Stealing Light (33 page)

‘Enquiry to elucidate, with pleasure?’

Dakota gritted her teeth. The alien’s word games were really beginning to get on her nerves. ‘You’re the one that calls himself Trader. You were there on Redstone, and then Bourdain’s Rock, and now you’re here, like a bad shadow following me everywhere. What’s your full name again?’

She already knew it, but somehow she needed to hear the creature repeat it. ‘Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals,’ he replied. ‘And you are correct.’

‘You know,’ she said, relishing the opportunity to give vent, ‘it really gives some indication of how little you regard us as a species that the name you use when you’re around us is a seriously tasteless joke.’

‘This one is forced to point out that circumstances remain unaltered from present: vis-à-vis relationship you and I, no change. Agreed?’

She was almost at the bridge by now. She slowed her progress, taking her time in case she ran into any of Arbenz’s skeleton crew. She had no idea what she was going to say to them when the time came, but could see no reason for them to keep her from the interface chair. If she was wrong about that. . . well, she’d just have to deal with it when the time came.

‘What happened to the race that built the derelict?’ she asked, realizing the creature was baiting her. ‘Where are they now? It has a transluminal drive dating from long before your species were supposed to have developed the technology, so just what are you trying to hide here?’

A secure link via her Ghost allowed her to observe Corso’s handiwork as he covertly hacked away at the
Hyperion’s
stacks from inside the
Piri Reis.
She had to hand it to him: he knew exactly what he was doing. Any lingering concerns faded regarding his expertise with computer systems.

Trader refused to be drawn, though. Instead of answering, he continued blithely, as if anything she had to say was of little or no concern to him.

But then she reminded herself that the alien very much had the advantage. Everything she and Corso had planned for the next few minutes depended on him not picking up on their attempt to take control of the derelict.

‘Of highest tantamount importance in approaching task of cataclysmic destruction is appreciation that the object of our concern, in order to be rendered nonexistent, cannot be destroyed by means conventional. Ergo, consideration of alternatives is necessitated.’

Dakota reached the gravity wheel and pulled herself up a series of rungs, feeling the tug of centrifugal force from the rotation of the
Hyperion’s
wheel segment, the higher she got. She climbed into a corridor in the wheel’s inner rim whose floor curved out of sight.

‘Who built the derelict, Trader? You’re holding all the cards. Why not just tell me?’

‘Please regard that derelict in question rests—chance and circumstance be thanked—upon the very precipice of a mighty abyss. A most advantageous and opportunistic means of destruction is thereby presented: to be sent tumbling into welcoming and bottomless embrace of mother ocean, is also to be squeezed and squeezed until boom! Derelict is at an end. How so, therefore, to reach accomplishment of this mighty and noble task? Placing of explosives conventional, certainly. Or activation of secondary propulsion systems, to allow such an unfortunate event to most merrily happenstance. All to be considered by this one called Dakota. Rescued, recall, please, from certain blackness of death aboard space-bound asteroid by this one. Surely, to indicate refusal in our current concern is equivalent to expression of churlishness, given my life-saving kindness?’

Keep him talking.
Anything, to divert the majority of his consciousness away from Corso’s hacking.

As it turned out, she had little to worry her, once she entered the bridge. The crew were dead.

It was unusual in itself to find the emergency seal on the entrance to the bridge activated when she got there. She reached up and deactivated it by hand, using a panel on the wall.

When the seal slid back, revealing the bridge’s interior, she stared at the scene before her with numb horror.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that Trader must have locked the crew into the bridge deck, sealed the emergency exits, and then voided the life-giving atmosphere.

By the looks of things, two of the crewmembers had made a concerted effort to open the emergency seals from the inside. They lay just inside the doorway, staring sightlessly upwards, their tongues protruding from their mouths.

At least I have my filmsuit.
Trader couldn’t possibly know about that. Even if he did, he’d still have to be a lot more inventive than this if he chose to hurt her.

She slowly picked her way past the two corpses. The other four crewmembers were all huddled by an open floor panel. Dakota averted her gaze from their faces, frozen in terror, guessing they’d been desperately trying to access bypass circuits as they’d died.

‘An unfortunate matter, but necessary,’ the alien’s voice boomed from the bridge’s comms system. ‘For them to be allowed interference in requisite destruction of derelict would be unforgivably remiss.’

Dakota nodded, still unable to find her voice. Her throat felt like something large and heavy had been lodged halfway down it, and she had a particularly nasty taste in the back of her mouth.

She watched as the petals of the interface chair began to unfold, unbidden.

‘Look, they’ll know by now, on the
Agartha.
and down on the moon, that the crew are dead. I’ll never be allowed to get as far as the derelict and do what you want. And you know I can’t do anything from up here.’

‘Interface, contrary to clear untruth, awaits your embrace, and is linked in readiness to identical device aboard derelict. Sufficient control for destruction may be manifested from here.’

Her heart sank as she realized the alien was a step ahead of them. ‘And what happens when Arbenz comes back up here? Who do you think he’s going to blame for . . . for this carnage?’

Of course.

She was being set up—had been set up, ever since Bourdain’s Rock.

The alien was covering its tracks, so that it would appear only she was responsible for the destruction of the derelict and the murder of the
Hyperion’s
crew: a wake of death and destruction, indeed. Corso hadn’t been so far off the mark then.

‘In order to achieve maximized disaster,’ the creature continued, ‘and to prevent immediate discorporation of Dakota most delightful, absolute cooperation is presently necessitated.’

Her Ghost flagged up a message from Corso. But before she had a chance to read it, she felt something pressing in on her thoughts . . .

She shook her head, feeling dizzy. She looked up and saw a computer-generated image of Trader, floating in the screens arranged all around the bridge.

‘My life won’t be worth shit if I do what you want. I. . .’

She stopped. There was something she had to do, something very urgent. She –

– was standing next to the open interface chair, one hand resting on the folded shape of a steel and plastic petal. She couldn’t even remember having crossed the bridge to reach the chair.

There was another message from Corso now, this one marked highest priority. She faltered, and there it was again, pressing in on her thoughts —

—she found herself in darkness.

Dakota reeled, and realized she was seated inside the activated interface chair, with no memory of having climbed inside it or of the petals enfolding her. She gasped with the shock of this sudden dislocation. It felt like being buried alive.

More, she was mind-linked into the second interface, the one on board the derelict. For a moment it lay wide open to her, a universe of data waiting to be pored over –

And then it was gone.

She gasped as the connection was suddenly, deliberately cut.

It was Corso, speaking from inside the
Piri Reis.

I’m not sure. I. . . I just blacked out for a second, or something. The Shoal-member was talking to me from inside the stacks. The crew are all dead.

Clearly he’d accessed the bridge video feed recorded a few moments before crashing the onboard systems.

Nothing to do with me, I assure you.

No. But I will now.

They’ve probably come looking for the crew. I don’t even know how long they’ve been dead.

There. Barely a thought and the derelict was now linked directly into the
Piri Reis,
without first passing through the
Hyperion.
In data terms it was like turning a tap and getting a trickle compared to the ocean of data she’d just tasted for one mesmerizing moment. It was a bare snatch of what she’d experienced while on board the derelict itself.

Even so, she reached out with her senses, and felt the control data from the interface chair aboard the derelict smoothly mesh with her Ghost. It felt like gaining a new set of limbs—but limbs that felt numb and weak and sluggish in their response.

But she still had control of the derelict.

It’s done, Lucas. The uplink is in place.

Except, against all her expectations, nothing felt different. Instead of feeling victorious, Dakota felt mildly disappointed.

The chair’s petals unfolded from around her. The image of Trader had gone. Overhead displays and status lights around the bridge had fallen into grey, unresponsive dullness. Pale red emergency lighting lent an awful, surreal quality to the horror and carnage that surrounded her.

Corso informed her. Hyperion
is recovering far faster than I’d have expected.>

Are you serious?

At that moment, she sensed the
Hyperion’s
few still-active systems disappearing out of reach of her Ghost.

She gripped the arms of the interface chair in shock.

Well, it’s nice to know you believed me in the first place.

I can’t be sure,
Dakota replied.
It feels. . . different.

Shut up, Lucas. I can . . .

Dakota closed her eyes and concentrated on the uplink: a long and fragile chain of communication.

The derelict became like an immense presence, brooding and dark, like a haunted house waiting to be explored. Immense energies flowed through it, yet it responded only sluggishly to her mental queries.

If I didn’t know better,
she told Corso,
I’d say something was deliberately trying to block my control of the derelict.

Corso snarled with exasperation.

—

Corso watched as a tsunami of information poured up and into the
Piri’s
stacks from deep under the moon’s ice. Yet, rather than celebrating, he felt merely haggard, run down and exhausted. The few hours he’d spent asleep, curled up with Dakota, hadn’t been nearly enough. That, plus nearly getting killed on board the derelict—and
that
following the torture and beating of Dakota herself—conspired to wipe away his remaining ability to concentrate.

He located the
Piri’s
autodoc menu and dialled up an amphetamine concoction, hoping it might do the trick for him. Dakota’s little ship could do a hell of a lot on its own, but there were limits to all things. He had to be awake and aware in order to supervise the uplink as long as it lasted.

The
Piri
pinged him a minute later. He’d earlier programmed it to let him know if it stumbled across anything particularly interesting, or plain coherent, among the data delivered from the derelict. He touched a screen and scanned the information appearing there.
Ah.

It had found what appeared at first glance to be a narrative: a myth cycle, perhaps, or maybe a simple record of events. It possessed the grandeur of the former, yet the brief, synopsized facts before him now suggested the latter.

He took a closer look, and what he saw appeared to confirm the Magi had, indeed, originated from a specific section of the Larger Magellanic Cloud.

Come on, come on.
He rubbed his hands impatiently through his hair as he waited. There were gaps of inactivity, lasting seconds long, as the
Piri
jumped from one set of incoming data to another.

Corso could discern that whatever was lurking deep within the
Hyperion’s
data stacks was recovering a lot faster than he could possibly have anticipated. He meanwhile sat at a console, muttering, as he tried to coax the
Hyperion’s
emergency support systems into accepting his override commands, in an attempt to prevent or at least stall the alien intelligence inside the stacks . . .

The
Piri
spasmed. A screech of static lasting perhaps all of a second burst out through the speakers, and the main screen went black for several moments before reasserting itself.

‘Piri!
Status report!’