Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  ‘So you’d say the Shoal AI was responsible.’

  Dakota nodded.

  Corso shook his head. ‘That’s part of it, but not all. Just before we got to Nova Arctis, I saw you walking away from the airlocks leading into the cargo bay. I went up to you, and you completely blanked me. It was like you didn’t even know I was there. It was the same behaviour the time I found you on the bridge, looking at maps of the Magellans. Except you didn’t seem to remember that.’

  ‘Corso, this is ridiculous. I . . .’A brief look of uncertainty crossed her face, and she changed her tack. ‘Look, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  ‘When I came across you that time by the external airlocks, it was less than an hour after Severn was murdered back in Ascension.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lucas! The man led a dangerous life. This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Dakota, do you remember at all what happened on the bridge just now?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you even remember killing Udo Mansell?’

  ‘I . . .’ That look of uncertainty flickered over her face again. ‘Yes,’ she said, a little more quietly. ‘I did. I’d ... I don’t know. I hadn’t forgotten. I just . . . couldn’t place the memory. Except. . .’

  ‘Except what, Dakota? Except it didn’t feel real, maybe? When I got there, you had this blank look on your face like you weren’t really aware of what was going on around you. It was exactly the same look you had that time I found you running trajectories on the bridge, and that time by the airlocks. Like you weren’t really quite seeing anything around you? You know, you almost managed to kill me back there.’

  Dakota shook her head vigorously. ‘I don’t remember anything like that. Besides, it was Udo attacked me. Then . . .’

  Corso cocked his head. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied, staring off into space. ‘I just can’t. . .’ She put one hand up to her head and dragged it through her hair, her fingers trembling.

  ‘Can’t remember?’

  She flashed him a hostile glare. ‘Lucas . . .’

  ‘Are you still having trouble remembering? After you killed Udo, I had to actually knock you out before I could start dragging you all the way down here. I’ve seen some weird shit in my life, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that. Not even back home.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Severn, I swear. I don’t know what makes you think I even could. I... it was complicated. We were close, back in the old days. The same goes for Josef Marados.’

  She sounded calmer now. ‘There’s no reason for me to kill either of them,’ she stated more defiantly. ‘But there was plenty of reason to kill Udo.’

  Couldn’t agree more, Corso reflected, but he didn’t say a word about that. ‘You do realize I just had your ship rip a shitload of invasive routines out of your skull? Stuff that shouldn’t have been in there at all.’

  Her head snapped back up. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m saying the Hyperion isn’t the only thing that was compromised. So were you—or your Ghost was, at any rate.’

  ‘But that’s . . .’

  He could see the realization dawning on her.

  ‘There’s no one else with the access privileges and the skill—including the support of your implants—to enable you to alter records and hide your movements the way you did with the Piri Reis. But there’s plenty of precedent for your conscious mind being taken over.’

  ‘I remembered everything that happened at Port Gabriel, Lucas. That was the worst thing about it. I remember exactly how good the Uchidans made me feel when they turned me into a murderer.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be just like that, does it? What about a fugue state where your conscious mind thinks it’s doing one thing, while something altogether different is happening in reality?’

  She twisted around and tried to strike him, but he anticipated the blow, catching her fist in his own and pulling her towards him.

  She gripped his shirt with her free hand and began to weep. He held her close for a while, feeling her shoulders heave.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lucas. I had such bad dreams—I don’t want them to be real.’

  She slid out of her seat and he let her drift until she snagged a piece of trailing fur and pulled herself in close to one wall. He let her just float there for a minute, before he continued.

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘I thought I was imagining it. I had . . . nightmares, about Chris Severn and Josef. I saw it happening. I just pretended it wasn’t real, because it couldn’t be real.’ She wept.

  She stiffened again, then twisted around to face him. ‘The figurine.’

  Corso said nothing. She pulled herself slowly upright and stared through him as if he were not there. Her expression was sphinx-like now: calm, eerie, deadly. ‘The figurine the alien gave me—Belle Trevois.’

  ‘I know. I—’

  ‘I remember now.’ Her tone was soft and calm, but something in its tone unnerved him. ‘I mean I’m starting to remember. Trader knew I was on Redstone during the massacres; he was just playing a game with me. I knew the figure was of Trevois as soon as I opened the box, but then I touched it and ... I forgot.’

  She focused fully on him now. ‘That thing raped me, Lucas. I don’t know how he knew I’d get here, but he had planned everything from Bourdain’s Rock on at the very least.’

  Her lips twisted in a snarl. ‘And now I’m going to destroy him.’

  Twenty-three

  A few minutes passed.

  ‘We’re going out on to the hull,’ Dakota suddenly informed him, grabbing his pressure suit from the corner it had drifted into and pushing it towards him. ‘Outside, now.’

  He gaped at her blankly.

  ‘Look, I’ll explain on the way, all right?’

  She’d barely got herself dressed, but she began to pull her clothes off once more. She noticed his lips tighten as the filmsuit spread across her skin, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood right now for asking too many questions. She was glad of that, because she wasn’t in the mood for explanations. She’d already guessed he might have seen the Bandati technology in operation while he was bringing her back to the cargo bay.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about this,’ she said casually.

  Corso glanced around to observe the small object gripped in Dakota’s hand, and froze when he saw it was one of the remote failsafes. He reached down automatically, and realized he didn’t have his own any more.

  ‘I found this earlier among your clothes, right after we got naked.’ Her tone remained casual. ‘This thing was meant to break the link between me and the interface chairs, wasn’t it?’

  Corso nodded dumbly.

  Dakota smiled like a cat. ‘I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you it wouldn’t have worked.’

  Corso swallowed. ‘Your Ghost?’

  ‘Nothing gets past it.’ She regarded him coolly. ‘After what you told me on the derelict, I figured there was a chance you might be carrying something like this.’

  He looked away from her and pulled his suit on. Then she guided him back out of the Piri Reis and into the cargo bay and towards the airlock built into the main bay’s external doors.

  —

  Outside, the surface of Theona looked so close she imagined she could reach out and touch its icy surface with one hand. The dull grey and orange stripes of the gas-giant Dymas hovered in the darkness beyond. Dakota was able to converse normally with Corso via a tiny, Ghost-linked transponder carried in the back of her throat.

  Beyond the curve of the ship’s hull, three new stars were visible shining unevenly but brightly: the approaching, unknown fleet. Their engines were pointed towards the inner system as they decelerated.

  She could see Corso’s face clearly through the visor of his suit. He looked absolutely terrified, his arms and legs waving frantically as only the intelligent lanyards built into the waist of his pressure suit kept him attached to the ship’s
hull. Delicate-looking but incredibly strong silver wires shot out from his waist, embedding and re-embedding themselves in the hull as Corso shifted up behind her. Dakota had slaved his belt to her own suit’s lanyards, so that Corso was forced to follow her as she made her way across and around the hull towards some half-remembered destination.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better’—his breathing was uneven, panicky—‘easier even, if I just pulled myself after you with the handholds?’

  ‘Not a chance. You don’t have the experience of zero gravity or outside work for me to risk the chance of you drifting off, and I don’t have the time to baby-sit you either. Those lanyards are pretty much fail-proof, all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ he gasped, his laboured breath making his words hard to decipher. ‘So tell me, why the hell are we out here anyway?’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘Well ... at a guess, then, you’re worried the Piri Reis has been infected by the same thing that infected your Ghost. But can the Piri hear us out here?’

  ‘Not as long as we stay on this frequency.’

  ‘You know, the Piri did say your implants were now clean of invasives.’

  ‘Maybe it’s lying.’ She paused for a moment, snatches of memory coming back. She looked around, thinking hard. That way, she decided, rapidly continuing on her way around the hull’s circumference.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if the Piri’s infected, we’re dead anyway. Your ship’s the only possible escape route we might have, right? We talked this over, and I’d prefer to believe it’s not infected. Besides, the Piri Reis is a paranoid’s wet dream. From what I saw and heard back there, it’s like your counter-surveillance doesn’t even trust itself.’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t. It has to deal with some very sophisticated probing techniques. Besides, you know what they say: paranoids live longer.’

  A mental image of a service hatch, and its number, flashed into Dakota’s mind from a pocket deep within her Ghost’s memory stacks that had, until very recently, been locked off from her consciousness. She paused for a moment, trying to think which way to go next. It came to her suddenly, and she set off once more.

  Corso’s response was panic. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  She explained as she went. ‘The Shoaler alien I met on Bourdain’s Rock was called Trader. Everything that’s happened since it gave me that damned gift has been set up so I take the blame. It was the alien destroyed Bourdain’s Rock, and then made me look responsible because I was the one carrying a GiantKiller on board my ship. Then it got inside my head and made me murder Josef Marados after he tried to save my skin. It was the same with Chris Severn. You’re right, Lucas.’

  The words spat out of her mind in bitter anger. ‘I did kill him.’

  ‘So I guess the memories are coming back now?’

  Dakota gritted her teeth. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  They were meanwhile passing an observation blister. Even though it was incredibly unlikely Arbenz or anyone else would be inside the blister looking out, Dakota nonetheless felt a stab of fear on passing it.

  She glanced over her shoulder to see Corso not too far behind her, still dragged along by his lanyards. At least he appeared to have stopped struggling.

  ‘The point is, everywhere I go, something bad happens. The alien covers its tracks by using me as a puppet to do what it wants me to, and that way there’s no reason for anyone to investigate any deeper.’

  She finally stopped and waited for him to catch up. As she led him along this curving path, Theona had partially slid out of sight behind the Hyperion’s hull. The gravity wheel still spun around the ship’s axis a hundred metres ahead to the fore. She heard Corso’s breathing become more laboured, and guessed that was because he had just glanced the same way. To him it must feel as if he were being dragged, by wires that couldn’t possibly hold his weight, up the side of a kilometre-high tower with a rotating wheel waiting near its apex.

  She decided to keep him talking to keep his mind off things.

  ‘Here’s a question. The entire reason Ghost tech was developed is down to the lack of anything like credible artificial intelligence, even after half a millennium of computer technology. Ghost tech was a way of sidestepping the problem, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Corso croaked. ‘An artificial unconsciousness that processes data and only bothers you with the really important stuff, right?’

  ‘Right. So given that fact, data stacks on board the Hyperion or anywhere else, couldn’t possibly contain something as sophisticated as the intelligence that communicated with me. So maybe then it’s reasonable to assume there’s something external to the stacks.’

  She spotted an access hatch and felt another flash of déjà vu. She pushed herself towards the hatch, lanyards whipping back and forth as she went.

  She kept glancing back at Corso to make sure he was making way all right. He’d now let his limbs hang loose, allowing his lanyards to carry him after her. She smiled: he looked like some impossibly skinny sea creature picking its way over a seabed, with a human-shaped prize mounted on its minuscule head. But they were starting to make good time.

  ‘And is that another reason why we’re out here now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. Hang on.’

  The service hatch had a simple locking mechanism. It contained nothing vital and was easy to open. She pulled back the lid and gazed down at something that looked not unlike a neuron cell, but blown up to the size of a human head and silver-grey in colour, its body apparently composed of crystalline, semi-transparent fibres. It extended dozens upon dozens of strands deep into a control panel inside the hatch.

  ‘Shit,’ Corso whispered as he came abreast of her. ‘What is that thing?’

  Dakota, too, stared down at it, struggling with a sense of deep loathing that filled her mind. It was hard for her to believe she’d been responsible for placing it there herself.

  ‘That’s Trader, Lucas. Or rather a copy of its mind, linked in through this panel and into the Hyperion’s subsystems. We need to destroy it.’

  She was beginning to remember how she’d murdered Josef.

  She’d slipped away from the Black Rock docks, literally minutes before she’d been due to depart for the Hyperion aboard a shuttle. Josef’s own hacks had made it simple for her to find her way back to his office undetected. The door had slid quietly open and he’d looked up, with barely enough time to register surprise, before she was on him, her face hidden by the smooth black oil of her filmsuit.

  She’d torn the ceremonial Challenge blade from where it sat in a niche on his wall, and used it to slash at his throat before he’d even had time to stand up. He’d staggered away from her, trying to keep the desk between them before he eventually collapsed, bleeding heavily. She’d dropped the blade and picked up a heavy-looking ornament that sat by the window, which looked out over Mesa Verde, and used it to bash his skull in, her compromised Ghost all the while altering the Hyperion’s live security feeds to make it appear she was in fact already on board the shuttle.

  After that, she’d made her way back down to the Black Rock departure bay and on to the shuttle, with barely seconds to spare.

  She had later killed Chris Severn while he lay in a medbox in Ascension, cutting out his heart and pushing the still-warm organ into his insensate mouth, as an attempt to disguise his death as a ritual killing carried out by one of Ascension’s many criminal organizations.

  Even so, Trader’s total mind-rape hadn’t taken into account the possibility of chance physical encounters either with Corso or anyone else. The more she thought about it, the more the alien’s strategies stank of hasty preparation, of seat-of-the-pants planning rather than careful deliberation.

  The machine-organ before Dakota twitched, and she wondered if Trader had any idea what she was intending to do next. She hoped it did.

  She pulled off her knapsack and rummaged inside, finally producing a tool similar to a crowbar. She leaned in towards the hatch, prising and
wrenching at the Trader-object, trying to pull it loose. It struggled, entwining soft silver limb tendrils around the shaft of the tool in a vain attempt to wrest it from her grip.

  After a few moments of this battle of wills, Corso reached in and helped her tug at the object. It struggled all the harder, wriggling frantically, but finally it came loose and floated free of the Hyperion, its limbs rippling in a futile attempt to gain purchase out in the void. Dakota swatted at it hard, sending it rapidly drifting away towards Theona.

  ‘And is that it?’ Corso asked in a tone of clear revulsion. There was something so fundamentally disturbing about the thing they had just destroyed.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s all there is, yes.’

  ‘And you put it there yourself?’

  ‘Under Trader’s control, yes.’ Dakota nodded. ‘I sat up one day while I was back on Mesa Verde and I had a vault number and an address in my head. I went to the address and collected a package. That thing was inside.’ She shrugged. ‘Then, I guess, it was just a matter of finding an opportune moment.’

  She saw that Corso was no longer paying attention, and followed the direction of his gaze.

  It seemed they had company.

  Three figures in armoured pressure suits were moving towards them, carried forward by their own lanyard belts. All three were clearly armed.

  Dakota twisted around so that her own lanyards held her upright, relative to the hull, her feet planted next to the open hatch, and watched as they approached.

  She wondered if her filmsuit would absorb the kinetic energy of the bullets, given that their weapons looked like the projectile variety.

  Yeah, she thought. And maybe I can magically fly home as well. If she didn’t go back inside the ship at some point soon, the filmsuit would run out of power and she’d be left exposed, naked to the vacuum. The only way for her to stay alive was getting back through the airlock, and just sneaking around clearly wasn’t an option any longer.

  At least her mind was her own again. She had Corso to thank for that. She couldn’t decide if what she now felt towards him was love, or merely a kind of ecstatic gratitude born out of the knowledge that he’d helped rip a parasite clean out of her head.