behind him. She darted forward and he stumbled out of her path, turning just in time to see Gardner appear at
the entrance to the bridge. Dakota slammed into the man and they both went down in a mess of tangled limbs.

  Corso looked around desperately for anything he could use as a weapon. He spotted a box of stack components left lying next to a partially disembowelled control console, and headed unsteadily towards it. The components within appeared to be individually encased in solid steel, and felt good and hefty in his hands when he lifted one of them out.

  Gardner was desperately fighting to push Dakota away from him, filling the air with his terrified screeching. When Corso went over and grabbed the edge of her jerkin, she suddenly peeled away from Gardner and leapt towards him instead. There was absolutely no sign that she recognized him at all.

  Corso landed hard, felled by a punch he hadn’t even seen coming. Her long fingers—those same fingers that had recently slid along the curve of his back in a lover’s embrace—reached down to grab him hard by the testicles.

  Corso choked and then screamed, lashing out with the reinforced component. By luck as much as by intention, it connected heavily with the side of her head. A clicking noise emerged from deep within Dakota’s throat, and she floated free.

  But she appeared to recover almost immediately, heading straight towards him again, her breath hissing harshly between bared teeth.

  Corso waited until the last second, then decided any attempts at a gentle approach would probably end up getting him killed. He flung the stack component and it connected with her head a second time. She was knocked entirely unconscious and crumpled on the deck.

  ‘Oh God.’ Gardner was literally shaking with fear as he stood up. ‘I thought... I thought she was going to kill me.’

  ‘She was certainly aiming to,’ Corso snapped. ‘I need to . . .’

  Need to do what, he wondered: take her to the med bay? No, Arbenz would surely have come up on the shuttle, bringing enforcements of some kind with him -assuming others weren’t already on their way from the Agartha.

  The Piri Reis was still the best bet he had. But even if he did manage to haul her back to her ship without being intercepted, what would happen when she finally woke? Would he be dealing with Dakota again, or something far more malevolent?