Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

  The expanding wave front of plasma rushed on towards the Agartha.

  —

  Kieran stepped towards the Senator, who looked up at him.

  ‘We only have a few moments, Senator,’ he said. ‘The wave front will reach us very soon.’

  The Senator nodded tightly; it was clear he was barely holding himself together. ‘I hope it’s—’

  He shook his head. I hope it’s quick, Kieran knew he’d meant to say.

  Kieran reached out, almost lovingly, and cradled the surprised man’s face in his hands.

  ‘I hope it is, Senator. But it may not be.’

  He broke Arbenz’s neck with a sudden, swift twist. The Senator didn’t even have time to look surprised.

  Kieran lowered the dead man’s body to the deck with due love and respect, before standing up straight again to wait for the end with the rest of the crew.

  —

  The shell of plasma swallowed the Agartha totally, tearing it apart and transforming it into superheated vapour in barely more time than it had taken to envelop the missile.

  It continued to expand, racing towards Newfall, a hundred and thirty million kilometres distant, carrying the gaseous remains of the Freehold ship and its crew ever outwards, as it would continue to do for many tens of thousands of years.

  On the sunward side of Ikaria, the effect was devastating. The amount of energy slamming into the planet was equivalent to several thousand nuclear warheads exploding every few seconds, as plasma that had been trapped within the photosphere of a star for untold epochs was unleashed instantaneously.

  Ikaria’s crust literally began to melt away, turning white-hot and then vaporizing, the overwhelming fire digging deeper into the planetary crust at a rate of hundreds of metres every second. Ragged mountain peaks, which had formed long ago during asteroid impacts, exploded under the pressure as they slowly turned from the night side to face the rage of the dying sun.

  Within hours, rather than days, the planet would cease to exist, joining the wave of expanding gas as it was reduced to its constituent atoms and spread through the local constellation.

  —

  The ground trembled under Dakota’s feet. She broke into a run, bounding under the low gravity straight towards the skeletal alien ship.

  She couldn’t help but feel, as she approached, that she was somehow tumbling into a trap. The ship’s spines were too much like the reaching cilia of some hungry sea creature. The beckoning space that had opened beyond the spines in anticipation of her arrival was too much like a gaping, expectant maw.

  She kept her eyes half-shut and focused on the ground, her thoughts filled with the terrible, pervasive light slowly seeping over the horizon and turning the top of the valley a dull orange-red.

 

  Almost there.

  She threw herself forward, as the terrible light began to overrun even the filmsuit’s filters, dashing through the derelict’s spines and into its interior.

  The impossible light began to fade as the entrance behind her flowed shut. There were no open spaces beyond the entrance. Instead, the body of the derelict began to enclose her, entombing her like a dinosaur that had stumbled into a swamp.

  She felt it cool and soft against her skin and realized in a moment of terror that her filmsuit had somehow shut off by itself. She struggled to draw breath as her lungs kicked back into action, but there was no air in here to breathe.

  She was buried alive, deep within a chasm on a dead world orbiting a dying sun.

  Madness began to seep into her thoughts.

  Then she saw stars rushing towards her.

  —

  Several minutes later, the shockwave reached Newfall.

  Shallow oceans were turned to superheated steam, and the very atmosphere burned. As one hemisphere facing Nova Arctis dissipated under the equivalent of ten billion suns beating down on it, Newfall began a process of losing mass that would last, at most, a day or two.

  It was like taking a flamethrower to a crumpled ball of paper. As gases burned away and the nova dug deeper towards the planetary core, Newfall’s gravity would drop, making it easier for burned-away atoms and molecules to achieve escape velocity under the intense pressure of nova heat.

  Newfall would soon be little more than a memory.

  —

  Corso had cried out in terror as the Piri lurched. Then he heard a high-pitched whistling that tore at his nerves, and felt air rush past his face, tousling his hair.

  The Piri was losing atmosphere. The lights had gone out.

  He grabbed fistfuls of wall-fur as the air vented, sucking him in the direction of Dakota’s sleeping compartment. If he didn’t do something now, he’d be dead in seconds.

  He let go of the fur, twisted around and landed just next to the entrance to the space where Dakota slept. He saw where the hull had been ripped open, sucking out half the contents of the room. He found the emergency-seal button and slapped it, waiting while the compartment was sealed off.

  The howling ceased abruptly and he gasped for air. Automatic pressure sensors had picked up the oxygen drop, and hissed quietly as they replenished the supply from the Piri’s depleted supplies.

  Corso paused there for the next minute or so until he had stopped shaking too violently. Then he pulled himself over to a console that still appeared to be active, though unresponsive. He couldn’t even tell if the Piri’s stacks were still functioning.

  There was enough basic systems information, however, to tell him the worst had happened. He was drifting now, and in another twenty minutes or so, the Piri Reis would orbit into Ikaria’s sunward side, and then straight into the path of the nova.

  Thirty-two

  Dakota awoke naked between cool sheets.

  She sat up with a start and looked around. Tall windows looked out over an azure sky.

  There was no sign of the derelict, of Ikaria ...

  After staring about herself for a while, convinced she’d gone mad, she stepped over to the window and looked up to where the sun should be. Instead there was only a black dot surrounded by a visibly expanding ring of fire.

  She looked down, at the empty city below her, and crumpled to her knees.

  Below the window lay a chasm of such magnitude that it made the valley on Ikaria look like a crack in the pavement. Lights burned all the way down as far as she could see, illuminating windows and verandas all the way down into an apparently bottomless pit.

  On the other side of the chasm, a vast alien metropolis spread out yet further.

  Without knowing quite how, she became aware she was now the only living thing on this entire world.

  She moved away from the windows, and from the sight of the pitiless chasm below, and noticed a door at the far end of the room. She raced over and tugged it open, finding a corridor stretching beyond. Everything—the shape of the corridor itself, of the doors, of the windows—suggested this place had been designed for creatures larger than humans, and of entirely different proportions.

  Dakota wandered down steps not designed for human legs and constantly peered about her. When she reached ground level, she saw that a street stretched away into the distance.

  Something about her surroundings made her sure this city had been abandoned for a long, long time. She wandered about, naked and still in shock, then turned back for fear of losing her way. Eventually she found her way back up to the room she had woken in.

  The bed was of entirely human proportions, as was the data book that stood on a plinth to one side of it. She had no idea if it had been there or not when she
’d woken.

  She picked up the book and began to read the words there.

  Some hours later, she wandered back into the empty streets in a daze. She was still naked, so clothes appeared to be a concept alien to whoever or whatever had brought her here. She didn’t feel cold, however. And though she felt hungry, the actual need to eat, just in order to stay alive, appeared to be absent.

  This entire world was a library: the book had told her that. The library obligingly shaped itself to her memories of human libraries, giving her information in the form of words on electronic pages. It had also told her she was still inside the derelict, and still on the surface of Ikaria.

  This, then, was how the derelict chose to communicate with her. Corso’s interface chair seemed laughably primitive by comparison.

  As months passed, she learned how to summon the ghosts of the dead Magi Librarians and quiz them about their history. In turn, they taught Dakota her true purpose: the one they believed she had been brought to Nova Arctis to fulfil.

  After a few years, she began to understand just how much was required of her, and just how much would be at stake throughout the galaxy if she failed.

  —

  Corso listened to the desperate sound of his own breath, as he counted down the seconds to his death. He was sufficiently preoccupied, and it took a moment before he realized a comms light on the command console was blinking.

  Someone was trying to communicate with him.

  He lurched upright. Information was scrolling across a screen, too rapidly for him to follow.

  It appeared something else had taken control of the Piri Reis.

  ‘Piri!’

  No answer.

  He hammered at the controls, but they failed to respond.

  The ship lurched violently.

  —

  For millennia, the three Magi vessels had lain in their silent graves, waiting for the arrival of a Pilot.

  The first Pilots were older than dust, half-forgotten Magi who had flown these ships to this lost, lonely system even as the Shoal hunted down the last of their numbers. Those first Pilots had enjoyed countless virtual years within the memories of these three craft, but even that near-eternity of subjective experience eventually gave way to the gradual pace of external time and entropy.

  In the end, death had claimed even them.

  Bright rivers of white-hot lava spat and flowed in the depths of Ikaria’s great chasm, sending searing light up towards the ridge on which the three derelicts lay. The one Dakota had entered finally rose from its resting place, bright energies flickering around its skeletal spines.

  As the ground fell away from beneath it, pockets of gas detonated from deep within the chasm walls, sending boulders and debris tumbling down on the two remaining vessels.

  Vast fissures began to tear through Ikaria’s crust, and the planet shifted in its orbit as it rapidly lost mass to the searing heat of the nova.

  Above it all, the Piri Reis floated like a dragonfly above the open door of a furnace.

  Thirty-three

  ‘Corso? It’s Dakota. Can you hear me?’

  Corso jerked around, astonished. For a moment he’d thought she was right there beside him, but the voice he heard had come through the Piri’s comms system.

  ‘I’m here, Dakota. I really, really hope you’ve got some good news.’

  ‘Can you activate the external cameras?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Corso admitted. ‘I can’t get the Piri to respond. Where are you? Are you still down there? I’m deaf and blind up here. I have no idea what’s going on.’

  ‘What’s going on is that it’s a fucking miracle you’re still alive. I need you to do something. I can see from where I am that the Piri Reis is badly damaged. The cargo section and aft, right?’

  ‘Yeah, part of it’s been sheared off, best as I can tell. I think you’re going to be sleeping in the command module for a while.’

  ‘A lot of primary systems can still be controlled manually, just not very efficiently. You understand?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m on my way up, aboard one of the derelicts. I’m going to tether it to the Piri and then we can get the hell out of here.’

  Corso hesitated. The idea that she had somehow succeeded was strangely difficult to accept. It was only at that moment he fully realized just how thoroughly he’d expected to die. That he might actually survive . . .

  ‘Now listen to me, Corso. There’s an extendible cable system at the back of the Piri, same stuff they use for building skyhooks. The only problem is the winch system, and how badly it got damaged during the missile impact. The Librarian thinks the cable itself might be fine, though. All I need you to do is release the cable manually, then I can take care of the rest.’

  Librarian ?

  ‘Release it how?’ he demanded.

  ‘You won’t need to go outside. Are the lights on—on the main console?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, key in this sequence.’ She recited a list of numerals and letters, and he entered them. More lights began to flash, and Corso felt a low vibration pass through the deck.

  ‘OK. Something happened, but I can’t tell what. Dakota . . . who’s this Librarian?’

  ‘Long story. I’ll be over there in maybe ten minutes. There’ll be time to explain later.’

  Corso stared at the console. You don’t say.

  —

  The derelict shot upwards, achieving escape velocity within seconds of lifting off. Beneath, the shelf on which the derelict had sat for so very long finally collapsed into the fire far below it.

  A blister formed on the Magi ship’s skin as it rose towards the Piri, which was still spinning helplessly. Once it had achieved orbit, a black figure emerged from within the blister, crouching low against the hull, peering out from amid the twisting spines.

  Dakota stared out beyond the derelict’s flickering energies towards the Piri Reis, allowing the zoom on her filmsuit to pick out the cable steadily extruding from the tiny craft. Her thoughts then merged with those of the derelict, whereupon the Magi vessel altered its coarse minutely.

  The derelict matched speeds with the Piri. Meanwhile the instructions Corso had already entered had caused the cables to extend from her ship. Dakota watched as the near end of the first cable slid between the spines and came towards her. She scuttled aside, watching as the cable was absorbed into the derelict’s hull.

  The cable became taut, and slowly—very slowly—the Piri Reis was drawn in towards the derelict.

  Dakota didn’t need to see the surface of Ikaria to know what was happening there: the Librarian was feeding images directly into her implants. Vast explosions rippled across the planet’s molten surface, rising upwards like fiery blossoms. Burning dust rose upwards, filling the space around the brilliant corpse of Nova Arctis with deadly light.

  As long as she stayed there within the shelter of the spines she was safe—at least for the moment. The space-time distortions generated by the transluminal drive, still powering up, acted only as a temporary shield at best.

  Come on, come on.

  The Piri was drawing closer, pulled tail-first in between the spines, like prey reeled into the mouth of a space-borne predator.

  The Librarian spoke to her.

  In a civilization as old as that of the Magi, knowledge was paramount. When a civilization had millions of years of accumulated cultural wisdom to draw on, some of its most powerful citizens were inevitably those who controlled access to that knowledge.

  The Librarians, in a sense, were the Magi. Their membership had been drawn from dozens of now long-extinct species, but their purpose—their recognized collective identity—had been in existence longer than many of the cultures that once supplied its members in the dim and distant past. They had always been jealous guardians of their knowledge.

  Creating the ships Dakota had until very recently known only as derelicts had been their idea—the Magi’s gift to posterity: a way for mind
s on worlds not yet born to understand the nature and the legacy of the Maker threat.

  The Piri Reis was finally drawn fully inside the embrace of the derelict’s spines. Dakota pushed her way over the hull to her own ship, then grabbed on to the cable and pulled herself along towards it.

  They were still deep within Ikaria’s shadow cone, sheltered from the full force of the nova blast, but that wouldn’t be the case for very much longer.

  The temperature of the Magi ship’s hull was rising rapidly, towards levels that would far exceed even its astonishingly high tolerances. And as they drew away from Ikaria, accelerating with increasing force, the cone of shelter cast by Ikaria’s shrinking shadow cone grew narrower and narrower.

  She had now to make sure the Piri Reis was thoroughly lashed to the Magi vessel. Otherwise it might not survive the final, hard burst of acceleration prior to the transluminal jump.

  There were other cables that could be manually wound out from the Piri Reis’s hull and attached around the much larger vessel. It hurt her to notice where the missile had ripped part of the hull away. She estimated it had lost almost a fifth of its total mass.

  No time now for regrets. She watched while the end of another cable was drawn into the derelict’s pale flesh.

  The Piri Reis was finally as secure within the derelict’s embrace as it ever would be.

  She found her way to an airlock on the exterior of the Piri Reis, and was thankful when she found it still opened. She cycled through, letting her filmsuit melt away as she climbed naked back inside the command console that she’d been so sure she’d never be seeing again.

  Pale-faced and wide-eyed, she looked like a ghost to the staring Corso.

  I am a ghost, she thought. The old Dakota was gone for ever. She’d lived a lifetime amid the derelict’s stacks while her fragile body had nestled within its pale flesh.