Empire of Light s-3

by Gary Gibson

  'No, not yet,' he replied, entirely aware of how evasive he was sounding. 'Something else.'

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. 'Oh, for… You still don't trust me, do you? Listen, I already checked myself out before Olivarri was murdered. I went down to the med-bay and ran a full set of diagnostics on my implants almost as soon as we were under way, because I wanted to be sure. Lamoureaux did the same, and he's never even met Trader. Believe me,' she continued, 'we're both clean, and neither of us is being controlled – not by Trader or anyone else.'

  'Why the hell didn't you tell me this before now?'

  'Because, after Olivarri was murdered, I knew it wouldn't make the slightest damn bit of difference what I said. You read the report on the med-bay; whoever did the vandalizing, they didn't just smash the physical scanners, they did a good job of wiping the core memory as well. So how could either of us prove that we'd scanned ourselves?'

  'All right, I'm sorry for doubting you. Anyway, Nathan now thinks it's possible there's a close relationship between the swarm and the Atn. He thinks one might have split off from the other a very long time ago and, given what he just showed me, I'm inclined to believe it.'

  Dakota's eyes widened. 'Shit, that's…' She tailed off into silence.

  'Pretty incredible, yeah,' Corso finished for her, then he nodded towards the exit. 'Maybe we should get going.'

  Dakota followed him to the nearest transport station. 'I've run into Atn a couple of times on coreships,' she said, as they boarded a car. 'They're harmless, so it's hard to believe they could somehow be related to something as malign as the swarm.'

  'It means there's at least the outside chance that Atn protocols might work on the artefact, but the fact is we're almost out of time. We're almost certainly going to need Trader to activate the thing, whether we like it or not.'

  'It's strange to hear you saying that, Lucas.'

  'Yeah, well, I'm still not too keen on the way you sprung him on us.'

  'But I'm not the only one who's been hiding things. How long have you known Leo Olivarri was working undercover for the Legislate?'

  Corso stared at her. 'Where did you hear this?'

  'Trader told me,' she replied. 'And, no, don't ask me where he heard it. He wouldn't tell.'

  'I haven't known about Olivarri that long,' Corso replied. 'There were suspicions, but we had to send a covert signal back home to get any kind of confirmation. It still doesn't tell us why he was murdered.'

  'If he was spying on us, maybe he knew something we didn't. I could have worked on finding out more, if you'd only told me. Or do you still not trust me?'

  Corso leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her. The transport station lay silent and empty through the curved glass behind him. 'All right,' he said, 'I know who killed Olivarri. Or at least I have a pretty damn good idea. I think it was Driscoll.'

  'What makes you think it was him?'

  'Whoever sabotaged the ship's stacks didn't do a thorough enough job. It turns out there are memory overflow buffers that can hold partial back-ups in case of a major failure. We managed to retrieve some of the missing hours from the surveillance feeds, and it turns out Driscoll was the last person to see Olivarri alive. We even have partial video of them arguing not long before Olivarri was killed.'

  'What were they arguing about?'

  He shrugged. 'No idea. We haven't managed to recover the sound yet.'

  'That's not necessarily incriminating in itself, is it? I mean, people do argue.'

  'There's more. Before we left Redstone, Nathan completely disappeared for several hours. We have no idea what happened to him during that time.'

  'Surely you asked him?'

  'Yes, but his answer never rang true.'

  Dakota leaned back and studied Corso for a moment. 'You're still holding something back, I can tell.'

  Corso smiled weakly. 'All right, when the med-bay was vandalized, it made it almost too easy to pin the blame on you or Ted.'

  'I think it was deliberate misdirection: a way to take the focus off someone else by making the obvious suspects look like the only suspects.'

  'That occurred to me too, but now I think it was vandalized for exactly the reason we originally thought it was – so someone couldn't be scanned for compromised neural implants. But not you or Ted.'

  Dakota smiled and shook her head. 'That's ridiculous. If there was another machine-head on board, I'd have known straight away.'

  Corso smiled softly. 'Dakota, our friend Driscoll is a Uchidanist.'

  'A Uchidanist? Why are you only telling me now?'

  'Because I need your help,' Corso replied miserably. 'I'm sure he's under Trader's control.'

  'How?'

  'Remember, Uchidanists have-'

  'Implants,' she finished for him. 'Oh, Jesus and Buddha. But that still doesn't necessarily prove he's responsible, does it?'

  'No,' he agreed. 'For that, you need evidence.' He reached up to the car's list of programmable destinations. 'Let's get going. There's something I want you to see.'

  She looked at him suspiciously. 'What?'

  'The evidence,' he said simply. 'But before we get there, there's something else I'm going to have to tell you about Driscoll. And you're not going to like it.' The frigate's reactor complexes were surrounded by a maze of access tubes narrow and cramped enough to induce any number of claustrophobic nightmares in the minds of anyone traversing them. Corso led the way, once they disembarked, relying on the detailed maps placed at each junction to help him navigate his way to one of the reactor bays.

  Dakota followed close behind, a knot of apprehension twisting in her stomach, her mind still numb with shock from what she'd just learned. Before long they reached the main control area for the frigate's fusion-reaction systems. A screen mounted on one bulkhead showed a real time simulation of the fantastically violent processes taking place just a few metres away.

  'I still can't believe you kept this from me for so long,' she mumbled, watching as Corso stepped over to a service hatch set into the bulkhead. He entered a code into a panel beside the hatch, and after a few moments it swung open.

  'We've been over this before,' he replied testily. 'If I can find a way to work with Whitecloud without throttling him, so can you.'

  Dakota didn't reply at first. In truth, what Corso had told her on the way still hadn't quite sunk in.

  Whitecloud was, whether directly or indirectly, one of the men ultimately responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life. The Port Gabriel incident had led to the banning of machine-head technology, and that had led to Dakota working for Bourdain – and that had led, one way and another, to Nova Arctis, and finally to the Mjollnir.

  'I want him dead,' she announced, her voice wavering.

  Corso was halfway inside the hatch as he glanced back at her. 'But we need him alive,' he said, with a warning in his tone.

  'You should have told me,' she protested in sudden fury.

  'And if I had, would you have been happy about him coming along?'

  'No, I wouldn't,' she spat back at him. 'He's a mass murderer, don't you understand? You weren't there, Lucas. You have no conception of what it was like losing your mind like that.'

  'And yet we have Trader sitting in his yacht there in the hold, and we all know what he's capable of. I seem to recall he did exactly the same thing to you. So how do you square that with your conscience?'

  Dakota's face paled and she fell silent, her eyes round and luminous in the light cast by the reactor simulation.

  Corso shook his head in irritation, embarrassed at his own sudden sense of discomfort. A silence stretched between them, but when he ducked to continue through the hatch, she followed after only a moment's hesitation. The area beneath the reactor control room was barely big enough to enable them to crouch together inside it, and the only light came from a single red panel in one corner. Corso pulled out a small flashlight and shone it on to what looked to D
akota at first like a jumble of machinery. He gripped the flashlight in his teeth and used both hands to pull himself closer to it.

  As Dakota followed, she saw that a plastic chair had been pushed into one corner, and was covered with matt foil that she recognized as a kind of force-feedback material. A bird's-nest tangle of wiring and circuitry surrounded it, while yet more circuitry and wiring was wrapped around the arms of the chair.

  'What is it?' asked Dakota, puzzled.

  'See that superconductor cable running through the back? That's so it can tap directly into the reactor power feed without showing up on the logs.'

  Suddenly Dakota saw the order in the chaos, and realized she was looking at a home-brew version of the interface chair up on the bridge.

  She moved abreast of Corso and brushed the fingertips of one hand along the wiring. 'So why build it at all?' she asked.

  'To trigger the shutdown,' Corso explained, 'and to hide the identity of Olivarri's killer. Some of its components were manufactured from the lab's dedicated fabricator. That would nail Whitecloud pretty conclusively.'

  'I don't see how,' Dakota muttered. 'Can Uchidan implants even work with an interface chair?'

  'Apparently his can. I did a little research into his escape from custody. His implants are a custom job – far from surprising, when you think about it. All the members of his R amp;D unit were regularly tinkering with their own neural hardware to see what results they got.'

  'There has to be a reason you're telling me all this now rather than previously.'

  'Because it was going to emerge sooner or later, and I'd rather you heard it from me. We're all going to have to make compromises if we're to have a hope in hell of getting out of this mess alive.'

  'What compromises?'

  'I need you to keep working with Whitecloud.'

  She stared at him, totally appalled. 'You've got to be fucking joking.'

  'If he's close to some kind of a real breakthrough, you're going to have to. If it makes you feel any better, I've talked with him about what happened at Port Gabriel. He doesn't deny his responsibility for what happened, and I'm not saying he's any less guilty, but I'm beginning to think he's genuinely contrite.'

  A sick, acid feeling was building in the pit of her stomach. 'Oh, that's okay then,' she snapped. 'No problem. Let bygones be bygones, right?'

  Corso bristled. 'That's not what I meant.'

  She stared off past his shoulder for a moment, thinking. 'Look, putting all of that aside just for the moment, one thing occurs to me. If he's under Trader's control, why did he tell you he'd made a breakthrough? Wouldn't that be against Trader's own interests?'

  'Trader didn't control your actions every second of every day, did he?'

  'Well, no,' she conceded.

  'I think it's the same with Whitecloud. That means he's his own man at least some of the time.' He nodded towards the jury-rigged chair. 'All this tells us is that Trader's planning something and, whatever it turns out to be, we're probably not going to like it.'

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Another jump, at only 50 per cent capacity, carried the Mjollnir several hundred light-years further across the gulf separating the spiral arms. The Perseus Arm grew to fill more of the sky, while patterns of dust and light began to reveal themselves to the Mjollnir's crew over the next several days, as they worked to keep the frigate's jump capacity above a certain critical level.

  Ty's dreams became stranger and more frequent whenever he slept, sometimes almost taking on the nature of visions. At one point he dreamt that a powerful storm roared out of the Mos Hadroch, where it sat in its cradle, commanding him in a voice expressed in the form of thunder and gales.

  Now she was back on board, the prognosis for Nancy was far from good; the radiation had caused deep and irreversible cellular damage. He found he dreamt of her also, suited and tumbling out of his reach, until she was lost in the depths of interstellar space. He had visited her in the med-bay a couple of times, and gazed at her through the transparent lid of her medbox, wishing his need for her could somehow bring her closer to life.

  He studied his personal logs of the tests he had run on the artefact, and in them found inexplicable gaps. He was by nature a meticulous record-keeper, going so far as to date and time-stamp even his personal observations and thoughts on the tests he ran. But the more he dug, the more he discovered periods where the logs and his own memory now clearly disagreed. He found no records of certain procedures on days when he would have sworn that they had been carried out, but the more he tried to recall the specific details of what had taken place, the more his memory failed him.

  Ty experienced a cold tightness in his chest when he discovered that these inexplicable blank spots displayed their greatest frequency around the time of Olivarri's murder.

  He sat for a long time, his right hand splayed on the surface of a greyed-out console, the data-ring on his index finger gleaming dully in the low light of the laboratory. Then he activated the console and, from the lab's dedicated fabricator, ordered up a dozen micro-surveillance cameras with broad-spectrum capability. The request would be logged, and he might have difficulty explaining it if it was ever questioned, but that was another risk he was willing to take.

  The cameras were manufactured within the hour, whereupon he spent the afternoon positioning the tiny devices in dark and secluded corners of the lab where he was sure they couldn't be spotted at a casual glance. A short time later, Ty found himself back out on the hull as part of another repair shift. He watched Corso drill a hole into the hull itself with a custom-made mechanism he had ordered up from the fabs. The frigate was bathed in the ruby light of dozens of young stars shrouded in nebulae that marked the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm. It was a tremendous spectacle but, after nearly twelve straight hours on EVA, nobody was in a mood for star-gazing.

  Once the plate-like Meridian field-generator had been plugged into the hull, Corso stepped back, allowing Lamoureaux room. Ted squatted beside it, laying the flat of one gloved hand on its slightly convex surface. A moment later, a flickering dome of light flared into life around them, which had to be at least fifty metres across.

  'All right, I guess that's the last one for today,' Lamoureaux announced over the shared comms, fatigue reducing his voice to a dull monotone. The field shut off once more as he stood upright again.

  'How much longer before we get the last one into place?' asked Corso.

  'If we can keep to our schedule, it'll be another two days before the last of them is fitted to the hull,' Lamoureaux replied. 'With the spider-mechs doing a lot of the prep-work, we can speed things up, but we're still going to have to spend some time calibrating them.'

  'And how long is that going to take?'

  'Another day, maybe.' Lamoureaux turned and gestured at the newly installed field-generator. 'They're powerful, mind you. Whole orders of magnitude stronger than anything the Shoal let us get our hands on.'

  Corso nodded. 'Ted, I need to check some diagnostics with you. So Nathan, if you don't mind-' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, then pointed at Lamoureaux, signalling they were going to talk over a private channel.

  'By all means,' said Ty, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'Don't let me stop you.'

  Ty simmered in silence while the other two men got to talking about whatever it was they didn't want him to hear. Paranoia made him sure that he was the subject of their conversation, and he wondered if they had finally picked up on his long-range tach-net communication with the avatar.

  The two men's comms icons changed back to public mode a few minutes later.

  'I'm going to take a look at the rest of the field-generators we planted,' Lamoureaux announced. 'Might be able to speed up the calibration if I double-check them.'

  Ty frowned behind his visor. 'You could do that just as well from the bridge.'

  'Well, since I'm out here, I might as well grab the opportunity,' Lamoureaux replied, trying so hard to sound casual that it aroused Ty
's suspicions further.

  Lamoureaux moved away from them, carried along the hull by the thin silver wires of his spacesuit's lanyard, and followed by a small retinue of spider-mechs.

  'Ty,' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, 'switch to a private channel, please.'

  With some reluctance, Ty switched to a one-on-one channel with Corso.

  'I wanted to talk to you about Nancy, Ty. Word gets around.'

  Ty opened his mouth and closed it. He almost blurted out a denial, then relented. 'It started long before we even got to Redstone. I-'

  'Forget it,' said Corso. 'That doesn't matter. When I told you to stay away from the rest of the crew, I didn't know you were already involved with her.'

  'Is she…?'

  'She didn't make it, Ty. I'm sorry.'

  Ty nodded inside his helmet, his throat suddenly tight. 'I see. There was never really any hope of recovery, was there?'

  'No,' Corso admitted. 'But you have to make the attempt, anyway.'

  Ty listened to the sound of his own breathing, close and loud within his helmet. Corso moved as if to turn away.

  'Then there'll have to be a funeral service?' Ty asked.

  Corso stopped and looked back at him. 'No, not yet, anyway.'

  'Why not?' Ty demanded, scandalized.

  'This isn't the time to be burying any more of our dead. Not when we're this close to our goal. The last thing the others need is to be reminded just how dangerous this job is. There's a real chance none of us is going to come back alive.'

  'You have to hold a service,' Ty rasped. 'There was one for Olivarri.'

  'That was different,' Corso snapped. 'He was murdered. Nancy's death is a direct result of our mission. We'll mark her passing properly, but not until this is over.'

  '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?'