Stealing Light

Twenty-nine

For Dakota, it felt strangely like stepping into someone else’s dreams.

For several hours now, her Ghost had been slowly flickering its way back into life. There was no trace of the highly personalized routines she had built up over so many years-but something was trying to speak to her, its voice reaching out from distant Ikaria.

Most of the sensations she was currently experiencing within her mind were entirely incomprehensible: synaesthetic flurries she strongly suspected were intended for sense organs entirely different to her own. But within that chaos appeared nuggets of information that were startlingly clear.

She was learning to understand the Magi.

The derelicts on Ikaria reached out to her, across the cold and lonely void. They had been waiting for someone like her for a long, long time.

She felt rough, hot rock pressing against her skin. She lay at the bottom of a deep valley, a kilometres-deep crack running along an ancient fault line in Ikaria’s crust.

There were three of her… no, of them. They were machines, the same as the Theona derelict-partly organic in nature: not alive in any way she could understand, but certainly aware nonetheless.

She opened her eyes and looked around. Corso had finally fallen asleep in his couch despite his grumbled complaints earlier about the constant acceleration. Her brain felt like cotton wool, and she knew she’d been communing with the distant derelicts for far longer than she’d realized.

She could see from the readouts that the Agartha, was accelerating fast in the same direction. Catching the Piri Reis wouldn’t gain them anything, so they could only be chasing after the derelict.

She laughed to herself. Did they actually think they could outrun it?

Directly ahead, Nova Arctis was steadily growing larger, though still barely more than a particularly bright pinprick in the unending night. Very soon, the Piri was due to flip on its axis mid-course, as a prelude to heavy deceleration.

The Piri’s miniaturized probes, in the meantime, were sending back initial reports from orbit above Ikaria. She stared at blurred images of what looked like, yes, three more craft identical to the Theona derelict, but buried deep within a chasm on Ikaria’s crater-pocked surface.

The probes circled lower and lower in their orbits, gaining higher and higher definition images in the remaining time before Ikaria’s gravity finally sucked them to their doom.

By now Corso had woken up.

‘They’re just the same as the first derelict we found, aren’t they?’ he commented.

‘Looks that way. Have you noticed the course the Theona derelict is taking?’

Corso tapped at a console and stared up at a screen. The first derelict had now adjusted its trajectory to bypass Ikaria, clearly having set a course for the heart of the sun.

Corso pulled himself up with a strap and swore, his muscles bunching with tension. ‘No, it’ll get there too soon. We don’t have enough time-’

‘Stop panicking,’ Dakota snapped. ‘It’s still too soon for it to make the jump. It could take hours, even days, right? Assuming it even can make a jump once it’s this deep inside a system.’

The most interesting aspect of not being real, Trader’s virtual doppelganger had long concluded, was the lack of concern felt for one’s own self-preservation.

The recesses of the derelict’s information stacks were near infinite in their storage capacity, far surpassing just the satisfaction of mere curiosity. Within their depths Trader had discovered the accumulated knowledge of a culture that had undergone endless expansions and contractions within the Magellanic Clouds for very nearly two million years. Their empire had ruled countless worlds before collapsing into half-remembered dust, only to rise again with passing aeons, and spreading yet further outwards.

The humans liked to call the cloud-dwellers ‘Magi’, and it was as good a name as any, given the miracles of which they were capable. But even so, some things had yet remained far, far beyond them. Their empire had been built with excruciating slowness, taking hundreds of millennia to spread incrementally across their galaxy at a sublight crawl. That empire had fought itself to the death a thousand times, as vast civilizations, locked into war with each other, failed to recognize their common ancestry until long after the combat was over.

In the meantime, the derelict hurtled towards its destination deep within the heart of Nova Arctis. The virtual Trader felt no concern, no sense of loss, and no fear over its own imminent destruction.

Here I am, embodied, within the mind of this craft, contemplating the end of my existence in a very short time indeed. Does that lack of concern deny me as a true thinking being, or is my ability to be aware of myself- to exist -suggest that I am just as alive as the original me?

When these philosophical questions grew tiresome, Trader dived deep within the derelict’s stacks and the endless realms contained therein-fully-fledged interactive environments representing a million worlds over a spread of uncountable aeons. He lived virtual centuries within these environments at an accelerated pace, while in the greater universe outside the derelict crawled towards its ultimate destination.

The tragedy was that the flesh-and-blood Trader would never know of the rich experiences being partaken of by his doppelganger. All evidence that the Magi culture had even existed had been deliberately destroyed some millennia before. Better to consign an entire civilization to the dust than risk the revelation that yet more caches might be found scattered throughout the cosmos.

The Magi had been seduced into destroying themselves.

They had stumbled across a hidden cache of high technology in much the same way as the humans had stumbled across their derelict starship. It had been buried in the heart of an asteroid, within a chamber of clearly artificial origin, seemingly a gift of sheer providence.

Trader idled a century away in the abyssal, kilometres-deep chambers of a world-library the Magi themselves had called Sadness of Lost Memories Recovered from Damaged Media. Therein he found the stories of a hundred mighty interstellar civilizations to rival the Shoal and far beyond, of their rise and fall and rise again, like the steady beating of a god’s heart-all lost in the depths of ancient time.

Of all the theories Trader had heard, ranging from the drily sober to the irredeemably insane, one appealed above all others. Not because it appeared to have any greater validity than any other theory, but because it scared him more than any other.

The theory held that the transluminal drive had been created by a race of beings responsible for the construction of the universe itself-a race generally referred to by the Magi as the Makers. The drives appeared to tap into the same infinite energy that fuelled the primordial chaos from which all reality had sprung: therefore it was not unreasonable to assume the drive had been a means by which those ancient godlike beings could tour their creation.

Unfortunately, after some billions of years had passed, the Makers found rats in the cellar: life, in all its astonishing fecundity.

And so they had set out traps, nets cast wide and deep in the hopes of snagging the unwary.

If some of those ancient Magi cultures had bothered to check the records lost deep inside their own world-libraries, they might have been able to prolong their existence by the simple expedient of hunting down those carefully hidden caches of dangerous technology and destroying them before they were found by others, much as the Shoal had now been doing for almost the entirety of their recorded history.

It was only stunningly bad luck that the humans had discovered a Magi ship, rather than one of the original Maker caches.

Trader had been present during the Twelfth Schism, some seventeen millennia before (a mere stripling a few thousand years old. and only just beginning to grow weary of existence, when the Maker Cult had swept through the younger ranks of the Shoal ruling elite. Thousands had been put to death or assassinated over the next millennia to prevent knowledge of the star drive’s destructive potential from becoming more widely known.

And if this star and all the ancient Magi ships hidden among its worlds were destroyed, how long before some other species discovered an actual Maker cache, before the Shoal could get to it first? This was the wearying reality-that the Shoal were only delaying the inevitable, galaxy-spanning conflict that even the Dreamers agreed must eventually come.

Let the stars die, Trader thought, drifting aimlessly through the long-dead shadows of a forgotten race. Let it all start again, until, a few billion years from now, other species rise from our ashes and wander through our own discovered memories and ancient ruins, wondering how we came to destroy ourselves so quickly, before themselves re-enacting that same history.

And then came a signal, disturbing its long years of idle wandering.

Finally it was time.

The Shoal AI prepared itself for non-existence.

The Agartha was closing on them, shadowing the Piri Reis’s cross-system vector. Dakota had altered their trajectory so that they kept Ikaria between them and the star it orbited. This helped prevent the Piri Reis’s external systems from becoming overwhelmed by Nova Arctis itself as it spread across their viewscreens.

They were deep into deceleration now, the last of the Piri’s fuel blasting towards Nova Arctis, and bringing them into an insertion point for orbit around Ikaria.

As the hours had finally become days, Nova Arctis began to appear on their screens as a ball of yellow incandescence with a dark blemish at its centre. This blemish gradually grew as the hours passed, turning the star into a halo of fire around the circumference of Ikaria as it grew larger and wider.

Long-range telescopes threw Ikaria’s mottled, broken surface on to the Piri Reis’s screens as they dropped towards it, using filtering technology to pick out a visual map of a vast chasm on the approaching planet, the result of a massive impact some billions of years before. It was a crack running two-thirds of the way around the dead world’s equator.

Their destination.

Dakota stared at the high-res video that floated in the air between the two acceleration couches. All they had to do was get down to that chasm, find a way on board one of the other derelicts, persuade it not to kill them, figure out how to fly it, and escape this system at light speed before the entire system detonated.

Easy.

She was conscious of Corso saying something to her.

‘… the chasm those other derelicts are in?’ He was pointing at the holo display between them. ‘That thing makes the Vallis Marineris on Mars look like a furrow. Something must have hit that planet hard enough to just about crack it in half.’

Dakota shrugged. ‘So?’

Corso sighed. ‘Look closer.’

He gestured, and a 3D model of Ikaria replaced the video showing the chasm.

Its rotation was slow enough that a day on its surface was longer than one of its years. Sunlight crept over its horizon at a snail’s pace, one hemisphere crisped by its extreme proximity to its parent star, the other dark and frozen until the inevitable arrival of a ferocious sunrise.

‘There are places on the dark side where that trench goes down very, very deep: maybe eight or ten kilometres. We could hide down there if the derelict does blow the star.’

Dakota couldn’t hide her incredulity. ‘Hide?’ She laughed. ‘From a nova) Lucas, we’re practically next door to the star as it is. If you shouted it would probably hear you. Ikaria would be vaporized.’

‘But not immediately.’ As Corso replied, his eyes were bright with an unpleasant mania from the quantities of stimulants he’d been pumping into his blood stream just in order to stay alert. ‘That could take up to a day or two, right? In the meantime we might be able to buy ourselves at least a few extra hours down inside that chasm.’

Dakota tried to frame a suitable reply, but it was getting harder to find the words. Instead, she just shrugged her shoulders and looked away, overwhelmed by a sense of increasing hopelessness. She was at a point where she wasn’t even sure if she really cared whether she lived or died, just so long as events came to some kind of conclusion.

Each of them was turning into a basket case while the other one watched.

Readings showed the incipient transluminal energies crackling around the hull of the Theona derelict, and the possibility had occurred to Dakota that coreships rarely approached the inner part of any system they visited for reasons other than the ones most often assumed. Perhaps the Shoal were simply nervous about getting too close to any star while they were on board a transluminal vessel.

It seemed incredible that something so tiny could cause so much destruction, yet as Dakota sank further and further into the dreamlike thoughtscape of the remaining Magi ships on Ikaria, she found it harder to deny.

Then there was the question of physically landing on the surface of Ikaria. If Corso were not so stressed and so thoroughly doped to the eyeballs, he might have been aware of the obvious problem: the Piri was simply not designed to land on any planetary body; they barely had enough fuel to make the approach into orbit and, even if they could somehow make a landing, the stresses involved would tear the little ship apart.

So they were going to have to think of something else.

Whenever Dakota closed her eyes, instead of darkness, she saw alien starscapes; vast citadels spread across the faces of entire worlds; and great world ships that dwarfed even the Shoal’s own interstellar craft.

‘The derelict!’ Corso shouted hoarsely. ‘It’s gone. It’s off the screens!’

Dakota switched her attention to a tracking view. The Theona derelict was indeed gone from every reading.

The Agartha, however, was still marked on a map of the system by an advancing red line, still shadowing the Piri Reis at every step. It was following them into Ikaria’s dark side, just as she’d expected.