Stealing Light

Thirty-three

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

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

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

‘Can you activate the external cameras?’

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

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

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

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

‘I do.’

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

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

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

Librarian?

‘Release it how?’ he demanded.

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

‘Yeah.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on, come on.

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

The Librarian spoke to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dakota…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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