Stealing Light

by Gary Gibson

‘There’s no time for questions,’ she stated firmly, pushing by him. It was strangely like walking into a house remembered from the earliest days of childhood and finding it unchanged, everything exactly where she had left it.

  She tried to match her memory of Corso to the man standing before her, pale and frightened. She remembered him with fondness, but in too many ways he was a stranger, someone she’d known a long time ago.

  ‘Dakota . . .’

  She glanced at him, saw he was looking at her strangely.

  ‘Long time no see,’ she said awkwardly. He frowned in confusion.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She stepped past him and towards a console.

  There were things she’d forgotten—the smell of her ship’s interior, for one. It smelled . . . stale. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, and remembered.

  ‘We need to use the Piri Reis to help boost the derelict, and we need to do it quickly,’ she explained.

  She saw the befuddled expression on his face and reached out, touching his chin with her fingers. After her long sojourn in the Library, it felt like an eternity since she’d touched—let alone spoken to—another human being.

  ‘The best way I can put it is that we’re going to tow the derelict,’ she continued. ‘It needs to pick up a certain velocity before the drive will fully activate, which is where the Piri Reis comes in.’

  ‘But that’ll use up the last of our fuel. . .’

  He was feeling too confused to be any help, so Dakota hit a button. She pictured the Piri Reis suddenly leaping forward, the cables taking up the strain, and the derelict nudging up behind, its own sublight engines powering it silently forward. The whole process was entirely inertia-free so long as they remained encompassed by the derelict’s spines.

  She could see that Corso hadn’t even realized they were accelerating.

  Outside, the Piri strained at the cables buried in the derelict’s flesh like a dog straining at its leash—the last of its fuel now burning up in intense fusion heat that sprayed across the Magi ship’s spines.

  They slid out of the shadow of the dying, shrinking world and into the full glare of the furious inferno beyond. At first the superheated plasma flowed around the localized distortions created by the Magi ship, but even that would not prove sufficient.

  The derelict’s primary structure had been manufactured on the surface of a neutron star, deep within a stellar factory complex that had spanned light years. Even so, it couldn’t survive indefinitely in such an overwhelmingly extreme environment. Slowly, very slowly, as the hull became superheated, it began to bubble at the extremities, revealing the skeletal structure underlying its spines.

  Thirty-four

  ‘So are you going to try and shoot me now?’ Dakota asked mildly. ‘Or are you going to be sensible and wait until we’re out of here?’

  Dakota had turned her back on the console, facing him with arms folded across her naked chest. There was something so bizarre about this situation, Corso found it hard not to think it was made some kind of joke. He watched as the filmsuit flowed back out of its hidden recesses and totally coated her body within moments.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

  She punched him with one black-slicked fist, the assault so sudden and so unexpected he simply went reeling away from her. Corso bounced off the opposite bulkhead, then grabbed on to the for there and stared back at her in shock.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘No, Lucas,’ she told him. ‘You listen to me. You were going to try and take the derelict away from me. I won’t be happy if you deny it.’

  ‘What? No, I . . .’

  She pushed herself away from the console and was across the cabin in a moment, pinning him to the wall with one hand at his throat.

  Under other, better circumstances he might have been able to defend himself, but he’d had too little sleep for too many days, and had been put under too much stress. Corso struggled, but was held firmly in place.

  ‘Listen, I don’t know what you think I was going to do, but for God’s sake . . .’

  She smiled with sad amusement. ‘Don’t worry, Lucas, I’m not going to hurt you. But you’re not going to lie to me any more.’

  She twisted his arm with her other hand, and flipped him over until his face was pressed deep into the velvety fur lining. Keeping one of his arms wrenched painfully back between his shoulder blades, she quickly reached inside his pocket and withdrew the weapon. It was a tiny thing really, but he’d known all along it would be his only real bargaining chip if by some miracle they managed to survive this far.

  Dakota suddenly let go of him and he whipped around, glaring at her. She pushed herself back over next to the command console, the slim oblong shape of his weapon in her hand.

  ‘All right,’ he said, trembling. ‘Exactly how did you know?’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’

  Corso stared at her in confusion.

  She shrugged. ‘I just figured it was likely you’d try something like this. You and me, Lucas, we’ve got different aims in mind for the transluminal drive. All along, you knew something like this had to happen, sooner or later.’

  Corso thought over his options, and realized he didn’t have any. ‘All right, fine. I understand what you’re saying. But you have to believe me when I say I wasn’t going to harm you.’

  She laughed. ‘You came on board my ship with a gun hidden away, and you weren’t going to harm me, yet the survival of your shitty little planet was at stake?’ She glared back at him.

  ‘Just let me explain myself.’

  She nodded for him to continue.

  ‘The Consortium is corrupt,’ he explained. ‘You already know that. It’s an empire in everything but name.’

  ‘You think I’m going to give this derelict to the Consortium?’ She laughed in derision. ‘Don’t you understand? The derelict’s whole purpose is to find booby-traps, caches of alien technology. It’s a weapon for destroying other weapons.’

  Corso looked back at her blankly.

  ‘I was inside that derelict for a long time. Not in objective terms—purely subjective. There used to be Pilots for the Magi ships, creatures utterly unlike us which lived for millennia. Their job was to find Maker caches.’

  She saw the look of comprehension that passed briefly over his face. ‘You’ve heard that name before, haven’t you?’ she said excitedly.

  ‘A progenitor race?’

  ‘The ones some of the Magi races believed created the universe.’

  Corso was staring at her with something like awe, as if he’d only now allowed himself to believe she’d been telling the truth about her experiences on Ikaria.

  ‘What’s important is that something left caches of high technology scattered throughout their galaxy, and ours, and maybe others. It’s exactly like I said, Lucas. The drive was seeded in this way specifically to entrap fledgling spacefaring cultures like their own. Any race that finds a cache soon figures out the drive’s potential as a weapon. If they’re aggressive, war is inevitable, whether it’s after a hundred years or a hundred thousand. In the process, they wipe out other species, either by accident or deliberately. Destabilize enough stars, and it’s going to wipe out higher life forms throughout the local stellar neighbourhood. The caches are bug traps, high-tech flypaper. The Magi created these ships, the derelicts, to track down those caches and destroy them, and also the knowledge they contained.’

  She smiled. ‘Which is pretty ironic, when you consider the only way for them to do that was to use the same drive technology that destroyed their own civilization.’

  Corso put his hands to his head. ‘For God’s sake, Dakota! Do you really think knowledge like this would be better off with the Shoal?’

  ‘I’ve got no love for them. But in all their history there’s never been a war in our galaxy like the one that wiped out the Magi. I’ll give them that much.’

  ‘As far as you know.’ He grinned nastily. ‘Maybe th
ey’re lying.’

  That stalled her. As her lips quivered, he knew she’d been wondering exactly the same thing.

  ‘I’ll tell you this much, Dakota. Before I even met you, I was terrified of you. I thought you’d be some kind of monster. I realize now you’re not, but you’re way, way out of your depth. How far do you think you can run with something like this, before someone catches up with you? As long as you live, somebody is going to be looking for you, whether you have the derelict or not, just so they can have the information tucked away in your brain. They’ll do whatever they can to get it all out of you, and then they’ll dispose of you.’

  ‘And what would you do?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Look, things are changing in the Freehold.’

  He ignored the disbelieving look on her face.

  ‘I mean it,’ he insisted. ‘The people who founded the Freehold are long gone. With Arbenz dead and his controlling faction out of power, we have a chance now to gain real legal status within the Consortium. Everything will change, but with the transluminal drive, we could be a power player. We won’t be sidelined any longer. And we can protect you, Dakota, seriously. Without our help, I don’t know if you stand a chance.’

  ‘Nice try.’ She smiled sadly. ‘But I don’t think the human race should have the drive at all.’

  ‘You’re condemning the whole human race to an eternity of despotism!’ Corso bellowed in frustration. ‘We’ll always remain at the mercy of the Shoal.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. That’s not so bad if the alternative is extinction.’

  —

  Even as they spoke, Dakota could sense the urgency within the derelict’s thoughts. She could almost feel the near-invulnerable flesh of the ship being abraded away by the constant, high-energy assault of plasma rushing away from Nova Arctis’ core. It was as if it were her own skin being burned away.

  —

  The Piri Reis’s engines began to blast intermittently, then fell dark and silent as the last of its fuel was gone. Despite the shelter afforded within the derelict’s spines, its hull was beginning to glow a dull red.

  Chunks began tearing away from the hull of the Magi ship. Much of the hull coating had already been eroded from the spines, till they had become entirely skeletal in appearance, like slender bony fingers reaching out to grasp the Piri Reis.

  Vast plumes of light began to radiate outwards from the derelict, almost indistinguishable from the burning plasma that roared past on all sides.

  —

  They waited in silence while Dakota slid rapidly back into her fugue state. But the moment he so much as twitched a muscle towards her, she became suddenly alert again, the tiny weapon aiming towards him.

  Corso shrugged and relaxed again. Her eyes subsequently unfocused once more and she went back to wherever it was she went at such times.

  And even if he’d been able to gain control of this situation, what then? He himself wasn’t able to communicate with the derelict. And even if he had been, he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t going to go anywhere he wanted it to go. No, Dakota had the upper hand—had always had the upper hand. She had always been the key to this whole operation.

  Corso gave himself up to the inevitable. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘at least tell me where we’re going.’

  She snapped back out of her fugue instantly and focused on him. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? I thought you said you were that thing’s pilot.’

  ‘We can’t jump this soon without taking some risks. But we don’t have any choice either. If we wait any longer, any minimal protection we have against the nova will be lost, and we’d be dead in an instant. So we jump now, but where we end up . . . hard to say.’

  Corso took a deep breath. ‘Frankly, I’m surprised we even got this far.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know before—’

  He raised a hand. ‘I appreciate it. Really. But after we get there, can you let me off at the next stop?’

  She laughed fiercely at that. ‘I don’t want to be enemies,’ she said.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Dakota felt the Piri Reis rumble beneath her. At the same time, she saw her ship from the outside, smashing hard against one of the white-hot spines, the confining cables whipping about.

  The derelict surged forward, crashing against the Piri’s engine block, sending it spinning. The derelict’s inertialess zone was the only thing preventing Corso and Dakota from being smashed to pieces in an instant.

  If they didn’t jump now . . .

  The derelict with the tiny ship cradled in its spines flickered out of existence, and fires unimagined even in hell filled the void where it had been.

  —

  When the plasma shockwave reached Dymas, the outer layers of the gas-giant’s atmosphere were stripped away within only hours. The planet was literally smeared across the face of the Nova Arctis system.

  As it shrank, the gas-giant’s gravitational grip on its satellites—including Theona—weakened, and these worlds spun away into space, burning and boiling under the lethal assault of the dying star, their rocky cores vaporizing over the following hours.

  Vast streamers reached out from where a star had once been. If anyone had been there to witness it, they would have recognized that they were witnessing the birth of a nebula.

  It was over.

  —

  Dakota crawled through the darkness until she found Corso’s warm body. She put one hand on his chest and felt it rise and fall. Then she let her head fall against his chest and wept.

  After another little while, the lights began to flicker back on.

  ‘Piri?’

  ‘Dakxxx—’

  She tried again, rerouting her ship’s language circuits. They were still running on emergency power; still cradled within the half-melted spines of the derelict.

  But they were alive . . . and somewhere far, far away from Nova Arctis.

  Corso was badly concussed, constantly slipping in and out of consciousness. The medbox had given her some of the necessary medication, but it was still going to be a while before he made a great deal of sense.

  ‘xxzzz-ota. Dakota.’

  ‘Piri, good to hear you.’

  ‘Our stellar maps appear to be out of context with the observed local area,’ the Piri advised.

  Dakota patted the console. ‘Yes, Piri, that’s right.’

  ‘We also appear to be attached—’

  ‘No more questions, Piri. We’re safe, at least for the moment, and that’s all that matters. I know we’re out of fuel. How are we tor everything else?’

  ‘There are sufficient supplies for another one hundred hours,’ Piri stated, ‘at normal rates of consumption by one person.’

  Not so great then, and now for the important question. Dakota licked her lips, and felt her heart hammering as she asked it.

  ‘Where are we, Piri? Do you have any matches in your stacks for where we are just now?’

  There wasn’t any sign at all of the burgeoning nebula where Nova Arctis had once been, and the last time the derelict they were lassoed to had travelled through this part of the Milky Way had been long enough ago for its own stellar maps to be wildly out of date.

  ‘I have found a match,’ Piri declared after a few moments.

  ‘You’re shitting me,’ she mumbled. ‘Where?’

  ‘We are in Bandati space,’ the Piri Reis declared. ‘On the edge of one of their colony systems. Analysis of current tach-traffic indicates they are aware of our presence. What appear to be a fleet of mining ships has departed in our direction from an outlying world. Would you like me to initiate an emergency broadcast to them?’

  ‘No, wait.’

  What now, Dakota wondered? What now, indeed?

  ‘Call them,’ Corso mumbled from somewhere behind her. ‘We don’t have any choice. You heard the Piri. We don’t have enough supplies to stay alive. Not even if you dumped me overboard.’

  There’s always the dere
lict, Dakota thought. It was out there, waiting for her. But it had been too badly damaged, and was now engaged in a long process of self-repair that might take months.

  ‘Call them,’ Dakota agreed after another moment’s hesitation. ‘Tell them it’s an emergency.’

  Perhaps, she thought, it was enough just to be still alive.

  —

  For a hundred thousand years, throughout the Milky Way, creatures with eyes—or something that fulfilled the same function—would turn their faces up to the sky and see a new star burning brightly in the night, before it gradually began fading after a few days. The sight of that light would inspire wars and poetry and philosophies that would live for a thousand years more, long after the memory of the nova itself had passed on.

  That same light would shine down on other worlds at far greater distances, even in other distant galaxies, and inspire curiosity and terror in equal parts.

  In time, other stars would join it, blossoming and burning briefly all across the face of the Milky Way, like a fiery portent of doom.