Stealing Light

Eighteen

A yellow star in its mid-life dominated the Nova Arctis system, accompanied by a retinue of eight planets comprising two rocky inner worlds, several gas-giants and a frozen snowball, two thousand kilometres in diameter, that barely clung to its hundred-year-long orbit.

The second innermost world was the one the Freeholders wanted to colonize: they had called it Newfall. That was a name clearly imbued with hope, but the long-range readings suggested it would be a considerable time, if ever, before the thin skein of atmosphere clinging to its rocky crust would support any kind of life.

Dakota sat enclosed within the steel petals of the bridge’s interface chair, watching the dance of numerals and data feeds that had constantly measured their deceleration into the new system. Before her hovered an image of the fifth world out from the star: a Jovian-type gas-giant called Dymas. It carried sixteen moons with it in its slow, majestic journey around its star. They were currently on an approach vector with the fourth moon out, a frozen world the Freeholders had named Theona.

They had been in constant deceleration now for several days, the Hyperion flipped on its axis for most of that time, its engines pointed starward. Dakota had been worried they might be forced into a delay if orbital braking manoeuvres were required to prevent them overshooting Dymas, but her fears were unfounded. For the fusion propulsion system, at least, unlike the rest of the Hyperion, was up to date. The ship was now on its way to a perfect rendezvous.

As the chair’s petals folded away and Dakota stepped down on to the bridge, she found Gardner studying a screen displaying high-res orbital images of Theona. Sharp-edged mountain ranges poked up through the ice that coated the little world’s surface. Deep-range scans showed a substantial liquid environment beneath the ice: and somewhere below that lay a core of rock and iron hidden under a liquid ocean several kilometres deep.

‘Nothing down there but ice and a little ammonia.’ She nodded towards the display. ‘Sure this is where you want to go?’

‘Very sure,’ Gardner replied, irritation clear in his voice. ‘Just pilot the ship, Mala.’

We found something. Corso’s words still reverberated in her skull, as they had every day since leaving Ascension. So they found something, but what?

Robot probes and supplies modules had already been boosted towards Newfall from out of the cargo bay, carrying the terraforming gear that was the official reason for Hyperion’s coming here to the Nova Arctis system. Dakota could see their trajectory paths marked on another screen: they were moving at a considerably higher number of gees than the frigate itself and its frail human cargo could possibly manage.

Dakota made final checks, which confirmed that the frigate was smoothly slipping into orbit around the moon.

Apparently there was already a minuscule human presence on Theona’s surface. A ground base had been established near one of the poles, the majority of its living and working units buried under the dense ice.

From the vantage point of the humans huddled in their cramped quarters under the icecap, Nova Arctis would be little more than a particularly bright star that frequently disappeared as the moon slid behind its parent. Right now they were basking in what passed for summer sun, despite surface temperatures not much above absolute zero.

Arbenz entered the bridge. ‘A few moments ago I picked up the ident of another ship on the hail frequencies,’ Dakota informed him. ‘It’s still on Dymas’s far side, but we should be matching course in another couple of hours or so.’

‘That’s the Agartha,’ he replied. ‘It’s here to provide us with back-up.’

Dakota’s Ghost fed her fresh information concerning the Agartha. It was only a third the size of the Hyperion, but armed to the teeth. In fact, it represented a considerable portion of the Freehold’s military might in their war against the Uchidans, yet here it was in another star system, dozens of light years from home and absent from a conflict where it was surely desperately needed.

That fact alone was enough to convince Dakota that whatever the Freehold might have found here, it was of enormous significance. More, her Ghost was feeding her images of what appeared to be a massive mining operation on the surface of Theona, a dark scar ripped across the pristine marbled white of its surface, just a short distance from the Freehold-maintained base. The hole that had been dug so far looked like it went a long, long way down.

Piri. How well integrated are you with the Hyperion?

‹Secondary copies of my routines have now been uploaded to the Hyperion’s stacks without detection, as per your instructions. All systems remain nominal.›

Dakota’s Ghost showed how the secondary copy of Piri’s faux-consciousness-Piri Beta, as she thought of it-integrated seamlessly with the original on board her ship. Fortunately, Senator Arbenz and the rest of them would never be aware of what she had done.

She decided to test the Beta copy. We’ll need a shuttle down to the moon’s surface, she informed it.

‹Affirmation with pleasure.›

Dakota stood stock-still for a moment, her lips growing tight.

Piri Beta, can you please repeat your last message?

‹Order affirmed. ›

That’s not the wording you just used. Please repeat the statement precisely as stated, when I requested a transport shuttle to be prepped.

‹System logs show the response as “Order affirmed”. ›

Dakota shut down her Ghost link and thought hard, an icy sensation crawling around in her stomach.

The sense that something, somewhere, was very badly wrong crept into Dakota’s mind and settled there like a great, hungry spider.

‘Something wrong?’

Both Gardner and Arbenz were staring at her. ‘Moment’s break in telemetry,’ Dakota replied. ‘Probably a minor glitch, but I’ll look into it now. Oh, and the shuttle’s being prepped. We can board in a few minutes.’

‘Thank you, Mala,’ Arbenz replied, studying her carefully as if the deceit in her soul had suddenly been laid bare. Dakota turned on her heel and quit the bridge quickly.

She let out a rush of breath as soon as she was out of sight of the others, wrapping her hands tightly around her chest as if she’d caught a sudden chill. Something in the nuance of the words the copy of Piri’s intelligence had used, something in the unusual way they had been arranged reminded her… reminded her of that Shoal-member she had met on Bourdain’s Rock.

As she continued on down the corridor, most of her attention was focused on a ship-wide sweep for anything, anything, that might indicate a source for the earlier, unexplained glitches she had stumbled across in the Hyperion’s systems.

Everyone climbed on board the shuttle bar Udo, who was still enjoying an extended stay in his medbox. More often than not, Kieran could be found in the surgical unit, talking with his brother through the medbay’s commlink now the patient was conscious most of the time. His nervous system had been pretty badly fried during his encounter with Bourdain’s assassin, and micro-surgical units were still working on repairing damaged neural pathways and grafting new skin.

Kieran was quick to take the controls of the shuttle, glaring at Dakota as if she didn’t already know how little he trusted her. She wondered for the millionth time precisely what Udo might have told his brother during those long hours of sibling communication in the surgical unit.

Corso was the last to enter through the shuttle’s hatchway, before strapping himself into a restraint couch next to her own in the rear of the cockpit. Recently he’d been keeping his distance, casting her strange looks and avoiding anything more than the most cursory conversation. She’d tried to draw him out further, hoping he might finally tell her more, but it had only led to some awkward moments.

I’ve been on my own too long, she reflected. Trapped in a tiny ship on the outskirts of Sol space, with no one but her own Ghost for company, wasn’t the healthiest of lifestyles. Her time so far on board the Hyperion had been the longest she’d spent around other people since…

Dakota pushed the memory away. Instead she watched the Hyperion dwindling rapidly from view on a nearby screen, Theona’s curving horizon becoming increasingly visible as the shuttle’s nose dipped towards it. It wasn’t very long before Dakota felt the first faint tug of gravity.

Arbenz twisted his head around from within his own restraint webbing and caught Lucas’s eye. ‘Mr Corso. You’re the expert from here on in. Anything Miss Oorthaus needs to know, you have my permission to discuss it in explicit detail.’

He looked at Dakota next. ‘What we’re about to show you today is something remarkable, quite unprecedented in the history of the human race. The reason for our strict security measures till now will become quite clear.’ He made an attempt at smiling. ‘I’m afraid we’ve employed a degree of subterfuge in bringing you here, but I’m going to ask you not to be alarmed. Everything is going to become very clear, very soon.’ Here he inserted an artful pause that somehow suggested a degree of thoughtful vulnerability. ‘Frankly, we need your help.’

Arbenz faced forward again and began conversing with Gardner while Kieran piloted. From what she could hear, they were discussing the personnel already stationed on the moon below.

She turned to Corso. ‘Start talking. Now.’

He gave her a queasy smile and then avoided her gaze. ‘We’re going to be covering a lot of ground, so in all seriousness the best thing I can do is explain things as we go along. Just trust me when I tell you that you’re in absolutely no danger, OK?’

‘You told me once,’ she said in the lowest whisper she could manage, ‘that you found something.’

The shuttle bucked under them as it hit the top of the moon’s thin atmosphere. ‘That’s the last time you mention I said anything of the kind,’ he muttered. ‘What we found is a derelict starship. One that might have a functioning transluminal drive.’

Dakota stared at him, waiting for the punch line, but it didn’t come. A dizzy sensation scrambled her thoughts and she felt light and giddy, as if filled with air.

Theona had changed from a body floating in space to a landscape spread out below them, pale and featureless except for its jagged mountain ranges where an ancient meteor impact had forced part of the rocky core to emerge above the frozen waters. Their craft dropped rapidly towards the Freehold base at the foot of one of these ranges, superheated steam blasting up around them in scalding clouds as the shuttle settled into a docking cradle. There was a heavy, twisting lurch, followed by a rolling vibration that set Dakota’s teeth on edge as the engines went into their shut-down procedure.

A squall of voices came over the comms system. Kieran Mansell spoke sharply to someone for a moment, and then hit a switch, cutting the voices off. ‘They’re prepping the sub,’ he announced.

Corso was halfway out of his restraint webbing when Dakota reached out with one hand and gripped his forearm.

‘I want you to know that if anything happens to me once we’re off this shuttle, you’ll be the first to die.’

Corso pulled away from her grasp with some difficulty. ‘Fine. In the meantime, can we please get out of here?’

The Theona surface base was manned by a staff of just a dozen. Half of these were preparing to ride the shuttle back up into orbit, where they would board the Agartha, while a relief crew newly arrived from Newfall rode the shuttle back down again. The station’s cramped and tiny rooms and corridors were consequently busy as a beehive as people made last-minute preparations for their departure.

Arbenz guided them through the chaos, meeting and greeting a succession of shiny-eyed young men and women all eager to announce their willingness to die for the Freehold cause. Dakota watched and listened to it all with some distaste, doing her best to ignore the curious and occasionally hostile glances she received from some. She was surprised to see a similar look of distaste appear on Corso’s face, when he thought people weren’t looking.

The Senator kept them moving, clearly not wanting to waste any more time than was absolutely essential. They were joined soon by two of the station’s staff, and Arbenz led them into an elevator clearly designed to carry large quantities of heavy equipment. As soon as they were all aboard, the elevator shuddered to life and dropped rapidly.

Several minutes passed, with Dakota wondering exactly how far down they were going. She glanced over at Corso and saw he was looking as apprehensive as she felt.

Something tugged at the edge of her thoughts: it was a little like sensing the presence of another machine-head. But this sense of otherness originated from somewhere far, far below them.

She ignored it after a moment, blaming her nerves.

The lift finally came to a halt, and they disembarked into a metal-walled antechamber with an airlock at one end and a series of cabinets ranged along one wall. The two men from the surface station stepped over to the cabinets and pulled out gel suits of the type normally used for orbital high-gee manoeuvring. It was freezing cold, and Dakota realized the gel suits were intended as a protection against hypothermia.

She pulled one on, aware of it forming around her body, immediately feeling warmer.

They filed through a narrow door and into the airlock. Once she was through, Dakota saw they were in a rectangular cavern carved directly out of the rock and ice. In the centre of the chamber lay a wide dark circle of water surrounded by machinery and ringed by a raised steel platform with steps leading up to it: a borehole, for want of a better description. A sealed and pressurized tunnel made from some transparent fabric led from the airlock directly over to the platform.

Arbenz led them along the fabric tunnel towards the borehole. Maybe we’re going fishing, Dakota thought, suppressing a semihysterical grin. As they approached the borehole, the water in its centre began to churn and bubble furiously.

She stared in amazement as a submersible rose out of it, its hull studded with instruments. A metal platform slid out from under the encompassing platform, locking into place on the craft’s hull, while the opposite end of the tunnel they were passing through slid forward on gimbals to connect with a hatch in the submersible’s hull.

A few moments later, the hatch opened and three figures in gel suits disembarked. The Senator took the lead, stepping up on to the encircling platform, and made sure to shake the hands of each of the submersible’s crew in turn. The personnel-two men and a woman-were apparently delighted to find Arbenz waiting for them. A few moments later they walked past Dakota and the rest, heading towards the antechamber.

Dakota peered down into the black, churning waters as she stepped up on to the raised platform. Heating elements were clearly visible for a long way down, ringing the interior of the borehole, and presumably there to keep it from freezing over.

She didn’t want to think just how far down through the solid ice the Freehold had drilled. The ocean under there had been dark for an eternity, and was deep enough to be effectively bottomless. The thought of plunging down into those empty depths, regardless of the circumstances, made her flesh crawl.

She turned again to Corso, who was standing beside her. ‘If you really found a starship,’ she whispered, ‘what the hell is it doing buried down here? And how did you even find it?’

‘Luck,’ Corso replied. ‘The Agartha was the first Freehold ship to arrive at Nova Arctis, but it ran into trouble straight away. It suffered an engine failure during a routine evaluation of the outer system, and somehow the derelict picked up on one of its distress frequencies and responded. The signal was extremely low-power, so they were lucky to pick it up at all. The crew managed to triangulate the source of the signal a couple of weeks later.’

‘Uh.’ A sense of numbness was spreading through Dakota’s body that had nothing to do with the subzero temperatures. A starship? But one, she could only assume, the Shoal knew nothing of.

It was like finding the Holy Grail-no, better. Transluminal technology, at least, was real.

As she followed the rest inside the vacated submersible, it was impossible not to think about the kilometres of lightless ocean below her. She took a seat in a cramped circular chamber. There was a control panel at one end of it, replete with displays showing infrared and sonar maps of the mountainous terrain above and below them, but from the craft’s interior layout Dakota guessed this submersible was automated rather than piloted.

And there it was again: a sense of otherness from somewhere far, far below, in the depths of Theona’s freezing subterranean ocean. It was like finding herself in an empty building, but nonetheless becoming filled with the absolute conviction there was someone or something nearby-but just out of sight. Her Ghost scanned the local comms traffic, but the only detectable signals were the usual low-level automated pings.

It had to be the derelict communicating, in some way she couldn’t understand, with her Ghost. Something was down there, and it was currently trying to say hello.

She looked around at the others, irrationally wondering if any of them could feel the same thing. Her skin prickled unpleasantly.

Corso had again taken a seat next to her. He turned to her and frowned, and she realized she must have looked more worried than she might want to let on.

‘What’s the problem?’ he asked softly.

She almost laughed.

Something alien is signalling to me, from the depths of a bottomless ocean in a dead system, you stupid bastard. What do you think?

Instead she said: ‘If you’ve really found some kind of crashed starship, you lot are going to have a ton of shit coming down on your collective heads once the news gets out. Tell me it’s not a Shoal craft, because if it is, I might as well start writing my will right now.’

‘It’s not Shoal,’ Corso replied, after a moment’s hesitation.

‘You’re serious?’ She looked at him and saw he was. ‘So they really aren’t the only species with faster-than-light travel, after all? It was all a big lie?’

‘The derelict doesn’t look like any Shoal vessel anyone’s ever seen, but it has a drive mechanism that could probably spit it right across the galaxy. It has the external spine structures typical of known Shoal spacecraft, but that’s about as far as the resemblance goes. Plus, it’s old. Really old?

‘How old?’

‘I’d say about a hundred and sixty thousand years.’

‘A hundred and sixty thousand years,’ she repeated. ‘And we know why that’s significant, right?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Corso pressed her in a low whisper, a peculiar look on his face.

It was too much information, too quickly. She needed to curl up in the warm dark of the Piri Reis and think about everything she’d seen and experienced.

‘Forget it,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I just thought of the Magellanic Novae for some reason.’ That memory of peering through Langley’s telescope, even after so many years and with Bellhaven so far away, was as strong as if it had happened only the day before.

Corso still had that same intense look on his face. It made her uncomfortable.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the derelict dates from about the same period. But that’s no reason to assume they’re connected with something else that happened in another galaxy.’ She wondered why he was staring at her so hard. ‘Unless you’ve got other ideas?’ he added.

‘You’re looking at me like I just tried to bite your nose off.’

Corso made an exasperated noise and lowered his voice, so he was barely audible over the sound of the submersible’s engines. ‘Mala, I saw you on the bridge of the Hyperion, studying a map of the Magellanic Clouds. You’d drawn lines of trajectory connecting them to this part of the Orion Arm. To as near as damn it to this system, in fact, as makes no difference. Why do that? Do you have some special interest in the novae?’

‘I don’t remember doing anything of the kind. Frankly, I’d say you’ve been working too hard. You’re starting to imagine things.’

He held her gaze for a few seconds more, tight-lipped and angry-looking. Dakota was completely baffled.

‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

‘I. Don’t. Know. What. You’re talking about,’ she hissed.

‘Fine.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Forget it.’ He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes for a few moments, taking a deep breath. When he opened them again, he seemed a little calmer.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘before we get to the derelict, a word of warning. There’s some kind of defence systems running on board, and so far we haven’t tried to bring it to the surface in case it activates suicide circuits. It uses artificial gravity fields to mash up anyone or anything it considers a threat, though we’ve managed to get a fair bit of a way inside it, regardless.’

‘I appreciate the warning, but I still want to know what’s going to happen to me when we get on board that thing, before I risk my fucking life.’

‘I guarantee nothing is going to happen to you, Mala,’ Corso replied.

The lie was startlingly clear on his face.

Something broke inside Dakota. ‘Take me back up,’ she demanded, lifting herself out of her seat and making a move towards the control console. ‘Whatever you’re up to here, I didn’t sign on for any of it.’

Arbenz quickly nodded to Kieran. Mansell stood up, punching her hard in the face. She caught a passing glimpse of Corso’s pale, shocked features as she crumpled. The next thing she knew she was on her knees, and Kieran had one of her arms twisted painfully behind her back while she was forced forward until her face was almost pressed into the deck.

Something acid and foul twisted deep in her stomach and she resisted the urge to vomit. Kieran put just the tiniest bit of extra pressure on her arm, but it was enough to make it feel like he was trying to wrench it off at the shoulder. She screamed.

Gardner looked down at her from where he sat, twisting around in his own seat, a mixture of pity and revulsion on his face.

‘All this time, Miss Merrick, and you thought we wouldn’t find out what you were up to. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice how badly you wanted to get out of the Sol System, just a day or two after the collapse of Bourdain’s Rock? Or that we wouldn’t figure out that the assassin who tried to kill you, and nearly killed one of the Senator’s own men, worked for Bourdain?’

Eyes wide, Dakota stared down at the submersible’s deck, millimetres from her nose. Her breathing was sharp and shallow.

‘It wasn’t hard to figure out the connections once I knew where to look,’ Gardner continued. ‘Marados was part of the conflict at Port Gabriel. So was Severn. That made it easy to draw conclusions about your own past.

‘I believe you killed Josef Marados and then used your remarkable skills to cover your tracks,’ Gardner continued. ‘That way you removed one more inconvenient link between yourself and your past. You removed details of Marados’s death from the stack processors to make sure we didn’t become suspicious. But I have my own lines of enquiry, outside of the official channels.’

‘We know you were there at Port Gabriel, Dakota,’ said Kieran, his voice filled with rage. ‘In the eyes of the Freehold you are a foul and bloody murderer-less than vermin.’

‘That’s not true, and you know it. I didn’t kill Josef or anyone else,’ Dakota managed to gasp. ‘I don’t know who killed him. I…’

She heard Arbenz mutter something indistinguishable. A moment later her forehead slammed off the deck. The world went white for a few moments, and then the pain hit.

‘Careful, we want her conscious,’ she heard Arbenz say through a haze of agony. ‘Dakota?’ His voice sounded closer now, and she guessed he was kneeling beside her. ‘We’re very nearly there. Can you hear me?’

Dakota moaned, then nodded, tasting bile in the back of her throat. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Gardner and the two men who’d joined them from the surface complex. Gardner stared away from her, his expression stiff and mask-like. The two Freeholder scientists eyed her with curiosity and mild revulsion.

‘OK, now here’s the deal. Unfortunately, we still need you and, as much as Kieran would really love otherwise, politics and war often mean compromise. Once you understand exactly what’s going on here -and Mr Corso will fill you in on the details-you might even find you’re on our side.’

Somehow I really, really don’t think so. But she said nothing.

‘We brought you here for a purpose, and you will fulfil that purpose. And just in case you think there’s any chance you can remain defiant, well, Kieran will be constantly available to make sure you understand just how bad an idea that might be.’

Something sharp dug into her lower spine and Dakota screamed. It was the worst pain in the world, an entire universe of suffering compressed into a few brief seconds. She heard herself, as if from a distance, begging for mercy. A part of her she had thought could never be breached shrivelled under that unendurable agony.

But Arbenz still hadn’t finished talking. ‘You want to get away from Bourdain. We want the transluminal drive. Help us get it, and you’re free. More, you’ll be a hero, liberating mankind from the oppressive restrictions of the Shoal’s technology embargo. You could be part of something glorious.’

She realized he was waiting for an answer. While she summoned the strength to speak, the cabin was filled with a silence as deep as the void between the stars.

‘You’ll just kill me then,’ she managed to say. ‘You’re Freeholders. So nobody trusts anything any of you say.’

Arbenz grinned. ‘Then you’ll just have to learn to trust me, Dakota. Whatever you think of us, we do believe in honour. You’re just as much a victim of the Consortium as anyone back on Redstone. The war with the Uchidans would never have happened if the Shoal hadn’t invoked their embargo clause. It hurt you just as bad as it hurt us. The Consortium let the Uchidans steal our world, and they took away the one thing you’d worked all your life towards: your implants.’

His tone had grown softer and more intimate, which somehow made it sound all the worse. Her thoughts became filled with revenge fantasies of the most exquisite complexity and savagery.

‘So when I say you’ll be safe,’ Arbenz finished, ‘I speak as a man of honour-and as a Senator in the Freehold Senate. You have my word, and all you have to do now is help us.’

Dakota listened to all this without comment. After a moment she felt Kieran’s grip on her relent. She looked up and saw Corso’s silent, appalled expression. Kieran and Arbenz had simply returned to their seats as if nothing had happened.

She began to get up. Corso tried to help her but she pushed him away. She pulled herself into her seat, fighting back tears of rage and horror and shame. The more she fought the feelings down, the more she hated herself for her own weakness.

She focused on the backs of her tormentors’ heads and decided she was going to kill them.

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Corso from beside her.

‘What for? You knew all along,’ she whispered.

‘I didn’t know any of it until just recently.’ Kieran and Arbenz were once again head to head in conversation with the two surface station staff, while static-racked voices briefly squalled over the comms system. Dakota suspected none of them really cared what either she or Corso now said to each other.

‘You’re a spy,’ she hissed at Corso. ‘Your job is to report everything I say and do.’

‘No!’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m here to find a way to salvage the derelict. That’s all I’m interested in doing.’

Something in the throb of the submersible’s engines had changed. They were slowing. The sonar maps on the displays showed a steep precipice that fell off into darkness: they were rapidly approaching the submerged slopes of a mountain. A strange, alien-looking shape was clearly visible dangerously close to the edge of the rocky precipice-not quite near enough for it to tumble over into the depths below, but almost.

It wasn’t long before the submersible shuddered to a halt. The hatch clanged open and Arbenz and Gardner took the lead, closely followed by the two ground-station staff. Kieran came last, behind Dakota and Corso.

They entered a steel-walled cylindrical tube immediately beyond the submarine. The sound of their boots clanging on the walkway echoed harshly, and Dakota winced, as if the sound were something physical and sharp driving into the soft tissues of her brain. Intermittent stabbing pains manifested in her shoulder and back, and she dug her nails into the palms of her hands until it hurt.

A screen bolted onto the wall at the far end of the passageway displayed an enhanced external view of the derelict. In profile the centre part of the craft resembled a fat teardrop, with a series of bumps around its hull, scattered with apparent randomness. There were no visible windows or any external instrumentation. Long curving spines, much longer than the central body, curved upwards and out, and Dakota suspected they were deceptive in their apparent fragility. It looked more like some piece of abstract sculpture than anything she might conceive of as an interstellar vessel. The passageway in which they now stood was also visible as a narrow snake of bolted-together segments connecting the submersible to the derelict itself. In terms of relative size, the submersible looked like a minnow escorting a whale.

‘This is your moment, Mr Corso,’ said the Senator, turning to face him. ‘You’re the expert here. Show us what you know.’

Lucas nodded and waited as the hatch leading into the derelict’s interior slowly swung open. Dakota saw another passageway beyond, but this had pale, mostly featureless walls, apart from long, twisted bands of some material that reminded her of muscles, around which the passageway walls appeared to have been moulded.

It was, in every way, profoundly alien, but strangely beautiful, too. The only thing marring this impression was an ugly rent torn out of one wall, where clearly human instrumentation had been inserted.

But the thing that struck her the most, as she followed the others inside, was that even though there was no apparent source of lighting, she could see perfectly well for the entire length of the passageway, up until it twisted out of sight.

After a moment’s hesitation, Corso moved ahead with a purpose that suggested he was already familiar with his surroundings. Dakota watched with the rest as he brought images up on a screen comprising part of the base staff’s crudely wired-in instrumentation, and saw what she guessed must be a map of the derelict’s interior. It didn’t take much guesswork to realize that the colour-coded corridors and rooms marked there represented only a tiny portion of the derelict’s interior.

Corso’s expression remained nervous and tense. Something still lurked within these walls, and Dakota could sense its intelligence somewhere deep behind the pale surfaces either side of her. The ubiquitous light made her feel increasingly vulnerable and naked. Without any shadows, where could any of them hide?

Corso tapped at a panel set below the screen, with expert ease. New images flashed up one after the other, appearing to be closed-circuit views of other parts of the derelict’s interior. Screeds of unreadable gibberish that she guessed were some form of alien language accompanied these images. After a moment her Ghost tentatively identified parts of the text as an archaic form of the Shoal machine language.

Corso took off his gloves, wiped his bare hands on his gel suit and muttered something to himself. It was already getting too warm for the gel suits: one more sign that the derelict’s main systems were still functioning.

‘OK,’ said Corso, pulling something out of his pocket. ‘Moment of truth time.’

He placed the object-a slender grey box scarcely larger than a human thumb-into a niche just below the screen. A moment later a faint but discernible hum filled the air. Dakota half-expected some monster to come rampaging down one of the corridors, angry at being woken from its aeons-long sleep. Instead, nothing happened bar a succession of new images and mostly incomprehensible data flickering across the screen like lightning.

The map of the derelict’s interior reappeared, except this time new corridors and rooms began appearing, shaded green where the original map was coloured blue. Arbenz and Mansell grinned and shouted in delight, and even Corso managed a shaky grin.

‘Good work, Corso,’ said Arbenz, clapping a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do we have access yet to the main deck or the engines?’

Corso shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t expect to this early, but it’s still a lot more than we could reasonably have expected.’

Arbenz looked ecstatic regardless. Even Kieran Mansell’s normally stony features retained a satisfied smile.

‘Now,’ said the Senator, ‘we need to test the machine-head interface.’

Dakota stared first at Arbenz, and then at Corso, but he avoided her gaze, a flicker of shame crossing his tight-lipped expression.

Arbenz’s glee settled back into the more familiar, unctuous smile. ‘Lead on, Lucas.’ He turned to Dakota. ‘I mean it when I say you’re going to like what we’ve got waiting ahead for you. You’re going to fly this thing back to Redstone for us.’

Dakota merely nodded in a daze.

Corso filled the silence with a string of nervous patter as he led them further down the passageway and deeper into the belly of the beast. What appeared to be small service robots raced ahead of them, apparently scouting out the intersections and twists ahead.

‘Whoever the ship was built by, they definitely weren’t Shoal. But they did have close contact with them. There are translation protocols embedded in the derelict’s operating systems that allow communication between machinery belonging to both species. It’s like a Rosetta Stone, a key to understanding who they are and where they came from.’

‘Did they have a name?’ asked Dakota, as they came to a fork in the corridor where another screen had been inserted into a hole ripped in the corridor wall.

‘Not that we’ve been able to discover, no,’ Corso replied. ‘But we’ve been calling them the Magi.’ He glanced at the screen and turned right: the rest of them followed.

Dakota’s skin prickled in anticipation of the unexpected.

They came to a stop at an intersection where Corso raised his hand. Directions had been scrawled on cards epoxied to the walls. Dakota saw rounded doorways, which looked more melted than constructed, leading into interior spaces.

‘This is where we managed to tap into a major control subsystem,’ Corso explained, nodding to one of the doorways. Dakota could see tools scattered by the entrance.

Corso turned to Arbenz. ‘From here on in, it’s new territory. I can’t guarantee there’ll be no unexpected problems if we go any further than this.’

Kieran nodded. ‘The derelict has already proved it can kill, Senator. Perhaps it would be best if you turned back for now.’

Arbenz shook his head. ‘If something was going to go wrong, experience shows it would have happened by now. Besides, this part of the derelict is secure, isn’t it, Kieran?’

After a moment’s hesitation, Kieran nodded. ‘This area is code blue, so we believe it’s safe. But there are no firm guarantees.’

‘That’s good enough for me. Mr Corso, you’ll find the technicians have already installed your updates. The interface chair is ready.’

Corso nodded hesitantly.

Arbenz turned to the two station staff that had accompanied them. ‘Lunden, Ivanovich. I want you to make sure the code green areas are safe for the technical teams to enter. Follow standard procedure and, for God’s sake, don’t lose sight of each other like those others did.’

The two men saluted and moved off. Arbenz next turned to Gardner. ‘David, we have some matters to discuss.’ He turned to Corso last. ‘I want you to test the interface now. We’ll be waiting here.’

Corso nodded, looking distinctly nonplussed. He motioned to Dakota to follow him. She glanced at Kieran, and realized he’d have no hesitation in hurting her again if she didn’t co-operate.

She followed Corso into the room, which was wide, with a low ceiling and completely featureless. In the centre of the room stood an interface chair identical to the one on board the Hyperion. Cables led from its underside through gouged-open holes in the floor.

Corso touched a button on the side of the interface device and its petals folded smoothly down, revealing the seat within.

‘I swear on my life you won’t come to any harm,’ Corso assured her, glancing back towards the doorway as he did so. ‘I’ve run tests again and again. This thing-the derelict, that is-it’s designed specially to be operated by a machine-head. Or at least something very like it.’

Dakota touched her hand to one of the chair’s folding petals and nodded.

‘You don’t look surprised,’ said Corso.

‘An alien equivalent of a machine-head, is what you mean.’

In truth, she wasn’t surprised. She’d already guessed there was some kind of commonality between her and whatever had originally piloted this craft. It was the only explanation for the sensations she’d been experiencing ever since they’d landed.

‘Right.’ Corso looked at her strangely.

She began to climb into the chair, then hesitated. ‘What’s to stop me flying away with this thing, right now, if I can control it?’

She watched as Corso blinked a couple of times. ‘There’s a… failsafe installed. Ultimate control devolves to us.’

She couldn’t be sure if he was telling the truth, but she would have to be very careful when it came to testing the limits of whatever Corso chose to reveal to her.

She climbed between the steel petals and took her seat. Corso leaned in close to her, making adjustments to the neural cap, his chin hovering close in front of her as he worked. He smelled of cold sweat.

‘This… place creeps me out,’ she muttered. ‘The way the light comes from everywhere.’

He finished his adjustments and stepped back. ‘It’s still only a ship, though, just a very old one. Now listen to me,’ he whispered, leaning in again as he stepped around behind the chair and tapped at an open panel. The others were out of sight in the corridor, but she could still hear the murmur of their voices. ‘I saw you studying the Magellanic Clouds back on the bridge of the Hyperion.’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out where this thing derived from originally, and I’ve got good reasons to think that’s exactly where it came from.’

‘The Magellanic Clouds?’

‘So imagine my surprise when I saw what I saw that time.’

Dakota twisted her head around to try and see him. ‘I swear, Lucas, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really, really don’t.’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Fine.’

‘Lucas,’ she whispered, ‘I mean it.’

It was obvious he didn’t believe her.

‘OK,’ she replied wearily. ‘So you think this thing does date from the same time as the Magellanic Novae?’

Corso’s expression became wary. ‘Looks that way.’

‘If you’re seriously suggesting this thing came all the way from a neighbouring galaxy, it would have taken centuries to get here, transluminal drive or not.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s another reason I more or less discounted it at first. Why come all this way at all? But when I saw…’ He glanced at her and sighed again.

‘Look, there’s no longer any question what direction it came from. The real question is, how far did it come?’

‘But why come all that way in the first place?’ she echoed. ‘What would make them want to… oh.’

‘Exactly. If they were running away from something, it would have to have been pretty bad to make them put so much distance between them and whatever drove them into leaving.’

‘Like a lot of stars blowing up?’ she said.

He moved back round in front of her and shrugged, apparently satisfied with the minute adjustments he had just made. ‘Until I find out more, it’s still only speculation.’ He stepped back.

‘Are they going to let either of us live once we’ve done our jobs?’ she asked. ‘Do you really want a man like Arbenz to get his hands on a working transluminal drive? What makes you think the Shoal won’t just raze your people entirely from the surface of Redstone once they know what you’ve done?’

‘There’s a dead man’s handle built into the chair,’ he explained, ignoring her questions. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘If anything unexpected happens, take your fingers off it, and it breaks the connection.’

‘Just supposing for a second your failsafe decides not to work and you can’t prevent me suddenly assuming full control of this vessel. What will you do to stop me?’

‘Answer one, either the Agartha or the Hyperion would shoot you down before you got up sufficient power, and that’s assuming you can somehow blast your way through a couple of kilometres of ice we’ve still barely managed to scratch the surface of. Two’-he flashed her a sardonic grin-‘nobody, including yourself, actually knows how to operate a transluminal drive.’

‘We have to talk, Corso.’ It didn’t take much effort to inject the right degree of urgency into her words. ‘I don’t know what happened to Josef Marados. I swear I had nothing to do with that. Whatever Arbenz has been saying to you, he’s not intending to let either of us live.’

‘I already told you, I don’t have any choice in the matter. So you’re telling me Arbenz is lying when he claims someone’s been altering the shipboard records to cover your tracks?’

Dakota couldn’t find a reply that didn’t sound thoroughly incriminating.

‘Fine.’

She saw Corso’s expression change as his eyes flicked towards the entrance. Dakota glanced over and saw Kieran had stepped inside.

‘All right,’ said Corso, suddenly all business. ‘First we need to run some calibrations.’

The chair’s petals folded in over Dakota, entombing her and blanking out her senses, so that the only information she received would come directly through her Ghost circuits.

‘I’m activating the connection between you and the derelict now.’ Corso’s voice came to her from out of the darkness, his voice hazed by electronic filters. ‘Remember, anything unexpected, any unusual activity or responses of any kind, the inbuilt alarms can shut off the interface. Beyond that, remember all you need to do is let go of the handle and the whole thing shuts down.’

‘I’m fine.’

In truth, part of her was excited by what she might now find.

She sensed the connection being made and…

… knowledge rushed in towards her in a great tide, a vast, near-indistinguishable mass out of which only a few clear details could be barely discerned. As if from a great distance she felt her fingers trembling as they gripped the dead man’s handle.

Sense-impressions slammed through Dakota’s cerebrum, a howling maelstrom of loss and regret. Stars tumbled past, their shape and light twisted and warped through the lens of transluminal space.

Light filled the sky above an alien shore, a million years of sunshine released in one terrible instant, transforming an ocean to steam while rocks and soil caught fire, all in one consuming wave of carnage. Then more images tumbled past her mind’s eye: other worlds, all imbued with a sense of the very ancient.

She saw creatures like nothing she could have ever imagined, dead and forgotten for longer than she could comprehend. She experienced memories of places that had fallen to dust countless aeons before. As she watched, worlds that had once been the centres of vast empires were reduced to blackened carbon corpses orbiting the burned-out shells of dead suns.

Within the confining petals of the interface chair, she struggled to breathe, her chest heaving as if she were drowning.

Dakota struggled to absorb the tidal wave of information being thrust upon her. Mercifully the myriad impressions began to fade, and the seeping omniscient light of the derelict surrounding her crawled back under her eyelids. The petals of the interface chair had folded down and Corso was leaning in over her, pulling the neural cap away from her skull.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Corso, letting out a shaky breath as he moved out of Dakota’s way. ‘I’d call that a resounding success. Judging by the measurements, you were in full neural lock with the derelict.’

‘I’m OK,’ she mumbled.

‘I don’t know what it was hitting you with, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in half-measures.’

Dakota glanced over Corso’s shoulder and saw Kieran watching her carefully. She decided not to reveal too much about just what she’d experienced. ‘I’m fine. I just couldn’t make much sense out of anything.’

‘What happened?’ Kieran asked Corso, as Dakota slowly lifted herself out of the chair.

‘Calibration,’ Corso replied. ‘It means the derelict accepts her input.’

‘But she was only in there for a second or two.’

Corso shrugged. ‘That’s all it takes.’

‘So she can fly the ship now?’

‘No, not straight away. But in the next few days, hopefully, yes.’

‘Let’s say “definitely”,’ Kieran replied tersely.

Folding her legs under her, Dakota lowered herself down next to the interface chair. ‘It’s like it’s alive,’ she muttered weakly. Her head was still spinning. ‘I don’t know if it’s hostile exactly, but defensive, scared maybe, assuming you want to attribute human emotions to the thing.’

‘Did you find anything out? Any information about where it came from, who built it, whether the drive is still functioning?’

She shook her head. ‘The whole experience was too vague for that.’ She caught his eye. ‘But I think you were right about them running away from something.’

The Magellanic Novae had occurred in such a relatively small volume of space, and in such a short period of time, that one of the most popular conspiracy theories posited that the stellar detonations had been deliberately induced. This remained no more than a theory partly because no one was in a hurry to give credence to the notion of any interstellar civilization with the technology to destroy entire solar systems.

Dakota gazed at the pale walls around her, and recalled the fleeting images and sensations she’d endured within the interface chair. A chill, deeper and darker than any she recalled experiencing before, went through her at the thought the Magi might have been capable of such terrible destruction.

As Arbenz and Gardner also entered, Dakota reflected that none of them had any real idea of the consequences of what they were trying to do. They were like soldiers on the eve of a battle, already celebrating their certain victory over a well-armed militia, when they only had one gun between them.

If only there were some way for her to steal the derelict out from under the noses of not only the Shoal, but the Freehold as well. But even if she found a way… what would be the consequences for the human race, of acquiring such embargoed technology? Would she bring the wrath of the Shoal hegemony down on her entire species?

A functioning transluminal drive would open up the stars to mankind… but the subsequent vengeance of the Shoal might mean the end of the Consortium.

Yet it was clear there was something more going on here. What Corso had accused her of made no sense: she had not been studying maps of the local galaxy cluster. Shortly after his challenge, she’d had her Ghost scan the bridge records, and found nothing amiss outside her own secret tweaks and alterations.

But why would Corso lie? She couldn’t help but think back to the many weird glitches occurring since she had first boarded the Hyperion: the way the Freehold vessel had reacted when she tried to scan the alien’s trinket on the imager plate; the almost seamless alterations to the ship’s records that she had assumed until now had been made by Arbenz, or one of his men, for reasons unknown.

And then there was the way the beta copy of Piri’s mind she’d uploaded to the Hyperion had spoken to her-that curious grammatical inflection so reminiscent of the speech pattern of the Shoal-member she had encountered at Bourdain’s Rock.

She’d been carefully avoiding thinking about the implications of that impression too much. She might just have imagined it. Anything else filled her with crawling horror.

She snapped back out of her train of thought to see Corso arguing with Arbenz.

‘Senator, we have no idea what kind of infrastructure, what kind of know-how, the Magi used to build either this ship or its propulsive systems. Taking the derelict out of Nova Arctis is one thing. Replicating the technology is something on a whole bigger scale. This is technology millennia ahead of our own. At the moment we just don’t know enough.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ asked Gardner.

‘Take our time, years if necessary,’ Corso replied immediately. ‘Pick the derelict apart piece by piece. Establish a permanent research base here as a cover. We were intending to move our entire population to Newfall over the next few decades anyway…’

Arbenz bristled, his anger clearly mounting. ‘We are at war, Mr Corso. We are engaged in a battle for survival. If we can’t take this thing apart and understand how it works, we don’t deserve to keep Redstone, or Newfall either, for that matter.’

‘I think,’ Corso replied, obviously choosing his words very carefully, ‘that there are people in the Senate who might see things otherwise. Technically, you require the authority of the full governing board before-’

‘They’re not here!’ Arbenz bellowed, his face contorting in rage. ‘This is a God-given opportunity to raise ourselves up. Either we succeed in what we do here, or at the very least we die with honour before the eyes of God.’ Arbenz made an apparent attempt to cool down. ‘That’s final. I won’t tolerate any further dissent.’

Dakota had already caught sight of Gardner’s face and wondered, not for the first time, exactly what had driven this businessman to think he could engage in a profitable relationship with Freeholders. At this moment he looked aghast.

‘Senator,’ said Gardner suddenly, ‘I’ll ask you, with the greatest respect, to shut the hell up.’

‘Gardner…’

It’s falling apart, thought Dakota. They’ve been down here only, what, a couple of hours? And already it’s falling apart.

Gardner was insistent. ‘Without my financial and technical backup, you have nothing, Senator, nothing. I’m tired of being constantly sidelined because of your petty, parochial political arguments. If there’s any way to exploit or make sense of whatever we find on board this ship, it’ll be my research teams, my contacts that will bring it about. Do you understand me? You don’t have the resources. I do.’

‘You may have the resources,’ Arbenz replied acidly, ‘but you do not have the will.’

‘This is a joint mission,’ Gardner continued. ‘If anything happens to me, if I fail to get in touch with my business partners at designated times, your chances of being able to either do anything or go anywhere with this ship are nil. You understand that, don’t you?’

Dakota tensed, waiting to see which way things would swing now. But Arbenz simply smiled as if they were all friends and the past few hours of argument and threats had never happened. There was something very unsettling in that smile.

‘I think we’ve seen enough here for today,’ Arbenz said, turning his attention from Gardner to Corso instead. ‘What’s our next move on the technical front?’

‘The calibrations check out OK. Now I just need to fine-tune the interface so Mai-so Dakota can work on controlling the derelict. Once we reach that point, we’ve got a good chance of being able to explore the whole of the ship without getting killed.’

‘Good work, Mr Corso. Remember, we need to work as fast as possible.’

Corso looked thoughtful. ‘I can get a lot of work done right away.’

‘Fine.’ Arbenz nodded. ‘Meanwhile we’ll return to the surface. Kieran, I want you to stay here with Corso and keep an eye on things. Anything unusual happens-anything you suspect might be life-threatening-I want you to evacuate immediately. There’s no sense in taking unnecessary risks if you don’t have to.

‘As for you,’ he said, turning finally to Dakota, ‘you’re going back on board the Hyperion until we need you again. Don’t try anything that would make us unhappy, as you’d only get hurt.’

She couldn’t keep the quaver out of her voice. ‘You can’t kill me, Senator. You need me too much.’

‘That’s true,’ Arbenz replied with a mirthless smile. ‘But we can make things bad enough that you’d wish we had.’