Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  She rolled back on to her feet by the edge of the path, almost colliding with one of the benches. She watched the guard as he crashed into his superior. Moss clutched at the tumbling man in surprise, and lightning snapped from his steel-meshed fingers. The guard screamed hideously, and Dakota caught the unmistakable stench of burning flesh.

  She turned and dived along a different path, running blind now. As more shouting erupted nearby, she could hear Moss scream and curse somewhere behind her.

  A moment later she realized that the local net was denying her Ghost access. And she was lost.

  Piri, I need you to get me out of here.

 

  The forest gave way to an arcade of empty shop fronts strung along a wide walkway that eventually disappeared out of sight as it followed the natural curve of the asteroid’s circumference. It was like a street constructed up and over the summit of a rounded hill.

  Shots whined from somewhere behind her, sending more birds flying upwards in panic from their nesting places in numerous sculpted nooks. She heard the sound of running feet, coming from the far end of the arcade that was still hidden from her by the curve of the asteroid.

  She slid into deep shadow between two shop fronts, then noticed that it was the mouth of a narrow alleyway. She ran further into it, and paused.

  ‘Get the lights up!’ somebody yelled. ‘Get them up now!’

  Panting hard, Dakota crouched with hands on knees. She guessed they were trying to get the main lights of the arcade switched on: the only illumination at present came from faintly glowing globes placed at discreet intervals, and which were clearly intended to be decorative rather than practical.

  With one hand, she touched the alien’s gift in her pocket.

  Piri, why can’t they turn the main lights on? Are you the reason?

 

  Then she noticed Moss’s eyes flickering, luminous and satanic, in the dim light of the arcade beyond. They turned in her direction and he started straight towards her.

  Dakota hauled herself back upright, wondering how much longer she could keep going like this, and why she was even bothered to try. They’d never allow her to get near the docks. Never.

  At its far end the alleyway opened on to a covered plaza. This wide open space was filled with yet more trees whose dense foliage reached up towards narrow walkways that ringed the lofty surrounding walls. Drunk on adrenalin, she scrambled up a tree trunk, and then dropped off a branch and on to one of these walkways, water dripping on her from the wet leaves surrounding her. She hurriedly looked around, her head spinning from so much physical effort.

  Muffled shouts as figures began to emerge at the far end of the plaza below. A sudden shot whined off the stonework of the wall, just inches from her head.

  There’s something I want you to do, so listen carefully, Piri. Apparently we were carrying a GiantKiller in the hold.

 

  Yes! I need to know if there’s a way we can trigger it. Can you trace the GiantKiller itself, since it was unloaded?

 

  She continued at a crouch towards the far end of the walkway, then saw to her horror that Moss was already waiting for her there. Torchlight flickered below, its narrow beam shining in her eyes for a moment. She ducked away from it, desperate to find some kind of cover.

  Ahead of her, Moss held his hands out and blue sparks flickered through the gloom, crossing and spitting between the lightning gloves. His enhanced eyes glowed as dim ovals in the dark silhouette of his face.

  He started towards Dakota, moving fast. She scrambled back the way she had come, then pulled herself up a stairway towards the roof. It brought her to the entrance of a wide gazebo set astride the wall at one corner of the plaza. Below its roof stood an intricate water sculpture.

  Water gushed from the mouth of a marble dolphin set high on a plinth of finely sculpted rock, tinkling as it descended and splashed into a wide but shallow pool through which myriad finned shapes darted incessantly. Grassy ferns and occasional palm trees surrounded the fountain, dripping water like rain on to the sculpture so that it constantly glistened.

  There were no other exits from the gazebo. Dakota turned to see Moss appear at the entrance, his unnaturally illuminated eyes finding her instantly in the dim half-light. She felt a sudden, terrible despair flood through her. She was trapped.

 

  How long exactly?

 

  Dakota felt all hope evaporate. She’d been planning on a complex bluff, in case Bourdain might back down if she threatened to set off the device.

  Someone else, she didn’t doubt, had scanned the contents of the Piri’s cargo hold on its voyage to Bourdain’s Rock. The critical question now was, who?

  It had to be the same Shoal-member that had spoken to her in the Great Hall. How else could it have known what was inside her ship?

  GiantKillers were a near-mythical technology, supposedly originating from a Shoal client race somewhere else in the galaxy, which humanity hadn’t yet been allowed to come into contact with. It was a tool of reportedly enormous destructive power, supposedly designed to reduce large bodies—such as asteroids, heavy with valuable mineral resources—to dust within mere minutes. Her Ghost’s knowledge stacks were filled with a century of wild speculation concerning how such a technology might work.

  As Moss moved slowly toward her, she decided to take a chance.

  ‘Back off!’ she yelled. ‘Let me through to the dock or, I swear on the Pope’s tits, I’ll activate the GiantKiller from here!’

  Moss paused. ‘Nice bluff, but it really won’t work.’

  ‘I mean it!’ she yelled in terrible despair. ‘I’ve got the activation protocols uploaded to my Ghost circuits,’ she lied. ‘I can read every last fucking one of them back to you right now, or I can blow the shit out of this asteroid. Got a preference?’

  ‘Lying slut, I’ll open you from neck to navel and devour your innards while you watch.’ Deadly blue sparks leapt lazily from one hand to the other as he again moved cautiously forward.

  ‘Do you really want to try me, Moss?’ she screamed, backing around the fountain, away from him. ‘Seriously?’

  Then something remarkable happened.

  —

  The GiantKiller had already been moved to its new home in a secure storage facility deep inside the body of the asteroid, several kilometres below its outer surface. The Piri Reis had meanwhile been monitoring the Rock’s communication channels, disguising its presence from moment to moment by simulating any one of thousands of maintenance programs, with a degree of sophistication equal to the covert systems used on board many of the Consortium’s finest military vessels.

  Suddenly, the Piri was no longer alone in its explorations. Something vast came crashing through the Rock’s data stacks, devouring information like a lumbering virtual behemoth. For a few moments the Piri became deaf, dumb and blind as this new presence swept through the Rock’s computer systems with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer being used to smash a doll’s house.

  By the time Dakota’s ship recovered, the Giant-Killer’s protocols had been wiped clean from the records. Alarm circuits blazed throughout the asteroid.

  In appearance, the GiantKiller itself was little more than a mottled silver ball several centimetres in diameter, still held in the same field containment chamber it had been placed in prior to its trip aboard the Piri Reis. A casual observer might notice that this silver ball appeared to
be flickering in and out of existence from moment to moment. But, rather than flickering, this was in reality a series of rapid expansions and contractions occurring almost too fast to register with the human eye. The GiantKiller was in fact testing its prison walls, lashing out in its pre-programmed desire to consume.

  A microscopic analysis of the GiantKiller’s surface would reveal something very like capillaries inside an organic body, channelling resources and information through a highly complex bundle of exotic matter held in check only by the shaped fields that contained it.

  Without warning, the shaped fields that surrounded the GiantKiller vanished, and the silver ball now dropped to the floor of its containment chamber deep within the heart of Bourdain’s Rock.

  That same microscopic analysis would have then revealed those containment fields dissipating without warning, allowing a torrent of programmed matter to crack through the dense walls of the chamber, in just a few millionths of a second.

  It was exactly as if a bomb had gone off.

  The alien device underwent explosive decompression, extending microscopic feelers deep into the ancient flesh of the asteroid, spreading and dissolving the molecular bonds of almost everything it touched, reducing the solid matter of Bourdain’s vast, pressurized folly to dust and gravel in an instant.

  The irony was that the GiantKiller had been intended as a practical resource for mining rather than as a weapon. And now it was transforming the asteroid into essential components that could, under more typical circumstances, be more easily collected by mining ships.

  —

  Dakota kept edging backwards, keeping the fountain between her and Moss. She was pretty sure he’d be careful about getting too close to running water while he was wearing . . .

  And then it came to her. Everything here, the trees above, the ground under her feet, was wet, so there must be some kind of sprinkler system, some method of generating artificial rain . . .

  Piri! If there’s any way to turn the water on in here, do it now!

  In response, Piri fired fresh instructions into the local network, again feeding false information to the asteroid’s computer systems.

  Dakota hauled herself up over the lip of the fountain and dropped into the pool, standing up again next to the splashing foam emerging from the dolphin’s mouth. Moss stood scowling at her, but kept his distance.

  Something rattled and spat in the dimness overhead.

  They both glanced up.

  All at once, throughout the entire Rock, it began to rain from ten thousand steel nozzles.

  A torrent descended from the dome above, soaking them both immediately. Dakota propelled herself instantly away from the fountain and hit the ground rolling. Moss began screaming as the artificial rain shorted his lightning gloves, and she almost gagged from the awful stink as he jerked and writhed in an expanding cloud of steam. Fresh torrents continued to drench him from above.

  The stricken man staggered blindly towards her, and then he fell face-forward right into the pool.

  Just then a sonorous boom sounded from somewhere deep within the asteroid, so faint at first that Dakota wondered if she’d imagined it.

  But more, heavier vibrations followed, rippling underfoot in regular pulses, each growing slightly stronger than the last. She heard yelling, and voices calling to each other, back in the general direction of the plaza. But then the voices faded, as if moving further away.

  Then there was a sound like the sudden onrush of an ocean tide. It lasted several seconds, before silence fell again.

  Dakota remained rooted to the spot for another few moments, desperately wondering what the hell was going on.

  She then crept back along the walkway leading to the plaza, noticing how the lush, damp grass below her now-shone with thousands of fragments of shattered crystal from the gazebo roof. Without warning, the entire plaza shook so hard she was almost sent tumbling over the railing to the ground some metres below.

  No wonder Bourdain’s soldiers had fled. Whatever was going on here, Dakota wasn’t their priority any more.

  The rumbling faded as quickly as it had started, whereupon Dakota made her way down to the ground level as fast as she could. She was conscious of glass crunching noisily underfoot, but that hardly mattered now there was no one around to hear.

  Or so she at first thought. Two security personnel, their weapons already raised, emerged from where they’d taken cover under the dense foliage. Dakota gave a shriek and dived out of the way just as bullets whined off the tree trunks right next to her.

  The ground rolled and rumbled beneath her with considerably more violence. Then it tipped sideways, suddenly transforming into a vertical plane.

  Dakota went tumbling into some bushes, her senses spinning with the sudden shift in gravity. Her stomach twisted with a surge of nausea, and she desperately grabbed some branches, her legs dangling in empty air. The sidewall of the plaza was now several metres beneath her swinging feet.

  Something was very, very wrong with the planet engine.

  One of the two security men had grabbed hold of a tree trunk somewhere above her, then lost his grip and plummeted past her with a yell. He crashed into a concrete pillar supporting one of the walkways, his neck twisting at a sickening angle. His companion already lay dead nearby.

  A steady shower of broken glass fell past her and on to the two corpses, but fortunately the dense foliage of the bushes sheltered her from most of the tumbling shards.

  Then gravity began to right itself, just as she could feel her grip starting to weaken. A few seconds later the world had returned to normal, and Dakota found herself kneeling on the soft, wet grass again.

  It took her a while to find the courage to stand upright.

  Someone had clearly activated the GiantKiller.

  Someone who wasn’t her.

  There came another series of dull booms from far beneath Dakota’s feet, each one sounding closer than the last. Cracks began to appear in the nearby walls and in the grass. The plaza suddenly split into two halves, drawing away from each other. Dakota threw herself over the yawning chasm, landing safely on the other side, and ran for her life back the way she had come.

  The constant tug of the Rock’s artificial gravity began to fade. Suddenly Dakota was swimming through the air, carried forward by her own momentum. A howling maelstrom of escaping atmosphere roared up from the lower levels of the Rock, spilling out through the yawning crack in the plaza’s floor and rushing upwards through the shattered roof.

  Dakota activated her filmsuit and, under her clothes, it coated her bare flesh within moments. Her lungs shut down automatically and, as always, it took her a moment to get over the sensation that she was suffocating.

  She then hurriedly discarded everything she was wearing, wanting to move as freely as possible. But first she removed the Shoal’s gift from the pocket it nestled in, and clutched it firmly in one night-black hand.

  Unfortunately for them, nobody else on the Rock enjoyed the benefit of stolen Bandati technology such as her filmsuit. Most of those guests she’d seen in the Great Hall earlier were either already dead or very soon would be. The only others likely to survive were the Shoal-members and the occasional Bandati she’d seen there. The priests she’d spied with their Pope-avatar were vacuum-proofed and radiation shielded, of course, as all their kind were. But whether they were alive or not in the first place was a matter of conjecture and religious inclination.

  Now the only thought in Dakota’s mind was how to escape.

  —

  ‘What did you say to her?’ Bourdain demanded from inside his own protective bubble of shaped fields. In a corridor filled with people desperate to find a way out, he’d caught up with the Shoal-member that had spoken with Dakota earlier. ‘How could you let her go?’ he screamed. ‘For God’s sake, look at what she’s done!’

  There was no sign of Moss, but Bourdain had received a verbal report from one of the squad he’d sent after her of how she’d threatened to act
ivate the GiantKiller. Bourdain raged at the thought of her actually following through, and right behind that thought came the appalling awareness that he had so badly underestimated her.

  As soon as he had things under control, he was going to hunt that murderous little bitch down remorselessly. And when he had her—well, he was going to take his time over what happened then. It would require time and imagination.

  ‘Simple enquiry made concerning Dakota’s cargo, nature of,’ the Shoal-member that called himself Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals replied. ‘Perhaps to peruse Mr Bourdain’s thoughts concerning aforementioned matter?’

  Anarchy now reigned throughout the ruins of the Great Hall. One of the ceiling buttresses had given way during the initial panic, sending a mighty spray of water across the cavernous space as the structure began to tumble into the artificial lake. Small decorative fish twisted frenetically in air that was misty with water now free of gravity’s grip.

  Like Bourdain, a very few humans were wealthy enough to afford personal shaped field technology. Those had long fled, along with anyone else who had been able to reach the docks before the atmosphere gave out. But most of the rest hadn’t got that far, and their corpses littered the air all around.

  Trader recognized that Bourdain was angry. It was very amusing to observe.

  ‘Your planet engines are guaranteed never to fail,’ Bourdain bellowed, his eyes showing white around the rims.

  A strong gust of wind whipped constantly past them, rapidly increasing in intensity.

  ‘I’ll rip your fucking fish guts out in court. I’ll see you in hell. I’ll—’

  ‘Terrifying power of the most illegal variety has been unleashed, a much prized and non-leased technology, most dangerous in hands of irresponsible species. A GiantKiller, I believe you would phrase it.’

  Bourdain sucked in a deep breath, and his eyes narrowed. ‘Prove it.’