Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  —

  Koti Uchida, more than two centuries before, had been a planetary genetics specialist on a research team evaluating a likely terraforming candidate in the Onada 125 system, thirty-seven light years from Earth. When a relief crew from Mann-Kolbert Geophysical Evaluations had arrived at the planet six months later, they’d found their predecessors wiped out by a crudely altered virus originally intended to modify carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

  Near catatonic with shock, Uchida was the only survivor, holed up alone in an airtight hut with its own air supply while the corpses of his fellow researchers rotted nearby.

  They got him transported back out on the next crew rotation, and the subsequent investigation turned up evidence of latent psychosis that Uchida had somehow kept hidden throughout the standard psych-evaluation tests. There was even the suspicion Uchida had been responsible for altering the virus that then wiped out his compatriots, but that could never be proved.

  Uchida was subsequently removed from his position, and disappeared off the general radar for a while.

  He resurfaced three years later, claiming he’d spent most of this time in his lonely hut taking dictation from a disembodied alien spirit that preached salvation through technology. Only once every human being could see the universe as God saw it, Uchida claimed, would a new age of peace and understanding come about. He began preaching his peculiar new gospel on the streets of the Mound, a city on the world of Fullstop, long famous for its surfeit of wild-eyed prophets.

  The book Uchida claimed to have taken down during his long solitude became known as the Oratory. In time, he gained followers. Only sixty years after his death, Oratory temples could be found on a dozen worlds throughout Consortium space. They all offered the same route to instant karma: a skull implant—a primitive forerunner of Ghost technology—that tapped directly into the temporal lobes of the human brain, long associated with religious epiphany, thereby generating a supposedly unending neurological state of transcendent consciousness.

  Follow Uchida, potential converts were told, and you will experience God for ever.

  There was no lack of takers for Uchida’s instant salvation. But then came the accusations that these implants had been placed inside the heads of less than willing converts. Eventually, the notorious debacle involving Belle Trevois pushed the Uchidans into even harder times.

  The riots breaking out on half a dozen Consortium worlds, after Belle’s death, helped push through approval for a long-standing application by the Uchidans for a colonial charter. They wanted to set up their own world—and, in order to get rid of them, the Consortium was more than happy to grant their request.

  The Uchidans were given a desolate, near-uninhabitable ball of rock with a thin veil of poisonous atmosphere, located in a system on the furthest edge of Consortium space. There they dug in, pressurizing caverns and boring tunnels for miles beneath the surface.

  Fifteen years passed before the Shoal suddenly invoked Clause Six in the Uchidans’ contract, and reclaimed the entire system without explanation.

  The Shoal Hegemony controlled a constantly shifting web of trade routes plied by their coreships, and they reserved the right to reoccupy any colonized system for their own purposes, so long as the colony in question had been in existence for less than twenty standard years. It proved the single most contentious item in the ongoing relationship between humanity and the Shoal. Concessions had been made in other areas, but on this one issue the Hegemony remained resolute.

  No one had seriously anticipated that the Shoal might ever actually invoke Clause Six and, as the centuries passed, it had looked less and less likely they ever would.

  Everyone, however, was proved wrong.

  Slews of civil servants and politicians, all the way up to the highest ranks of the Consortium, fell by the wayside in the ensuing chaos. Fledgling colonies within a three hundred light year radius of Earth hurriedly reexamined their own charters in a panic.

  Over the next several years, the Uchidans were rescued from their failed colony and shipped instead to Redstone. But that planet was already home to the Freehold, who were no strangers to controversy themselves. Extreme libertarians with a bent for violence, the Consortium had been equally happy to see the Freehold occupying their own inhospitable ball of mud somewhere far away from the centre of human affairs.

  On Redstone, the Uchidans had occupied the deserted continent of Agrona, a token Consortium military force remaining in orbit for a couple of decades in order to maintain peace between the two groups now inhabiting the planet.

  Eventually they left, and such co-existence might even have proved ultimately acceptable if the Uchidans had not then begun work on altering Redstone’s biosphere—with potentially disastrous consequences for the Freehold colony.

  The ensuing war had remained in a state of detente for decades, a constant tit-for-tat struggle along fluctuating borders, until the Consortium uncovered evidence that the Uchidans had meanwhile smuggled Howard Banville to Redstone on board one of the Shoal Hegemony’s coreships. As a result, the Freehold were suddenly granted Consortium military support.

  And that was why Dakota and Severn and all the rest were now here on this desolate world, so far from home.

  —

  Below, the Freeholder whose breather mask had been displaced snapped it back into place, then pulled out some kind of weapon. It was a short, nasty-looking blade which he began to wave in the face of his assailant, who retreated quickly. There was something showy about the motions: as if he were playing to an audience, and Dakota felt she was witnessing some secret ritual.

  ‘See, most Freeholders tend to stay right here,’ Severn explained. ‘Redstone’s a fair distance away from all the normal coreship routes, so you’ll get one coming through here only once or twice a year. But every now and then some of these people find their way in among the human communities on the coreships, and put on a show for them, fighting to the death for a paying audience. There’s big money in it, from what I hear—for the survivor, anyway.’

  ‘Shit, really?’ Dakota shivered again, not entirely from the cold this time.

  ‘Yeah, but they’re still playing within their own rules. The winner still gains in social status here, but also becomes wealthy in the process.’

  Dakota turned to look at Severn. ‘You’ve seen one of these fights before, haven’t you? I can tell from the sound of your voice.’

  ‘Once,’ he admitted, ‘when I was barely more than a kid. Nasty. Never, ever again.’

  The fight was now being broken up. Freehold military police in dark uniforms arrived, flashing torches and wielding clubs, and soon the adversaries were pulled apart. Yet there was still that sense they—she, Severn, the Consortium—had been deliberately made spectators to an aspect of Freehold life few outsiders rarely got to see. As if this was some kind of warning, that the Freehold were not to be treated lightly.

  ‘So how come you never told me about you and Marados?’ Severn asked.

  ‘Wasn’t any of your business,’ Dakota replied, turning back to him with a smile. ‘It was never anything serious.’

  ‘None of my business, like you said. But not serious, right?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  Severn shook his head and pulled her back towards the cot. They tumbled onto it together, burying themselves under the warm blankets.

  Some time later Dakota woke to see grey dawn light seeping through the blinds, and carefully touched her temple, where she could still feel the painful throb of her headache.

  Ten

  Trans-Jovian Space, Mesa Verde

  As far as Josef Marados was concerned, the Piri Reis would be scrapped and reduced to its essential components within forty-eight hours of her boarding the Freehold frigate Hyperion. But then Dakota had made some enquiries of Mesa Verde’s stacks, and found that the type of vessel used by the Freehold had an overall cargo capacity of one hundred and eighty thousand cubic metres—allowing more t
han enough room to hide something the size of her little ship.

  Even better, the Hyperion itself was old, the ageing military legacy of a backwater colony. Subverting its security systems surely couldn’t be that difficult.

  While she worked desperately on finding a way to keep the Piri intact, she had it display streaming news reports, the bright logo of the Ceres News Service flashing endlessly within the cramped space of the command module. They were still running images of Bourdain’s Rock disintegrating into gravel.

  The news services on Ceres were airing a series of back-to-back interviews with anyone who had the remotest connection with Bourdain’s Rock. To her horror, at one point a commentator raised the possibility that the Rock had been destroyed by a rogue machine-head, someone programmed to infiltrate the asteroid and then destroy it.

  Security clampdowns were being enforced system-wide, and it became rapidly clear to Dakota how lucky she had been to get inside Mesa Verde at all. Only a few days ago, the scale of the disaster hadn’t been fully absorbed, but now, the entire outer solar system was at a state of high alert.

  It was a reminder, as if she needed one, of how badly she needed to get herself very far away, and very fast.

  Ready, Piri?

 

  As she left the Piri Reis, probably for the last time, she felt a deep ache in her chest. But if anything went to plan, she might still come out on top.

  —

  The Hyperion started talking to Dakota even as she and Josef were making their way towards Black Rock’s private docking area. It began as a gentle buzz in the background of her thoughts—like hearing an auditorium filling up from down the far end of a corridor. But before long a familiar flood of information descended on her, every scrap of data demanding equal attention: hull stresses, systems integration failures, and a seemingly infinite queue of process queries.

  Her Ghost handled this onslaught with practised ease, bringing to her conscious attention only those items that were most genuinely urgent. Although she didn’t yet have physical control over the Freehold ship, it felt a little like slipping on unfamiliar clothes that then grew more comfortable with every passing moment.

  She focused her attention on the Hyperion’s cargo hold, but the fresh map data she uploaded from the frigate became blurry once she tried to see what was carried within it.

  She realized Josef was saying something to her.

  ‘. . . all the security and guidance systems remain in lockdown until you’re ready to take the helm. The passengers themselves will be telling you where to go, but you—Mala Oorthaus, that is—will still have the usual legal right of override. So if they order you to dive into the atmosphere of a star, you can stick them in the brig and still get paid. That kind of thing.’

  ‘But dumping them into space as soon as we get there and lighting off on my own isn’t approved behaviour, either?’

  Josef grinned, but Dakota was pleased to see an edge of nervousness there too.

  ‘Everything I need is right here.’ She indicated a small bag by her foot.

  Josef shrugged gamely as they arrived at the mass transit elevators leading down to the docks. ‘Guess this is it, Dakota,’ he said, coming to a halt. ‘Anything else you need to know?’

  Dakota stretched languorously, tired after her long bout of reprogramming the Piri Reis, and enjoyed the way Josef’s eyes took in the shape of her under her clothes.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘What are the chances of them figuring out who I really am?’

  Josef smiled reassuringly. ‘Your identity is secure, I can assure you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m glad you’ve helped me, when I really don’t think you needed to’—Josef started to speak, but she put up a hand to shush him—‘but the Freehold hiring a machine-head for any reason at all kind of stretches credulity, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘I’m saying perhaps they’re holding something back, something they’re not mentioning. I’ve seen these people in action, Josef. They’d rather go down in flames than face the dishonour of using someone like me as an ally, even as a paid ally.’

  ‘Look, all I know is that careful enquiries were being made about machine-head pilots, starting maybe a few weeks ago. Not through official channels, obviously. Then you came along looking for a way out, and it just seemed’—he shrugged heavily—‘fortuitous, I guess. Outside of Gardner and the people on board that ship, nobody but me knows about you. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She glanced at him and saw a tiny pinprick of light appear, somewhere above his left shoulder, just on the edge of her perception.

  Piri, run a scan on my implants. I’m getting some very minor visual distortions showing up—like a spark of light.

 

  Thank you.

  She had the overwhelming sensation there was some kind of unfinished business she still had to take care of, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.

  A little while later, just as she was about to board the shuttle that would take her to the Hyperion, it came to her.

  —

  Things didn’t look much better inside the Hyperion than they had from the outside.

  The frigate was a dart-shaped missile more than a thousand metres in length that flared out to the aft, where a fusion propulsion system powerful enough to push it across a solar system in no more than a few days of heavy acceleration was located. A heavily armoured gravity ring, where the command bridge was located, slowly revolved towards the ship’s fore. Yet there were museum pieces docked in some of the Consortium’s grandest orbital cities at Tau Ceti that looked in better shape than the Hyperion did.

  Every few minutes a fresh cascade of systems-failure notifications came crashing down into Dakota’s thoughts like an all-consuming tidal wave of information, before being near-instantaneously tidied away by her Ghost, and becoming once again reduced to little more than a vaguely distracting background hum tinged with the machine equivalent of hysteria. It was easy to picture the Hyperion as a wounded dog howling its distress through a broad-spectrum network.

  ‘Quarters,’ Dakota—who was now Mala—muttered out loud, hanging on to a rung at the junction of two of the Hyperion’s access corridors, one of which plummeted away into what would have been terrifying depths if there had been any gravity present in this part of the ship. There was a barely perceptible—and therefore worrying—pause before glittering icons appeared in Dakota’s vision, leading the way.

  If the ship had been up to date, finding her way around it would have been second nature: with the information already uploaded into her back-brain, it would feel as if she had been finding her way around the Hyperion for decades. As it was, too many data systems were either damaged or corrupted through lack of maintenance. Even the icon-projections reminded her just how old this frigate was.

  ‘Bridge,’ she said next.

  In response, the first set of icons vanished, to be replaced by another.

  She sighed. This was still better than nothing. She pushed herself forward, floating along a corridor, and watching the icons flicker into a new configuration as she came to a y-junction.

  Halfway to the command bridge, her Ghost allowed Dakota to sense the presence of several people up ahead. Her employers.

  —

  Initially, Lucas Corso wasn’t sure what to make of the woman as she entered the bridge for the first time. Short dark hair curled around her ears. Her face was small and round, her frame slight and gamine. This is what the Freehold are meant to be scared of?

  Perversely, he was nonetheless relieved to see her. He didn’t enjoy spending any more time in the company of Senator Arbenz and his cronies than he absolutely had to, but the request for his presence on the bridge had been unambiguous.

  With any luck, this would be over quickly, and then he could return to the saf
ety of his research, as far from the Senator as possible.

  He glanced over at a bank of dataflow indicators and was shocked to realize how much information was passing between this initially unremarkable-looking woman and the Hyperion, as if she were a black hole drifting through the digital corona of the frigate’s star, bending and warping computer systems to her will.

  ‘Miss Oorthaus.’ Gardner guided the machine-head woman towards Senator Arbenz.

  All Corso knew about Gardner came from random snatches of overheard conversation, most frequently between Arbenz and Gardner himself, but also from casual jokes and disparaging comments shared between Arbenz and his two bodyguards, the brothers Kieran and Udo Mansell. From this it was clear neither the Senator nor the two brothers had much respect for David Gardner: he was an outsider, not part of the Freehold, a resident of the old, impure world the Freehold were supposed to have left behind and which had resolutely failed to destroy itself in the centuries since. Gardner, then, was a necessary evil, as much as the machine-head woman—a businessman, free of honour and morality, but able to part-finance such an enormous undertaking as a planetary survey.

  Oorthaus’s expression remained wary as she came face to face with Arbenz, like she was expecting something to rear up and bite her. After only a few weeks on board with only the two Mansells for company, Corso could hardly blame her.

  Gardner directed her towards the Senator. ‘This is Senator Arbenz,’ Gardner continued. ‘The man in charge of this operation. I—’

  ‘You may call me Gregor,’ Arbenz offered, cutting him off. ‘I’m glad you could join us on our little adventure.’ Grasping both her hands with his own, Arbenz smiled, for all the world like a kindly uncle welcoming a long-lost niece.

  Oorthaus nodded politely, although her stiff smile made it clear she felt less than comfortable. Corso had to suppress a smile creeping up one side of his face: the newcomer clearly had good survival instincts.