by Gary Gibson
Beyond it lay the bright starry band of the Milky Way, while far below he could see the bright lights of low-orbit docks. Yet farther down were the blue-green continents and wide, shallow oceans of Ironbloom itself.
Corso could only guess where they were taking him, but the best bet was they were heading back to the derelict. As he stared down at the planet below, he wondered if Dakota was still trapped in her cell, and if she was looking up into the sky at that moment. Once Corso was safely on board the dreadnought, the ship underwent constant acceleration for what he estimated was the better part of a Redstone day. When weightlessness briefly returned, he guessed they must be at the midpoint of their journey.
He'd been left to his own devices in a small compartment that featured a bundle of twisted ropes attached at either end to two widely-spaced wall brackets. It resembled an abstract rendition of a spider's web, but a few minutes' contemplation finally brought him to the conclusion it was the Bandati version of a hammock.
He wasn't even under lock and key, as he'd assumed he would be. His quarters lacked a door, but this also meant there was no way to hide from observation. Once he was sure he was alone, he stepped outside the room.
He looked around the area beyond.
After a while, for lack of anywhere else to go, he went back into his billet.
What brought him his first surge of joy in a long time was to discover his clothes stuffed into a wall niche.
They stank of sweat and those long sleepless days and nights in the Piri Reis and, before that, in the Hyperion. He surely smelled no better now, but putting his clothes back on made him feel more alive, more human than at any point since his capture.
It was amazing how much confidence this simple act of getting dressed provided him with. It was hugely empowering.
I'll never let myself be locked up like that again, he decided. If his freedom had been valuable to him before he'd left Redstone, it was now more in the nature of an obsession. Accompanied again by two guards, Honeydew came for him some time later, as Corso lay dozing in a corner of his billet, having been unable to work out how to use the hammock provided.
He sat up, feeling grubby and sticky again, and instantly recognized Honeydew by the colour and pattern of his wings. The Bandati agent had a distinctive green-blue shading to his upper pair, while the lower ones were shot through with a fine tracery of vermilion.
'Mr Corso, accompany us, please.'
By this point the ship was moving again, decelerating now for the second half of their journey at a gravity-equivalent speed close enough to what he was used to from Redstone, so that he could again walk around quite comfortably. Corso nodded without replying, and Honeydew took the lead.
Soon Corso found himself back in a docking bay that looked identical to the one he'd disembarked into on their arrival.
There were various small craft to be seen – mostly variations on the ground-to-orbit launch that had first lifted him into orbit – as well as several even smaller, bulbous ones lacking engine nacelles, which were probably life rafts. The scale of the chamber alone was enough to give a sense of just how big the Bandati dreadnought must be.
He was led on towards a mobile platform set into the floor of the bay that started to sink as soon as all four of them had fully stepped onto it, dropping them down into another chamber almost as big as the one immediately above it.
This one, however, was filled with a deep gloom, through which occasional flashes of light sparked and flickered eerily. A bulky, dark shape occupied the far end of the otherwise empty chamber and, as Corso peered at it through the gloom, he felt his jaw actually drop when he realized what he was now looking at.
It was Dakota's own ship, the Piri Reis – battered, dented and scarred, but nonetheless utterly familiar. The Piri floated just above a maintenance cradle built over a set of horizontal bay doors in the deck beneath it, and was held in place by shaped-field generators built into the cradle itself.
Corso then realized this chamber was simply a very large airlock where ships and heavy cargo could be loaded, before being raised to the pressurized upper chamber. He could see clearly where part of the ship had been damaged by missiles back in Nova Arctis.
'This is the craft used to bring the starship out of the Nova Arctis system,' Honeydew enquired, 'is it not?'
Corso nodded absent-mindedly, but realized after a moment that he still hadn't given an answer. 'It is, yes.'
Something was different, however.
He'd now just about been able to make out odd shapes through the gloom, scattered more or less at random across the floor of the chamber, between where they stood on the platform and the cradle holding the Piri. The light flickered once more and Corso noticed scorch marks on the walls, ceiling and floor around Dakota's ship. Those shapes now resolved into the singed remains of Bandati, their bodies contorted in their death-agonies.
He realized, with a start, that they were standing on the edge of a battlefield.
Most of the lighting units in the walls and ceiling had either been destroyed or were functioning only sporadically, hence the flickering gloom. Clearly a vicious fire-fight had taken place here. He could make out weapons scattered near the bodies of the dead Bandati, while various chunks of dented and blasted machinery looked like they'd started out as robotic exploratory devices. There was also a suspiciously Piri-sized dent in the bay doors situated directly beneath the cradle.
'What the hell happened here?' Corso asked, once he remembered how to breathe.
'The Magi protocols you developed are stored inside this vessel's stacks,' Honey dew replied bluntly.
'Yeah, that's what I said before.'
'This vessel was also in communication with the starship that brought you to Night's End.'
'I know she was making it difficult for you to get inside the Piri Reis.' Understatement of the century, Corso thought to himself. 'Based on what I've seen and heard, I guess she was using the derelict as some kind of relay between herself and the Piri.'
Wide black eyes surveyed him intently while Corso desperately tried to glean some notion of what was going on in the Bandati's mind. 'You do not clearly understand. This craft also communicates with the starship,' Honeydew repeated.
'Look, I – oh.' Exasperation gave way to enlightenment. 'The Piri Reis is communicating with the derelict – directly? You mean, under its own volition, without Dakota being involved?'
'The evidence strongly suggests it.'
This was a revelation. 'How do you know?' Corso asked.
'Remote sensors previously showed a link between increased systems activity on board the Piri Reis, and increased gravitic and neutrino activity within the region of the Magi derelict. The correlation is clear: the ships were – and still remain – in communication with each other.'
Corso stared out across the scene of ruin. He had a pretty good idea just what the Piri Reis was capable of when it came to defending itself, but it had no onboard weapons capable of causing this level of devastation.
'You agreed to cooperate,' Honeydew reminded him. 'Now board the Piri Reis and retrieve the protocols.'
'But… what about this?' Corso asked, waving a hand towards the field of carnage. 'What did this?'
'That is something we would also like to know.'
Corso turned to face the alien directly. 'The Piri Reis doesn't have any kind of offensive capabilities, and that's a fact. You've been monitoring the ship, haven't you? So this must be obvious to you?'
'Yes, but our monitoring systems have been… unresponsive. All we can say for certain is that there have been sporadic surges of power to the field generators built into the supporting cradle.'
'Okay' Corso thought for a minute. 'I'm assuming you did try turning the power supply to the cradle off?'
The alien stared at him silently.
For pity's sake. 'What, you can't actually turn it off?'
It didn't take much for him to sense Dakota's hand somewhere in all of this.
; 'You made it clear that Merrick granted you override privileges that allow you to board her ship.' The alien cast his gaze across the silent, darkened bay. 'Our own attempts to do so have not met with success.'
Corso gazed over the swathe of destruction before them and felt sweat prickle his brow. 'Yes, but she's not here. I tried boarding the ship without her direct permission once before, and it came very close to killing me. Maybe if you brought her here-'
'That isn't currently possible,' came the bland synthesized reply. 'You, however, are a noted expert in pre-Shoal electronic linguistics. You will board the Piri Reis, find the information we need, and thereby prove your worth to us.'
'Everybody wants something from me,' Corso sighed, half under his breath.
'I don't understand.'
'Nothing,' Corso snapped, feeling irritable. Would the Piri Reis still recognize him? Or would it find some way to kill him before he could even get near it?
'In that case, time is of the essence, Mr Corso. Don't wait too long before returning – or think about hiding inside the ship. If you do, we will not hesitate to destroy the Piri Reis, with you inside it if necessary'
Corso stared into the alien's implacable black eyes.
Just get this over with. He stepped off the platform and walked slowly forward, eyes firmly fixed on the Piri Reis. After a dozen or so steps he stopped and turned to look back at the platform, and saw the three Bandati still standing there like giant-eyed statues, unmoving and implacable beyond the occasional involuntary twitch of their wings.
He turned back to face the Piri, and started moving again, unable to keep himself from crouching slightly, as if to make a smaller target.
Reaching the first group of corpses, he saw that their wings had been almost entirely burned away.
The Piri sat only about fifteen or twenty metres ahead, drifting very slightly inside its field restraints. The constantly flickering light was too much like some cheap effect out of a haunted-house 'viro for Corso's comfort. He tried to remember what he'd seen of the Piri 's internal systems layout, in case there was some clue there as to how it had managed to kill those heavily armed warriors.
He stopped dead as a new thought occurred to him.
Honeydew had mentioned unexplained power surges in the cradle's field generators. That had to be it.
Shaped-field generators could have short-range defensive uses. Normally, you needed 'receiver' devices that 'contained' the field, since otherwise it would dissipate almost as soon as it was created.
But it was possible to create a small bubble without a receiver -a bubble that might be only a few centimetres across – and then shrink it rapidly in the fraction of a moment before it burst. If air molecules were trapped inside the field, they could be compressed hard and fast enough to form a white-hot plasma with explosive energy. And as soon as the tiny field-bubble containing that plasma dissolved…
Corso gazed down at a blackened lump by his feet. It took a moment for him to realize he was looking at the blown-off head of a Bandati warrior. He felt a chill, thinking about what just one person could do with that much power – and that much reach, in being able to subvert computer systems at will from across an entire solar system.
'Dakota?' he whispered, feeling ridiculous at calling out the name of someone who, as far as he knew, was still sitting alone in a tower back on Ironbloom. But in that flickering half-light, surrounded by devastation and death, it was almost as if he could sense her presence all around him. He'd seen enough over the past few months not to make the mistake of taking anything for granted, any more.
He received no reply, of course.
He ventured another step forward, fresh sweat prickling his brow. He thought about picking up one of the abandoned weapons lying nearby, but then thought better of it. He was most of the way towards the Piri now, and had already noticed a faint hum emanating from the craft.
Corso took a step closer, and heard the hum change in pitch. He froze in place, one foot half-raised, and waited to see what would happen. He could see the half-incinerated form of a dead Bandati just out of the corner of one eye.
Now he noticed a faint hissing.
He glanced downwards to see a thin line of black running precisely between the two bay doors situated directly under the Piri Reis. The Piri Reis had apparently crashed into the docking bay doors hard enough to compromise their integrity, and as a result air was slowly but perceptibly seeping out of the chamber.
But how to get inside? Corso wondered. In through the main airlock, or around the side and then in through that hole in the hull?
He stood there thinking about the various half-truths he'd told Honeydew.
Strictly speaking, the Bandati didn't need him at all. Oh, it was true he'd developed the protocols they – and everyone else -wanted so badly, and it was just as true that he was an expert in the extremely rarefied field of antediluvian Shoal programming languages. Yet the fact remained that it had been just plain dumb luck that Senator Arbenz's researchers had stumbled across a veritable Rosetta Stone while making the first tentative explorations of a derelict starship. Once you had that, it wasn't really much of a jump to figure out how to create the necessary protocols – at least, as long as you had a handy supply of experts to hand, like himself.
That much, fortunately, Corso had kept from his captors. This way, at least, they needed him; this way they had a reason to let him live – until they had acquired what they wanted, at any rate. But he still had to give them something in the meantime: something that was only to be found inside the Piri Reis.
He came right up to the hull of Dakota's ship and slowly walked around one side, despite an overwhelming urge to turn tail and run. He did his best to ignore two part-exploded bodies that lay nearby.
'Congratulations, Mr Corso.'
Corso nearly shrieked when he heard Honeydew's voice seemingly right behind his shoulder. He turned and saw the glowing bead of an interpreter hovering, unaccompanied, just a metre away. He hadn't known they could do that.
'You've done very well,' said the Bandati's disembodied voice. 'Please continue.'
'Don't try that again,' Corso muttered, his voice cracking. The bead hovered there without replying.
'I mean it,' he said a little louder. 'If you follow me on board with that thing, I've got no idea how the Piri's going to react. So get rid of it.'
He waited a tense moment until the interpreter began to move back across the bay towards the figures waiting on the platform. Corso breathed a sigh of relief.
He moved quickly along the side of the craft until he came to its primary airlock. There was a hiss, and the door slid open. Corso pulled himself up and inside, and listened carefully.
He could hear something creaking, through the inner door of the airlock, like metal straining against metal.
'Piri?' Corso called out, feeling more confident now. If Dakota's ship had meant him any harm, he'd surely know it by now.
He activated the airlock's inner door and stepped through that, too. 'Piri, it's me, Lucas Corso. Can you hear me? I'm coming on board.'
Nothing.
'I still have Dakota's authorization for command override, Piri,' he said, a little louder this time.
The inner airlock door swung shut behind him, in the best tradition of haunted-house 'viros. He peered into the gloom, and enjoyed a brief fantasy of taking control of the Piri, and using it to smash through the airlock doors and out to freedom.
And how long before they tracked you down and shot you out of the sky? It had to remain a fantasy, nothing more.
Even to Corso, his senses inured to the odour of his own unwashed skin after so many weeks of captivity, the interior of the Piri Reis stank to high heaven. There was garbage everywhere -bits of Dakota's clothing, as well as food cartons with blackened remains still clinging to their insides. Patches of the fur that lined every wall and surface now looked shiny and greasy in the low-power emergency lighting.
He moved carefully, all too
aware that the ship's interior was a paranoid's wet dream. There were countermeasures secreted in every nook and cranny, all controlled by a central faux-intelligence that had been designed, from the ground up, to be overwhelmingly neurotic.
He headed for a console and brought up its main interface, tapping at the screen while thinking hard. Okay, get the protocols. Then what?
There they were, boldly displayed on the screen before him. Now just hand them over to the Bandati and wait for them to realize they didn't require his services any more?
Hardly.
Corso gazed at the screen and frowned, trying to work out what it was that didn't look right.
He brought up base routines, studying what should have been hardwired algorithms meant to control how the spacecraft functioned, and all the while the lines on his face furrowed deeper. Wholesale alterations had been made to the Piri's integral systems, and all within the past few weeks.
The only person who could have done so was Dakota.
He called up log-files and reviewed some of the changes, most of which turned out to involve the main AI functions. At first glance, it looked more like vandalism than anything else, for great chunks of the ship's programming had been entirely rewritten.
Except nothing he saw there made any sense to his skilled eyes.
He thought of the Bandati waiting for him in the chamber outside, and wondered how much more time he had.
Honeydew had claimed the derelict and the Piri Reis were somehow in direct communication with each other. That Dakota would have used the derelict as a secure relay in order to talk to the Piri made sense – and, based on what the Bandati had already told him, only Dakota could have been behind the slaughter of the Bandati lying outside its hull.
But if the derelict itself was somehow responsible for these changes to the Piri, the question remained – why?
He flipped back to the Piri's altered base routines. It was a devilish piece of work, but a closer look revealed a certain order amongst the chaos. Every piece of spare circuitry on board the Piri had been put to the task of carrying some part of the ship's mind, regardless of whether or not it had been designed for that purpose. Entire chunks of what remained had been reallocated all across the vessel's data stacks.
