Stealing Light (40 page)

‘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.

‘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.’

‘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.’