Empire of Light

by Gary Gibson

  Once the attack subsided, he gazed back along the hull, towards the flat dome of a shaped-field generator, only a few metres away. Apart from defensive purposes, these devices were primarily used to deflect interstellar debris that might otherwise tear through the hull. If he relaxed his eyes just a little, he could even pick out the faint sparkle of the combined energy fields surrounding the entire frigate.

  Just beyond the field generator rose the first of a forest of drive-spines, curving up and outwards from the hull itself.

  ‘Will you look at that,’ said Willis, his voice sounding flat and close inside Ty’s helmet. ‘All that way in less than a second.’

  ‘It’s not such a big deal,’ Nancy replied. ‘Coreships did it all the time.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but . . .’

  But Ty knew what he meant. You didn’t see or feel anything when inside a coreship; it was the same rocky sky held up by pillars you looked at, wherever in the galaxy you might actually happen to be. Being able to step outside and see where you were could be an awe-inspiring experience.

  ‘All right,’ said Nancy, suddenly all brisk efficiency. ‘I had to lead a bunch of repair crews the last trip out, so just follow my lead and do what I tell you, and it’ll all be fine.’

  ‘What about the spiders?’ asked Willis. ‘Couldn’t we just run them from inside the frigate and get them to do the work?’

  ‘We tried that,’ Nancy replied, ‘but there’s always something finicky that needs a pair of hands to deal with. But, with any luck, the spiders will still end up doing most of the work. Now check your HUDs for the schedule.’

  Ty dutifully brought up his suit’s display, which indicated a list of repairs to be made, ordered by priority.

  ‘That’s three drive-spines in need of immediate repair, all on this section of the hull,’ said Nancy. ‘Follow me.’

  Ty used lanyards, coiled silver lines that shot out of the rear of his suit just below the air tanks and attached themselves to the hull. All he had to do was lean one way or the other and the lanyards would carry him along at a couple of kilometres an hour, rapidly retracting or reaching out to grip the hull in a steady rippling motion. As Willis and Nancy did the same, Ty was reminded of how comical the lanyards looked, as if each of their suits had suddenly grown spindly cartoon legs.

  Nancy had slaved the spiders to her own suit, so that they followed a short way behind her, propelled on tiny puffs of gas.

  They soon reached the first drive-spine. In that brief, barely measurable moment when a craft passed through superluminal space, electrical systems often failed and the molecular bonds of the hull began to crumble at the extremities. Nobody knew what would happen to a ship if it stayed in superluminal space for a few seconds longer, but Ty strongly suspected that it would disintegrate entirely.

  At the base of the first drive-spine was a tangle of power cables leading inside the hull, ultimately terminating at one of the plasma conduits. Some of the cables had worked loose, which was easy enough to fix.

  The drive-spine arching above them looked grey and dusty towards its tip, like it had become badly corroded. Ty could see where a panel had come loose about halfway up, exposing naked circuitry beneath.

  ‘Ray, will you go ahead and take a look at the other spines?’ suggested Nancy. ‘We only need two pairs of hands for this one, and it might speed things up if we know what else we’re going to have to deal with, okay?’

  ‘Uh . . . sure,’ said Willis, after a moment. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather—’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she replied, just a little bit too sharply. ‘Besides, myself and Nathan need to talk over some of the . . . some of the technicalities.’

  Uh-oh, thought Ty.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Willis, sounding far from pleased. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Yeah. You kids have fun,’ Willis grumbled.

  Ty watched as he moved away across the surface of the hull, dragged along by his suit’s smart lanyards, whipping in and out.

  A moment later a one-to-one channel request was transmitted to Ty’s suit, and he accepted it with a sinking feeling.

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ asked Nancy. ‘The view, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, quite so,’ Ty replied. ‘How have you been, Nancy?’

  Things had been cordial in the safe-house, but it was best, he felt sure, to nip this in the bud. Corso had warned him to stay away from the rest of the crew, and he had little doubt how the Senator might react if he discovered Ty had once been sleeping with the Mjollnir’s head of security.

  ‘Good enough,’ Nancy replied. ‘Kind of crazy how we both wound up here, yeah?’

  ‘I guess so,’ he replied, finding himself suddenly stuck for words.

  A silence followed, seeming deeper and wider than the void around them. Ty felt an urgent need to fill it. ‘I think it was a surprise for both of us,’ he said, and then laughed.

  Nancy’s own laugh sounded more than a little forced. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘About that.’

  ‘About what?’ Were they ever going to get these repairs done?

  ‘About us. Back on the . . . back on that last trip. That whole thing.’

  ‘It’s all right, Nancy,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of us was looking for much more than—’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I mean, that’s what I was going to say, right? There’s no expectations, since I don’t think we thought we’d ever see each other again.’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I guess not.’

  ‘But . . . we are here, and maybe we won’t make it back. Yet I don’t know if there’s any of us wouldn’t rather be somewhere else.’

  But you still have a choice, Ty almost said. Every step he had taken was either due to a gift from providence or through a desperate clutching at life. The alternatives had been stark: stay in Unity and risk execution, or board the Mjollnir and take his chances with the Emissaries. So here he was.

  ‘I guess not,’ he replied. ‘I won’t bother you, Nancy, if that’s what you’re afraid of

  She came closer. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  Something in the tone of her voice made it clear she was struggling to find the right words. Nancy was, Ty had found, not the type to reveal her feelings except in the most intimate of circumstances.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to face out there,’ – she waved one gloved hand towards the stars, – ‘and … when I think about it, I don’t want to be alone.’

  Something made him reach out and touch one gloved hand to the arm of her suit. He stared at his spread fingers, contemplating this unexpected betrayal by one of his own limbs.

  ‘You won’t be,’ he said finally.

  ‘I’m glad, Nathan.’ She then moved away, sounding more subdued now. ‘I . . . you know where I am. Just drop by sometime.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he heard himself reply.

  Ty watched her go, suddenly back to her brisk efficient self.

  He had actually meant to cut things short; that being the easiest way to deal with such things. He had opened his mouth intending to say one thing, but something else entirely had emerged.

  He summoned one of the spiders and started to rummage inside its toolbox, feverishly thinking all the time. What, he wondered, could Corso actually do to him by way of punishment? Very little, he suspected.

  Ty called up his suit’s menu and put in a call to Nancy, and she replied almost immediately.

  ‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘Ship time. Come down to the labs.’

  ‘You . . . need help with something?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied with a grin. ‘Something like that.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘This is where we are just now,’ indicated Lamoureaux.

  Dakota leaned back in her seat on the bridge and stared up at the overhead simulation: a view of the Milky Way as it might be seen from roughly twenty thousand light-years above its ecliptic plane. A small point of l
ight representing the Mjollnir blinked constantly from deep within the Orion Arm.

  From the perspective Lamoureaux had chosen, it was clear the Orion Arm was not so much a true spiral arm in its own right, but more a broad streak of stars caught midway between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

  ‘And this,’ Lamoureaux continued, from the interface chair, ‘is our first stop. After that we’re in for the really long haul.’

  A line reached out from the icon representing the Mjollnir, and came to an end at a star fifteen hundred light-years from their current position. A second line grew from there, stretching across a relatively starless gulf before terminating at a point deep within the Perseus Arm.

  Dakota studied Lamoureaux, who had tipped the interface chair all the way back to a forty-five-degree angle, until he was looking almost straight up at the simulation. He still seemed frail, and when he glanced at her she could sense the pain and loss he was feeling. Sometime soon, she was going to have to explain to him just why she had destroyed her ship.

  Corso sat close behind Dakota, while Nancy, Ray and Nathan were still outside working on the drive-spines. Martinez was not expected out of the med-bay for another couple of days, Olivarri was asleep in his quarters, and Perez was somewhere halfway across the ship, checking over the plasma conduit systems and prepping the onboard fabricators to produce replacement drive-spines.

  ‘Ted, can you put up that information I gave you about our first target system?’ asked Dakota.

  ‘No,’ said Corso from behind, his tone hostile. He had barely spoken to her since she had told him about Trader. ‘That can wait a minute. Ted, you said you had secured some updates on the war.’

  Ted flashed Dakota an apologetic glance before he nodded assent to Corso. Moments later dozens of bright red points appeared in clusters along one edge of the Orion Arm, with a few scattered deeper within it.

  ‘These are the current confirmed sightings of Emissary forces,’ Lamoureaux explained. A few dozen more points now appeared, coloured yellow. ‘And these,’ he continued, ‘are stars that have gone nova since the war escalated. You can see they’re mostly centred on the region of the Long War, but there’s been more detonations deeper inside our arm, and getting closer to Consortium territory.’

  ‘Any word from Ocean’s Deep?’ asked Corso.

  ‘They’re in total disarray, Senator. The Legislate’s taken up a large military presence in the orbital station and rounded up a lot of the key Authority staff for questioning. Most of this news comes through Bandati contacts, rather than from our own people. It’s the same at Tierra – no news coming in or out.’

  ‘I think,’ declared Corso, ‘it’s time everyone stopped calling me “Senator”. From now on “Lucas” will do just fine, don’t you think?’

  ‘Then I guess you’d all better start calling me “Eduard”.’

  They all turned to see Martinez standing at the entrance to the bridge. Corso started to rise, but Martinez gestured him to sit back down.

  ‘I’m fine. Leave me be,’ Martinez insisted, shuffling forward. He was walking with a stick, Dakota noticed. He stopped when he spotted her, staring at her like she was a ghost.

  ‘Sir, are you absolutely certain you’re ready to be out of treatment?’

  ‘Why, yes I am, Lucas,’ Martinez replied, still without taking his eyes off her. ‘I just have to go easy. Maybe spend another night in the medbox to speed up the healing.’

  He moved closer to her. ‘So you’re Dakota Merrick. When the hell did you get on board? And where the hell were you when we were getting ready to . . .’

  ‘Commander,’ Corso interrupted. He had come to Martinez’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘As soon as we’re finished here, we’ll go to your quarters and I’ll explain everything.’ He gestured towards a couch. ‘Please.’

  Martinez looked like he was struggling to control his temper. ‘Then you’d better make your reasons good,’ he replied tautly, and headed for the seat.

  A priority comms icon appeared, floating just to one side of the galaxy simulation. Corso reached up to his ear and spoke quietly into the air for a few moments.

  ‘Nancy just reported in,’ he explained, once he had finished. ‘If we’re going to make a significant jump any time during the next couple of days, we’re going to have to leave up to a quarter of the drive-spines offline.’

  ‘That’s not good,’ said Martinez.

  Corso shrugged. ‘Not much we can do about it. The engineers hadn’t finished work on the hull when we boarded. Dan’s ready to start running out replacement drive-spines as soon as he’s got the fabricators back online.’

  He paused for a moment, then turned to face Dakota, with visible reluctance. ‘How many jumps do we need to reach our first destination?’

  Martinez frowned, looking back and forth between them. ‘First destination?’

  Of course, Dakota realized, he didn’t know about Trader yet.

  ‘We’re taking a detour,’ Dakota explained, ‘so we can salvage weapons systems left behind by an extinct alien race. It means stopping off at another star system on the way.’

  Martinez regarded her warily before turning back to Corso. ‘And you concur with this?’

  ‘We’re just one ship, so we’re going to need every advantage we can get. A couple of days’ detour shouldn’t make any difference in the long run.’

  Martinez nodded wearily and looked back at Dakota. ‘Lucas asked you how many jumps to get there.’

  ‘At least three,’ Dakota replied. ‘Possibly more, given the issue with the drive-spines.’ She stood up and nodded to Lamoureaux. ‘Ted, if you don’t mind, maybe I’d better run the next part myself.’

  ‘Sure.’ Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair, moving with elaborate care. Dakota felt his implant-mediated senses brush against hers.

  ‘Okay.’ She climbed into the chair and locked on to the ship’s data-space. A moment later the great swirl of the galaxy faded, to be replaced by a model of a single star system.

  ‘This is where we’re headed next,’ she explained. ‘You’re looking at a star towards the cooler end of the main sequence. It has eleven planets altogether, but our main point of interest is coming up in a moment.’

  The system expanded rapidly until they had a view of a lifeless world no more than a few thousand kilometres in diameter, its surface dotted with ancient impact craters. A broad, artificially flat plain, at odds with the surrounding landscape, surrounded what seemed at first to be just another crater.

  ‘That’s the cache entrance you can see there,’ Dakota continued. A cutaway view of the planetoid now appeared next to its photorealistic image. ‘Same layout as the Tierra cache, in fact and, like the Tierra cache – and every other cache in existence, from what I gather – it’s located on a dwarf planet too small to be geologically active.’

  The cutaway showed that the cache primarily consisted of a borehole extending more than thirty kilometres beneath the surface, with hundreds of passageways of varying length extending out from this central shaft and into the remaining body of the planetoid.

  ‘How the hell could you know all this?’ asked Martinez, switching his gaze between her and Corso.

  ‘This all comes from a renegade Shoal-member—’

  ‘A renegade what?’ said Martinez, looking like he was about to throw his walking stick at her.

  ‘Eduard,’ intervened Corso, ‘as soon as we’re done here. I swear.’ He nodded to Dakota for her to continue.

  Martinez looked far from happy, but held his silence.

  ‘It’s a dead cache,’ Dakota continued. ‘I learned that it was discovered by a race called the Meridians, who’re long gone. They had a colony here, but they wiped themselves out while fighting over it. The physical structure is still there, but everything inside was destroyed. If we get the opportunity or the time, I think it would be a very good idea to take a look down inside the cache. Apart from the fact I want to see what it looks like, it’ll
give us a much better idea of exactly what we’re going to be facing once we reach our final destination.’

  ‘And these weapons we’re looking for,’ said Corso. ‘They’re inside the cache?’

  Dakota tilted the interface chair a few degrees upright so she could see his face more clearly. ‘No, but apparently they’re close to the mouth of the cache,’ she explained. ‘And, strictly speaking, they’re not weapons. They’re a form of field technology – same idea as our own field-generators but whole orders of magnitude more powerful – according to . . .’ according to Trader, she almost said, until she caught Corso’s eye.

  ‘The point is,’ said Corso, now picking up the thread, ‘there’s something there that can give us an even better fighting chance against the Emissaries.’

  ‘According to who?’ asked Martinez. ‘Some . . . Shoal-member?’

  ‘I think maybe we should go and have that talk,’ said Corso, looking as if he would rather do almost anything else. ‘And maybe a good stiff drink, if your meds will allow it.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Ty. ‘I thought no time passed at all during a jump?’

  They had come outside again as soon as the latest jump had been completed. Star-tangled nebulae hung in the void behind Olivarri. He had the whitest teeth Ty had ever seen in another human being; they positively shone when he grinned, and right now they were just about the only thing Ty could distinguish through the other man’s visor.

  Their three-person repair team was completed by Nancy, who was mending a spine-clamp prior to lowering a new spine into place. Ty could see her over Olivarri’s shoulder, busily working away.

  What lazy creatures we men are, he thought, standing here while the woman toils. The reality, of course, was that Nancy didn’t trust anyone but herself to fulfil certain jobs. He found himself recalling the way her hands had gripped his hair the night before, her small lithe form arching above him, her mouth round and wide as she noisily climaxed.

  ‘Virtual time passes. Jump-space has to find a way to deal with the sudden appearance of physical matter from our universe. So it wraps the Mjollnir in a bubble of virtual time.’