by Gary Gibson
‹Okay. Just get back here as fast as you can. I'm picking you up on the external arrays, and it looks like you're just clearing orbit.›
Dakota glanced around the crowded chamber, where everything seemed perfectly still and silent. There wasn't the slightest clue to suggest the ship had so much as moved. Spotting her wadded-up jumpsuit, she started to pull it on, while letting the filmsuit drain itself back inside her body.
Then, for the first time, the ship rocked gently around her, sending fresh beads of moisture caroming through the air.
Trader?
‹An unfortunate encounter with some Emissary scouts following us. Might I ask that you set some of the Meridian drones to defend us?›
Dakota closed her eyes and locked into the drones, immediately finding herself submerged in a chaotic whirl of data. The drones had reverted to their original programming, and were now fighting to push the Emissary scouts back down inside the cache.
She felt one of the Meridian drones die; they were a superior technology, but the Emissary scouts had the advantage of sheer numbers.
Dakota concentrated on protecting the yacht, keeping her eyes tightly closed and letting her limbs float out around her, her fingers jerking spasmodically as she directed her side of the battle raging outside. Trader's yacht looked tiny and fragile compared with the bristling black mass of the pursuing scouts. Yet more of the Emissary scouts were pouring out from the mouth of the cache, their skins flickering with multiple bright energies as they repelled tightly focused bursts of energy directed towards them. The hulls of the machines on both sides of the battle crackled as their outer layers were burned off, while the complex nanomolecular circuitry within attempted to repair the constant damage.
‹We're just about prepped for a short-range jump,› Lamoureaux sent to her. ‹Have you checked the monitors on Nancy's suit?›
Dakota swore silently to herself for not having thought of that already. She opened her eyes and quickly activated the data screen printed on the sleeve of the other woman's spacesuit.
It says she's absorbed more than fifty grey of radiation, Dakota sent in reply. She was far from sure whether even the wonders of modern medical technology could combat such a huge dose of ionizing radiation.
Nancy coughed, and Dakota studied the other woman's face. Her lips moved soundlessly, and her eyes had rolled halfway up into her head.
‹Okay, that's really not good,› Lamoureaux remarked.
Understatement of the fucking century.
‹Look, all we can do now is stick her in a medbox and hope for the best.›
I should have listened to her, Dakota sent. She had a better idea of the situation, and I didn't pay attention. I should have checked things out more thoroughly, instead of going barging into a situation I didn't understand.
‹Don't beat yourself up too much, Dakota. She wasn't exactly going out of her way to win your trust and respect.›
The yacht shook again. Trader, how much damage are we taking?
‹A considerable amount, I regret to say. I believe there might originally have been only a few scouts inside the cache, who would have used any available resources to build copies of themselves.›
How do you know?
‹The tactic is familiar. A few enter a defended territory, multiply rapidly, then attack from within.›
And knowing this helps us how?
‹The ones with antimatter cores are identifiable by the magnetic fields they use for containment. Those are suicide devices. The ones without antimatter cores control the rest.›
So if we can destroy the ones doing the controlling, we can stop the rest.
‹Precisely›
Dakota slowed her time frame until the seconds stretched out. She ran an analysis of the course of the battle so far, and noticed how just a dozen scouts kept themselves close to the cache, while all the rest pushed the attack aggressively. She watched as one of them dived towards a Meridian drone, detonating at the point of closest proximity, overwhelming the drone's wrapping of protective fields and annihilating the machinery within in an enormous blast of heat and radiation.
It was time, she decided, to stop running and go on the offensive.
As she drove the drones straight at the cache, several were annihilated instantly, but instead of breaking away again, as they had been programmed to do, she kept the rest driving relentlessly towards the cache and the cluster of controlling scouts sheltering there.
‹Dakota, It's Ted. We've come up with an idea.›
I hope it's good.
‹There's a couple of scouts heading towards us. We might be able to take them out with the pulse-cannons, once they get within range, but we can't risk letting them gather intel on the frigate and then maybe sending advance warning to the Emissaries that we're in the vicinity.›
You're assuming they haven't done that already?
‹Yeah, well, we still need to cut any potential losses. So here's what we're going to do: we'll jump now, and rendezvous with you at the following co-ords. Pass them on to Trader, and we'll meet you there later.›
We could wind up separated from each other by a long way, Ted. Maybe even by a couple of light-years.
‹Not if we make it just a small jump, like you did back at Redstone. That reduces the chances of wide separation. There's a binary system about twelve light-years from here that might be a good recognizable target.›
A moment later an image of the binary system materialized in Dakota's mind.
‹It's got about six satellites, so we'll aim for the fifth one out. Neither of us is going to hit the exact spot, but with luck we'll be in close enough range of each other to make a relatively fast rendezvous.›
What about Nancy? She needs emergency treatment, Ted – as in right now.
‹The consensus is we're taking too big a risk if we let those scouts get any closer. We're going to initiate that jump immediately.›
Consensus? You mean Corso and Martinez, don't you?
Lamoureaux didn't reply, but she could sense his tension and concern as if it were her own. Dakota pulled back into the real world, and she looked down again at Nancy. Her skin had reddened even more, and her lips trembled faintly.
Perhaps it was better she wasn't aware of what was happening. Dakota described the new plan to Trader. By now more than half the drones recovered from around the mouth of the cache had been destroyed.
‹Are any of the remaining drones recoverable?›
I don't think so, she replied. I could pull them back towards us, but all that'll do is draw the scouts straight to us.
‹Then we must abandon them.›
We have what we came for anyway. How long before we can jump?
‹Immediately.›
The frigate was already gone: it had slipped into superluminal space only seconds after she had spoken to Lamoureaux.
She switched her attention back to the cache. The scouts had rallied, throwing the last of their antimatter-equipped clones at the remaining Meridian drones with devastating effect.
Dakota opened her eyes and again checked on Nancy, thinking that, if she was lucky, she might live long enough to appreciate the irony of trying to save the life of a woman who'd like nothing better than to see her dead.
Time to go, Trader.
‹Initiating.›
The stars spun around the yacht and then, for one brief instant, vanished.
'That's it,' said Lamoureaux, leaning forward in the interface chair as he reached back both hands to massage his neck muscles. 'Twelve light-years, and just half an AU off-target.'
Corso nodded, looking up at the simulation of the system they had landed in as it floated beneath the ceiling. Each of the simulation's planets became gradually more detailed as additional data arrived from the hull's sensor arrays.
Martinez stepped away from the console he had been manning and slumped next to Perez on one of the couches. 'I guess all we can do now is wait and see if they make it, too.'
The nex
t several minutes slid by at a glacial pace. Corso glanced around the bridge, at displays of intercepted tach-net feeds originating from the Perseus Arm: most of it indecipherable gibberish.
Thirteen minutes after they had jumped, an alert sounded.
'They made it,' Lamoureaux exclaimed, his gaze fixed on some faraway point. 'I'm picking them up now.'
Martinez clapped his hands a couple of times, and Corso found himself grinning as the tension suddenly lifted away.
'They're a couple of light-minutes away,' Lamoureaux added. 'That means a couple of hours before we can rendezvous.'
'Is the med-bay prepped for Nancy?' asked Martinez.
Corso didn't miss Lamoureaux's hesitation when he answered. 'I've unlocked the seals and reactivated the medboxes.'
Martinez merely nodded, as if satisfied with this answer, yet Corso knew they were all maintaining a fiction: there was likely very little they could do for Nancy Schiller. Even if by some miracle she was still alive by the time Trader's yacht docked with the frigate, it would almost certainly be far too late to save her. Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair and approached Corso. 'Have you had any more thoughts about what we found back by the reactors?' he asked him quietly.
Corso glanced towards Perez and Martinez, but they had stepped over to a console on the far side of the bridge, and were deep in a discussion over astrogational data.
'I think we're going to have to let Dakota see it,' he replied. 'If we're right about Whitecloud, she should be the first to know.'
'You realize that means telling her who he really is?'
'Yes… yes, I suppose I do,' Corso replied. 'Not that I'm looking forward to it.'
'Rather you than me,' Lamoureaux said softly. 'Rather you than me, any day of any year.'
Chapter Thirty-one
Whitecloud sat staring at a screen and nursing a bulb of coffee as Corso entered the lab a short time later.
'Found anything new?' Corso asked him, shooting a glance at the Mos Hadroch still wedged inside the enormous machine and surrounded by probes.
Whitecloud went on staring at the screen like he wasn't even aware of the man standing next to him.
'Ty?' Corso asked again, this time in a substantially lower voice.
Whitecloud finally turned to face him. Nobody home, thought Corso, chilled by the empty expression on the other man's face.
Whitecloud seemed to come back to life a moment later, and jerked backwards, clearly surprised to find Corso standing in front of him. The bulb of coffee went spinning out of his hand, but Corso reached out and caught it, then handed it back. His lingering doubts about Whitecloud being under some form of control had now vanished completely.
'I was wondering if you had anything new to report,' Corso started again, keeping his voice level even while his heart hammered inside his chest. It was important not to let Whitecloud suspect anything was amiss. 'You were supposed to file an update this morning, but I didn't receive anything from you.'
In truth, Whitecloud's reports rarely made for good reading. Rather than containing actual information or providing any insights, they tended more to be a list of tests, or variations of tests, that had been run on the artefact, all producing the same dismal results. The only time the derelict had shown any sign of being anything other than a dumb inanimate object had been that first time Corso had laid eyes on it.
Whitecloud blinked and pulled himself out of his chair, grabbing a rung in the low ceiling for support. 'New?' He scratched his head, staring around him as if he had been asleep for a long time. 'Yes. Yes there is, actually. Take a look at this.'
Whitecloud pushed past Corso and headed for a tabletop imager. He activated it first by passing his hand over its plate, then quickly sped through a series of holographic menus until he found what he was looking for.
A few moments later Corso found himself looking at the image of a translucent upright cylinder hovering above the plate, with thousands of hair-thin passageways extending outwards from it horizontally.
'That's a cache, isn't it?' remarked Corso.
'It is,' Whitecloud agreed. 'The one at Tierra, to be precise. I only got a chance to take a look at this for the first time the other night. The main reason I didn't get round to filing your report was because I wanted to check more of the correspondences before discussing it with you. But since you're here…'
Whitecloud reached up towards the floating cylinder and nudged it to one side with an expert flick of his fingers, then he quickly navigated through another menu. A second cylinder appeared, similar to the first except that, rather than having a single primary shaft, this one had two shafts that merged in the middle, forming a cross.
Corso started. 'That's…'
'The interior of the asteroid where we found the Mos Hadroch,' Whitecloud finished for him.
'But they look identical!' Corso exclaimed, coming forward and putting both hands on the rim of the imager's flat plate. 'Well, no, not identical, but…'
'But strikingly similar, wouldn't you say?'
'Yes.' Corso nodded. 'And you only just picked up on this?'
'You'll recall I was working outside on the hull during the briefing about the cache we just visited. A summary was forwarded to me, but I didn't get round to studying it until now. Still, I don't know how I missed it before,' he admitted, a touch of wonder in his voice. 'When I saw this for the first time yesterday, I was thunderstruck. The relationship was immediately obvious. Anyone with enough knowledge of the Atn could have made the connection, but there are so few of us left, really, and with the chaos of the last few years…'
Corso studied the two images and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the lab. 'Just to be clear, you're saying there's obviously some kind of relationship between the Atn and the machine-swarm that created the caches?'
'You sound surprised, but think about it for a moment. They're both widely distributed, self-reproducing machine species. It's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that they share some common point of origin. Perhaps what we're seeing here is a case of some kind of genuine machine evolution.' Whitecloud paused to think for a moment. 'Or more likely one was created from the other.'
'And the swarm was hunting down and destroying Atn clades.' Corso, too, thought for a moment. 'Can knowing this help us in any way?'
'I don't know,' Whitecloud admitted. 'Just about the first thing I did, once I realized this, was to try and crack the Mos Hadroch with the Atn's own machine-protocols. I got nowhere, though that's not to say there aren't other commonalities between the species that might give us the key we need to understanding how the artefact actually works.'
'We're running out of time, Ty. A few more days and we'll be reaching our destination.'
Whitecloud nodded. 'Did we get what we needed at our last stop?'
'Yes… but there were some problems. Dakota and the others are on their way back right now.'
'What problems?'
Corso briefly summarized the events on the cache-world, including Nancy's radiation poisoning.
Whitecloud paled at this final piece of news. 'Nancy… is dying?'
Corso frowned at his reaction. Whitecloud was clearly severely shaken, more than might be expected given that he hardly knew the woman. 'No, not dead, but it's really not looking good. She's going straight into a medbox as soon as she's back here but, to be honest, the delay before we can rendezvous is just going to further reduce any chance she might still have had to pretty much zero.'
Whitecloud's face became a mask. 'I see,' he said briskly, looking away from Corso. 'That's a matter of some concern, of course.'
Corso nodded, and wondered again just what it was Whitecloud wasn't telling him. 'We need to find a way to activate the Mos Hadroch that doesn't involve Trader,' Corso reminded him. 'Dakota's been down here a couple of times, hasn't she?'
'Yes,' said Whitecloud, 'but we never got a repeat of the phenomenon that occurred the first time she saw it.' He nod
ded towards the artefact in its cradle. 'It's been inert ever since.'
'Do what you can, Ty. It could mean the difference between success and failure. I'll see if I can get Dakota to come back down. Maybe this connection between the swarm and the Atn is what we need to finally get somewhere.'
Ty nodded, but his whole mood had changed dramatically once he'd heard the news about Nancy. Just what have you been hiding from me? Corso wondered as he left. As soon as Trader's yacht had docked, Dan Perez and Ray Willis helped Dakota get Nancy out of her suit. Corso arrived in time to watch the two men lower her into a portable medbox towed away by a spider-mech, before following it back out of the bay.
'Her suit's support systems are keeping her alive, but only just,' remarked Dakota once she and Corso were alone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. 'I know she's not going to make it, but why do I feel so bad? The woman hated my guts. She wouldn't want me to feel sorry for her.'
'Maybe you're still a little more human than you seem to think,' Corso suggested.
Dakota just shook her head, her eyes filled with regret. 'I can't help but blame myself. I let myself get careless.' There was anger in her tone. 'I was in too much of a hurry to get down inside the cache.'
Corso sighed and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him directly. 'There's no way you could have known beforehand what was going to happen, and Nancy knew the risks before she came along on this trip. We all did. You understand that, right?'
Dakota looked away from him again. 'Maybe.'
'Maybe, yes,' he said. 'Now listen, there's something we need to talk about. Something urgent.'
She glanced back at him. 'What?'
'The closer we get to where we're going, the more nervous I get when it comes to letting Trader anywhere near the Mos Hadroch. But I just got back from seeing Nathan Driscoll over in the labs – and it looks like he's finally on to something.'
'A way to activate it?'
Corso hesitated. It had already occurred to him that there was no reason to assume Whitecloud was the only one to have been compromised.
