Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  The changes inside her skull were abrupt and violent, the higher functions of her implants fading away to leave only a dim, insensate void.

  ‘Sir,’ one of the other troopers was saying to Arbenz. Theona base camp reports that the enemy fleet is now in range and moving in for an attack.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kieran snapped. ‘If that was the case the Hyperion’s automatic systems would have . . .’

  Gardner, Kieran and the Senator all stared at each other at that same moment. Suddenly, emergency klaxons began sounding the length of the ship. Kieran shouted something incomprehensible, and stamped over to the door, but it refused to open.

  ‘We’re locked in.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Arbenz retorted. ‘Blow the damned thing open if you have to.’

  The troopers exchanged glances with each other, then stepped forward, lowering their weapons to aim at the door’s locking mechanism. A moment later, thunder and light filled the room. As Dakota watched, the door held for just a few moments, before fracturing at the hinges and falling outwards into the corridor.

  I’m losing my mind, thought Dakota miserably, as her Ghost continued its self-immolation.

  It felt a lot like dying, like plummeting into an endless abyss where one’s soul had previously resided.

  Then, just when she thought it was all over, something else slid into the vacant space inside her skull. Something dark, heavy and alien.

  She writhed uncontrollably, gasping for breath.

  Whatever this was that had settled into her brain, it wasn’t the Shoal AI. Something entirely different had replaced the higher-level Ghost functions she’d just erased.

  From somewhere far down the corridor sounded a series of loud, echoing booms, accompanied by a grating, rolling roar that grew louder second by second. It didn’t take a lot of guesswork to figure they were listening to the sound of explosive decompression. The Hyperion’s entire atmosphere was being violently dumped into space.

  Dakota had her filmsuit to protect her, but Corso’s pressure suit had been torn from his back and discarded as soon as they’d been brought back on board the Hyperion. Keeping him alive over the next few minutes wasn’t going to be easy.

  ‘Is this your doing?’ Arbenz screamed at Corso. ‘A thousand generations of Freeholders are going to grow up using your name as another word for traitor—or don’t you get that?’

  ‘You’re the traitor!’ Corso screamed back. ‘You’re a murderer, a gutless opportunist.’ The roar of air had become deafening. A powerful wind tore at Dakota as she tried, with difficulty, to stand up.

  ‘It’s no wonder we’re trapped on a useless backwater rock being told what to do by a bunch of psychotic assholes like you,’ Corso continued. ‘The Shoal know everything, Senator. And they probably have ever since you got here.’

  Arbenz looked apoplectic. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Listen to him,’ Dakota shouted from behind the Senator.

  Arbenz whirled around to face her. ‘They know everything that’s going on,’ she continued. ‘They planted software spies in the Hyperion’s stacks long ago.’

  There are worse ways to die, Dakota reflected. It was clear neither she nor Corso was going to leave this room alive. At least, before the troopers blew their heads off or the last of the air was gone, she’d had the satisfaction of seeing the look on Arbenz’s face.

  Ignoring them both, Kieran grabbed the Senator’s shoulder. ‘We can get to the bridge!’ he yelled. ‘We can seal it off manually, and try and retake control from there.’

  The Freehold troopers had begun pulling breathing apparatus out of their uniforms and fitting masks over their faces. Kieran pointed to two of them. ‘Barnard, Lunghi—you’re coming with me.’

  ‘What about them?’ Gardner shouted, gesturing at Corso and Dakota.

  ‘Fuck them,’ Arbenz replied. ‘They—’

  Everything went black.

  Pandemonium reigned. Dakota blindly fought her way over to Corso, but the darkness went deeper than just the lights going out. There was an emptiness now that Dakota hadn’t felt inside herself since her first set of Ghost implants were ripped out.

  Corso fought against her at first, until she identified herself by yelling in his ear over the cacophony of raised voices and howling air. He stopped struggling immediately.

  ‘This is our chance,’ she urged him, her mouth pressed right up against the side of his head. Her words sounded thin and indistinct as the atmospheric pressure rapidly dropped.

  She dragged him away in what she hoped was the right direction, blindly crashing into other bodies. Hands grabbed and punched at her, and she lashed out in return, taking a savage bite at someone’s hand when she felt it grab her face. Despite the near-total darkness, her eyesight was starting to adjust. Something thudded against her shoulder. She reached up, and it felt warm and sticky to the touch.

  The confusion got them out through the door, where it was just as impenetrably dark. She could hear Corso’s laboured panting next to her as she took an educated guess on which way to head to get back to the cargo bay. There was a fifty-fifty chance she’d made the wrong decision, but it was still infinitely better odds now than before the lights had gone out.

  And all the while, Dakota struggled to understand what had just happened.

  She had no doubt Trader was responsible for this shipwide systems failure, yet she was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had destroyed whatever remained of the Shoal AI inside the Hyperion. Without the semi-organic machinery she had tracked down and destroyed, the Hyperion’s stacks couldn’t possibly allow the alien’s intelligence to function or survive.

  Which led her to the conclusion Trader had left boobytraps in case of just such an eventuality. After all, it was exactly what she would have done.

  The air got thin enough for Dakota’s filmsuit to activate automatically, swallowing her bruised and battered body in its oily embrace. She felt Corso’s hand jerk away for an instant, as it touched his skin where he clung on to her.

  She realized to her chagrin that getting out of the storage room would have been a lot easier if she’d activated the filmsuit as soon as the lights went out, because the lenses over her eyes were starting to pick up the infrared heat signatures of the walls and machinery around them, making it far easier for her to find her way.

  Corso’s flesh glowed a dull orange beside her, while the corridor was transformed into a hellish tangle of hidden power conduits and circuitry overlaid with the ghostly cool sheen of the walls. But at least she could see they were heading in the right direction.

  Corso was floundering badly, struggling to breathe. The howling sound was becoming fainter. Another minute or so and they’d be in vacuum.

  She grabbed hold of Corso, dropping them both straight down the middle of a drop shaft that she remembered would take them most of the way.

  Then, thankfully, dull red emergency lighting flickered on.

  They got to an airlock, and she hauled both of them inside it, feeling her bruised and exhausted muscles protest. Fortunately the airlocks were all equipped with emergency manual switches that would pressurize them within a couple of seconds, and they ran on circuits independent of the ship’s central stacks.

  She hammered at a switch and waited for what felt like long, long seconds before she heard a faint hiss that gradually built up into a roar that lasted several seconds.

  She let herself slide down against the wall, almost crying with relief. Corso lay slumped beside her.

  That empty silence inside her, where her Ghost had been, was no longer so silent. The alien presence she’d felt entering her now filled up her skull, grating against her senses as if it quite literally didn’t fit.

  She listened carefully to its voice, and realized the creature that had entered her mind was the same as the intelligence she’d previously sensed within the derelict’s stacks. And with this came other knowledge.

  She could hear other voices—like that of
the derelict, but different—calling from deep within the inner system.

  It seemed there was more than one derelict in the Nova Arctis system.

  Without thinking about it, she tried to summon a mental image of the cargo bay on the far side of the airlock. But instead of the perfect, accurate, three-dimensional map she would once have expected, there was only a half-formed notion drawn from her own frail human memories, inexact and unreliable.

  She opened a locker, hoping to find an emergency suit there, but it was empty. She cursed and slammed the door closed. She glanced at Corso lying half dead beside her, and knew they had no choice but to exit into the vacuum of the cargo bay regardless.

  If she remembered—if her frail, human memory served her right—the Piri Reis was located very close to their current position.

  ‘Corso? Corso, can you hear me?’ She shook his shoulder frantically.

  His eyelids fluttered, and Dakota thanked the heavens as his eyes focused on her.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘There’s only so much air in here and hard vacuum out there. Understand?’

  His head moved slightly in what passed for a nod. ‘I hear you,’ he rasped.

  ‘The cargo bay is just on the other side of this airlock. We’re going to have to move fast, and I mean fast. But it shouldn’t take more than half a minute or so.’ She forced a weak grin. ‘Think you can last that long?’

  ‘But I don’t have a suit.’ His eyes focused more clearly. ‘Dakota, no—’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, reaching up to the airlock’s control panel. ‘When I say, take a couple of deep, rapid breaths, OK? Suck it in, hyperventilate, and then let your lungs empty. I’ll get you there in a couple of seconds, I swear.’

  ‘You’re insane,’ he murmured.

  ‘Right, and back on your blessed Redstone people don’t try to prove they’re the ultimate flicking warrior by seeing how much poisonous native atmosphere they can breathe without passing out or dropping dead?’

  ‘That’s not the same thing.’

  ‘Like hell it isn’t. It’s dangerous, and so is this -except this time you don’t actually have a choice. Unless you’d rather sit here in this airlock and wait for those maniacs to find us again.’

  ‘There’s no other way?’

  ‘Like you don’t know that already!’ she snapped. ‘No more time for arguments.’ She hit the panel, and it began counting down the ten seconds to depressurization. ‘Now, Corso! Draw it deep, blow it all out. Hard and fast. Do it!’

  Corso staggered to his feet. ‘Crazy bitch,’ he yelled, then forced his chest in and out, drawing air deep into his lungs. For all his apparent anger, Dakota could see just how terrified he was.

  A bell chimed, followed by a loud hissing that got rapidly fainter. Corso’s eyes widened in alarm and he emptied his lungs one last time. Absolute silence fell and the outer door swung open on a cargo bay that was tinged hellish red. Corso propelled himself out of the airlock and into the interior of the bay with manic energy.

  Dakota followed. For a heart-stopping moment she couldn’t figure out which way to go, but then she managed to make out the Piri’s dim shape. She boosted across the empty space, towards a spinning and flailing Corso, and collided with him.

  They sailed together across the bay, crashing into a bulkhead only a short distance from the Piri Reis’s hull. Dakota stabbed towards it with one oilslick hand, Corso kicking after her.

  He almost made it, heading the right way, but then he started to drift. The frantic pedalling motion of his arms and legs grew weaker moment by moment. Dakota pushed back towards him in a panic. For far too long, they’d both been running on nothing but sheer adrenalin.

  As he finally drifted up against the Piri’s hull, she reached for the emergency access panel and slammed the release switch with her fist. An airlock flipped open a few metres further along, and Dakota manhandled him inside.

  Corso lay beside her, apparently unconscious, as she waited for the pressure to stabilize. She shook him, out of fear and frustration as much as anything else, but got no reaction. She pinched his nostrils and blew air deep into his lungs. After several seconds he jerked away from her, his chest rising and falling more noticeably.

  The inner door finally swung open and Dakota’s filmsuit dissolved back into her pores. ‘Piri,’ she shouted, ‘get the medbox ready!’

  She looped one of Corso’s arms over her shoulder and dragged him inside, weeping from the effort. To her eternal gratitude, the status lights on the medbox showed it was already activated. She cracked the lid open and started to lift Corso inside with one last, strenuous effort.

  He pushed weakly against her with her hands. ‘Dakota. I’m fine. It’s fine. I’m—’ He curled up in a ball and started coughing violently. ‘Oh God, I never want to go through anything like that again. I thought I was dead.’

  ‘Take it easy. We’re safe for the moment.’ She put one hand on his shoulder, in an effort to reassure him.

  A few moments later he passed out. Dakota closed the lid on the medbox and went through to the command module and sat down at the console. Her stomach twisted to think of piloting the ship without her Ghost anticipating every thought and action.

  ‘Piri,’ she spoke into the air. ‘Respond only to voice commands from now on.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  It all seemed so clunky, so difficult, with none of the speed of thought reaction she was used to. But it would have to do.

  ‘Primary systems are currently down on board the Hyperion. I want you to seek out any localized automatic or override systems for the cargo bay doors. Then open them and prepare to exit the Hyperion on my command.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  Dakota waited in silence as seconds stretched into minutes. Meanwhile she ripped up an old shirt and used it to bind her shoulder and help stop the bleeding where Kieran had wounded her during their scuffle in the dark.

  Finally, laboriously, the cargo-bay doors began to swing open.

  Dakota sank back into an acceleration couch and guided the Piri out through the doors, slowly remembering half-forgotten piloting skills that didn’t involve the use of her Ghost implants. After slipping out of its cradle, the Piri moved inexorably towards stars framed by the huge open bay doors. The Hyperion slowly fell away behind them, and she instructed the Piri Reis to set a course for the inner system.

  If anyone on board the Hyperion, or its sister ship, was bothering to pay any attention, it wouldn’t have been difficult to shoot them out of the sky. But if the Senator and his buddies were still alive, maybe they were too busy trying to stay that way.

  Twenty-five

  Arbenz did not relish having to sacrifice the lives of the three troopers.

  But they were soldiers and, more, they were Freeholders, men brought up to appreciate the necessity of sacrifice in the face of war. Without his personal command, the Freehold forces arrayed in the Nova Arctis system would fall into disarray. It was therefore militarily essential that he himself stay alive. The same went for Kieran, the most deadly weapon the Senator possessed.

  Gardner was another matter. He should have been considered entirely dispensable but, unfortunately they needed the technical and financial support he represented.

  That meant sacrificing a trooper, which was no small matter. For that, Gardner would find himself paying a price one day.

  One of the troopers resisted, and Kieran had to slay him against his will. Another looked like he meant to resist, but Kieran’s dispatching of him was swift and merciful and clean. The third had a look in his eyes the Senator had seen before, during Challenges. It was the look of a man who knew with absolute certainty he was about to die.

  As the last of the air drained out of the Hyperion, Gardner, Kieran and the Senator hurriedly set to pulling the combat suits off the three dead troopers and putting them on. The suits were of a standard size, but designed to expand, contract and reshape themselves according to the physique of
the individual who wore them.

  Arbenz was pleased to feel his own suit fit itself tentatively around his contours, adjusting itself for maximum comfort and freedom of movement. All three of them next pulled on light, foldable helmets.

  He stared at the corpses of the three troopers, floating lifelessly nearby, and decided that one day children would be taken to see their commemorative statues standing tall and proud in public parks on Freehold worlds scattered throughout the furthest reaches of the Milky Way.

  Kieran led them along darkened corridors and via drop shafts towards the bridge, with nothing untoward occurring on the way. His soldier’s instinct assured him that whatever had been responsible for the sudden depressurization was finally gone.

  Once they reached the bridge, Kieran managed to reactivate the main systems without too much trouble, but it was clear that much data had been wiped from the Hyperion’s stacks. It was even clearer that the approaching fleet was almost upon them.

  Once Kieran had the emergency doors locked down and the bridge repressurized, Arbenz pulled off his helmet. ‘Kieran, see if that fleet is trying to hail us. Can you take us out of orbit if necessary?’

  ‘Propulsion systems are down for the moment, Senator, but the weapon systems remain fully functional.’

  ‘What if they start shooting?’ asked Gardner, his face white and eyes wide with alarm.

  ‘They’ll be waiting for us to start shooting first,’ Arbenz reassured him. ‘That way, history would record us as the aggressors. Kieran, hail the Agartha. I want to know if that fleet out there has identified itself yet.’

  Kieran nodded absently and tapped at a screen. He spoke up several moments later. ‘Senator, the ships are owned by Alexander Bourdain. They’ve requested our immediate surrender, or they’ll begin firing on us.’

  Gardner took a step forward. ‘Senator. We have to do something. We can’t just sit and wait!’

  Arbenz hustled over to a command console, which had a map of the Arctis system displayed above it. The approach vectors of Bourdain’s fleet were overlaid in lines of glowing green. Kieran meanwhile stepped over to man the weapons station immediately next to it.