Empire of Light s-3

by Gary Gibson

  Ty crouched beneath the window, next to a console, still gripping the bag containing the Mos Hadroch tight against his chest. He'd already taken his helmet off.

  'You shouldn't have followed me,' Ty rasped in what sounded more like his own voice.

  As she stepped closer, he pulled a knife out of the bag, its blade still stained with Willis's blood.

  'You can't hurt me with that,' she said. 'Believe me.'

  She started to move closer to him – and the yacht moved towards the window with startling suddenness. A drive-spine pierced the glass, sending dozens of fragments spinning through the air. Dakota grabbed hold of a metal shelf bolted to the wall, before the venting atmosphere could suck her out of the module and into the hold.

  But the explosive decompression ripped her hands away from the shelf, and she collided with the bulkhead nearest the window. She then managed to grab hold of the console for just long enough to let the force of decompression finally relent after a few moments.

  The next time she looked, Whitecloud was gone. The strap of his bag, however, had become caught on a piece of twisted metal to one side of the window-frame.

  Dakota pushed herself towards it, hands outstretched.

  She was not aware of any kind of explosion, or of being hit by any form of missile. Only later did she recall having a momentary glimpse of a ball of white light expanding through the shattered window towards her. She was initially only aware of now being on the opposite side of the room. The metal shelves were twisted out of shape where her body had rammed into them with sickening force.

  The filmsuit had protected her, but the impact had nearly drained it of power. She might have as little as a few minutes left before it would begin to fail.

  Trader swam in through the ruined window, moving towards the bag until the sphere of water enveloping him had surrounded it. The tentacles dangling from his underbelly untangled the strap from the obstruction and drew it close to his body.

  She watched, helplessly, knowing that if she provoked Trader into attacking her a second time, the power drain would likely overwhelm her filmsuit.

  Trader swivelled to look at her directly. ‹To continue our conversation, you are, of course, aware that there are sophisticated means by which cultures much more advanced than your own can track individuals across enormous distances.›

  I don't know what you mean.

  ‹Of course you do. It's how Hugh Moss chased me all across the galaxy. Don't you realize he doesn't want us to succeed? The Emissaries are winning. The Shoal is retreating, world after world destroyed. You can't imagine how many lives have been lost already.

  Nothing would please that monster more than to see us all die, so it was hardly surprising that he might place a similar form of tracking technology on your own person. Something so small and undetectable you would never find it. Then, my dear Dakota, he gave the means of tracking you to our enemies, the Emissaries.›

  Dakota remembered how Moss had touched her shoulder back on Derinkuyu, and the way his touch had stung.

  You're lying. There's no way you could possibly know all this.

  ‹I am not so alone in my endeavours as you seem to imagine. I still have those whom I can trust to supply me with certain intelligence, otherwise Moss would have found and destroyed me long ago. But the final proof that the Emissaries have a means of tracking you lies in the ease with which they found us here, out of all the vastness of this spiral arm. I cannot believe those scouts hidden in the cache were anything other than a trap carefully laid in anticipation of your arrival. The only course of action then left to me is to take the Mos Hadroch far away from yourself and the frigate, in order to preserve it.›

  This is bullshit. You were always planning to steal it.

  ‹Once our mission here was finished I intended to return it to the Hegemony for safe-keeping, that much is true. Perhaps, if you survive this day, you will eventually come to understand that the Mos Hadroch is far too precious to be allowed to remain in the hands of a fledgling and barbaric race such as your own. The Emissaries' attention will be on the frigate or, more precisely, on you, while a much smaller ship like my own may be able to slip past their defences.›

  A hatch began to slide open in the side of Trader's ship, and he moved towards it.

  Wait…

  ‹Goodbye, Dakota. I did not come to this decision lightly›

  The hull of Trader's yacht closed behind him as he slipped back inside. Flickering lightning began to form around the tips of its drive-spines.

  Dakota activated the command structure Moss had given her, feeling it unfold like an impossibly complex origami flower in the depths of her mind. She tried to lock on to the yacht's primary control systems, but it was already too late; the craft was fully committed to a jump. Trying to reverse the flow of energy spilling out through the drive-spines at this point would likely destroy the yacht, the frigate's hold, and herself along with it.

  She scrambled for the door and felt real panic well up inside her when she found it had sealed itself following the decompression. She launched herself back into the data-space and found the door's override codes, but Lamoureaux was in the chair, meaning she couldn't activate them without his explicit permission.

  Ted, I need you to override the safety locks at my current location. Now!

  ‹I've got your location, but just blowing the door will be dangerous. Won't-?›

  Just do it, Ted! Do it now or I'm dead!

  ‹Okay. You might want to move back from the door if you're anywhere near it.›

  She pulled herself into a corner, under a metal desk that projected out from one wall, and held on to its legs. The light from Trader's yacht was beginning to build in intensity, becoming almost blinding.

  The exit door slammed open a second later, and Dakota clung on for her life as the atmosphere rushed past her and out the shattered window. Once it was over, she threw herself back into the access tunnel, bouncing from wall to wall in a frenzy, heading back towards the airlock.

  The light followed her, still increasing in intensity. Whenever her hands or feet touched a bulkhead, she could feel a heavy vibration building up inside it.

  She was back out on the hull less than a minute later. The stars had changed once again, the Emissary scouts now several hundred light-years aft.

  ‹Dakota!› Lamoureaux screamed to her through their link. ‹What the hell is happening back there? Are we still under attack?›

  She could hear priority alerts blaring on the bridge. It's Trader. He's going to jump his ship from inside the hold. I don't know what it's going to do to the frigate, but you'd better warn the others and tell them to get ready.

  She kept pulling herself back along the hull towards the bow, hand over hand, until she reached the same heat-exchange nacelle she had passed before. She pulled herself around the other side of it and pressed herself close, the vibration now growing into a powerful tremor that in turn became a series of hammer-blows that very nearly sent her spinning off into the encompassing darkness.

  Light spilled out into the void from somewhere on the other side of the nacelle. She peeked over the top in time to see the hull around the main hold tear open like putty, hull-plates silently spinning away as an inferno of light and energy burst outwards. The dazzling light pulsed as it reached a crescendo, casting off a great burning shell of plasma that expanded outwards from the frigate, before quickly dulling to a deep orange.

  Trader's yacht was gone. Dakota stared in shock at the devastation left behind it.

  ‹Dakota! Dakota, are you still there? We've lost contact with everything beyond Deck E. Please respond.›

  Yes, I'm here. Trader's gone – along with most of the main hold.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Half an hour later, Dakota was back on the bridge. She looked at the grim, worried faces around her, thinking how few of them were left now.

  Five against an empire was not good odds.

  Dan Perez was giving everyone booste
r shots, Dakota last of all. 'For the nerves,' he said, with an attempt at a smile, as he pressed the spray against her shoulder.

  A numb, icy feeling spread through her where the spray touched her skin.

  Corso sat next to a console, Martinez standing beside him with folded arms.

  'All right,' began Corso, leaning forward slightly, with his elbows resting on his knees. 'Whitecloud's dead, Trader's left our ship half-crippled, and he's taken the Mos Hadroch with him. According to Dakota, we lost a third of the Meridian drones when he blew the hold apart.' He shrugged and made a face. 'But it could be worse, right?'

  Dakota affected a weak smile.

  'I'm not kidding,' Corso continued. 'At least we're still alive. We came very close to suffering a breach of one of our plasma conduits, and if that had happened, we wouldn't be here now. Not only that, most of our critical systems are unaffected, despite losing most of the hold. Our jump drive is still functioning. A good part of the ancillary fusion propulsion system is screwed, admittedly, but enough of the reactors are still working that we might be able to compensate for what we've lost. Manoeuvring inside our target system isn't going to be nearly as easy as we want it to be, but it won't be impossible.'

  Martinez sighed and shook his head. 'Lucas, our reason for coming out here is gone. When the hold went up, it almost certainly took all our landing craft with it. The most sensible thing we can do now is turn back.'

  'We're getting a response from the on-board systems for at least two of the landers,' Lamoureaux pointed out. 'I've already sent a couple of spider-mechs in to take a look, and I reckon they're salvageable, but I can't know for sure until we check them out.'

  'Of course we go on,' interrupted Dakota. 'We chase Trader all the way there. Why give up now?'

  'You don't make the decisions here!' Martinez exploded, stabbing a finger at her. 'You told us yourself, he's gone to do the one thing we came here to do. That means our job is over. So we go home.'

  'Look, I don't know if we can go home,' said Dakota wearily.

  They all stared at her, waiting until she continued.

  'When I was chasing him – chasing Whitecloud, I mean – Trader told me the Emissaries had some way of tracking us.'

  'How do you know that's true?' Corso demanded.

  'I didn't believe him at first, but the fact is those scouts we ran into back there knew just where to find us, out of a truly enormous volume of space. The chances of that being a coincidence are beyond astronomical. Trader said so himself

  'That would make sense out of what happened back at the cache,' confirmed Perez, from beside her. 'It felt like an ambush.'

  'Exactly.' Dakota nodded vigorously. 'They clearly knew we were coming.'

  'If that's the case,' Lamoureaux said slowly, 'they could be on their way here right now.'

  'Just hold on for one minute,' said Martinez, moving closer to Dakota. 'You haven't told us how they could track us.'

  She chose her words carefully as she answered. Some things, she had decided, were better left unsaid for the moment.

  'He told me there was something planted on the frigate that would lead them right to us.'

  'So what does that have to do with Trader taking the artefact?' asked Perez.

  'He planned on grabbing it for himself once we'd done what we came out here to do,' she explained. 'But he panicked when he realized the Emissaries knew how to find us. The way he sees it, we might as well have a bull's-eye painted on the hull.'

  Martinez glared at her. 'Even if any of this is true, it doesn't fundamentally alter my original point. There's no reason for us not to turn back.'

  'Because, even if we did turn back, there's a good chance the Emissaries would still come after us,' she snapped. 'And remember what Whitecloud said: the Mos Hadroch might decide not to let Trader activate it. If that's true, then it's imperative we carry on and be ready to finish the job, if we have to.'

  Martinez laughed. 'You really believed that fairy tale?'

  'The Mos Hadroch isn't just a weapon any more than the Magi ships are just ships,' Dakota persisted. 'And Whitecloud might have been an evil son of a bitch, but even you could see he was telling the truth when he recorded that message. Right there at the end, he did one good thing in his life by trying to warn us.'

  'How the hell do you expect us to "finish the job"?' Martinez demanded. 'The artefact is gone!'

  'We have the command structure,' she reminded him. 'We could activate the artefact ourselves, if Trader fails. And even if he doesn't, we have enough drones left to let us try and stop him escaping with the artefact.'

  'Perhaps you're forgetting who's in charge of this expedition,' Martinez spat, his face turning red.

  Dakota regarded him with a weary expression. 'You're out of your depth, Commander. You don't have any idea about the forces we're dealing with, or the kind of power they have.'

  Martinez started to move towards her with bunched fists, but Corso leaped up and grabbed him by the shoulders.

  'I want you to shut the fuck up for now,' Corso barked at Dakota, then turned his attention to the Commander.

  'Eduard… listen to me. I know exactly what's going through your head right now. It's much the same thing that's running through mine. I don't want anything more right now than to go home. But I also don't want to have come this far just to turn around. Especially not if something could still go wrong.'

  'I agree,' said Lamoureaux, nodding vigorously and gazing around at them all. 'We can't just turn around now – not this late in the day.'

  'I'm sorry, sir,' added Perez, 'but, with the greatest respect, I'm with the others on this one.'

  'We still have most of the drones,' Dakota pointed out, sweeping back the dark fringe of hair from her face. 'And the new field-generators, too. We can do this.'

  Martinez stared at her like she was insane. 'Are you even listening to yourself? You already said the Emissaries know that we're on our way!'

  'No, they only know where we are right now. And I don't see any reason to believe they have any idea exactly where we're headed, or that the Mos Hadroch even exists, let alone what it's capable of

  A sudden alert sounded, an insistent beeping that cut off abruptly when Corso reached out and touched the console nearest him.

  'Scouts,' he announced a moment later. 'Lots of them, and about one light-minute away. No details on their acceleration or specific vector, but definitely too close for comfort.'

  Martinez tightened his hands again into fists before opening them wide, peering down at them as if seeing them for the first time.

  'I guess that clinches it, then,' he said, dropping his arms helplessly to his sides. 'We go on.' The frigate jumped again less than twenty minutes later, running at approximately 40 per cent jump capacity – just enough to carry them several hundred light-years across the Perseus Arm and into the close vicinity of their target system.

  Dakota took the interface chair for the jump procedure, fatigue washing over her like a dark tide.

  She closed her eyes and let herself sink deep into the ship's data-space. As long as she could keep up concentration, she could stay awake.

  The power of suns flowed out of the fusion reactors and then through the drive-spines, tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe. The stars twisted, then changed.

  A flood of new data immediately began to stream in via the sensor arrays: spectral analyses, mass estimates, number of visible planets, evidence of technology. They were still at least half a light-day out from the main-sequence star at the system's centre, but they would get up close to the target world through the next couple of jumps.

  Dakota was distantly aware of Lamoureaux guiding a small contingent of spider-mechs out on to the hull, intending to make a quick assessment of the hull-degradation.

  Dakota activated the command structure that Moss had given her, and tried using it to locate Trader's ship. Before very long she got an automated response from the vicinity of a low-albedo object somewhere deep in the he
art of the star system. She compared the object with the data she had received from Trader, and they matched. That meant they had reached the target cache.

  She checked in on Lamoureaux once more, and found he was analysing video feeds scraped from the spider-mechs that had been sent into the hold. Pieces and fragments of hull-plate clung to those sections of the underlying skeleton that had survived the blast.

  I can see the landers, she sent to Lamoureaux.

  ‹Yeah, they must have been at the farthest point in the hold from where Trader's yacht was when it jumped.›

  Feeling a hand on her shoulder, she opened her eyes to see Corso bending over her.

  'Do we know where we go from here?' he asked.

  She nodded, her throat dry. 'The target cache is on a small planet in the inner system, not much over a thousand klicks across and tidally locked to its star. The cache is on the dark side, however.'

  'And how long before we get there?'

  She let her head fall back against the head-rest, almost afraid to close her eyes in case she passed out from exhaustion.

  'At least another hour before the drive is up to making another jump.' She raised a hand, stopping him before he could speak again. 'I know what you're going to say. The scouts will reach us before that, but it's just not possible to do it any sooner.'

  'Then you're going to have to find a way to keep us safe from those scouts in the meantime.'

  'Sure.' She nodded wearily. 'Of course.'

  He studied her. 'How are you holding up?'

  Dakota laughed weakly. 'Just barely.'

  He started moving away, but she reached out to stop him. 'Wait. I need to show you something.'