Stealing Light (18 page)

For all their sophistication, Ghost implants could sometimes produce unexpected results, varying from individual to individual. In a few very extreme cases they had been known to subtly twist the perceptions of those who possessed them. In such cases the subconscious began to manifest itself in unexpected ways, via the artificial conduit of the implants.

This was why Dakota at first fervently hoped she had only imagined the flagged news item. But hope rapidly gave way to a bottomless despair as she stared miserably at the information now on the screen before her.

Josef Marados, late of Black Rock Ore Industries, had been found dead, apparently murdered. Unpleasant images of a vicious murder scene—Josef’s office, and a brief glimpse of a body that was hard to reconcile with Dakota’s memories of the living, breathing man -flashed before her in gory detail.

I should go back,
she thought miserably. But who could have done it?

Bourdain.

Who else? It had to be Bourdain. He was still alive, and hot on her trail. Josef’s only reward for helping her had been his own murder.

After a few minutes, good sense prevailed. Under the circumstances, returning to Mesa Verde now would be tantamount to suicide. With Josef gone, there was no one there to protect her any more.

Then she had a better idea. She could lose herself somewhere on the coreship they were now rushing to meet.

The alien starship continually sent out informational ripples that lapped upon the shore of Dakota’s boosted consciousness. Any ship Bourdain sent after her would never be able to catch up with the
Hyperion,
but it might still be able to rendezvous with the Shoal coreship before it departed the solar system.

At least once the
Hyperion
had rendezvoused with the coreship, she herself could disappear into the throng of humans who made their lives there, then keep moving, boarding other coreships for as long as it took for Bourdain either to give up or lose interest. It was a worst-case scenario—and one that would guarantee her the additional enmity of the Freehold—but if things really were as bad as she thought, any other options were seriously limited.

Paranoia began to spin new webs inside her mind. The alien had given her the statuette while she was still on board Bourdain’s Rock. Was it possible, she wondered, that the statuette might contain something within it that allowed Bourdain to keep track of her?

No, too paranoid,
she thought, shaking her head. The concept of an alien collaborating with Bourdain in some way raised a thousand more questions than it provided answers. And yet. . .

And then she remembered noticing an imager on the bridge of the
Hyperion.

If there was anything hidden inside the figurine, then that would be the best way to find it. The easier solution would be simply to destroy or get rid of it, but that overwhelming feeling there was something desperately important about the object continued to haunt her.

She cursed herself as an idiot for not considering an imager scan earlier. At the very least doing so would keep her preoccupied until she had a better idea what exactly had happened back on Mesa Verde.

She stepped through the door of her quarters into the corridor beyond, the figurine squeezed securely into a jacket pocket.

Twelve

Redstone Colony

Consortium Standard Date: 01.06.2538

3 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

Dakota snapped awake to hear the duty klaxon blaring like Satan’s own alarm clock. She stumbled out of her cot—Severn mumbling behind her, only just beginning to stir—and collapsed to her knees beneath the window, gripping her head in her hands until the pain of the headache began to ebb. The last lingering fragments of her dream faded with it.

Frequent migraines were a worrying sign. They could get worse, much worse, and sometimes the only cure for a machine-head was to have the implants removed altogether. The idea of life without her Ghost was already unthinkable.

Finally, as the pain faded to nothing, Dakota stood up and let her forehead touch the icy windowpane. She stared outside to the spot where the altercation had taken place the night before. Fresh snow had fallen, obliterating any history.

Then the second klaxon sounded, and Severn finally jerked upright with a surprised snort.

—

Less than twenty minutes later, Dakota felt another sharp stab of pain in her temple as they both made their way to the mess hall. It felt like tiny, fire-breathing dragons were rampaging through her skull, but there and gone in an instant.

‘Shit. Dak, you OK?’ Severn put a hand on her shoulder as she leaned her head against a wall.

‘No ... I don’t know, Chris. I think I need to see someone.’

He offered to accompany her to the medical labs, but she waved him off, suddenly not wanting any company at all. She was nervous enough about this morning’s mission, and didn’t feel too much like breakfast anyway.

—

‘Sounds like a standard circuit-induced migraine to me.’

The doctor was a youngish man with dark curly hair. Her Ghost informed her his name was O’Neill. She lay back in something that looked like Hieronymous Bosch’s idea of a dentist’s chair, staring up at the ceiling beyond the curving plastic of the scan unit. The chair was angled so far back, she suspected she might slide right out of it and headfirst on to the floor, had she not been tightly strapped in place. Her head was held immobilized as tiny, needle-like devices rotated on well-oiled arms around her scalp, interrogating her implants. Ultrasound images were projected on a nearby wall.

‘Well, it felt worse than any fucking circuit headache I’ve ever had before,’ Dakota complained bitterly.

O’Neill shook his head. ‘See, this is exactly why they should keep machine-heads apart as long as possible. With so many of you gathered together like this, if one’s got any kind of a problem, the rest of them will pick it up in no time.’

‘I know Chris Severn’s been having the same problem. Anyone else?’

O’Neill hit a button and the chair back rolled up with a soft hum. ‘You’re not the first this morning,’ he agreed, while a nurse undid the straps and helped her down.

Dakota watched him carefully, noting his tight-lipped expression. ‘Then is it safe to go ahead with our scheduled missions? Shouldn’t we be investigating this?’

‘Yeah, we should. But there’ll be shit to pay if we have to pull back now. We’ll be losing a vital “window of opportunity”, as they like to say upstairs.’

Dakota was scandalized. ‘And this comes from Commander Marados?’

O’Neill paused for a moment with his mouth open. ‘No, higher, I think,’ he finally admitted.

‘It just seems a bit dubious.’

‘Well,’ O’Neill touched her elbow to lead her out the room, ‘that’s the military for you. One big, happy, bureaucratic family. If anything goes wrong, it’s always somebody else’s fault.’

Dakota stopped at the door and glared back at him accusingly.

‘Look,’ said O’Neill, ‘there’s really nothing to worry about, OK? Otherwise orders would have come down from Command to postpone the mission. If they’re happy, we’re happy.’

Perhaps, Dakota thought, as she walked away, she should have mentioned the hallucinations as well.

She had dreamed of angels with wings. They had drifted down to alight in the centre of a town marketplace she remembered from her childhood. Warmth and beauty and a sense of welcoming had been carried in the opalescent radiance of their perfect golden skin. One, a woman with long flowing hair and an expression so kind that Dakota had wept even in her sleep, floated just millimetres above the cobbled ground, regarding her with infinite compassion.

The angel had spoken to her in some strange, incomprehensible dialect that somehow translated into perfect meaning the instant she heard it.

On waking that morning, she hadn’t been able to recall a single word the angel had said. But the sense of having been somewhere
real
was sufficiently strong to leave her with an overwhelming sense of loss.

Dakota hesitated, and thought about turning back. But what exactly could she tell O’Neill? That she had experienced a particularly vivid dream? She would only be making a fool of herself.

Instead she continued on her way. O’Neill surely knew what he was doing, and orders were indeed orders. The med-tech would have just reprimanded her for wasting his time. The dream itself was only that, a dream—perhaps brought about by her general state of anxiety in the run-up to the assault on Cardinal Point.

—

On her way to that morning’s briefing, Dakota passed through a wide circular room that had been nicknamed the Circus Ring. This had become the centre of operations for the Consortium’s ground command, and a huge array of communications and data systems had been set up all around the Ring’s perimeter.

There, the general air of tension had been given an overnight boost by a threefold increase in the number of staff now wandering the corridors. The briefings were being run constantly, along with endless strategy meetings and drills. Within just a few hours, the arrival and departure of orbital personnel carriers and dropships had become a constant background roar that was expected to continue for several days and nights.

Dakota stood on a walkway running around the Circus Ring’s circumference and looked down at a group of Freehold commanders talking with their Consortium equivalents. There seemed something peculiarly archaic about the Freeholders’ uniforms, as one of them stood with hands planted imperiously on hips.

After a moment, Dakota noticed the Freeholder was talking with Josef Marados, whose face was red and angry She felt a stab of sympathy for him, having already heard numerous stories of such encounters with arrogant Freeholders making extraordinary demands of the people there to help them win their war. The calm of Consortium staffers moving past the tense knot of Freeholders made for a stark contrast.

The Freeholders were a joke, and they didn’t even know it.

Then she noticed the alien for the first time, gliding like a watery phantasm across the central space of the Ring.

Shoal-members were generally about as easy to miss as an elephant in a tuxedo playing the flute. A few of its tentacles regularly shot out from underneath its body, grabbing at smaller creatures swimming within its gravity-suspended ball of water, and drawing them rapidly in towards it and out of sight. A few moments later, tiny pieces of bloody cartilage and bone spewed out from the creature’s underside, staining the water.

Josef broke off from his argument with the Freeholders and went immediately over to the alien, followed by his suborn, Ulmer. The alien was already accompanied by a phalanx of black-armoured Consortium elite security.

Dakota recalled something Severn had said the night before:
one of these days, someone’s going to figure out how a bunch of fish ended up ruling the galaxy without learning how to make fire.

This increased entourage swept across the Circus Ring, before disappearing through a door leading into a part of the complex for which Dakota didn’t have clearance.

It was the first time she’d ever seen one of the Shoal in the flesh.

She’d heard arguments day and night throughout the mess halls and these temporary barracks about how none of them would be here at all if it were not for the Shoal’s restrictive colonial contracts. There had been something terrifyingly random, even meaningless, about the expulsion of the Uchidans from their original colony, so it was far easier to blame the Shoal for the current unhappy state of affairs than anything else.

She recognized the guard posted outside the doorway Josef had just passed through along with the alien. She’d met him at a drinking session, just before dropping down from orbit, and recalled his name was Milner. He had made the mistake of trying to match her, and three others, shot for shot before he wound up comatose under a bar table.

He grinned as she came up to him. ‘Merrick, right? And my head still hurts.’

‘Call me Dakota,’ she said, then, ‘What’s with the alien?’ nodding towards the door he was guarding.

Milner shrugged. ‘Beats me why that thing’s here. And even if I knew . . .’ he shrugged.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, you couldn’t tell me. I wasn’t asking you for any secrets, I was just wondering if I’d missed something in the briefings this morning. I had to go to see the doctor.’

‘It’s here just to observe,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Like maybe it’s curious to see how we handle these things, but I don’t think anybody really knows.’

Part Two

Thirteen

Dakota was relieved to find no one else on the bridge of the
Hyperion
when she got there.

For a sophisticated piece of technology, an imaging plate didn’t look like much. Just a circular platform: you took an object, stuck it on the plate, and waited while the item was scanned. That simple.

Except, it wasn’t really so simple as that. Placing her figurine on the plate wouldn’t just return data concerning the raw composition of the materials comprising it. If the imager’s database was up to date, it could also return a whole slew of information about the figurine’s probable cultural origin and significance, and maybe even the name of whoever had created it. Beyond that it could also return reams of forensic data, including the DNA traces of every human—or non-human—who had ever handled it.

Accordingly, any number of artefacts—jewellery, mementos, even works of art—had been designed specifically with imager technology in mind. A ring placed on such a plate might generate a wide-band artificial sensorium representing the sight, sound, memory and tactile experience of an associated loved one. The pornographic potential of this technology had therefore been explored for centuries. On top of which, plate-readable data could be encoded into almost any substrate, and often was.

Perhaps this, then, was why the alien had handed her the figurine—because it contained some form of encoded data.

She had muttered curses at the empty corridors as she passed through them on her way across the ship, wondering why she’d taken so long for this to occur to her.

She pushed back the cover over the imager, a horizontal flat black disc set into a wall recess. Dakota pulled the figurine out of her pocket, placed it on the plate and stepped back. A few seconds passed and nothing happened.

She began to wonder if she’d been wrong after all.

The
Hyperion
shuddered and the bridge lights flickered.

Piri! What was that?

A light blinked and she realized the imager had begun its scan, although it was taking a lot longer to do so than normally. Numerical and compositional data began to spill across the imager’s screen:

COMPOSITION

88% ferric alloy, 10% organic matter, 2% other factors

*

ORIGIN OF COMPOSITE ELEMENTS

unknown/not on record. Phylogenetic analysis of organic materials suggests: Indonesian maize hybrid.

MICROSCOPIC SOIL TRACES DETECTED

(<0.0002% of overall composition): ORIGIN: unknown.

GENERAL TACH-NET ENTRIES     None

MANUFACTURED BY              Unknown

PRIOR OR PRESENT OWNERSHIP   Unknown

INTERACTIVITY INDEX          Zero/not known

*

SAVE SUMMARY OR RE-SCAN?

Piri, I felt something happen almost the instant I put that statuette on the imaging plate. There’s no way that’s a coincidence.

the machine repeated pedantically. Dakota quelled her frustration and picked up the figurine, stashing it out of sight behind a panel.

She turned and saw several message icons were now flashing on screens and in the air. It appeared her passengers, too, were concerned at this fresh turn of events.

—

‘Look, I don’t have a fucking clue what just happened. You ever flown a ship before?’

‘A low-orbit glider,’ Gardner replied, studying Dakota with eagle eyes. ‘That isn’t the point.’

‘Well, my point is, this isn’t a glider,’ Dakota snapped back. ‘I need to check every system is functioning, and that’s what I’ve been doing. So frankly, if the lights go dim or the ship shakes again, don’t be too surprised—’

‘I’m not happy about this, Miss Oorthaus,’ Gardner replied, glowering at her.

‘Fine.’ Dakota folded her arms. ‘Want to find another pilot? Go ahead.’

Gardner stared at her in silence for long seconds then let out a long sigh. ‘Mala, the Senator and the rest of them here aren’t nearly as reasonable as I can be. When things go wrong, they tend to react badly.’

He spoke quietly, leaning in towards her as if sharing the details of some secret indiscretion. ‘Josef Marados assured us you were one of the very best. If you’re not being straight with me now, we can trace the source of the incident through the stack records. After that it’s in the Senator’s hands.’

She gazed into Gardner’s eyes and suddenly felt sure he had no idea what had happened to Josef Marados. But surely he knew? How could any of them not know?

But Gardner wasn’t questioning her about Marados’s death. He was concerned about the sudden, violent spike in the
Hyperion’s
computer systems while she’d been on the bridge on her own.

‘I am,’ she told him fervently, ‘one of the best. I can take you through the necessary protocols and show you everything I’ve done since I came on board. And the fact remains that this ship’s been quietly falling apart in orbit for the best part of a century. It’s like a three-legged dog. That they’ve managed to keep the thing flying at ail is remarkable.’

Gardner put his hands up. ‘That won’t be necessary. I’m going to go talk to Senator Arbenz now, and I can guarantee he’ll run an independent systems analysis. Is there anything else you want to add?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, holding his gaze, and injecting what she hoped was just the right mixture of irritation and outrage into her response. ‘This vessel is a shit-can. If you don’t let me do things my way and it ends up dumping the internal atmosphere because I wasn’t allowed to fully test the systems, it won’t be my fault. Otherwise, I need to know how it works and what holds it together, and that means running checks on systems that haven’t been properly maintained in a very long time.’

‘All right, but if there’s any chance whatsoever of any further disruptions occurring, I want you to clear it with me first. Understood?’

Dakota nodded her assent and watched Gardner depart.

Piri, who else has been reading the news reports coming out of Mesa Verde?

She then had the
Piri Reis
recheck the Mesa Verde bulletins and found to her amazement that the news item about Marados’s death had been erased. She had her ship backtrack, but the original item Dakota had read no longer existed. There was no longer any evidence it had even been picked up by the
Hyperion’s
tach-net monitors.

Dakota found herself gripped by an overwhelming sense of paranoia, a feeling that her grip on reality had become deeply tenuous. Dakota had read one thing . . . and, somehow, Gardner and the Freeholders had read another.

Either she was going crazy and she’d imagined it all, and Josef was still alive back on Mesa Verde, or someone on board the
Hyperion
had reprogrammed the tach-net transponders to exclude any mention of his murder.

She turned and glanced behind her. ‘You can come out now, Udo.’

Udo Mansell emerged from the shadows to the rear of the bridge like a looming ghost.

‘Very good,’ said the Freeholder, stepping towards her. ‘How long did you know?’

‘Ever since you arrived through the service hatch. I know where
everything
is on this ship, at all times.’ She reached up and tapped the side of her head. ‘Remember?’

He kept coming forward until he was peering down at her from his imposing height. He reached out to touch her cheek. She flinched, then stepped back till she had put a work console between them.

‘Why afraid?’ he asked her.

‘Who says I’m afraid?’

‘The problem with your kind is you don’t know how to talk to normal human beings. You’re all so busy being wired into each other’s brains, you’ve forgotten all the subtleties of normal human interaction. I’m sure you can’t be beaten when it comes to operating machinery like on this vessel, but when it comes to deception, you’re more of an open book than most. That’s how I can tell when you’re lying.’

He kept moving closer to her, and Dakota found herself being gradually forced back towards the entrance to the bridge. At the last moment, Udo stepped around her, putting himself between her and the exit. She tried to push past him and he reached for her shoulder.

She brought her fist up in instinctive response, aiming for his head. But he caught it with ease, as if she’d perfectly telegraphed the motion in advance. Her arm trembled under his grip as he forced it back down to her side. She yanked herself free and again put distance between them.

Udo moved towards her once more, grinning widely. ‘Let’s look at some facts. We need you to perform a specific and important task. You obviously need us too, as you’re an illegal. It’s like that idiot Gardner said—the very fact you’re working for us makes you by definition a liar, because it’s the lies you tell that keep you alive. We both know that, right?’

She went on the offensive as he reached out to her again. She grabbed his arm and pulled him towards her, but again he anticipated the move, and pushed down on her chest with his free arm.

It would have been easier if the
Hyperion’s
bridge hadn’t been under spin, but instead provided anyone on the ship’s central ring with a close to Earth-normal gravity. She was always a better fighter in zero gee.

She hit the floor hard, Udo twisting her arm so she was forced into a prone position beneath him, her face to the floor. A long, wicked-looking knife appeared in his free hand as he kneeled over her. Her throat constricted with horror as he brought the serrated edge close to her neck.

She could smell the rank stink of his breath over her shoulder. She tried to push herself back up with her free hand and felt an explosion of pain in her other shoulder.

‘See that?’ he muttered, bringing the blade up closer to her face so she could see it more clearly. ‘Maybe you’d like to know how many throats it’s cut.’

Dakota said nothing, her breaths erupting in short tight gasps.

‘Let’s get this straight,’ Udo continued. ‘I don’t like your kind. I saw what happened at Port Gabriel, and I don’t buy this crap about how it wasn’t really any of their fault. You’re all a bunch of untrustworthy walking fucking time bombs. That’s bad enough, but you—you
like
being that way. You like it so much, you’ve still got those chips in your head. What the fuck is that about, huh?’

‘I wasn’t there,’ Dakota gasped.

‘I really hope so,’ Udo snarled. ‘Because if you had been, you’d already be dead and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Gardner’s a businessman, he avoids seeing the messy side of things. Even the Senator and my brother have to play by certain rules. That’s how things are for them. Me, I prefer to get straight to the point and fuck the politics. So let’s be clear on this, Mala. I’ll be watching. Closely. The instant you screw up and I think it’s deliberate, or I think you’ve been lying to us, you’re dead.’

‘Well, you’re going to have a hell of a time steering this ship without me,’ she spat back.

Udo laughed, and there was a momentary relaxation of pressure. ‘Steering
this
ship? If you only knew. Maybe it’s time you did.’

‘Hey, let her go.’

She didn’t recognize the voice. With her arm twisted back and bent over, all she could see was the floor beneath her.

‘Hey. I said let her
go
.’

The pressure on Dakota’s back relented momentarily, presumably because Udo was distracted by the sudden interruption. She took the opportunity to twist free of the Freeholder’s grasp, rolling over to one side as fast as she could move. He mumbled profanities and aimed a hefty kick at her: his boot struck home and sharp pain lanced through her hip. She yelped, and a moment later Udo had her by her hair.

She caught sight of Lucas Corso, who stepped forward and locked one arm around Udo’s neck and tried to pull him away. Udo responded by reaching behind himself and grabbing at Corso’s shirt. He had to let go of her again to do this, and she took the opportunity to twist round and punch him hard in the stomach.

Dakota scuttled out of Udo’s reach and watched as Corso tumbled to the floor of the bridge, winded by a blow. But Udo had his back to her for the moment, and Dakota’s military training kicked back in. She locked one arm around his neck, delivering a series of rapid punches to the side of the man’s head.

It had almost no effect, and felt like punching hard granite. Her knuckles ached from the effort.

‘Stop this. Stop this
now.’

Dakota looked up to see Gardner had returned.

‘Udo. I’ll want to speak to you later. In the meantime, get the fuck off of the bridge.’

For a moment, Dakota wondered if the Freeholder was going to do what he was told or if he’d attack Gardner as well. She could see the businessman had his own doubts, judging by the pallor of his skin, but he held his ground.

‘I’m telling you now, Udo,’ Gardner repeated, his voice pitched higher than usual, ‘I don’t want to see anything like this again. If Senator Arbenz has any sense, he’ll have you thrown out of the nearest airlock the instant he gets wind of this. Until then, return to your quarters.’

Udo Mansell stood like a statue, a solid carved block of hatred focused on Gardner. Then he relaxed, and smiled, as if he’d just lost a friendly game of cards.

‘I think you’ll find my approach to shipboard security tends to produce high dividends,’ he replied, his voice suddenly sounding breezy and relaxed. ‘Catch you all later,’ he added, and stepped past Gardner and off the bridge.