Stealing Light (25 page)

Dakota unlocked her seat restraints and tumbled out. She could hear the sound of wind blowing. Her eyes were dazzled by a sliver of bright sunlight coming through an enormous rent in the side of the cockpit.

She found the manual switch for the emergency exit and watched as a panel slid away in the cockpit’s ceiling. Moving carefully, she lifted herself through it and saw the craft had gouged a hole in the frozen soil, thirty metres in length, a long black scar that intersected a narrow highway crossing a flat plain of snow and rock, but scattered with the vast plumes of canopy trees further away towards the horizon.

Frozen air assaulted Dakota’s lungs. She scanned the horizon, feeling the whip of frigid wind over her stubbled scalp. Black columns of smoke rose up towards the sky from downed dropships all around. In the distance she could see the tented buildings and ‘scrapers of Port Gabriel, and the winding curve of the river it stood next to.

The ad hoc Ghost network, of which she was now part, informed her how many serving God’s purpose had survived the impacts, reminding her that those who died would now be safe in God’s embrace. And before too long, Dakota would join them in eternity. The knowledge filled her heart with gladness.

In the meantime, she was in danger of freezing to death, as her suit might insulate her, but not indefinitely. She reached into pockets provided on the hips and shins of her suit and pulled out high-quality survival gear, composed of super-thin fabrics designed to keep her insulated and alive. Last of all, she pulled the hood over her head, and down over the top of her gee suit.

Next, she checked her weapon. She had heard voices coming from the rear of the dropship, so there were survivors among the Freeholders.

She noticed that her dropship, too, was sending its own thick, black contrail of death spiralling into the sky. She strode past the ruined command module, in which the cockpit was located, heading for the rear of the craft.

Pausing, she saw the command module had been largely torn away from the rest of the ship.

Hearing more voices, she kept going and, as she came aft, she saw several figures struggling out through another emergency exit. Shouting and calling to each other, they were intent on lowering bodies to the ground from inside the ship. She’d had two dozen Freehold assault troops on board, and it appeared the majority of them were now either dead or severely injured. Bodies lay everywhere, many without breather masks.

Soot-smudged faces looked towards her and gestured, calling out to her, anger clear in their voices. In the distance, far beyond, the angel strode the earth once more. It rose even higher than the mountains, gathering the souls of the fallen.

The Freeholders shouting to her appeared unaware of its presence, and Dakota felt sorry for them.

‘How many survivors?’ she called out, approaching at a brisk pace.

‘What the
hell
happened back there?’ one man screamed, his face contorted with fury. He rose from kneeling over one of the bodies, and came towards her, his hands bunched into fists. Blood streaked his face where it wasn’t hidden by the breather mask.

‘Some kind of systems error,’ she replied, trying to inject just the right tone of concern and despair into the words. ‘Orbital Command’s override systems must have been compromised in some way. How many survivors?’

‘Not many.’ The Freeholder stared like he wanted to swat Dakota like a fly, but for the moment at least he was thinking rationally. He glanced over his shoulder, looking at four companions still extracting bodies from inside the hull. ‘Just the five of us are mobile, most of the rest of us are dead. It looks like part of the fusion drive chassis sheared off during the impact, and—’

He never got to finish his sentence.

For Dakota, the worst thing about killing him was knowing that he would never see the Kingdom of God. She slipped her pistol out of its holster with practised ease and fired off three rapid shots, tattooing the man’s chest with rapidly spreading dark stains. He dropped like a stone, sprawling lifeless on the ground.

The others immediately went for their weapons, but Dakota had the element of surprise. She fired again, shearing off the side of one man’s head. Another flipped over and tumbled into a twisted heap. The remaining three scrambled towards cover, but Dakota killed them with expertly placed shots in the back.

Dakota had never killed anyone before. It had taken seconds.

She walked over and saw that one or two lying on the ground were merely injured. Their friends had pulled them free of the wreckage and placed breather masks over their faces. Filled by an overwhelming sense of peace, she despatched each of them with a single shot to the head.

Somewhere in the distance, she noticed a glint of light from a moving windscreen. A line of vehicles was approaching along the road leading from Port Gabriel.

Eighteen

A yellow star in its mid-life dominated the Nova Arctis system, accompanied by a retinue of eight planets comprising two rocky inner worlds, several gas-giants and a frozen snowball, two thousand kilometres in diameter, that barely clung to its hundred-year-long orbit.

The second innermost world was the one the Freeholders wanted to colonize: they had called it Newfall. That was a name clearly imbued with hope, but the long-range readings suggested it would be a considerable time, if ever, before the thin skein of atmosphere clinging to its rocky crust would support any kind of life.

Dakota sat enclosed within the steel petals of the bridge’s interface chair, watching the dance of numerals and data feeds that had constantly measured their deceleration into the new system. Before her hovered an image of the fifth world out from the star: a Jovian-type gas-giant called Dymas. It carried sixteen moons with it in its slow, majestic journey around its star. They were currently on an approach vector with the fourth moon out, a frozen world the Freeholders had named Theona.

They had been in constant deceleration now for several days, the
Hyperion
flipped on its axis for most of that time, its engines pointed starward. Dakota had been worried they might be forced into a delay if orbital braking manoeuvres were required to prevent them overshooting Dymas, but her fears were unfounded. For the fusion propulsion system, at least, unlike the rest of the
Hyperion,
was up to date. The ship was now on its way to a perfect rendezvous.

As the chair’s petals folded away and Dakota stepped down on to the bridge, she found Gardner studying a screen displaying high-res orbital images of Theona. Sharp-edged mountain ranges poked up through the ice that coated the little world’s surface. Deep-range scans showed a substantial liquid environment beneath the ice: and somewhere below that lay a core of rock and iron hidden under a liquid ocean several kilometres deep.

‘Nothing down there but ice and a little ammonia.’ She nodded towards the display. ‘Sure this is where you want to go?’

‘Very sure,’ Gardner replied, irritation clear in his voice. ‘Just pilot the ship, Mala.’

We found something.
Corso’s words still reverberated in her skull, as they had every day since leaving Ascension. So they found something, but what?

Robot probes and supplies modules had already been boosted towards Newfall from out of the cargo bay, carrying the terraforming gear that was the official reason for
Hyperion’s
coming here to the Nova Arctis system. Dakota could see their trajectory paths marked on another screen: they were moving at a considerably higher number of gees than the frigate itself and its frail human cargo could possibly manage.

Dakota made final checks, which confirmed that the frigate was smoothly slipping into orbit around the moon.

Apparently there was already a minuscule human presence on Theona’s surface. A ground base had been established near one of the poles, the majority of its living and working units buried under the dense ice.

From the vantage point of the humans huddled in their cramped quarters under the icecap, Nova Arctis would be little more than a particularly bright star that frequently disappeared as the moon slid behind its parent. Right now they were basking in what passed for summer sun, despite surface temperatures not much above absolute zero.

Arbenz entered the bridge. ‘A few moments ago I picked up the ident of another ship on the hail frequencies,’ Dakota informed him. ‘It’s still on Dymas’s far side, but we should be matching course in another couple of hours or so.’

‘That’s the
Agartha,’
he replied. ‘It’s here to provide us with back-up.’

Dakota’s Ghost fed her fresh information concerning the
Agartha.
It was only a third the size of the
Hyperion,
but armed to the teeth. In fact, it represented a considerable portion of the Freehold’s military might in their war against the Uchidans, yet here it was in another star system, dozens of light years from home and absent from a conflict where it was surely desperately needed.

That fact alone was enough to convince Dakota that whatever the Freehold might have found here, it was of enormous significance. More, her Ghost was feeding her images of what appeared to be a massive mining operation on the surface of Theona, a dark scar ripped across the pristine marbled white of its surface, just a short distance from the Freehold-maintained base. The hole that had been dug so far looked like it went a long, long way down.

Piri. How well integrated are you with the Hyperion ?

Hyperion’s
stacks without detection, as per your instructions. All systems remain nominal.>

Dakota’s Ghost showed how the secondary copy of
Piri’s
faux-consciousness—
Piri
Beta, as she thought of it—integrated seamlessly with the original on board her ship. Fortunately, Senator Arbenz and the rest of them would never be aware of what she had done.

She decided to test the Beta copy.
We’ll need a shuttle down to the moon’s surface,
she informed it.

Dakota stood stock-still for a moment, her lips growing tight.

Piri Beta, can you please repeat your last message?

That’s not the wording you just used. Please repeat the statement precisely as stated, when I requested a transport shuttle to be prepped.

Dakota shut down her Ghost link and thought hard, an icy sensation crawling around in her stomach.

The sense that something, somewhere, was very badly wrong crept into Dakota’s mind and settled there like a great, hungry spider.

‘Something wrong?’

Both Gardner and Arbenz were staring at her. ‘Moment’s break in telemetry,’ Dakota replied. ‘Probably a minor glitch, but I’ll look into it now. Oh, and the shuttle’s being prepped. We can board in a few minutes.’

‘Thank you, Mala,’ Arbenz replied, studying her carefully as if the deceit in her soul had suddenly been laid bare. Dakota turned on her heel and quit the bridge quickly.

She let out a rush of breath as soon as she was out of sight of the others, wrapping her hands tightly around her chest as if she’d caught a sudden chill. Something in the nuance of the words the copy of
Piri’s
intelligence had used, something in the unusual way they had been arranged reminded her . . . reminded her of that Shoal-member she had met on Bourdain’s Rock.

As she continued on down the corridor, most of her attention was focused on a ship-wide sweep for anything,
anything,
that might indicate a source for the earlier, unexplained glitches she had stumbled across in the
Hyperion’s
systems.

—

Everyone climbed on board the shuttle bar Udo, who was still enjoying an extended stay in his medbox. More often than not, Kieran could be found in the surgical unit, talking with his brother through the medbay’s commlink now the patient was conscious most of the time. His nervous system had been pretty badly fried during his encounter with Bourdain’s assassin, and micro-surgical units were still working on repairing damaged neural pathways and grafting new skin.

Kieran was quick to take the controls of the shuttle, glaring at Dakota as if she didn’t already know how little he trusted her. She wondered for the millionth time precisely what Udo might have told his brother during those long hours of sibling communication in the surgical unit.

Corso was the last to enter through the shuttle’s hatchway, before strapping himself into a restraint couch next to her own in the rear of the cockpit. Recently he’d been keeping his distance, casting her strange looks and avoiding anything more than the most cursory conversation. She’d tried to draw him out further, hoping he might finally tell her more, but it had only led to some awkward moments.

I’ve been on my own too long,
she reflected. Trapped in a tiny ship on the outskirts of Sol space, with no one but her own Ghost for company, wasn’t the healthiest of lifestyles. Her time so far on board the
Hyperion
had been the longest she’d spent around other people since . . .

Dakota pushed the memory away. Instead she watched the
Hyperion
dwindling rapidly from view on a nearby screen, Theona’s curving horizon becoming increasingly visible as the shuttle’s nose dipped towards it. It wasn’t very long before Dakota felt the first faint tug of gravity.

Arbenz twisted his head around from within his own restraint webbing and caught Lucas’s eye. ‘Mr Corso. You’re the expert from here on in. Anything Miss Oorthaus needs to know, you have my permission to discuss it in explicit detail.’

He looked at Dakota next. ‘What we’re about to show you today is something remarkable, quite unprecedented in the history of the human race. The reason for our strict security measures till now will become quite clear.’ He made an attempt at smiling. ‘I’m afraid we’ve employed a degree of subterfuge in bringing you here, but I’m going to ask you not to be alarmed. Everything is going to become very clear, very soon.’ Here he inserted an artful pause that somehow suggested a degree of thoughtful vulnerability. ‘Frankly, we need your help.’

Arbenz faced forward again and began conversing with Gardner while Kieran piloted. From what she could hear, they were discussing the personnel already stationed on the moon below.

She turned to Corso. ‘Start talking. Now.’

He gave her a queasy smile and then avoided her gaze. ‘We’re going to be covering a lot of ground, so in all seriousness the best thing I can do is explain things as we go along. Just trust me when I tell you that you’re in absolutely no danger, OK?’

‘You told me once,’ she said in the lowest whisper she could manage, ‘that you found something.’

The shuttle bucked under them as it hit the top of the moon’s thin atmosphere. ‘That’s the last time you mention I said anything of the kind,’ he muttered. ‘What we found is a derelict starship. One that might have a functioning transluminal drive.’

Dakota stared at him, waiting for the punch line, but it didn’t come. A dizzy sensation scrambled her thoughts and she felt light and giddy, as if filled with air.

Theona had changed from a body floating in space to a landscape spread out below them, pale and featureless except for its jagged mountain ranges where an ancient meteor impact had forced part of the rocky core to emerge above the frozen waters. Their craft dropped rapidly towards the Freehold base at the foot of one of these ranges, superheated steam blasting up around them in scalding clouds as the shuttle settled into a docking cradle. There was a heavy, twisting lurch, followed by a rolling vibration that set Dakota’s teeth on edge as the engines went into their shut-down procedure.

A squall of voices came over the comms system. Kieran Mansell spoke sharply to someone for a moment, and then hit a switch, cutting the voices off. ‘They’re prepping the sub,’ he announced.

Corso was halfway out of his restraint webbing when Dakota reached out with one hand and gripped his forearm.

‘I want you to know that if anything happens to me once we’re off this shuttle, you’ll be the first to die.’

Corso pulled away from her grasp with some difficulty. ‘Fine. In the meantime, can we please get out of here?’

—

The Theona surface base was manned by a staff of just a dozen. Half of these were preparing to ride the shuttle back up into orbit, where they would board the
Agartha,
while a relief crew newly arrived from Newfall rode the shuttle back down again. The station’s cramped and tiny rooms and corridors were consequently busy as a beehive as people made last-minute preparations for their departure.

Arbenz guided them through the chaos, meeting and greeting a succession of shiny-eyed young men and women all eager to announce their willingness to die for the Freehold cause. Dakota watched and listened to it all with some distaste, doing her best to ignore the curious and occasionally hostile glances she received from some. She was surprised to see a similar look of distaste appear on Corso’s face, when he thought people weren’t looking.

The Senator kept them moving, clearly not wanting to waste any more time than was absolutely essential. They were joined soon by two of the station’s staff, and Arbenz led them into an elevator clearly designed to carry large quantities of heavy equipment. As soon as they were all aboard, the elevator shuddered to life and dropped rapidly.

Several minutes passed, with Dakota wondering exactly how far down they were going. She glanced over at Corso and saw he was looking as apprehensive as she felt.

Something tugged at the edge of her thoughts: it was a little like sensing the presence of another machine-head. But this sense of
otherness
originated from somewhere far, far below them.

She ignored it after a moment, blaming her nerves.

The lift finally came to a halt, and they disembarked into a metal-walled antechamber with an airlock at one end and a series of cabinets ranged along one wall. The two men from the surface station stepped over to the cabinets and pulled out gel suits of the type normally used for orbital high-gee manoeuvring. It was freezing cold, and Dakota realized the gel suits were intended as a protection against hypothermia.

She pulled one on, aware of it forming around her body, immediately feeling warmer.

They filed through a narrow door and into the airlock. Once she was through, Dakota saw they were in a rectangular cavern carved directly out of the rock and ice. In the centre of the chamber lay a wide dark circle of water surrounded by machinery and ringed by a raised steel platform with steps leading up to it: a borehole, for want of a better description. A sealed and pressurized tunnel made from some transparent fabric led from the airlock directly over to the platform.