Empire of Light

Chapter Ten

Ty was in a passageway just off of Shaft B when Cesar called in the warning.

The passageway terminated abruptly at a flat expanse of stone that differed substantially from the floor, ceiling and walls leading up to it. It featured none of the carved glyphs that covered almost every square centimetre of every other passageway throughout the abandoned clade-world. There was an unfinished quality to it, as if the Atn that had once made their home here had been interrupted in its construction.

Deep in thought, he crouched next to the unblemished wall of stone, a hand-held sodium lamp casting a sharp-edged pool of light around him. The comms indicator in one corner of his helmet visor had been blinking on and off for the past minute or so, but he had chosen to ignore it, suddenly certain that the last piece in a highly complex puzzle was about to slide into place.

Ever since the Mjollnir had brought them here, all the way from Ocean's Deep, Ty had wandered throughout the desolate shafts and passageways of the clade-world, convinced the Atn had left behind a message for those who knew how to read it – if not for him, then certainly for others of their own kind. There were hints, if you knew how to look, and careful study of them had drawn him to this particular passageway among all the rest.

The comms link continued to flash obstinately, and Ty finally activated it. In one corner of his visor an image popped up, of three interconnected white domes nestling together in a shallow crater. Digging equipment and spare parts for the spider-mechs were stacked out in the open. He noticed with a shock that at least one of the domes had been partly deflated.

'Nathan, you need to get back to the surface,' he was informed. Like the rest of the Mjollnir's crew, Cesar Androvitch had no idea of Ty's true identity. 'Nancy's come over to help us get packed. We're going back over to the frigate.'

'But why? There's still too much to-'

'Nathan,' another voice cut in; this time it was Nancy Schiller, the Mjollnir's chief of security. 'I'll explain everything when you get up here. Don't bring anything with you. Leave it all for the spiders. Just get here as fast as you can.'

She cut the connection, so that Ty hadn't even had a chance to tell her what he had found.

He pulled himself back along the passageway until he reached Shaft A, a borehole nearly thirty metres wide that cut straight through the heart of the asteroid, at which central point it intersected with a second shaft – Shaft B – running at a right angle to it. The asteroid itself was a little over thirty-five kilometres across; thousands of passageways, all identical in width but varying in depth, radiated outwards from each of the shafts.

He tapped at a panel on the arm of his spacesuit and, in response, one of a dozen spider-mechs that had been floating motionless near the centre of the shaft now moved towards him, propelled by tiny puffs of gas. The approaching device consisted primarily of a series of grappling arms that extended from a central hub a metre in diameter.

Once it had reached Ty, the spider rotated, presenting two handholds to him. Ty grabbed on to them, taking care not to look down the length of the shaft towards the asteroid's core as the machine carried him back towards the surface. Despite the minimal gravity, one such glance was sometimes all it took to send his suit's bio-monitors into high alert.

Instead he looked up towards a slowly widening circle of stars no more than a few hundred metres away – the white dwarf around which the clade-world had been orbiting for the last few billion years standing out clearly amongst the rest. A second dome had been deflated by the time Ty got back to the surface camp, which had been set up in a shallow crater a short distance from the mouth of the shaft itself. He let go of the spider-mech and allowed himself to drift slowly downwards, his boots kicking up a tiny puff of ice and dust. Then he made his way over to where Nancy and Cesar were working hard at packing the first dome back into its crate, under the harsh glare of an arc light. The Mjollnir was visible far overhead in the starry blackness, like a black and grey stick thrown high into the air, and which had never come down.

The frigate had taken a beating on the trip out, and it had not taken long for Ty to realize there was a very good reason why almost all the Shoal's superluminal craft comprised hollowed-out moons and adapted asteroids, since contact with the superluminal void put enormous stresses on the hull of any craft equipped with a faster-than-light drive.

The Magi starships were self-healing, but the Mjollnir wasn't built from the same pseudo-organic material. Along with the relatively few other human-built craft that had so far been converted to superluminal travel, the frigate was instead forced to undergo lengthy and difficult repair stops at the end of each and every jump it undertook. Outer hulls became corroded and damaged. Drive-spines required such constant repair and maintenance that onboard fabrication engines had to work around the clock to keep up with demand. While Ty and Nancy had been exploring the clade-world's passageways and caverns, Martinez and his crew had been striving to get the Mjollnir in full working order for the trip home.

One of the two helmeted figures now glanced up, and Ty's suit automatically projected an icon floating beside that figure, identifying it as Nancy.

'Merrick's swarm is on its way here,' she told him without preamble. 'Mjollnir's on full alert, and Martinez wants us out of here within the hour.' Ty was close enough now to see the worried expression through her visor. 'I'm sorry, Nathan. We did our best.'

'How do you know it's on its way?' he asked.

'The reconnaissance probes we sent out,' explained Cesar. 'One of them picked up a lot of drive-signatures no more than thirty light-years from here.'

'Drive-signatures?'

'Sure,' said Nancy. 'Remember the briefing?'

Ty made an exasperated noise. 'There were endless briefings. Care to remind me?'

'Superluminal ships produce gravitational anomalies every time they enter or depart normal space,' Cesar continued. 'The probe's got tach-net monitors that can pick up short-range fluctuations propagating through superluminal space. So we know something just turned up.'

No more than thirty light-years from here, Ty reflected. How easily the words tripped off Cesar's tongue. They'd travelled a thousand light-years without any help from the Shoal, putting them on a par with the greatest explorers the human race had ever known.

'How could they get here so soon?' he demanded. 'I thought the best estimates gave us at least another month before they arrived here.'

'Nathan… Cesar… for Christ's sake, shut up and get packing, will you?'

Ty turned his attention to Nancy. 'Look, we can't possibly leave here with nothing to show, not after coming all this way. Tell me exactly how much time you think we have left, to the precise minute if it's at all possible.'

He could just make out her terse expression through the visor. 'Nathan-'

'Just humour me, okay?'

Nancy hesitated, and Cesar jumped in. 'I'd say anything from ten to twenty-four hours before they're right on our doorstep, Nathan. But I don't rate our chances of survival very high if we aren't ready to jump out of here before then.'

Ty thought hard for a moment. 'Okay, but once the swarm does reach this system, exactly how long do you think we have before they pinpoint our exact location?'

'Nathan,' Nancy spoke as if she were talking to a slightly dim child, 'if there was ever anything here, it's long gone now. Give it up.'

'Is that Martinez's opinion too?' he countered.

'Of course it is, otherwise we wouldn't be packing up, would we? Unless you've got any last-minute bright ideas.'

'Maybe I do. Look, we spent a week just trying to find this rock after we arrived in this system, right?'

'What's your point?' asked Cesar.

'The swarm needs to find us first, or more specifically this one asteroid out of the huge volume of them surrounding the white dwarf. Now, clade-worlds are always found within specific distances from their stars, which is one reason we managed to find this one as quickly as we did. The swarm's going to know that, but it still means we're going to have at least some time to finish our work before they trace us.'

'We really don't have time to debate this,' Nancy snapped, her voice getting louder. 'You've worked harder than anyone else, Nathan, and there's no reason we couldn't come back here some other time and try looking again, after the swarm is gone.'

'Think about what's at stake,' Ty insisted. 'What's going to happen if we return empty-handed?'

'Jesus and Buddha, Nathan!' Nancy finally exploded. 'Don't you understand? All that happens if we stay on now is we get killed, and it's all over either way! Not unless you finally think you found the damn…' She stuttered to a halt, and he realized she could see the grin almost splitting his face in half.

Cesar looked back and forth between them. 'What – you found something?'

'There's an anomaly,' Ty explained. 'It was right there in front of me the whole time.'

'So why the hell didn't you mention it before?' Nancy demanded, angry again.

Ty shrugged, then remembered the gesture probably wouldn't be visible to the others, regardless of how light and flexible their suits were. 'You didn't really give me a chance. I came up here when you called, and-'

'Okay,' Nancy said, cutting him off. 'Okay, what anomaly?'

'I'll need to show you,' he replied. Nancy conferred quickly with Martinez and got permission for them to go back inside the asteroid. Cesar remained on the surface to supervise the spiders as they busily manoeuvred the packed tents and supplies on board an unmanned cargo transport that had just arrived from the frigate.

'I hope you know I'm risking my life for you,' Nancy muttered over a private channel, her voice tense.

'I promise I won't read too much into it,' Ty replied. The shaft walls slid past as they dropped down into darkness, each of them carried by a spider-mech. 'God forbid you might ever admit to actually liking me.'

'It's not that I don't like you; it's just that… I don't know.'

'"I'm just not your usual type." That's what you always say, isn't it?' he asked.

Sudden, intense sexual relationships were to be expected, while so far from home for months at a time; and such had been part and parcel of Ty's experiences while exploring other clade-worlds in years long gone by. But he never let himself forget that Nancy Schiller was a Freeholder. She was not unlike Karen, in that she was used to a life of discipline, and her body was a landscape of smooth, well-trained muscles; whenever they shared a bed, Ty would find himself wondering whether life under an assumed identity had left him with a perverse attraction to the threat of discovery.

He heard her sigh, over the channel. 'Forget I said anything,' she muttered. 'How long before we get to this chamber?'

'Not long. Does it matter?'

'No,' she grumbled. 'It's just…'

'What?'

She made an irritated sound. 'I just can't stand to think of those… machines hunting us through all this darkness.'

'It's not far,' he replied, knowing she was referring to the images of swarm-components they'd occasionally watched since departing Ocean's Deep.

The mouth of the shaft had shrunk to almost nothing, and now the only light came from the spider-mechs' lamps, which cast sharp-edged pools of illumination against the walls of the shaft as they rushed by. Their conversation lapsed into silence, and Ty guessed Nancy was just as intimidated by the scale of the clade-world as most people were the first time they found themselves inside one.

Before long they reached the crossroads at the asteroid's heart. Someone had directed a spider to nail up a handwritten sign indicating basic directions. Ty braked, and waited for Nancy to do the same.

'We're going into Chamber Two,' he explained, nodding in the direction of Shaft B West. 'It's pressurized, okay? That means we can-'

'Nathan, I know you're dedicated to your work, but get your head out of your ass. Remember I'm the one who writes the daily progress reports. What makes you think I don't already know it's pressurized?'

'Sorry I was just thinking out loud. Another hundred metres, then down the hatch.'

The Atn usually left a basic assortment of data and tools behind whenever they abandoned a clade-world, but in this case there seemed to be a surfeit of artefacts both physical and virtual. The data was recorded on storage devices built around a core of self-repairing molecular circuitry, the resulting stacks resembling rows of bronzed shields embedded in the walls of dedicated chambers. Most, but not all of the data stored there still remained incomprehensible to human researchers.

The stack chamber was accessed through a pressure seal installed by spider-mechs shortly after their arrival. They passed through the airlock quickly, Ty pulling off his helmet once they were inside the chamber. He watched as Nancy did the same, shaking sweat from frizzy blond hair cut into a bob.

The chamber was rectangular, its walls crowded with the ubiquitous spiral-form glyphs. A heap of what might appear to the casual observer as nothing more than blackened junk lay jumbled in one corner. The remains of eight Atn stack-discs were embedded in the wall directly opposite the pressure seal. Each had been carefully and deliberately vandalized; fragments and chunks of the discs lay scattered all around.

Nancy knelt by the pile of junk and poked at it with one gloved finger. 'I don't know, Nathan, we've already been over every inch of this place, and I'll be seriously surprised if we've missed anything.'

Ty pulled off a glove and ran one hand over the ruined edge of a stack-disc. 'We missed one thing.' He nodded towards the pile of junk in the corner. 'That's the remains of an Atn, for a start.'

'Oh.' She stood up and took a step back. 'Are you sure?'

He glanced past her at the twisted remains, which were hardly recognizable as having ever been anything living. 'I ran a tomographic analysis on some trace organic remnants. It's definitely the remains of an Atn, and it's been subjected to extremely intense levels of heat, like something turned the interior of this chamber into a furnace. You remember what Cesar found out about those craters?'

A lot of them were formed relatively recently, and in the same short period of time, right?'

'Exactly It's like something turned up here, killed everything living it found, then disappeared again.'

'All right,' she said, eyeing him with wary respect. 'But if that does turn out to be the case, doesn't it lend itself rather strongly to the notion that if the Mos Hadroch was ever here, it's gone now? And you told me yourself the Atn clades used to go to war with each other. Maybe the ones in this asteroid just happened to lose a fight.'

Ty shook his head violently. 'No, the assumption used to be that the Atn must have fought amongst themselves, but the data we got from Merrick makes a strong case for the swarm being responsible for all the damage to clade-worlds we've found in the past.' He stared thoughtfully at the stack-discs for several seconds.

'But? I can tell there's a but.'

'There are clade-worlds in even worse condition than this one, back home, but I've never come across stack-discs that looked like they'd been as carefully and deliberately smashed as these.'

She glanced at the melted remains of the Atn, and then back at Ty. 'You think this one smashed them himself, before he got killed?'

'I think it's a fair conjecture. There was something in those discs he didn't want found. Maybe even the exact location of the Mos Hadroch.'

She stared at him like he was an imbecile. 'But if the stacks-discs have been destroyed, how the hell are you going to find out?'

'By looking at things differently. For a start, we've mapped out every inch of this asteroid, but there's one passageway off Shaft A that's a hundred metres too short.'

She looked at him blankly, and he explained further. 'Look, every single Atn clade in existence follows the exact same internal architecture. It's like they have a blueprint they never deviate from. They only go for bodies of a certain size, between seventy and one hundred kilometres across. Then there are always two central shafts, and exactly the same number of branching passageways and chambers, all in the same place and according to a ratio relative to a particular asteroid's dimensions.'

He grabbed her by the shoulders and grinned. 'When Cesar called in, I'd already gone to check out that passageway – and I'd bet my life it's capped with a false wall.'

'You think there's something hidden behind it?'

'Why not? There's gear back on the frigate that can tell us if I'm right.'

Nancy carefully extracted herself from his grasp. 'Well, that's great. We can have Martinez send over some explosives so we can blow it open.'

'First we need to know how thick the false wall is. Too thick and we'll need a lot of explosives, except that could collapse the passageway on top of us and maybe destroy whatever they hid beyond. No,' he shook his head, 'first we image the passageway to get some idea what's back there. We can even drill a hole through if necessary. But we need to get started on this now, Nancy. Right now.'

She stared at him for another moment, then set her mouth in a firm line and opened a comms link to the Mjollnir 's bridge.

Ty felt a weight lift off his shoulders; it seemed they were finally getting somewhere. Less than an hour later, Curtis Randall and Anton Swedberg – technical specialists – were manoeuvring new equipment down the shaft and into the suspect passageway, with the help of nearly a dozen spider-mechs. A large drill mechanism, mounted on a tripod and assembled from a kit, had been set up next to the false wall, its three legs firmly secured to the floor. The drill bit itself was hidden from view behind a flat plastic shield.

'Got word from Perez,' Ty heard Randall say over their shared comms. 'Martinez is coming online in a couple of seconds. Something's up.'

Ty glanced behind himself and saw two spider-mechs delicately directing a package down the passageway towards the false wall, casting deep shifting shadows as they passed under a string of lights positioned along the ceiling. 'What is it?'

'Anton says he spoke to Tibbs on the bridge, and Mjollnir 's picking up a local increase in background tach-net noise as well as gravity flux waves in the tach-net continuum. Looks like the swarm just arrived.'

Ty felt a sudden panic flood him. They were running out of time.

Get a grip, he thought angrily. He glanced over at Nancy, unpacking gear beside him, and caught the look of alarm on her face, even through her visor.

'If we're lucky, it's only a few advance scouts,' Randall added, as the two spiders came to a halt. Ty turned to them and began unstrapping the packages they carried. 'I'm sorry to be, you know, the bearer of bad news.'

Ty nodded, feeling numb. 'Then we have to-'

'Forgive me for eavesdropping, Mr Driscoll,' said Martinez, 'but I couldn't help overhearing.' Ty glanced down and noticed that the small, gold-coloured bar representing the Mjollnir's commander had manifested in one corner of his visor. 'The situation's starting to look pretty desperate from where I'm standing.'

Ty could hear murmured conversations and background noises on the bridge. 'How far away are they?' Ty asked immediately. 'A star system's a big place, Commander, so we might have as much as a couple of days before they figure out exactly where the asteroid is.'

'Mr Driscoll, if the swarm gets here before we leave, it isn't going to matter a damn whether you find anything behind that wall or not.'

'I know that, sir,' Ty replied carefully. 'But all I really need is a couple of hours. You know how important this is.'

The background hiss faded for a moment, and Ty guessed Martinez was consulting with Dan Perez, one of his senior officers.

'Okay, here's what I propose,' said Martinez when he came back online. 'The instant the swarm appears, the Mjollnir jumps straight out of this system regardless of whether you're still on that rock or not. The same goes for everyone else who stays there, and the choice is strictly voluntary. I have to think of the crew.'

'Nobody's under any obligation to stay here and help me if they don't want to,' Ty replied, glancing over at Nancy and Curtis, 'but I know I can do it a hell of a lot quicker if I have some help.'

'What about the spiders?' asked Martinez. 'Have you considered whether you could run the entire operation from the bridge?'

'No,' Ty said straight away. 'Look, the spiders help a lot, but they're no good for fast, delicate work. They're far too slow and clumsy for what we need to do here, and it'll end up taking much longer than it should, if we have do the entire thing by tele-operation.'

'Nathan's right,' Ty heard Nancy say. 'The spiders are fine for this kind of work only if there's no time constraint.'

'Yeah, I agree,' said Curtis. 'The more of us down here who know what we're doing, the faster we get everything done and get back out. The last of the detectors is now in place, so we should be able to pick up a video feed straight away.'

'That's fine, Curtis,' Martinez replied. 'But every analysis says we don't need more than two people down there, so I want you and Anton back here on the frigate. Nancy and Nathan, I spoke to Cesar. He's going to remain on the surface with a fast launcher. Just don't take one second longer than you have to.'

'No problem.'

Martinez cut the connection.

'Detectors?' asked Nancy.

'Muon detectors,' Curtis explained. 'We stuck them around the surface of the asteroid. They pick up traces of decaying cosmic-ray particles, so we can build up a picture of whatever's inside there.'

Ty nodded. 'Did you bring the screens?'

Curtis passed a rolled-up video monitor over to Ty, who opened and smoothed it against one wall, holding it flat there while Curtis retrieved a hammer from a spider's toolbox and nailed the monitor to the stone at all four corners.

Ty stepped back and studied the chiaroscuro of greys that appeared on the monitor a few moments later, quickly resolving into a map of the asteroid's tunnels and chambers.

'There,' Ty said excitedly, pointing one gloved finger at a shape like a fat grey worm. 'That's our passageway, right there.'

Nancy stepped up beside him and peered at the shifting image. 'There really is something behind that wall, isn't there?' she murmured, clearly fascinated.

Curtis leaned in beside them and touched the screen with one gloved finger. 'There are some dark shapes on the other side. Can you see them?'

Ty felt a burst of elation and fought to stay calm. 'I see them, yes, and I don't think this is going to be as difficult as I thought.' Glancing at Curtis, he said, 'Martinez is expecting you and Anton back at the Mjollnir. You'd better get going.'

Curtis nodded, and Ty could see the other's desire to remain there warring with his fear of the approaching alien threat. Assuming they got out of this alive, they'd all of them have stories to tell for the rest of their lives.

Curtis nodded with resignation and stepped back. 'Nathan, Nancy – good luck to both of you. I'll see you back on the ship.'

Ty nodded and watched for a moment as Curtis retreated back down the passageway, before turning his attention to the drill rig. He touched a button, and the drill's bit began to cut into the wall in total silence. All he really had to do now was set the parameters, step back, and let the machine perform.

It did not take long before the passageway around them began to fill with clouds of grey-black dust as the device did its work. Ty watched the drill's readout, indicating how deep it was penetrating; it had cut through nearly fifty centimetres of rock before it signalled that it was no longer encountering resistance. Nancy watched as he pulled the drill free, and together they stepped up to the narrow opening left behind.

Nancy withdrew a long, narrow silver tube from a suit pocket and carefully slid it inside the freshly drilled hole. After a couple of seconds she pulled it back again.

The tube had contained a mobile security device modelled on a terrestrial insect, complete with a minuscule propulsion system optimized for zero-gee. After she'd repocketed the now empty tube, Nancy pushed a couple of high-intensity glow-sticks through the hole until they slid through into the other side, falling slowly under the asteroid's minimal gravity.

'Okay,' Nancy said breezily, stepping over to the screen. 'Let's see what we'll see.'

She now reset the screen to show whatever the insect-machine's lenses were picking up on the other side of the wall. After a few moments they saw a huddled shape about fifteen metres from the false partition. Other than that, the other side looked deserted.

'That's it?' murmured Nancy, unable to mask her dismay.

'Doesn't matter,' said Ty, fighting back his own growing doubt. 'There's still something back there valuable enough that someone wanted to seal it up for a very long time.'

Nancy peered at the screen. 'I can't be sure, but it looks like it might be the body of another Atn.'

A warning light blinked up inside both their visors and a priority transmission came through from Martinez. 'Nathan, Nancy; the gravity flux readings just about went off the chart during the past couple of minutes.'

'What does that mean?' asked Ty, baffled.

'It means there are even more swarm-components than we thought. Hundreds of the damn things. You should seriously reconsider returning to the ship now.'

'No way. There's definitely something here, but it's going to take time to get to it. You need to hold on until then.'

'I thought you might say that. I already talked to Cesar, and he's going to stay topside for at least the next hour. Any longer than that, and every risk analysis the ship can come up with says our chances of getting out of here alive drop off dramatically. Good luck.'

Martinez signed off and Ty let out a slow, steady breath. 'You're okay with that?'

Nancy shrugged, and a faint smile tugged the corners of her mouth upwards. 'I guess I'll have to be.' Under normal circumstances, Ty might have spent days meticulously scanning the sealed-off corridor before carefully and laboriously dismantling the false intervening wall. The present circumstances required a more direct approach, for which purpose shaped charges had already been spidered over from the Mjollnir.

They first drilled several more holes at different points on the rock wall. Meanwhile a computer feed from the Mjollnir 's bridge hovered in one corner of Ty's visor, showing a schematic of the system, along with a constantly updated animation based on the estimated location of the swarm.

Every time one of the alien machines jumped through super-luminal space, it sent a faint ripple rushing through the super-luminal continuum like an undulation moving across the still surface of a pond. The Mjollnir 's defensive systems mapped these ripples as they occurred in real time, and it was immediately clear that the swarm was spreading out to cover the whole system. Ty thought of the sheer volume of space they were trying to encompass, and wondered if the swarm really had a chance of finding them any time soon.

Once the drilling was finished, Ty carefully slid the charges into place, one to each hole, then followed Nancy back towards the relative safety of the main shaft. The spiders moved ahead of them, spreading out into the shaft beyond.

Ty and Nancy then moved to either side of the passageway's mouth. He tried to ignore the trickle of sweat he could feel rolling down one cheek, and glanced over at her spacesuited figure.

'Ready?' she asked, one finger hovering above an arm-mounted control.

Ty nodded.

'Okay Three, two, one, boom.'

There was no sound, of course, but Ty's imagination filled it in all the same. Seismic taps on the surface immediately fed details of the resulting tremor back to him through his suit's readout. Barely a moment later, a thick column of grey smoke and grit came billowing out of the mouth of the passageway, spreading into the main shaft.

Nancy was now barely visible through the dust and swirling grit. 'Can't see anything on the visuals,' he heard her say.

'Too much debris for that,' he replied. 'Let's go see if it worked.'

They sent a couple of spiders in first, in case there were any really big chunks of debris still bouncing around inside the passageway, then both followed it in, moving carefully.

The explosives had worked better than Ty might have hoped, and yet the passageway immediately beyond what remained of the false wall differed little from the section that preceded it. The threat of disappointment lurked like a leaden weight in the pit of his stomach. But they finally got a good look at what they'd previously glimpsed only as an indistinct grey shadow.

It was indeed the body of a single Atn – but nothing else.

'Are you getting this?' Nancy asked. Ty looked round to see her turning her head slowly from side to side as she moved through the opened-up section of the passageway. He assumed she was transmitting live video to the Mjollnir's bridge.

Ty kneeled by the Atn's bulky corpse and brought his suit's light up close to it, studying the intricate, stylized whorls and sigils engraved into its carapace. As far as he could see, there was nothing whatsoever unusual about it.

'Well, I guess that's it,' he heard Nancy announce over the general comms link. 'This is all there is.'

'Just hold on a minute,' Ty snapped irritably. 'We've barely had a chance to look around yet.'

'Come on, Nathan, there's nothing here. Let's face it, we tried and we failed.'

Ty struggled to control the quiver in his voice. 'Nothing here except for an Atn that the rest of its clade went to such enormous time and trouble to hide. Does that make sense to you?'

'I don't know. Maybe it's simply a burial chamber, and this was one of their leaders. That would explain the story of the Mos Hadroch, wouldn't it? Maybe that thing's what the Atn regarded as a king or hive-queen?'

'You're talking nonsense,' Ty snapped, running one gloved hand along the creature's carapace. And also you're over-anthropomorphizing them. Besides, the Atn are entirely non-hierarchical. And if this place is nothing more than a burial chamber, then explain to me why a swarm of alien machines just turned up searching for this asteroid.'

'I'm just telling you what I see here,' Nancy insisted, and he could tell he'd sounded too harsh. 'A dead Atn, that's it.'

Ty stood up and looked around. All he could see were smooth, unblemished rock walls, entirely devoid of glyphs, amid swirling dust. 'All the evidence points right here,' Ty reaffirmed, thinking out loud.

'All right, and maybe it's a deliberate red herring set up to misdirect anyone coming looking for the Mos Hadroch, and we fell for it.'

The same thought had already occurred to Ty, but he didn't care to admit to it.

Commander Martinez's icon blinked back into life at the bottom of Ty's visor. 'We just picked up a mass of gravity-traces located no more than three or four AUs from here,' he informed them. 'Whatever you think you have, grab it and get out, or you risk being left behind.'

Ty could feel the blood pounding in his head, and he felt suddenly sick with anxiety. He leaned forward, again shining sharp-edged light on the dead alien's carapace markings, while he studied it for long seconds.

Think, he told himself. All they had so far was a name… they had no idea what the Mos Hadroch might look like, how big it was, or how small…

A sudden sense of excitement gripped him and he pinged Nancy with a request for a secure one-on-one link, at the same moment he severed his comms link with the Mjollnir 's bridge.

Nancy accepted the link, and her voice came through a moment later. 'What the hell, Ty?' she asked. 'Why did you just cut off the ship? Martinez'll throw a fit.'

'We can't go back yet.'

Her shoulders slumped, her expression more puzzled than angry.

'Look around you,' he demanded. 'What do you see?'

'An empty passageway – and a dead alien.'

The Atn were a cyborg species, and only part organic, of course; that much was well known. Not that anyone had ever managed to prove it, but the general consensus was that their long-term memories and any other data stored in their brains could be passed from one individual to the next. That way you got creatures whose individual identities constantly shifted and changed, as they each accumulated the experiences of their brethren. What if he wondered, the Mos Hadroch was nothing more than some form of information, carefully hidden inside some dormant circuitry located somewhere inside what passed for this creature's brain?

Ty shook his head, thinking hard and fast. No, that couldn't be it. If that had been the case, they'd have done as well to hide the actual stack-discs here, too, rather than destroy them in their storage chamber.

He let out a snarl of exasperation and squatted on his haunches. 'X marks the spot,' he muttered.

'What?'

'Everything points to here,' he said, unable to contain his exasperation. 'The records I found way back when, the spiral texts we discovered here, and even this Atn.'

Nancy said nothing, simply stood there waiting, while he stared at the Atn's metal carapace. They were hardly elegant creatures: slow and ponderous, the size of a small car. There was, he suddenly thought, a lot of room in there.

He bent down again to read more closely at the creature. There was something, he was sure, wrong with its head. He put both hands under it and tried to lift it. It moved with surprising ease, as if it were nothing more than an empty casing.

He stood up again. 'It's in there,' he declared, flushed with sudden and overwhelming certainty.

'Excuse me?'

'The smashed discs, the walled-off passageway… none of it makes sense unless there's something inside the body.'

He stared at Nancy, his eyes bright, while she gazed back at him in mystified, thin-lipped silence. 'How can you be sure?'

'Frankly, I can't. There's just nowhere else it could be. Nobody's been in here since that false wall was put up, so it has to be inside that thing.'

'We don't have time to break it open,' Nancy replied decisively. 'We'd need cutting tools for that, which means we're going to have to get it back to the Mjollnir.'

Ty nodded. 'Tell Martinez we're coming out.' The Atn lay with its head pointing in the direction of the main shaft, the bulk of its massive body pushed up against the wall on one side. Deciding to move it was one thing, but managing it was another. Ty got in touch with Cesar and told him what he was planning, while Nancy reopened the link with the Mjollnir and fielded Martinez's angry demands.

Ty glanced down at the image of the swarm's movements projected on the interior of his visor, and saw that some of its members were converging on the Mjollnir's location a lot sooner than he had expected.

Nancy signed off and just stood there, looking tense and angry. 'How long did Martinez give us?' he asked her.

'Thirty minutes, that's it. And then they jump without us.'

'I just talked to Cesar,' Ty explained, 'and he's got an idea he wants to try.'

'Fine. In the meantime, let's get this thing hooked up to the spiders, then haul it the hell out of here.'

Some of the spiders were equipped with additional bits of equipment, among them a powerful oxyacetylene torch and several winches that spooled out super-strong cable. While he talked with Cesar over the comms, Ty unwound the cable from one of the spiders and fixed the carabiner lock attached to it around the dead alien's neck like a noose. Nancy did the same with another, and after a few minutes' work they'd secured the body to three separate cables.

'We're going to have to set them all to maximum burn,' Nancy muttered, surveying their work. 'But at that rate they've only got fuel for thirty seconds.'

'Is that going to be enough?'

She thought for a moment. 'Maybe. I think we should set them up for two separate burns, of fifteen seconds each.'

'Why?'

'In case we don't get it moving the first time, or if something goes wrong, we'll still have a second chance. And if this works the first time, that leaves us with extra fuel.' She gave him a steady look. 'But that only gets it out into the shaft, not up to the surface, or into the launcher.'

'Cesar's moved the launcher over the shaft mouth. He's also taken a winch off one of the other spiders, and by the time we've got our friend here out into the shaft itself, he'll have lowered that cable from the launcher, and we can just winch the damn thing up to the surface.'

'Sounds like a plan,' she admitted, but her tone gave away her doubt. 'But we might be cutting this far too close, Nathan.'

'We can do this,' he insisted.

'Yeah, well, I just hope you're right.'

The spiders were soon in place, all facing towards the shaft entrance almost a hundred metres away, their cables now knotted tightly around the alien's body. As Ty got into position behind the body along with Nancy, he glanced at her and saw her lips set in a thin, hard line behind her visor, her gaze fixed on the far end of the passageway.

'Fifteen seconds, with an initial three-second delay,' he reminded her. 'Ready?'

'Ready as I'll ever be,' she muttered.

Ty braced himself, knees bent, the soles of his boots pressed hard against the scuffed stone floor, and then he initiated the first burn.

Moments later, the thrusters of all three spiders flared in unison, and Ty's visor quickly darkened in response. Seeing the winch-lines draw taut, he put his shoulder against the Atn's inert form and pushed with all his strength. His feet almost slipped out from under him and he quickly sought fresh purchase, wondering if he'd been a fool to think something like this might actually work.

Just as time seemed to run out, the Atn started to slide forward, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. It scraped against the stone floor and then collided with the facing wall. They stumbled after it, using their hands to try and steer it away from either side.

As the spiders finished their programmed burn, the Atn kept moving forward under its own momentum, dead limbs flailing as it drifted up from the floor and towards the ceiling, turning slowly as it went.

'Don't let it get turned around too far!' Nancy yelled. 'If it gets wrapped up in the cables, it'll pull the spiders in towards it.'

The Atn smashed into the ceiling and lost some of its momentum. At least, Ty thought, they had it moving in the right direction. It scraped grit and dust from one wall as it drifted onwards.

'Okay,' said Ty. 'Second burn, now.'

He tapped at his arm console and triggered the second blast of energy. The spiders shot towards the mouth of the shaft, drawing the cables taut once more, and dragging the Atn's lifeless form after them.

The second burn seemed to last for ever.

The spiders finally ran out of fuel, and the cables grew slack once more as the Atn drifted forward, colliding with the three spiders and grinding one of them to pieces against a hard surface. Smashed components and delicate robot arms were sent flying, but it was heading in the right direction. A few seconds later the alien's body finally sailed out into the main shaft, spinning slowly and followed by a hail of fresh debris and machine parts.

Several spiders had been hovering nearby, and their programmed sense of self-preservation made them scatter like fish disturbed by a shark as the Atn went crashing into the main shaft's opposite wall. It then rebounded at a fraction of its original velocity, tangled in cables, from the spiders still tethered to it.

Ty looked up along the shaft towards the external entrance and saw a ring of stars surrounding the bulky silhouette of the fast launcher. A cable extended down from it, its tip swaying just a few metres above them.

He grinned: Cesar had clearly been hard at work. Ty pushed himself towards the cable and grabbed hold of it.

The Atn kept rotating slowly, more or less hanging in the centre of the shaft. Ty managed to cling to one of its legs long enough to secure the cable to it. He pulled himself on top of the Atn, then opened a link to Cesar.

'Nathan,' came the response. 'How's it going down there? Are we ready to move?'

'Yeah,' Ty replied. 'Start pulling it in right now.'

'Sure thing.' The cable drew taut, causing the Atn's body to twist around a little faster, swinging from side to side like a huge ungainly pendulum. Ty kicked himself away from its bulk, and landed against the shaft wall just a moment later.

He felt a powerful tremor rumble through his gloved fingertips the moment they came into contact with the shaft wall. More dust began to slowly billow out from the passageway entrance, as well as from the other passageways both above and below. He noticed a moment later that Cesar's icon had blinked out. He tried to hail him, but didn't get an answer.

'That had to be something big hitting the asteroid,' said Nancy, sounding panicky. 'Get to the surface, Nathan, now.'

Ty didn't bother answering. He summoned a spider and grabbed its handholds. The passageway began to drop out of sight as the machine carried him back to the surface.

Looking upwards, he realized that the launcher's attitudinal systems were having to fight to keep it in place over the mouth of the shaft. Whatever had slammed into the asteroid might have done so hard enough to increase its otherwise barely perceptible rotation, and the Atn's inert form swinging about inside the shaft wasn't helping either. It was then he noticed one of the launcher's fuel nozzles was firing only sporadically.

'Cesar? Cesar, can you hear me?' Ty yelled into his comms, but the other man's life-support icon stayed dark. Next he tried pinging the Mjollnir, and felt a chill sweat spring up between his shoulder blades when there was no response. He started to wonder just what they were going to find waiting for them up on the asteroid's surface.

It was possible, of course, that the frigate's crew were under attack and too busy to reply. It was just as possible that they had already jumped out of the system, and abandoned the outside team. Worse, the frigate might have been destroyed by whatever had hit the asteroid.

He glanced down at Nancy, who was also being carried upwards by a spider, and tried to think of something he could say that might make both of them feel better. He drew a blank.

'Nancy, if something's happened to Cesar, I don't know how to fly the launcher.'

'Let me worry about that.'

Ty glanced at his visor's life-support indicators. They each had about half an hour's oxygen supply left.

The Atn was finally drawn inside the rear cargo hatch of the launcher, the craft veering to one side as the Atn crashed into its interior bay. Its boosters cut out a moment later.

'Don't worry,' Nancy said quickly. 'I just took control of the launcher.'

Ty released the spider's handholds, letting his own momentum carry him towards a set of rungs fixed to the launcher's exterior.

'Get up front and strap yourself in,' Nancy shouted, already pulling herself up the other side of the launcher. 'Move it, Nathan.'

The launcher was entirely open to vacuum, and was little more than a computer-controlled rocket platform with two pairs of seats mounted on its nose. At the rear, four primary nozzles angled outwards from the cargo bay that comprised most of the craft's volume. As Ty got into his seat, he glanced up and felt relief wash over him like a tide. The Mjollnir was still right where it should be.

A dense cloud of dust was rising from some point just around the curve of the asteroid's narrow horizon. A fog of ice and grit now covered its surface. Whatever had struck it must have been big.

'What about Cesar?' he asked.

Nancy was already strapped in and stabbing at the launcher's control console. 'Your guess is as good as mine.'

'He should have been here at the controls.'

'We abandoned some equipment at the camp, remember. All I can think is he must have left the launcher running on automatic, and tried to salvage some of that.' Nancy peered at the panel. 'Shit, one of the thrusters is out of action. I'm going to have to shut it off and hope I can compensate with the rest. But I'm getting close-to-fail readings on the others, so cross your fingers and hope they don't turn us into a fireball before we get back to the ship.'

'Thanks for that thought,' Ty replied.

'Just strap in and get ready. This is going to be a rough ride.'

Ty then caught sight of a suited figure drifting close to the asteroid's surface, partially obscured by the clouds of grit and ice. It took a few moments before he realized with a shock that the lower half of Cesar's body was missing. He pointed this out to Nancy and she cursed. 'He should have stayed with the damn launcher.'

'I guess he must have been hit by debris. We're lucky the launcher wasn't wiped out the same way.'

'Right now, I just want to get the hell out of here before we wind up like him.'

Something flashed out of the sky and the asteroid was struck a second time. A fresh plume of grey dust and ice shot up from its surface.

'I'm going to perform a fast burn,' announced Nancy, her voice taking on a hysterical edge. Ty twisted around to look at her, but all he could see was the side of her helmet. Suddenly it seemed important to be able to see her face. 'Then I'm going to decelerate for thirty seconds,' she added. 'Got it?'

'Got it.'

If I were the swarm, he thought, I'd collect chunks of rock from somewhere and accelerate them close to the speed of light. All it would take was a simple railgun technology; the rocks didn't even need to be very big to cause a lot of damage once they had reached relativistic speeds.

'Three, two, one,' Nancy counted aloud, and a second later Ty felt his heart and lungs press up against his spine while a seemingly enormous force flattened his head back against his seat. The asteroid's surface disappeared out of his peripheral view as the launcher blasted away from it.

Thirty seconds. Nancy hit a second button and cut off the burn. The intense pressure lifted from Ty's body and they were weightless once more. He twisted around and saw how the asteroid had already shrunk into the distance. Even as he watched, something slammed into it for a third time, cleaving it like a lump of dried clay smashed with a hammer.

'Jesus and Buddha,' Nancy swore, sounding like she was on the verge of crying with relief. 'They can hear us again! I've got a channel open to the Mjollnir, Nathan. I think we're going to make it.'

'Are they ready to jump out of the system?' asked Ty.

'I seriously fucking hope so. They're under attack, but no direct hits so far. Deceleration burn in ten, so get ready.'

Ty grabbed hold of his armrests as the launcher swivelled round in a slow, graceful arc until it was facing back the way they had come. No direct hits. He stared at the expanding cloud of debris that was now all that remained of the asteroid. If the Mjollnir had been hit by anything like that, there would be nothing left of it.

'Here we go,' said Nancy. 'In three… two… one.'

The launcher had not been built with comfort in mind. When the rockets cut out half a minute later, Ty twisted around to see the dirty-grey and black exterior of the Freehold starship fast expanding towards them. He could also make out a faint blue shimmer around the frigate's drive spines. More split-second bursts decelerated the launcher yet further, and soon the yawning mouth of a forward bay swallowed them up.

The bay doors slid shut over their heads and grappling arms reached out from the deck, locking on to the launcher and drawing it down into a cradle. Ty started to unstrap himself.

A deep thrumming sound rapidly resolved itself into a rush of air, but Ty waited until his suit gave him the signal before he pulled his helmet off, tasting welded metal and sweat as he sucked in a breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to get out of his suit. As he kicked away from the launcher and grabbed a handhold on the wall of the bay, he glanced across at Nancy, also with her helmet off, her face drenched in sweat.

'I'm sorry about Cesar,' was all he could say to her.

She shrugged, staring away across the bay. 'If it wasn't for him, we'd never have got that thing into the launcher.' She met his eyes. 'But if that thing's body isn't as valuable as you seem to think it is, he might have died for nothing. Can you live with that thought?'

He returned her gaze. 'Whatever it is the swarm's after, it's inside that Atn,' he replied. 'I promise you.'