Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  What he had in mind was very simple.

  The observation blister was a weak point in the hull, and the ship was old. The maintenance work done prior to its departure from Redstone had been the bare minimum necessary, given the restrictions of time and funding.

  The automated warnings had made it clear that relatively little effort would be involved in destroying the clear blister before him and exposing himself to the vacuum of deep space. A series of switches under a panel within easy reach by the side of the reclining chair gave him control over explosive bolts that could blow the blister clear away from the hull, thus providing an emergency escape route. By the time any alarms could bring the ship’s crew running to the observation blister, it would already be far too late.

  He touched a button and the chair dropped a little, giving him a still better view. He got as far as flipping open the panel, tapping in the same default code that most equipment on board still used (Dakota had been right about the appalling lack of appropriate security), and rested his finger on the emergency release button that would blow the bolts.

  Then he slowly brought his hand back up and closed the panel.

  Even with him dead, there was at least a chance Arbenz could still use the protocols he’d created to negotiate the derelict’s guidance systems and take it out of the Nova Arctis system. Corso knew the work he’d done was flawless. But if the derelict’s assault on both him and Kieran was then a deliberate act of sabotage, who was responsible for it?

  He sat beneath the blister’s curving dome, with the lights up, staring up at his own reflection staring back down at him for what felt like a long time. His hand dropped again towards the panel by the side of the chair.

  He already knew he wasn’t going to do it. If the Senator could still win even with him dead, that made the whole notion of killing himself pointless.

  Sal came into his thoughts. Corso was pretty sure Sal was dead by now, but as is so often the case with people who constitute a large part of your life for enough years, his old friend’s physical presence was far from necessary in order for Corso to have a laborious, albeit primarily silent, imaginary argument with him, as if they sat there together beneath the curving transparent dome.

  Sal won, of course. He usually did.

  Corso tapped a button and the hatch in the floor next to the chair irised open once more, revealing the ladder. He climbed back down and went looking for Dakota.

  —

  Arbenz stepped into the moon base’s centre of operations, still feeling foggy from a lack of sleep. Anton Lourekas, the base’s medician, had been giving him shots to keep him awake, but there was only so long before he’d end up losing his grip on events. Things were starting to run out of control badly enough as it was.

  He was not pleased to find Gardner waiting for him.

  ‘What do you mean by telling me I can’t communicate with my partners?’ Gardner nearly shouted in his face. Arbenz winced, too tired to be as angry as he really should be. ‘Your communications staff are downright refusing to patch me through the tach-nets—’

  ‘With good reason,’ Arbenz muttered, pushing past Gardner and nodding a greeting to the three technicians working at the opposite end of the room.

  ‘Don’t ignore me, Senator. I demand—’

  Arbenz turned around. ‘If you continue to make demands in front of my own people, Mr Gardner, I’ll have you permanently confined to quarters on board the Hyperion. Do you understand me?’

  Gardner looked apoplectic. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘But I can, David. And if your partners decide they don’t like that, then they can come and find me themselves. Once this is all over.’ He gestured over Gardner’s shoulder to a guard, who stepped forward from his station by the entrance to the ops-centre.

  ‘Now listen,’ Arbenz continued, softening his voice a little. ‘I believe some form of expeditionary force is on its way here, on board another coreship. That means we have to accept the fact our little secret has been compromised.’

  Gardner’s eyes were already bugging out. ‘We have to contact—’

  ‘No, Mr Gardner. We run silent until they actually get here, otherwise we risk the possibility that they also find out about the derelict, assuming they don’t already know about it.’

  ‘But they must know, if they’re on their way here.’

  ‘This is all we know: they’re on their way here, and our time is limited. Anything else is just an assumption.’ No need to let him know just yet about the coup on Redstone. ‘So no more demands, Mr Gardner. Is that understood?’

  Gardner’s lips trembled, his face so red it looked ready to explode. Then he glanced at the waiting guard nearby, and clearly thought better of any further protest. He turned on his heel and stormed out of the ops-centre.

  Arbenz immediately felt more relaxed.

  ‘Sir?’ He turned to find a technician called Weinmann standing by him. ‘The signal emanating from the derelict. We’ve narrowed down the target.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The signal is extremely tightly focused, on a very low-power beam. It’s aimed at this system’s innermost world, sir. Just here.’ Weinmann tapped at the screen before him.

  Arbenz leaned in to take a look. ‘But that’s just a ball of rock.’

  Ikaria drifted a few bare tens of millions of kilometres from the surface of its sun. So what was there, that the derelict could want to signal?

  ‘Ikaria has minimal rotation around its axis, as you’d expect from a body that close to its parent. The signal was directional enough for us to isolate a series of valleys that have just emerged into the planet’s dark side. There’s meanwhile been regular transmissions about three thousand seconds apart each. And each of those is being adjusted to match the planet’s rotation.’

  ‘I would have thought anything down there would have been burned away long ago,’ Arbenz mused.

  ‘Those valleys are extremely deep. And we’re lucky because they’re just emerging from the terminator line. They’re going to be on the planet’s dark side for a while.’

  Arbenz sighed. ‘But do we know what’s down there, in those valleys? Is it possible, perhaps, that we might find other ships like our derelict there?’

  Weinmann shook his head, clearly not prepared to speculate.

  One of the largest problems they faced with the derelict they’d already found was digging it out of the ice. Excavation had indeed been proceeding ever since they’d discovered the craft, but the sheer scale of the project meant this exercise was taking far, far longer than originally hoped.

  But if there was now the chance there were indeed other transluminal ships further in-system, perhaps sitting out in the open and ready for the taking . . .

  If action were to be taken, it would have to be soon, before the unknown fleet arrived. Their best bet therefore was to take either the Hyperion or the Agartha to Ikaria with all due haste, and retrieve whatever they could find—even if it meant abandoning their efforts under Theona’s dense ice.

  Time was running out all too quickly.

  —

  ‘I want to know everything,’ Corso said on his return to the Piri. ‘Everything you haven’t told me.’

  ‘What makes you think there is anything else?’ Dakota replied, her voice shaky.

  He thought she looked like she’d been crying, but he couldn’t be sure. At the very least her eyes were red-rimmed and clouded, her body pushed into a fur-lined nook inside the Piri Reis.

  ‘Because there’s too much at stake here for any more bullshit,’ he snapped back. ‘We’re in serious trouble here. If there’s anything else I should know, you tell me now, otherwise I find out later and then you’re on your own. Completely. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I haven’t gone out of my way to do anything I shouldn’t—’

  He laughed. ‘There’s a wake of death and destruction following you wherever you go. I can understand why you’d hate the Senator, and now he doesn’t have a hold over me I
’m going to do everything I can to take the transluminal drive away from him, but I know I can’t do that without your help. So start talking, Dakota. I want to know everything. From the beginning.’

  He could see the acquiescence in her eyes, in the way her body relaxed. After a moment, she began to talk.

  She told him about the Shoal; about Bourdain’s Rock, and the alien’s gift, about the system surge when she’d placed the figurine on the Hyperion’s imaging plate. About her conversation with an AI version of the alien, which had apparently penetrated the Hyperion’s systems.

  It came spilling out in a cathartic rush, as if some mental logjam had finally given way, and a black tide of memory had pushed through like a swollen river spilling into an empty basin. She told him yet more: about the loss of her first set of implants, and the misery and pain that followed; about the alien’s offer to wipe the slate clean if she only agreed to help it destroy the derelict. . .

  Corso’s anger gradually faded, and in the end he slumped in a corner facing her, a look of defeat coming across his face. Then suddenly he smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded, annoyed he could find anything faintly humorous in their predicament.

  ‘It would almost be worth it to tell Arbenz all of this, just to see his face, don’t you think?’

  ‘Funny,’ she scowled.

  ‘Do you have any idea why this Shoal creature picked you for all this? It seems more than a little fortuitous, don’t you reckon, that it would seek you out on the Rock, hand you this thing just on the off chance . . .’

  ‘Don’t assume I haven’t thought about it—a lot. But, outside of the Shoal being able to see into the future, your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘There’s a lot of unanswered questions, though,’ he continued. ‘For one, the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence is lurking inside the Hyperion’s computer systems—I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘How so?’

  He stared at her like she was stupid. ‘Come on. The Shoal having the secret knowledge of how to create true artificial intelligence I could accept. But on the Hyperion’s computer systems? I guarantee you’d need something far more advanced than you’ll find anywhere within the Consortium. And why wait until now? Why not grab us while we were on their own coreship on the way here, sitting right under their noses?’

  Dakota shrugged. ‘I thought about that, too. I think that the Shoal-member I spoke to—the thing inside the Hyperion’s stacks—is working alone for some reason. I can’t think of anything else that makes sense.’

  She looked up and saw the sceptical look on his face. ‘Corso, everything I’ve told you is true. If you can’t figure that out, you’re a bigger fool than I originally took you for.’

  Corso raised his hands in mock defeat. He pulled out his workscreen and held it up before her for a moment as if it were a glittering prize. Then he balanced it on his knee and began tapping at its screen.

  ‘Since we’re sharing, I’ve been analysing fresh information pulled from the derelict. One of the big questions we need to answer is, what was the relationship between the Shoal and the Magi? Was it a meeting between two species that had separately developed a transluminal drive?

  ‘In fact,’ he said with a grin, ‘the evidence makes it more likely the Shoal stole the transluminal technology from the Magi.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘It’s all in here,’ he continued, still with a faint smile, tapping further at the workscreen. ‘I think I’ve even stumbled across a potted history of the Magi. Trust me, though, when I say I’m making some wild leaps of interpretation.’

  Dakota remembered that sense of witnessing the passing of entire civilizations while she’d been in the interface chair on board the derelict.

  ‘Interpret away,’ she said.

  ‘I managed to narrow down the time the derelict was built by a little more,’ he continued. ‘And it was created at least a few millennia before the Shoal claim they developed the transluminal drive.’

  ‘So that nails it pretty conclusively. Some other species possessed the transluminal drive—’

  ‘And then they encountered the Shoal, who now claim to be the only species in the entire Milky Way to have the technology,’ Corso confirmed.

  ‘And you’re sure about that?’

  Corso shrugged. ‘Hard to say without getting a lot more time to go over the data. There’s decades of work still in there.’

  An overwhelming sense of weariness came over Dakota. She was still badly rattled from Kieran’s assault, and there were times when she felt overwhelmed by the constant flow of recent events.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said, her voice small and quiet, and pushed herself over to where Corso sat. She laid her head against his chest. After his initial surprise, he let one hand fall down to rest on her shoulder.

  ‘You know,’ she murmured at length, ‘I hate Freeholders. I mean, I really, really hate the fucking lot of you. You realize that, don’t you?’

  ‘I could tell,’ came Corso’s dry response, ‘from the way you seem to have your hand on my dick.’

  —

  It started with an awkward fumbling during which Corso managed to bash his elbow hard on the corner of the seat. Then they both slid further down, both laughing, and Dakota pressed her face against his. That was how she remembered it: a classic first-kiss scenario after a stumbling beginning, so different from the artificial attentions of the Piri’s faux-human effigy. From the enthusiasm with which Corso responded to her advances, it was clear it had been some time for him too.

  In fact, over the next several minutes, her suspicion grew that it had been a very long time indeed for Corso. His technique didn’t exactly match his enthusiasm, but Dakota couldn’t care less. She shouldered her way out of her clothes in record time while Corso still fumbled with his belt, a hilariously embarrassed look on his face.

  In the end, once he’d finally got out of his clothes, she climbed on top of him, despite the look of clear puzzlement on his face. She guessed he wasn’t very likely to be familiar with sex in zero gravity.

  He grunted with surprise when she twisted her hips in a practised way (some things, she mused, you never really forgot) and found himself deep inside her.

  Corso cleared his throat in between deep, shuddering breaths. ‘Back home, you know, usually the man—’

  ‘Where I come from, usually the man shuts the fuck up,’ Dakota gasped.

  Completely nonplussed, Corso looked so ridiculous she giggled, as if the air in the cabin had suddenly been flooded with nitrous oxide.

  Shame, she thought, to have forgotten how good sheer, wild abandonment feels. Revelations of the senses: a cool flush presented itself deep between her thighs and she realized he’d come already. Yet she didn’t feel disappointed: she stayed where she was, balanced on top of him, leaning forward to put her hands on his chest for traction while he gripped onto a furry bulkhead (having almost floated off him a couple of times to begin with), and after several more seconds she came herself.

  The orgasm rattled through her, peaking in an explosion somewhere behind her eyes and deep within her brain. Her skin was now flushed and beaded with perspiration. She held onto him for a few more moments, despite the pained expression on his face as her fingernails dug in.

  When she finally let go, he emitted a small, almost silent sigh of relief.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she breathed.

  Corso cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded thick and broken. ‘I ... no problem. I didn’t even notice.’

  ‘Liar.’

  The beginnings of a grin tweaked the edge of his mouth. ‘Harlot.’

  She grinned back. ‘Yes?’

  —

  A while later they floated together in the deep cocoon darkness of Dakota’s sleeping quarters.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked, sensing his restlessness.

  ‘Can’t sleep easily in zero gee,’
he explained. They floated against one fur-lined wall. ‘And to be honest, this fur stuff creeps me out a little.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘Haven’t really been able to sleep ever since I got on board the Hyperion. I keep waking up and thinking I’ve fallen out of bed back home—but I’m still falling . . .’

  ‘Yeah. That’s a familiar one.’ By now, sleeping in zero gee felt like the most natural thing in the world to Dakota. The only possible improvement on it was having a warm naked body next to hers, so all her bases were pretty much now covered.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If the Hyperion is compromised the way you say it is, any data I’ve recovered from the derelict is probably accessible to your alien friend by now.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Perhaps it was the Shoal-member that somehow caused the derelict to attack us, by using what it found in the Hyperion’s stacks. But that’s all conjecture: there’s no way of being sure.’

  ‘Remember what I told you, Lucas. The Piri Reis is stealthed to the eyeballs. There’s no reason you couldn’t read the same data into the Piri’s stacks, and bypass the Hyperion altogether.

  ‘Think about it.’ She really had his attention now. ‘You could query the Hyperion’s stacks from here, even send low-level commands from here direct to the derelict. Everything would be disguised as routine subsystem comms and, frankly, your people don’t have the means to spot the deception.’

  Corso unravelled himself from her, clearly thinking hard. ‘You know, I wasn’t entirely being honest when I said we couldn’t pilot the derelict just yet.’

  Now he had her full attention.

  ‘Do you mean . . .?’

  ‘I lied, yes.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I wanted to make things as hard for the Senator as possible. Maybe you can understand that. But you could hypothetically control the derelict from the Hyperion’s bridge. I mean, you could link the Hyperion’s interface chair to the one on board the derelict.’