Empire of Light (24 page)

‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ asked Nancy. ‘The view, I mean.’

‘Yes, quite so,’ Ty replied. ‘How have you been, Nancy?’

Things had been cordial in the safe-house, but it was best, he felt sure, to nip this in the bud. Corso had warned him to stay away from the rest of the crew, and he had little doubt how the Senator might react if he discovered Ty had once been sleeping with the
Mjollnir’
s head of security.

‘Good enough,’ Nancy replied. ‘Kind of crazy how we both wound up here, yeah?’

‘I guess so,’ he replied, finding himself suddenly stuck for words.

A silence followed, seeming deeper and wider than the void around them. Ty felt an urgent need to fill it. ‘I think it was a surprise for both of us,’ he said, and then laughed.

Nancy’s own laugh sounded more than a little forced. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘About that.’

‘About what?’ Were they ever going to get these repairs done?

‘About us. Back on the . . . back on that last trip. That whole thing.’

‘It’s all right, Nancy,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of us was looking for much more than—’

‘No, it’s not that. I mean, that’s what I
was
going to say, right? There’s no expectations, since I don’t think we thought we’d ever see each other again.’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I guess not.’

‘But . . . we
are
here, and maybe we won’t make it back. Yet I don’t know if there’s any of us wouldn’t rather be somewhere else.’

But you still have a choice,
Ty almost said. Every step he had taken was either due to a gift from providence or through a desperate clutching at life. The alternatives had been stark: stay in Unity and risk execution, or board the
Mjollnir
and take his chances with the Emissaries. So here he was.

‘I guess not,’ he replied. ‘I won’t bother you, Nancy, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

She came closer. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

Something in the tone of her voice made it clear she was struggling to find the right words. Nancy was, Ty had found, not the type to reveal her feelings except in the most intimate of circumstances.

‘I don’t know what we’re going to face out there,’ – she waved one gloved hand towards the stars, – ‘and … when I think about it, I don’t want to be alone.’

Something made him reach out and touch one gloved hand to the arm of her suit. He stared at his spread fingers, contemplating this unexpected betrayal by one of his own limbs.

‘You won’t be,’ he said finally.

‘I’m glad, Nathan.’ She then moved away, sounding more subdued now. ‘I . . . you know where I am. Just drop by sometime.’

‘I’ll do that,’ he heard himself reply.

Ty watched her go, suddenly back to her brisk efficient self.

He had actually meant to cut things short; that being the easiest way to deal with such things. He had opened his mouth intending to say one thing, but something else entirely had emerged.

He summoned one of the spiders and started to rummage inside its toolbox, feverishly thinking all the time. What, he wondered, could Corso actually do to him by way of punishment? Very little, he suspected.

Ty called up his suit’s menu and put in a call to Nancy, and she replied almost immediately.

‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘Ship time. Come down to the labs.’

‘You . . . need help with something?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied with a grin. ‘Something like that.’

Chapter Twenty-two

‘This is where we are just now,’ indicated Lamoureaux.

Dakota leaned back in her seat on the bridge and stared up at the overhead simulation: a view of the Milky Way as it might be seen from roughly twenty thousand light-years above its ecliptic plane. A small point of light representing the
Mjollnir
blinked constantly from deep within the Orion Arm.

From the perspective Lamoureaux had chosen, it was clear the Orion Arm was not so much a true spiral arm in its own right, but more a broad streak of stars caught midway between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

‘And this,’ Lamoureaux continued, from the interface chair, ‘is our first stop. After that we’re in for the really long haul.’

A line reached out from the icon representing the
Mjollnir,
and came to an end at a star fifteen hundred light-years from their current position. A second line grew from there, stretching across a relatively starless gulf before terminating at a point deep within the Perseus Arm.

Dakota studied Lamoureaux, who had tipped the interface chair all the way back to a forty-five-degree angle, until he was looking almost straight up at the simulation. He still seemed frail, and when he glanced at her she could sense the pain and loss he was feeling. Sometime soon, she was going to have to explain to him just why she had destroyed her ship.

Corso sat close behind Dakota, while Nancy, Ray and Nathan were still outside working on the drive-spines. Martinez was not expected out of the med-bay for another couple of days, Olivarri was asleep in his quarters, and Perez was somewhere halfway across the ship, checking over the plasma conduit systems and prepping the onboard fabricators to produce replacement drive-spines.

‘Ted, can you put up that information I gave you about our first target system?’ asked Dakota.

‘No,’ said Corso from behind, his tone hostile. He had barely spoken to her since she had told him about Trader. ‘That can wait a minute. Ted, you said you had secured some updates on the war.’

Ted flashed Dakota an apologetic glance before he nodded assent to Corso. Moments later dozens of bright red points appeared in clusters along one edge of the Orion Arm, with a few scattered deeper within it.

‘These are the current confirmed sightings of Emissary forces,’ Lamoureaux explained. A few dozen more points now appeared, coloured yellow. ‘And these,’ he continued, ‘are stars that have gone nova since the war escalated. You can see they’re mostly centred on the region of the Long War, but there’s been more detonations deeper inside our arm, and getting closer to Consortium territory.’

‘Any word from Ocean’s Deep?’ asked Corso.

‘They’re in total disarray, Senator. The Legislate’s taken up a large military presence in the orbital station and rounded up a lot of the key Authority staff for questioning. Most of this news comes through Bandati contacts, rather than from our own people. It’s the same at Tierra – no news coming in or out.’

‘I think,’ declared Corso, ‘it’s time everyone stopped calling me “Senator”. From now on “Lucas” will do just fine, don’t you think?’

‘Then I guess you’d all better start calling me “Eduard”.’

They all turned to see Martinez standing at the entrance to the bridge. Corso started to rise, but Martinez gestured him to sit back down.

‘I’m fine. Leave me be,’ Martinez insisted, shuffling forward. He was walking with a stick, Dakota noticed. He stopped when he spotted her, staring at her like she was a ghost.

‘Sir, are you absolutely certain you’re ready to be out of treatment?’

‘Why, yes I am, Lucas,’ Martinez replied, still without taking his eyes off her. ‘I just have to go easy. Maybe spend another night in the medbox to speed up the healing.’

He moved closer to her. ‘So you’re Dakota Merrick. When the hell did you get on board? And where the hell were you when we were getting ready to . . .’

‘Commander,’ Corso interrupted. He had come to Martinez’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘As soon as we’re finished here, we’ll go to your quarters and I’ll explain everything.’ He gestured towards a couch. ‘Please.’

Martinez looked like he was struggling to control his temper. ‘Then you’d better make your reasons good,’ he replied tautly, and headed for the seat.

A priority comms icon appeared, floating just to one side of the galaxy simulation. Corso reached up to his ear and spoke quietly into the air for a few moments.

‘Nancy just reported in,’ he explained, once he had finished. ‘If we’re going to make a significant jump any time during the next couple of days, we’re going to have to leave up to a quarter of the drive-spines offline.’

‘That’s not good,’ said Martinez.

Corso shrugged. ‘Not much we can do about it. The engineers hadn’t finished work on the hull when we boarded. Dan’s ready to start running out replacement drive-spines as soon as he’s got the fabricators back online.’

He paused for a moment, then turned to face Dakota, with visible reluctance. ‘How many jumps do we need to reach our first destination?’

Martinez frowned, looking back and forth between them. ‘First destination?’

Of course, Dakota realized, he didn’t know about Trader yet.

‘We’re taking a detour,’ Dakota explained, ‘so we can salvage weapons systems left behind by an extinct alien race. It means stopping off at another star system on the way.’

Martinez regarded her warily before turning back to Corso. ‘And you concur with this?’

‘We’re just one ship, so we’re going to need every advantage we can get. A couple of days’ detour shouldn’t make any difference in the long run.’

Martinez nodded wearily and looked back at Dakota. ‘Lucas asked you how many jumps to get there.’

‘At least three,’ Dakota replied. ‘Possibly more, given the issue with the drive-spines.’ She stood up and nodded to Lamoureaux. ‘Ted, if you don’t mind, maybe I’d better run the next part myself.’

‘Sure.’ Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair, moving with elaborate care. Dakota felt his implant-mediated senses brush against hers.

‘Okay.’ She climbed into the chair and locked on to the ship’s data-space. A moment later the great swirl of the galaxy faded, to be replaced by a model of a single star system.

‘This is where we’re headed next,’ she explained. ‘You’re looking at a star towards the cooler end of the main sequence. It has eleven planets altogether, but our main point of interest is coming up in a moment.’

The system expanded rapidly until they had a view of a lifeless world no more than a few thousand kilometres in diameter, its surface dotted with ancient impact craters. A broad, artificially flat plain, at odds with the surrounding landscape, surrounded what seemed at first to be just another crater.

‘That’s the cache entrance you can see there,’ Dakota continued. A cutaway view of the planetoid now appeared next to its photorealistic image. ‘Same layout as the Tierra cache, in fact and, like the Tierra cache – and every other cache in existence, from what I gather – it’s located on a dwarf planet too small to be geologically active.’

The cutaway showed that the cache primarily consisted of a borehole extending more than thirty kilometres beneath the surface, with hundreds of passageways of varying length extending out from this central shaft and into the remaining body of the planetoid.

‘How the hell could you know all this?’ asked Martinez, switching his gaze between her and Corso.

‘This all comes from a renegade Shoal-member—’

‘A renegade
what
?’ said Martinez, looking like he was about to throw his walking stick at her.

‘Eduard,’ intervened Corso, ‘as soon as we’re done here. I swear.’ He nodded to Dakota for her to continue.

Martinez looked far from happy, but held his silence.

‘It’s a dead cache,’ Dakota continued. ‘I learned that it was discovered by a race called the Meridians, who’re long gone. They had a colony here, but they wiped themselves out while fighting over it. The physical structure is still there, but everything inside was destroyed. If we get the opportunity or the time, I think it would be a very good idea to take a look down inside the cache. Apart from the fact I want to see what it looks like, it’ll give us a much better idea of exactly what we’re going to be facing once we reach our final destination.’

‘And these weapons we’re looking for,’ said Corso. ‘They’re inside the cache?’

Dakota tilted the interface chair a few degrees upright so she could see his face more clearly. ‘No, but apparently they’re close to the mouth of the cache,’ she explained. ‘And, strictly speaking, they’re not weapons. They’re a form of field technology – same idea as our own field-generators but whole orders of magnitude more powerful – according to . . .’
according to Trader,
she almost said, until she caught Corso’s eye.

‘The point is,’ said Corso, now picking up the thread, ‘there’s something there that can give us an even better fighting chance against the Emissaries.’

‘According to who?’ asked Martinez. ‘Some . . . Shoal-member?’

‘I think maybe we should go and have that talk,’ said Corso, looking as if he would rather do almost anything else. ‘And maybe a good stiff drink, if your meds will allow it.’

Chapter Twenty-three

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Ty. ‘I thought no time passed
at all
during a jump?’

They had come outside again as soon as the latest jump had been completed. Star-tangled nebulae hung in the void behind Olivarri. He had the whitest teeth Ty had ever seen in another human being; they positively shone when he grinned, and right now they were just about the only thing Ty could distinguish through the other man’s visor.

Their three-person repair team was completed by Nancy, who was mending a spine-clamp prior to lowering a new spine into place. Ty could see her over Olivarri’s shoulder, busily working away.

What lazy creatures we men are,
he thought,
standing here while the woman toils.
The reality, of course, was that Nancy didn’t trust anyone but herself to fulfil certain jobs. He found himself recalling the way her hands had gripped his hair the night before, her small lithe form arching above him, her mouth round and wide as she noisily climaxed.

‘
Virtual
time passes. Jump-space has to find a way to deal with the sudden appearance of physical matter from our universe. So it wraps the
Mjollnir
in a bubble of virtual time.’

‘Because time doesn’t actually exist within superluminal space?’

‘Exactly.’ That toothy grin again. ‘It’s the virtual time that allows the physical matter to begin degrading.’

‘But that’s purely theoretical, isn’t it? We don’t know this for a fact.’

Olivarri was standing with one gloved hand resting on the lower curve of a drive-spine. He raised his other hand and waggled it from side to side. ‘No, but it’s the current best explanation, unless the Shoal have a better idea, and they weren’t telling us even before they pulled a vanishing act. But virtual time at least explains why the degradation starts from the outside’ – he lifted his helmeted head to look up towards the tip of the drive-spine – ‘and works its way in towards the hull, rather than affecting every atom of the frigate at once. You need to introduce time, even if it’s just virtual time, to explain that.’

‘Like the little bubble of virtual space-time we’re caught in had started to shrink.’

‘Exactly. And because the virtual time that passes is vanishingly small—’

‘We come out with relatively minor degradation.’

‘Got it.’ That brilliant toothy smile again.

Ty turned to look behind him towards the stern. He couldn’t even pick out the Hyades Cluster any more, and it was only six days since they had left Redstone. A hundred metres away, a couple of spiders were hovering around another drive-spine, getting ready to repair some of that very same degradation.

He and Olivarri had decoupled the failed drive-spine, and half a dozen spiders were ready, their extendible arms gripping it at various points, to lift it away from the hull once the clamps that attached it in place were released.

Its replacement waited nearby, held in place by its own separate retinue of spider-mechs. It was a tricky and dangerous procedure, so all three humans kept a safe distance for the moment, letting the spiders do most of the work, and stepping in only where absolutely necessary.

Despite the precautions, there had already been some near fatalities. Lamoureaux had nearly fried himself getting too close to some frayed power-conduits; a hull-plate had swung loose while being detached, totalling a couple of spiders and very nearly taking Corso with it. And that wasn’t even taking into account the greater risk of replacement drive-spines blowing up once they were plugged into the frigate’s plasma flow, if they weren’t configured in
just
the right way.

Given those risks, using the spiders generally, with a few human beings at hand to step in if absolutely necessary, was a fine idea in principle, except that in practice the team had to take over from the spiders on pretty much every occasion. The mechs were fine for grunt work, but the more delicate aspects of the job required human hands and minds.

‘Okay,’ said Nancy, ‘releasing the clamps
now.
’

The restraints holding the drive-spine in place slid back into the hull, and the spiders arranged around it began emitting tiny jets of gas. Slowly, ponderously, the spine rose away from the hull, tilting to one side as the spiders coordinated with each other. The new drive-spine began to move forward as its own retinue of spiders pushed it towards the slot.

The work was so tedious that it was easy to fall into lengthy conversations. Nancy and Leo had spent most of this shift talking politics, and they quickly picked up the same thread again as the spider-mechs dragged the two drive-spines in different directions.

‘Am I right in thinking,’ asked Olivarri, ‘that the only people who’re allowed to vote or hold political office in the Freehold are those who’ve seen military service?’

‘Well, mostly,’ Nancy replied. ‘Senator Corso’s one of the exceptions, but for most of the Senate members, yeah. It’s a sane principle.’

‘Sane how?’ asked Olivarri.

‘Well, think about it,’ Nancy replied. ‘Why should someone who isn’t prepared to pick up a gun to actively defend his or her society get to have a say in how that society is run?’

‘Well . . . I’m not sure that the kind of people who
are
prepared to pick up a gun, based on an argument like that, are the ones I’d want running things for me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they usually turn out to be exactly the kind of people I need protecting from in the first place.’ Olivarri guffawed.

Nancy made a sound of disgust. ‘You just don’t understand.’

‘What’s not to understand?’ Olivarri shot back. ‘That’s
exactly
why the Freehold were booted from world to world.’

‘Leo, seriously. You have no understanding of the historical context. Our ending up on Redstone had nothing to do with our relations with the Consortium. The Freehold is about self-determination. It’s about the right of the individual to defend herself and not to have to answer to any authority that wants to take away her basic human right to self-determination.’

Ty sighed quietly. Leo appeared bent on needling Nancy, and she appeared unable to resist rising to the bait every time.

‘Okay,’ said Olivarri, ‘so what happened to all those ideals? That’s – what – two coups you’ve had in a little over two years?’

‘Because . . .’ Nancy sighed. ‘The wrong people are in charge, that’s all.’

‘Those people with the guns, you mean.’

Ty was deeply grateful when they all received an automated alert that the new drive-spine was ready to be locked into place. Nancy moved in close, obsessively rechecking the hull clamps and running a final systems scan. After a few minutes she stepped back, and they watched as the spiders slowly lowered the new drive-spine into its slot, the clamps snicking smoothly into place.

‘Nice,’ said Leo approvingly. ‘Everything went right, just for once.’

But Ty reflected on how often the drive-spines were failing, and how many of them would need replacing before they reached the end of their journey. They were making long and frequent jumps that would take the
Mjollnir
a lot further and faster than it had needed to go on its maiden superluminal flight. At the rate they were going, they would end up having to cannibalize the ship itself for the necessary raw materials.

Nancy was in an ebullient mood once they got back inside.

‘C’mon, Nathan, come back up to the centrifuge with us. You can’t hide away from the rest of us for ever.’

Ty stowed his helmet on a rack in the changing room and climbed out of his pressure suit, wrinkling his nose at the smell of his own stale sweat. He twisted his head around in a slow circle, hearing the crunch of tired muscles as he locked his hands together behind his head and stretched a little.

‘Maybe,’ he replied. But Nancy understood that
maybe
within the context of their developing relationship really meant
definitely.

Ty glanced at Olivarri, who was pretending not to listen. He had no idea what the other man might report to Corso, though perhaps it was better to play safe. ‘But not this time,’ he added, for Olivarri’s sake. ‘Maybe next time.’

‘What next
time?’ Nancy jeered, smacking him in the chest with a glove she had removed before tossing it into a bin below the helmet rack. She was grinning, but Ty recognized the uncertainty in her smile.

‘Soon,’ he mouthed at her, then glanced again at Olivarri to make sure he hadn’t noticed. He would sneak up to Nancy’s quarters only when he thought he was less likely to run into anyone else.

‘Shower!’ Olivarri shouted, pushing away from them and heading towards the washing facilities. ‘I
need
a fucking shower.’

With a thin, permeable mask covering his nose and mouth, Ty groaned with pleasure as needle-thin jets of hot water washed away the tension that had gathered between his shoulders. The water shut off after two minutes, and was rapidly vacuumed out of the sealed shower cubicle while he leaned against its door.

He looked down at where his skin was red and chafed from wearing a pressure suit for hours at a time. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was stars scattered across the void like diamond dust.

Ty glanced down at the ring he still wore on his right hand, as the cubicle door clicked open. That encounter with the avatar back in Unity felt more and more surreal, the further the
Mjollnir
got from home, and yet the ring was always there to remind him he hadn’t just imagined it.

He grabbed a towel and pushed his way out, hastily drying himself before pulling on a set of clean clothes from the locker. How, he wondered, might he have gone about arranging that strange encounter, if he had been in the shoes of whoever was behind the avatar? What resources would he have needed?

Access to explosives, for a start. Ty brushed his fingers through his damp hair as he thought. Explosives wouldn’t be too hard to get hold of, for someone determined enough. His time with Peralta had taught him how cheap fabricators could be hacked to mix the right chemical compounds. Unmanned taxis were equally notorious for being easy to hack. The imaging equipment the agent had used to speak with him was expensive, but standard; all that was necessary was to pay someone to install it in an empty office, no questions asked. One man could do it. In fact, given modern tach-net comms technology, one man could organize it all and not even have to be on the same planet.

Ty paused, his eye catching the glint of the ring. The avatar/agent had threatened to expose him if he didn’t take the ring, but in reality he had already been exposed. For a start, Marcus Weil had recognized him, and he hadn’t been quiet about it. Quite possibly Martinez and the other members of the frigate’s crew were the only ones who did not know his true identity. All in all, it made a mockery of the avatar’s threat.

Filled with a sudden decisiveness, Ty grasped the ring and started to pull it off. He would fling it into the void the next time he was outside the ship.

He tugged it as far as his knuckle and then froze, gripped by a sudden conviction that something terrible would happen if he took the ring off. He just stood there, bewildered by his own sudden reluctance.

‘Hey.’

Ty spun around, his heart in his throat. It was Olivarri, and he had been so sure he was alone.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Olivarri. ‘You were standing there staring into space like you’d seen your own ghost.’

‘I’m fine. I was just . . .’ Ty reached up and realized with some confusion that his hair was now bone-dry. How long had he stood motionless? ‘I must be more exhausted than I thought,’ he stammered.

‘Yeah, I guess.’ Olivarri nodded warily. ‘Takes it out of all of us. Some of us haven’t clocked this much time doing EVA in more than ten years.’

Ty realized all he wanted to do was get out of there. ‘I guess so,’ he replied, and stepped past the other man.

‘Wait.’

Ty turned back in irritation.

‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ said Olivarri.

He stepped over to open a locker, withdrawing a slim black box. He placed this on a shelf under a mirror, then touched a hidden switch on top. A single orange light on one side blinked into life.

Ty stared at the device in confusion. ‘What is that?’

‘It’s a jamming device. I’m just making sure our conversation stays private, in case anyone’s listening in.’

Ty looked around. ‘What exactly is it you want, Leo?’

‘You’re going to help me make sure the Mos Hadroch gets into the right hands, Mr Whitecloud.’

Ty stared back at him. ‘Who exactly are you?’

Olivarri spoke low and fast. ‘I work for the Legislate, Ty. I can make sure you’re safe when you get back to the Consortium. Nobody will ever find you, and that’s more than Senator Corso could ever guarantee. As far as anyone’s concerned, you’ll disappear. If you cooperate, we’ll give you a whole new life, and you’ll never have to worry about anyone tracking you down again. All you have to do is agree to help me.’

‘So . . . you’re, what? A spy?’

‘I work for the Consortium Security Services. I was meant to bring you into custody along with the Mos Hadroch. Then the Senator decided to take the frigate by force and, by the time I learned about it, it was too late to come up with an alternative plan.’

Ty shook his head. ‘Just what is it you want from me?’

‘Nothing just yet,’ Olivarri replied. ‘Right now I’m just establishing contact. We wanted the artefact where we could run our own tests but, by the looks of it, Merrick and Corso have access to information we don’t. For the moment, we’re going to let them run things the way they want to.’

Ty stared back at him. ‘Then what the hell do you need
me
for?’

‘We’re concerned about what happens to the artefact
after
it’s been implemented. It’s a powerful weapon that could conceivably be used to shut down the Tierra cache once the
Mjollnir
returns to the Consortium – or any other cache, for that matter. That makes it too valuable to allow it to remain in anyone else’s hands.’