Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Kieran, do you think—?’

  ‘I make sure to keep up my simulation training, Senator,’ Kieran replied, anticipating Arbenz’s further question. ‘There are three ships approaching, but only one of them is armed. More than likely the others are nothing more than troop carriers. My best guess is they didn’t anticipate us moving quite so many of our orbital military resources to this system.’

  ‘You’re saying they didn’t think we’d be so well armed, then?’ asked Gardner from behind them. There was a nervous edge to his voice that Arbenz didn’t miss.

  Kieran ignored his interruption and continued to address the Senator. ‘To all intents and purposes, the Hyperion appears to be still crippled. We could use that to our advantage.’

  ‘Where is the Agartha?’

  ‘Relative to Bourdain’s fleet, it’s been maintaining a position out of sight on the far side of Theona,’ Kieran informed him. ‘That means they’re using up a lot of fuel, but I’m fairly certain Bourdain’s fleet don’t know about her yet. Their approach vector is focused solely on the Hyperion.’

  Arbenz nodded, pleased once more with Kieran’s natural instinct for warfare. ‘We’ll wait until they’re closer, then we can spring a little surprise on them.’

  Twenty-six

  Corso was dreaming of his family back on Redstone, who were all glad to see him. He hugged his father, who was still wearing his prison uniform, his face streaked with blood from the prolonged torture sessions he had been forced to endure. Lucas recognized uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews he hadn’t seen in months.

  One by one, they all waved goodbye to him as, smiling and happy and holding hands, they lined up along the edge of a ditch. The children all wore brightly coloured breather masks, from which rose plumes of steam. But, after a few seconds, half a dozen armoured troopers stepped suddenly out from under the shade of a canopy tree, and mowed down every last one of them with repeated bursts of fire from their weapons.

  As Corso watched his kinsfolk tumble lifelessly into the trench, from nearby came the sound of an earth-digger engine roaring to life.

  —

  He woke feeling weak and dizzy, and the increasing gees from their rapid acceleration away from the Hyperion and from Theona didn’t help any. The Piri Reis was now roosting at maximum speed towards the inner system, putting as much distance between them and the Freehold as possible. He’d have actually preferred they headed for Newfall, but it was situated on the far side of Nova Arctis, and therefore out of range of the Piri’s fusion propulsion systems.

  When Dakota had explained how she’d deliberately fried her implants, a long silence followed that particular declaration.

  ‘So now you’re going to tell me where we’re going?’ he prompted. ‘Since, as far as I can tell, there’s nowhere else to go.’

  As he stirred, Corso found himself securely strapped into one of the acceleration couches. Dakota’s attention had been focused on a display of the invading fleet manoeuvring into orbit around Theona.

  The Hyperion appeared to be inactive, yet somehow he couldn’t help but believe the Senator was still alive. They’d know soon enough, once the fleet came within proper range of the frigate. Meanwhile, the Agartha, for reasons unknown, was only just beginning to move out from its orbit on the far side of Theona.

  ‘I’ll explain in a minute,’ she replied. ‘But first I want to tell you something—and then you can tell me if it sounds crazy or not.’

  Corso was too exhausted to argue and waved at her to go on.

  ‘Let’s say there was some kind of war a long way off, using some kind of starkiller weapon,’ Dakota continued. ‘Then the survivors escaped here, but the Shoal wiped them out, thereby establishing a technological hegemony.’ She looked around at him. ‘Why would the Shoal do that?’

  ‘Self-preservation?’ Corso shrugged. ‘Maybe the Magi were aggressors.’

  She shook her head. ‘Too simple. Everything changes now that we know the transluminal drive is also a weapon. It’s the one great question of the age: why do only the Shoal possess the secret of faster-than-light travel?’

  ‘Because they stole it from the Magi,’ he replied, as if stating the stunningly obvious.

  ‘But if the Magi figured out how to do it, why not the Shoal? Why did they have to steal it from someone else?’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘My point,’ Dakota answered, ‘is if one race can develop a transluminal drive, then why not a dozen races? Or a thousand, for that matter? By all rights, based on what we now know about the drive, half the Milky Way should be barren and lifeless. The skies should be filled with battlefields thousands of light years across and littered with dead worlds.’

  Corso smiled wryly. ‘Maybe it is, and we just don’t know it yet. You’re also assuming other species would be as aggressive and expansionist as we humans are.’

  She laughed, the sound dry and pitiless. ‘And you reckon they aren’t?’

  Corso peered at her. ‘What happened to you that time I put you in the interface chair? I could tell you were holding something back.’

  ‘All right,’ she relented. ‘I saw a lot. It was like I was actually on some world within the Magellanic Clouds. I know the link only lasted a couple of seconds but, believe me, it felt like longer. Much longer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve hardly had time to really think clearly about it.’ Corso smiled at that. ‘It felt like waking from a dream where you feel like you’ve spent ten years of your life in a place that doesn’t exist any more. It felt like knowing everything about it, instantly. That’s what it felt like.’

  ‘But were you able to hang on to any of it, once your Ghost was wiped?’

  ‘Only what I could remember with my natural memory. Even with my Ghost fully operative, most of it didn’t make sense—at least, not at first.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I don’t think even the Magi developed the transluminal drive themselves. I think they found it somewhere.’

  Corso didn’t look as surprised as she might have expected.

  ‘There were hints of something like that in the derelict’s historical records,’ he confirmed. ‘It didn’t make much sense at first, but—’

  ‘But it does now?’

  ‘Worryingly so, yes.’

  She nodded. ‘All right, here’s another idea for you. What if the Magi, when they discovered their first transluminal drive, had actually walked into a trap?’

  Corso looked at her disbelievingly, but she hurried on.

  ‘Look, say you want to get rid of potential competitor species, for whatever reason. Maybe to prevent them from becoming powerful enough to end up effectively ruling a galaxy the way the Shoal now do. So what you do is leave something very like that derelict hidden away somewhere it might eventually get discovered by a species possessing the ability to get into space, but only at a sublight crawl.’

  ‘This is the most paranoid thing I’ve ever heard in my life,’ Corso guffawed. ‘What could possibly make you think—?’

  ‘One thing I learned while I was in that chair is that the Shoal may own the transluminal drive, but even they don’t really understand how it works. The derelict on Theona isn’t one of those traps I suggested, but I think the Magi themselves found something very like it a long time ago—and that was a trap.’

  ‘You know, even when we were on board the derelict, I had no idea of the drive’s destructive capacity. It sounds to me like maybe you already had some idea of what it could do.’

  ‘No, Lucas, I didn’t. But once the Senator forced you to admit what the drive could do, all those fragmented bits and pieces of knowledge from the derelict started to make sense. Think about it: a cache of technology left hidden on some uninhabited world, like bait for a rat.’

  ‘And you know all this from only a few seconds in that chair?’

  ‘Why not?’ Dakota demanded. ‘You can’t deny it makes a lot of sense, once you put the evidence together.’

&n
bsp; ‘So why haven’t the Shoal managed to wipe themselves out, in all this time?’

  ‘Because they’ve been careful. Very careful. Maybe only a select few of them ever know the truth. Whatever created the cache the Magi discovered intended that the drive would eventually wipe out any aggressive, war-making species that later stumbled across it.’

  ‘So the Magi got wiped out.’

  ‘Yes, but some of them survived and escaped here. Now the Shoal roam the galaxy, looking for the same kind of caches wherever they might still be hidden. Not necessarily because they’re greedy, and not just to retain their power, but maybe because, if they don’t, someone else might find the technology and initiate a war like nothing we could ever begin to imagine. The kind of war that usually doesn’t leave any survivors to pass on a warning.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound almost like you’re on the side of the Shoal.’

  ‘No, I’m saying that once you begin to take into account the things we now know, the overall picture gets a lot more complicated.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Corso shook his head. ‘It’s a lot to accept.’

  Dakota twisted her head around to eye him triumphantly. ‘All right, here’s the killer proof. Clause Six, in the Shoal’s colonial contracts.’

  Corso gazed at her quizzically. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We don’t really know why the Shoal insists on that clause, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. They gave the Uchidans a world of their own, and a couple of decades later they took it away from them again. But why?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Because the Shoal found another cache there: the same kind of thing the Magi once stumbled on. It’s the one explanation that helps everything else make sense.’

  Corso looked thunderstruck. ‘But a solar system is a big place, Dakota. Why—?’

  ‘Even the Shoal can’t search through every solar system in the galaxy. Easier to wait until one becomes inhabited, and then scour it thoroughly for evidence of a cache. Even if they don’t find one at first, they know they’re going to be frequent visitors there aboard their coreships, since no one can get to that world except through them. And this gives them plenty of time, in the long run, to survey every last boulder and grain of sand within a system. So when they found one in the Uchidan home system, they didn’t want any witnesses, and they weren’t taking any chances whatsoever.’

  Corso shook his head and looked away. ‘Maybe you’ve got something there.’

  ‘No, Lucas, I’m more sure of this than I’ve ever been of anything.’

  ‘So,’ he asked carefully, ‘what are you proposing we do now?’

  She studied him carefully as she spoke. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. At first I just didn’t want Arbenz to get his hands on that Theona derelict, and now I realize you don’t either. But there’s even bigger reasons now to make sure he doesn’t win this.’

  ‘That’s a given, but it’s not what I meant,’ Corso replied. ‘Say, for argument’s sake, you got your hands on that derelict. Do you destroy it like the Shoal presumably want, or do we take possession of it and make humanity into a true star-faring species?’

  ‘I’m still not sure,’ Dakota admitted. ‘But right now our priority is staying alive. Your Senator has that fleet to deal with, and I don’t know who’s going to win the fight, but once it’s over, the survivors are going to come after us.’

  ‘Now you’re going to tell me just why it is we’re headed into the inner system.’

  ‘Do you remember when I came to you in the medical bay, and I said the derelict had fired out some kind of signal at the same time it attacked you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said guardedly. ‘But I never had the chance to find out what that was all about.’

  ‘It looks like our derelict isn’t alone: it might have been part of a fleet. Well, that transmission was fired directly toward Nova Arctis’ innermost world, Ikaria.’

  Corso took a moment to absorb this information. ‘But you don’t actually know anything’s there,’ he said finally.

  ‘It’s a chance.’

  ‘A chance at what?’ Corso protested. ‘There’s nowhere for us to go. You saved my life. I’m grateful for that.’

  ‘We’ll never get control of the derelict that’s on Theona,’ Dakota replied, ‘but I’ve got reason to think we might do better with whatever other derelicts are on Ikaria. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, we can survive this one.’

  Corso stared at her, speechless.

  She grinned. ‘But, if you’d rather turn back and surrender . . .’

  Corso shook his head. ‘No, Let’s just maintain this course. At least we’ll gain ourselves some breathing space before the fusion piles give out.’

  Twenty-seven

  Bourdain’s fleet fell into the Nova Arctis system like a swarm of avenging silver angels, the hull of his centre ship bristling with plasma weapons focused on the silent shape of the Hyperion, still locked into its tight orbit around Theona.

  They had crossed the system at the highest speed possible, and were currently locked into a high-gee deceleration, their engines pointed in-system as they braked hard to avoid overshooting the gas-giant Dymas altogether. Warriors in dull-grey liquid body armour were couched in racked acceleration couches inside the two accompanying craft.

  The three ships began to turn as they came out of deceleration, each slowly spinning around until they dropped towards Theona nose-first, their automated weapons systems swivelling to maintain their line of fire on the Hyperion itself and the base on the moon’s surface, far below.

  —

  Arbenz frowned, glancing across the bridge to where Kieran still maintained his post at a console. Gardner sat a little way off, in a couch at one end of the bridge area, watching them both with a contemplative look. Contemplating how to get rid of us, more than likely, the Senator mused.

  Kieran looked up. ‘Sir, I’m concerned about what that woman Merrick said, about the Shoal placing software spies inside the Hyperion’s stacks—’

  ‘We can worry about that later,’ Arbenz responded dismissively. ‘Right now, we have this fleet to contend with. In the meantime, I’d love to know who was responsible for leaking information about the derelict’s existence to Bourdain.’

  ‘Senator?’

  Arbenz glanced over at Gardner, who was peering down at a comms console with apparent fascination.

  ‘What is it, Mr Gardner?’ he snapped, his voice full of irritation.

  ‘It’s the derelict, Senator. You might want to take a look at this.’

  Arbenz turned to Kieran, who then brought up what Gardner was seeing to the main screens.

  There were severe tremors evident on Theona, bad enough to rupture the ice, and all centred on the derelict. The officer in charge of the surface base had already ordered an evacuation.

  Doubt assailed Gregor Arbenz for the first time in a very, very long while. Things were starting to move far faster than he would have anticipated.

  —

  The staff and troopers stationed inside the Theona base had barely a few seconds to register what at first appeared to be a major ‘quake. Then they registered nothing at all, when the base, along with several cubic kilometres of ice and rock, was vaporized in an instant, leaving the churning ocean below exposed to the stars and the cold of space for the first time in half a billion years.

  A hole had appeared in the pristine white surface of Theona, a vast chasm with foam churning at its bottom, as water boiled on contact with the near vacuum of the moon’s atmosphere.

  From the centre of it all arose a shape like a nightmarish expressionist sculpture of a squid, carried upwards by incandescent bursts of energy. Water cascaded from its hull, freezing instantly and shearing off in great sheets, as the derelict fought its way through the clouds of debris and superheated steam that rose in a great mushroom above Theona’s fractured horizon.

  —

  ‘Senator,’ Gardner’s tone became harsh and clipped,
‘I am asking you again to order the Agartha to fire on the derelict.’

  Arbenz sighed and forced himself to turn away from what he was seeing on the overhead screens. So far, Bourdain’s fleet hadn’t fired on them, and Kieran had regained nominal control of the propulsion systems as well as the weapon banks, but hadn’t activated either. They were going to run silent for as long as possible. The Hyperion still looked like it was mostly inoperative: dead in the water, as they used to say.

  So far it looked like their strategy was working, while the approaching fleet appeared to be heading for a rendezvous. Arbenz couldn’t help but wonder what they would make of the alien craft that had just wiped out an entire Freehold base.

  Meanwhile, the Agartha was due to reappear, any minute now, from its hiding place on the far side of Theona.

  ‘Mr Gardner, you have no power aboard a sovereign Freehold military vessel. Your role here is purely advisory—and I’d counsel you to remember that.’

  Gardner came round to stand directly in front of the Senator, thrusting his face forward. ‘If you don’t shoot that thing out of the sky before it jumps out of this system, our entire arrangement is over. All support for this expedition will be withdrawn, and you can pay your own damn bills.’

  The Senator stared at Gardner, and then burst out laughing. ‘Why in the name of Christ do you think we would destroy the one thing we came here for?’

  Kieran stood silently nearby, awaiting his orders. It seemed Gardner had forgotten about him for the moment. Good.

  ‘That derelict is clearly under the control of some alien force,’ Gardner persisted. ‘What if it jumps right inside the heart of this system’s star and turns it nova, Senator? What if it tries to destroy us all?’

  The Senator gave him a pitying look. ‘Or you might consider the more realistic possibility that Dakota Merrick is controlling the derelict herself.’

  Gardner stared at him, almost bug-eyed with horror. ‘You think this is just a matter of someone simply stealing the derelict?’ he choked. ‘We don’t have any reason to think it isn’t about to destroy this entire system, you fucking lunatic. Merrick said the Shoal knew from the start what we’d found and now, by the looks of it, they’re busy protecting their secret. If you don’t act right now, there’s a very good chance we’re all going to die.’