Empire of Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘And is that what the others think, too?’

  ‘I’m not here to debate the issue with you. I’m just telling you how it is.’

  ‘Good of you to let me know,’ Ty replied sarcastically.

  ‘She had no idea who you really were, did she?’

  ‘It wasn’t the kind of thing that came up in conversation,’ he replied, unable to keep the acid out of his voice.

  ‘Ty, didn’t it ever occur to you what you were actually doing by deceiving her like that? Did you really think I instructed you to stay away from the crew just to punish you? I’ve been deceiving people who would give their life for me, and for this mission, by not telling them who you really are. I wanted you to stay away because I didn’t want to make that lie any bigger than it already is.’

  ‘I thought of telling her,’ Ty confessed, ‘but I couldn’t face the idea of her hatred.’

  Corso chuckled. ‘Keep saying things like that, and I might end up mistaking you for a human being one of these days.’

  Once he was back inside, Ty slept for a solid ten hours before waking with aching muscles and skin that had become infuriatingly itchy from pressure sores. He dragged himself into the lab’s minimal toilet facilities, turned on a tap and watched a ball of water form at the end of the nozzle. Once it was about the size of his fist, he pulled it free and pushed his face into it, gasping at its icy coldness against his skin. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

  It was time to take a look at what the cameras he’d positioned around the lab had recorded. But first he was going to fix himself a drink.

  Ty could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had ever touched alcohol, but some compulsion born of fatigue and grief, as well as the fear of what he might find when he reviewed the video feeds, made it easier to break what had until now been a habit of lifelong abstinence. Before long he was heading for an echoing, empty mess hall not too far away, where he breakfasted on freeze-dried crackers and reconstituted yoghurt. Once he had finished eating, he wandered through the kitchen area until he found the liquor cabinet he had spotted previously and randomly picked out a few squeeze-bottles of wine of indeterminate vintage and quality.

  He broke the plastic seal on one of them, loaded the rest into a shoulder bag, then took a few sips from the open squeeze-bottle, careful to keep his thumb over the seal to prevent it spilling out in the zero gee. He grimaced at the taste, but kept drinking until a comfortably mellow feeling had begun to permeate into his tired limbs and his brain.

  Back in the lab, Ty loaded the video feed and ran it from the beginning, watching himself go round the lab to check the cameras were properly networked before he sat down at the console and began typing some notes.

  He fast-forwarded the feed an hour, and saw himself still thoughtfully typing or else pulling up data from the stacks.

  And there was still another thirty hours of video to go through.

  He sighed and fast-forwarded again, watching himself stand up and propel himself over to the far side of the lab, where a dedicated stack system maintained a real time back-up of all the experimental data gathered so far.

  Ty frowned: this was something he definitely didn’t recall doing. The only reason ever to use the back-up stack at all was because something had gone wrong with the primary system: and there had been no such issues that he could recall.

  He switched views so that the feed from another camera allowed him to look over his own shoulder at the screen positioned above the back-up unit.

  He leaned forward as the view zoomed in, and beads of sweat prickled his forehead when he saw nothing on that screen but seemingly unintelligible garbage. It no longer felt like he was actually watching himself; this was someone else looking out at the world through his own eyes – a monster hiding inside his own head.

  He left the video feed running and headed over to the back-up stack to run a quick search. But he couldn’t find any clue there as to just what he’d been staring at so intently: the data had either been wiped or hidden. Nonetheless, he spent the better part of the next hour running increasingly aggressive queries that got him nowhere.

  Eventually he gave up, turning back to the console where he had left the video running, and froze.

  His own face – somehow inhuman in its lack of any discernible human emotion – filled the screen. The eyes were wide and blank, as if staring off at some infinitely distant horizon. It seemed the monster had found the camera he had hidden in a recess to one side of the stack system, and crouched down to take a close look at it.

  Ty moved over quickly to forward the video feed another hour. Nothing changed: the monster was still crouching next to the stack-unit, staring directly into the lens. Its slack-muscled features betrayed all the warmth and compassion of a reanimated corpse. He – no, it – must have been standing there during all that time, just staring into the lens.

  Ty knew he was being sent a message here. No wonder he felt like he hadn’t been getting any sleep; because he hadn’t.

  He slammed the console with his open palm so hard that it stung. The video feed blanked, but he could still see his own traitorous face reflected back at him in the smooth black glass.

  He snatched his gaze away, suddenly sober again, and now filled with a terrible, skin-crawling chill. He hunted about for the hidden cameras and soon discovered most, but not all, were missing. He repositioned the undamaged ones in places where he hoped they might be harder to find, then he took a seat, opened another squeeze-bottle and began drinking with grim determination.

  At first, the others didn’t notice his condition when Ty arrived in the airlock bay for his next shift on the hull.

  That was fine by him, since he felt wrung out after spending the night vomiting into a vacuum hose, and tiny gold-plated hammers still pounded with an unwavering rhythm against the inside of his skull. Conversation was certainly not something he was looking forward to, but it looked like he would once again be working with Corso and Lamoureaux, who usually spent most of the time just talking between themselves.

  The two men were standing almost head-to-head, already deep in discussion. Ty paused by the entrance, where they couldn’t yet see him, and listened quietly.

  ‘So you think we can still recover more data?’ Corso was asking.

  ‘The Mjollnir has a lot of inbuilt redundancy,’ Lamoureaux replied, keeping his voice low – but sounds tended to carry easily inside the frigate. ‘There’s a chance we can recover the rest of the lost data from the surveillance systems.’

  ‘You mean the overflow buffers?’

  ‘No,’ Lamoureaux shook his head, ‘we’ve got everything we can from them. But some of the core stack arrays can act as virtual buffers in an emergency. So it’s possible there’s still . . .’

  Lamoureaux glanced to one side, spotted Ty and fell immediately silent. Corso turned and scowled when he saw him.

  But Ty didn’t care, and he headed for one of the suit racks, his mind suddenly racing with possibilities.

  Over the next several hours, he had plenty of opportunity to mull over the brief snatch of conversation he had overheard.

  Memory overflow buffers. He guessed they were talking about the data lost during the catastrophic systems failure around the time of Olivarri’s murder. Clearly there was a way of recovering at least some of that data. And what else might be hidden in those buffers?

  Later, on his way back to the labs, Ty once again stopped off at the mess hall, an idea forming in his head. One bulkhead was dominated by a display of ceremonial weapons: a dozen long knives of the type used in challenge fights were arranged in a circle, their blades all pointing inwards.

  It took a little effort, but he managed to prise one loose, then concealed it inside his jacket and returned to the labs. He found several messages waiting for him, including a new shift-schedule put together by Willis, who had taken over that particular duty following Nancy’s death.

  He activated the back-up stack system, and dug dee
p into its operational guts. He felt a flush of triumph when he traced the files he had seen on the video feed to a virtual buffer located in a linked stack in an entirely separate part of the ship. What those files might actually be was a question he couldn’t yet answer, but a lot of time and effort had been taken to hide them somewhere neither he nor anyone else might think to look.

  He thought again of the monster staring at him from out of his own eyes, and felt a second flush of triumph: I’m on to you now.

  Ty now used a set of software tools to study the contents of the files, and found them to be lightly encrypted command structures of a type he had never seen before, carefully modified to run on the imager array in which the Mos Hadroch still sat.

  He regarded the unmoving artefact for a moment, and felt an uneasy chill. Surely it couldn’t be this easy.

  He spent a few minutes loading the command structures into the imager array, set the probes to start recording, and activated them.

  What happened next was far more than he could possibly have anticipated. A bass moaning sound filled the air, modulating every few seconds. The sound seemed to penetrate deep inside his body and mind, in a way that was far from pleasant.

  At the same time, the artefact appeared to come apart – no, unfold – in some way that his human eyes couldn’t make sense of. He stared, utterly transfixed, as it appeared to grow larger over the next few minutes, its shape now constantly morphing and shifting. Jewel-like shards appeared all around it, hanging in the air, and glistening and twisting like a kaleidoscope projected in three dimensions.

  A message alert flashed, but he ignored it.

  The only way he could explain what he was seeing was by assuming the Mos Hadroch existed in more than three spatial dimensions. What appeared to be disparate shards might instead be components of this device that normally existed only in the other, higher dimensions, but were now briefly flickering into view.

  The throbbing became more intense, driving itself deeper into his mind and making it hard to think clearly. He found himself involuntarily re-experiencing key events in his own life in flashes of almost hallucinatory detail, as if the Mos Hadroch were pulling them out of his subconscious and attempting, in its alien way, to understand who and what he was.

  A machine for passing judgement: that’s what he had told Lamoureaux and Willis, back in Ascension. It was trying to find out if he was worthy of it.

  He relived his days in the hidden R&D complex; the celebrations when the Legislate-backed strike against the Uchidan Territories floundered; the sense of betrayal when his Uchidan masters had decided to hand him over to the Legislate.

  Despite his terror at what was happening to him, Ty laughed. The irony was inescapable: for all his abortive attempts at understanding the artefact, it was doing a much better job of understanding him.

  Finally, mercifully, the Mos Hadroch reverted to something closer to its normal appearance. Meanwhile the monstrous noise that had accompanied its transformation decreased to a quieter pitch.

  Ty remembered the ceremonial knife. Splaying his right hand flat on the console, he held the blade in his left so that it hovered over the finger wearing the data-ring.

  If he could just do it quickly enough, the ring might not have the opportunity to send a signal through his nervous system. All he had to do was strike down, a single slash, and it would all be over . . .

  His hand trembled as a cold wash of fear passed through him. He sobbed and let go of the knife, unable to go through with this act of self-mutilation; not when he knew the action might kill him.

  He moved his shaking fingers across the surface of the console and set it to record, then began to speak. He did his best to summarize what he’d discovered, and what he thought they were dealing with. He tripped over his own words but pushed on regardless, knowing he was babbling but afraid that his mind might be stolen away from him before he had a chance to finish. He knew the monster inside his head could come back at any time.

  Ty took the command structure he’d discovered and attached both his message and the video footage of the artefact’s sudden transformation to it, then distributed multiple copies throughout the ship’s networks. He left the console to continue recording in the meantime.

  Even if the monster managed to track down some of the copies of the command structure, it couldn’t find or delete them all. All Ty needed to do now was . . .

  A glint of light suddenly manifested in the corner of his vision, like a ray of sunlight reflecting off glass.

  The monster had woken up.

  Ty scrabbled for the knife and splayed his fingers across the console once more, just as he heard the heavy door behind him begin to open. He took a firm grip on the knife and prepared to strike down at his finger.

  Something stopped him, and he cried out. It felt like the air around him had solidified, freezing him in place.

  The monster crawled back inside his skull, just as he heard someone call his name.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The comms terminal in Dakota’s quarters began to beep insistently. She accessed the data-space and found a high-priority alert waiting for her from Corso. A moment’s mental navigation pinpointed him on Deck C, close by the labs.

  Lucas. What’s up?

 

  There was an edge of panic to his voice.

  I’m in my quarters, she replied.

 

  Why don’t you just tell me what it is?

 

  He cut the connection. Dakota checked the time and realized, with a silent groan, that she had been asleep for less than two hours.

  On getting there, she found Lamoureaux waiting by the entrance to a storage room, halfway between the transport station and the labs.

  He nodded towards the open door, his expression grim. ‘Take a look.’

  She stepped inside, but her nose had already told her everything she needed to know. The bulkheads were stained red with blood, and the air smelled of copper and rust.

  She saw Corso and Martinez kneeling on either side of Ray Willis, who had been pushed into the space between two tall metal equipment bins. It was clear from the deep gashes in his throat and chest that he was very dead.

  Corso glanced up at her as she entered. ‘Did you see anyone else on the way here?’

  ‘No, I came straight away.’

  Corso and Martinez exchanged a look. ‘Four of us here—’

  ‘And Dan on the bridge,’ Martinez finished for him. ‘We should get back there as soon as we can.’

  Just five of us left, Dakota thought numbly. Ray, Nancy, Leo – all dead.

  ‘What about – what about Driscoll?’ she asked. She had almost said, what about Whitecloud?

  ‘Now there’s a question I’d like to answer,’ said Martinez, straightening up. He grabbed hold of one side of a storage module to keep himself standing the right way up. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Not only that, it looks like he took the Mos Hadroch with him,’ Corso added. ‘And . . . Dakota, Eduard knows about Whitecloud. Or he does now, at any rate.’

  ‘Please tell me you only found that out recently,’ said Martinez. His tone was calm, but something in the way he looked at her made it abundantly clear he was suppressing a great deal of anger.

  ‘I swear, I only just found out myself.’ She glanced at Corso. ‘You know, maybe you should have told all of us a long time before now.’

  ‘Maybe I should,’ Corso agreed, but she knew he was dissembling.

  She couldn’t stop staring down at Willis’s face; he wore an expression of mild surprise that seemed utterly at odds with the violence that had been done to him. The gashes in his body were horrible, and yet she couldn’t look away.

  ‘I guess it’s pretty conclusive now that Whitecloud killed Olivarri,’ she said.

  ‘I’m still not making any
assumptions until we find him,’ replied Martinez.

  ‘What about Willis here? Who found him?’

  ‘We were getting unexplained major power surges from the labs,’ Corso explained. ‘Driscoll . . . Whitecloud,’ he corrected himself, ‘didn’t answer our calls, so Ray came down here to check things out. That was the last we heard from him.’

  Dakota dipped back into the data-space and checked on Trader’s yacht.

  ‘Trader’s where he should be,’ she announced. ‘His yacht hasn’t budged, and he hasn’t tried to link up to any of the airlocks.’

  Lamoureaux leaned in through the doorway and caught her eye. ‘You think Whitecloud might be on his way to the hold?’

  ‘How the hell does Trader come into this?’ Martinez demanded.

  ‘How much did Lucas tell you about Whitecloud?’ Dakota asked him.

  ‘Enough to make me a very unhappy man, Miss Merrick.’

  ‘Well . . . he has a customized Uchidan implant, and it’s possible Trader’s using it to exert some kind of control over him. It’s also possible he doesn’t even know what’s happening to him.’

  ‘That might be the case,’ Martinez growled, ‘but if I happen to accidentally blow the bastard’s head off, I won’t cry about it.’ He nodded towards the corridor outside. ‘There’s an arms locker near here. We get armed and we go looking for him.’

  ‘No. No firearms,’ said Corso firmly. ‘We can’t take a chance that the artefact might get damaged.’

  Martinez pulled himself upright, took hold of a metal shelf bolted to the bulkhead behind him, and used it for leverage as he planted one booted foot on Corso’s shoulder and pushed hard. Corso was sent skidding across the floor until he hit the bulkhead opposite.

  ‘I should kill you now,’ the Commander rasped. ‘You’ve lied to me too many times, Lucas, and it’s getting people killed. This is still my command, my ship, my crew. Therefore we carry arms.’

  He glanced around them all with an expression of disgust. ‘Nothing would make me happier than to shove the whole fucking lot of you out the nearest airlock and watch you wriggle, but right now you’re going to get yourselves armed and start looking for Whitecloud. I don’t care how big the fucking ship is, this time I want him found.’