Empire of Light (4 page)

The Tierra system had briefly been home to a Uchidan colony before the Shoal Hegemony had reclaimed it without explanation. The uprooted colonists had been evacuated to a new home on Redstone, an ill-fated decision that left the Uchidans in a state of near-permanent war with the Freehold colony already long established there.

Much more recently, it had been discovered that the Shoal had been actively suppressing knowledge of the existence of these caches for a very, very long time. When they’d discovered this particular cache orbiting out in the very farthest reaches of the Tierra system, the Shoal had reneged on their existing contracts with the Uchidans.

But now the Shoal themselves were gone, and the cache had been quickly rediscovered, and subsequently placed under the control of the Peacekeeper Authority. Corso had been locked in a political battle with the Consortium Legislate ever since, desperate for the resources and personnel needed to exploit the cache, but forced to make more and more concessions in order to get them.

‘All the latest research is right here on this data ring,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘It can take up to a couple of weeks to produce a single superluminal drive, and as soon as one is finished half a dozen different colonial governments, with their own agendas, start threatening embargoes and worse if we don’t give it to them. At the moment most of the drives are meant to go into ships intended for relief operations throughout the Consortium, but we’ve got no guarantees that’s what they’ll get used for. That and about a hundred other reasons are why there are so many delays, and why Eugenia doesn’t have its drive yet. And that’s before we even get to considering the increasing rate of neural burnout in our machine-head pilots. We’ve had to retire nearly a third of our longest-serving navigators in the past six months.’

‘“Neural burnout”? Is that what they’re calling it now?’

‘That and the bends, but the neurologists prefer not to call it that. It’s primarily affecting the ones who’ve been piloting Magi ships the longest.’

‘Like yourself.’

‘So far I’ve been fine, but it might only be a matter of time.’

‘And we still don’t know what’s causing this?’

‘Nope.’

Corso leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling wearier despite the pills. ‘In other words, we’re even more fucked than we already were.’

Lamoureaux spread his hands. ‘Look . . . I don’t want to be the one to have to say this, but if things keep on the way they are, we’re going to wind up losing navigators faster than we can replace them. We might then be forced to give the Legislate at least some of what it wants.’

‘Specifically?’

‘Relaxing the rules governing the recruitment of new navigators. Allow the Legislate, and the governments it represents, to share the responsibility for finding and training them.’

‘Which would leave the Peacekeeper Authority without any purpose. Or authority.’

Lamoureaux’s expression was carefully non-committal.

‘Yugo,’ Corso asked, ‘your thoughts?’

‘If I can speak candidly?’

Corso nodded.

‘I think Ted’s right. If we don’t make major concessions now, the Legislate might claim we’re being unreasonable and merely blocking them. That might be just enough of an excuse for them to try and make a grab for the Tierra cache. The Allocation Treaty means a certain proportion of finished drives go to them, so if they then decided to carry out a military action against us, they’d have the means and resources to do it.’

‘Not to mention,’ Lamoureaux added, ‘a lot of ships are being retro-fitted to make it harder for them to be remotely grabbed by machine-heads. That means we might not be able to stop them, even with the help of the Magi ships. Unless we threaten to blow up their suns.’

‘Not even remotely funny,’ Corso muttered. Clearly he was going to have to intervene directly over the business of Eugenia’s drive. ‘Whatever else it is you came here to tell me, I really hope it’s good news.’

‘We received a transmission from Dakota Merrick.’

Corso tried not to look too startled. ‘It’s been, what, more than a year? I was beginning to . . .’
To wonder if she was even still alive,
he almost said.

‘She’s rendezvoused with the Maker,’ Lamoureaux continued. ‘We received a targeted burst from her several hours ago. According to what she sent us, the Maker is really a swarm of space-going machines, quite vast in number. The evidence points to a single, unified intelligence, even though its individual components are apparently spread out across a number of light-years.’

Lamoureaux reached out to the imager once more, and the Tierra cache was replaced by something that looked more like a metal sculpture created by a psychotic than it suggested a space-going vessel.

There’s something evil-looking about it,
Corso thought, even though he knew it was pointless to attribute human qualities to something so very clearly alien.

‘The swarm possessed data relating to something called the “Mos Hadroch”, which it apparently regards as a serious threat,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘According to the Magi’s own records, it’s some kind of weapon of phenomenal power, but – until now – there was never any evidence that it even existed.’

Corso stared at the image of the swarm-component. ‘And this means it does?’

‘Dakota came up against a blank wall, and asked us to see if we could find any correlation with anything known to us. Imagine our surprise when we did. Now, look at this.’

The swarm-component was replaced by an image of a lumpy-looking asteroid. ‘This is an Atn clade-world,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘You can find them out on the edge of many systems in the Consortium.’

‘I know something about them,’ observed Corso. ‘I studied some of their machine-languages. They travel everywhere at sublight speeds.’

‘And they usually stick to the very remotest part of a system. If Dakota’s findings are anything to go by, the depths of interstellar space are even more densely infested with them than we thought.’

An image of an Atn now appeared next to the hollowed-out asteroid. A large, rectangular metal body, covered in a curious alien calligraphy, sat on top of four stumpy legs. At the end of each leg, thick, splayed metal claws gripped the ground, while a mass of mechanical manipulators extended from a slot just below the brick-shaped head.

‘Since they can visit parts of the galaxy we ourselves couldn’t until recently, there was always the chance we might learn something from them,’ Lamoureaux continued. ‘Which is why we’ve been studying them carefully ever since we came into contact with them.’

Corso nodded. ‘And?’

‘Imagine our surprise when we stumbled across references to a “Mos Hadroch” in some research papers written just a couple of decades ago by a specialist who’s still around. The term crops up in relation to one specific Atn clade called “Eclipse-over-Moon”.’

‘So what do we know about them?’

‘Practically nothing, and the term shows up only once, and in an oblique reference at that. But the man who actually wrote the papers knows more about this particular clade-family than anyone else alive.’

Corso nodded. ‘Then we need to track him down.’

There was a look on Lamoureaux’s face as if he was trying to make up his mind whether or not to tell Corso something. ‘Already on it, and . . . I’d like your permission to get him to Ocean’s Deep as soon as possible.’

‘Granted. Who is he?’

‘His name is Ty Whitecloud, Senator.’

Corso sat stock-still for a moment, then stood up carefully. ‘No,’ he said, very simply, and turned towards the door.

‘Senator, there isn’t anyone else who knows as much about the Atn as he does.’

‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me the first time, Ted. I said no. There are other people who could—’

‘With the greatest respect, Senator, but there aren’t,’ said Stankovic. ‘It’s a pretty rarefied field.’

‘I know a little about Atn machine-languages, Yugo. I’ve even read one or two of Whitecloud’s papers. But there are others we could try.’ He thought for a moment. Anton Laroque and Sophie Sprau, for a start. They’re leaders in the field.’

Lamoureaux shook his head. ‘We checked them out already. Laroque was in Night’s End when it was destroyed, and Sprau’s extremely elderly and on life-support back on Earth. She isn’t expected to survive more than another couple of weeks. That leaves only Whitecloud.’

‘He’s a war criminal,’ Corso barked.

‘Sir?’ asked Stankovic, looking puzzled.

Stankovic was from Derinkuyu, Corso remembered then, a long way from Redstone. ‘Whitecloud is a Uchidan,’ Corso explained. ‘Or at least he worked for them. One of the bright lights of their scientific community at one time. Do you remember the Port Gabriel incident?’

Stankovic’s eyes slid to one side as he strove to recall buried memories of media reports from years before. ‘In the general details only.’

‘The Uchidans found a way to control the minds of machine-heads sent to Redstone as part of a Consortium peacekeeping force. Uchidan skull implants aren’t, after all, that fundamentally different from those of machine-heads. They identified a flaw in the machine-head architecture and exploited it. The result was a massacre that killed a huge number of non-combatants.’

‘And Whitecloud was implicated?’

‘He was,’ said Lamoureaux, cutting in, ‘but he was a minor figure in the research project, not at all involved in the actual implementation. It’s important to make that distinction.’

‘That doesn’t make him any less respon—’ Corso snapped his fingers. ‘I remember now. Whitecloud escaped from custody, years ago. And now you know where he is?’

Lamoureaux nodded. ‘Legislate agents tracked him down in Ascension a couple of weeks back and he’s being held in a barracks prison there. Turns out he’d been hiding under an assumed identity for years. It’s possible we could spring him, but we’d have to move fast.’

Corso regarded him with a pained expression. ‘Ted . . . if it came out that we were employing
war criminals,
we’d be kissing any chance of concord with the Legislate goodbye for ever.’

‘Well, that gives us a serious problem, Senator,’ Lamoureaux replied, ‘because if Dakota’s on to something, we’re going to need Whitecloud very, very badly.’

Corso glanced at the door and fantasized for a moment about just walking out of there and having nothing to do with what Lamoureaux was suggesting. And yet, at the same time, he sensed – not for the first time – the inevitability of having to compromise what he had once considered the immutable beliefs and values he had long held dear. After the last couple of years, he was almost getting used to it.

He sighed and sat back down. ‘You’re a machine-head yourself, Ted. How can you even contemplate this?’

‘Because sometimes you just have to live with the cards life deals you, Senator. I have good friends who would never talk to me again if they had any idea what I’m suggesting here. If there was another way, believe me, I’d take it. But Whitecloud was far from the worst of them.’

‘And that’s in your best professional judgement?’

‘It is, but we need to move fast on this. Most of the Emissary forces are still kiloparsecs away, but advance scouts have been observed engaging with Shoal fleets a lot closer to home. I’d like to go to Ascension and take charge of this myself, with your permission.’

‘Alright, fine, if that’s what it takes,’ Corso replied, a void seeming to form deep inside his chest. ‘Tell Willis he’s to rendezvous with you there as well. Olivarri can take care of things at Ocean’s Deep for now. You understand,’ he added, ‘that if any word of this gets out . . .’

‘It won’t.’

Lamoureaux left a few moments later, and Corso noticed the fusion globes outside were beginning to dim in preparation for evening, the ghostly band of the Milky Way gradually becoming visible.

Somewhere out there, entire star systems were being destroyed all along the frontiers of the Long War, a vast region encompassing the outer rim of the Orion Arm. There were reports of fleets so vast they were almost beyond comprehension, and these made the idea that Dakota or anyone could possibly affect them seem hopelessly deluded. But they had to try.

‘If this doesn’t work,’ Corso said, so quietly that Stankovic had to strain to hear him, ‘then the only thing left to do is save what we can.’

‘Senator?’

Corso stared out beyond the fading fusion globes, picturing the light spreading out from distant novae like a fiery cancer. ‘If we don’t find a way out of this mess, we’re going to have to dispatch ships, as far away as we can, and found new colonies in some other part of the galaxy where the war can’t reach them. At least that way we might save some.’

He stood and moved towards the door. ‘Arrange for a priority message back to Dakota. Let Ted know about it, too. Tell her what we’ve found out and make sure she’s kept up to date whenever something new comes up.’

Lamoureaux hesitated. ‘What about Whitecloud? Do we mention him?’

‘Dakota was at Port Gabriel during the massacres. I think we’d better not mention him at all, don’t you?’

Chapter Four

Next time, the interrogators were different.

The first one to enter Ty’s cell was balding and middle-aged, with loose wisps of hair curling around his ears. A younger man closed the door behind him, his own head carefully shaved. The older one had the look of a civil servant, and wore a sombre-looking suit with a high collar. His younger companion was dressed more casually.

‘My name is Rex Kosac,’ the older man explained, as Ty lifted himself up from the narrow plastic shelf that served as his bed, ‘and my colleague here is Horace Bleys.’

Ty gazed at them warily, trying to adjust the thin paper uniform he’d been given to wear. ‘You’re not part of the staff here, are you?’

Bleys glanced around the tiny cell and wrinkled his nose, perhaps becoming aware of the perpetual scent of detergent and urine that clung to every surface. His flattened nose, thick, muscled hands and general air of barely suppressed violence suggested he was Kosac’s bodyguard.

‘On the contrary, Mr Whitecloud, I administrate this facility,’ Kosac replied.

Ty sat up straighter. ‘When they brought me here, they said I would be formally arraigned within a couple of days.’

Kosac shook his head sadly. ‘That’s not why I’m here, Mr White-cloud. I just wanted the chance to meet you before . . .’ he glanced at Bleys with a smile, as if he’d caught himself on the verge of saying something he shouldn’t. ‘Well, you’re our most famous resident, as a matter of fact.’

A helicopter passed over the prison, the sound of its blades dopplering as it descended towards a nearby landing pad. The muffled sounds of men shouting and trucks pulling up outside continued unabated day and night.

‘Would you like to know how we found you so quickly?’ asked Kosac, his grin increasingly feral.

Ty cleared his throat, his mouth suddenly dry and his tongue feeling heavy. ‘I assumed it was the blood sample.’

Kosac frowned. ‘Blood sample?’

‘A doctor took it from me at a clinic. I assumed you were running automatic gene-profiling and matched it to a sample that was taken from me before I was due to be handed over by the Uchidans.’

Enlightenment crossed Kosac’s face. ‘Ah! I see. No, on the contrary, we picked up a friend of yours a couple of months back. Ilsa Padel – you know her?’

Ty nodded, a terrible feeling of inevitability beginning to overcome him.

‘She tried to exit the coreship along with a group of refugees. She almost got past us before we figured out who she was. She was
extremely
helpful when it came to identifying key members of General Peralta’s senior staff in return for certain concessions. Even if we didn’t have the blood sample, Mr Whitecloud, it was still only a matter of time. And hiding right there in the clinic! Well,’ – Kosac shook his head as if sorrowful, ‘that was always going to make it easy for us, wasn’t it?’

Ty slumped back against the wall. ‘I see.’

Ilsa.
Few others could have had the opportunity to betray him so thoroughly. Apart from her, only Peralta had been aware of his true identity. Ty felt a tide of bitter melancholy well up as he remembered all the times he had searched for her, unaware she had already bartered him for a more comfortable cell or a shorter sentence.

His first sight of the barracks had been at dawn. The block-shaped prison building was tucked into one corner of a large fenced compound belonging to the permanent Consortium military presence stationed in the coreship. Rover-units with heavy armaments mounted on their backs surrounded it, while supply trucks and transports constantly arrived or departed. The corridors within teemed with black-suited troopers, their faces more often than not hidden behind visors.

His first night in this cell had convinced him that he would not survive to see the morning. The single window above the toilet bowl looked out over a courtyard surrounded by a high concrete wall. An automated gun-tower equipped with IR and motion sensors stood on a skeletal tripod in one corner of the courtyard, while most of the rest of it was stacked with pallets containing emergency supplies, the spaces in between forming narrow corridors.

Ty had watched as guards dragged three men in rags past this maze of pallets and towards the courtyard’s rear wall. One of the troopers raised a pistol to the back of the head of each in quick succession, dispatching them with quick and brutal efficiency. The pistol emitted a muted bass thump with each shot that Ty felt more than he heard.

He had soon collapsed on to the plastic shelf and spent the rest of the night waiting for his own turn to come. He could imagine the cold biting wind on his face, the chafing of the plastic ties around his wrists, and his last sight of those cracked grey concrete walls before a single shot took out the back of his skull. Instead he woke to another day, and then another after that. But every night the same drama was repeated: one or more figures would be marched out to the rear of the courtyard and executed. Yet nobody ever came for him.

Not until now.

Kosac stepped over to the window and peered out. ‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘how did you wind up with the Uchidans? I believe you grew up in the Freehold.’

‘I grew up on a farm, Mr Kosac. My father was murdered on the orders of a corrupt senator, and I had to stand and watch as an entire agricultural facility and several thousand acres of land that should have been my inheritance were stolen from my family.’ He shrugged. ‘After that, switching sides was easy.’

‘I see.’ Kosac stepped away from the window. ‘You trained originally in biotechnology, but switched careers. Why?’

‘After I arrived in the Uchidan Territories, I developed an interest in the Atn. They’re a form of extreme biotech, after all, engineered rather than evolved, so it wasn’t really that much of a career change. I obtained a Consortium-funded research grant and made a name for myself studying them. My work took me all across human-occupied space, and I spent several years far from home. But when the war with the Freehold became intractable, I found myself conscripted into Territorial Research and Defence when I finally returned.’

‘And so you did your duty, because of your faith in God?’

Ty regarded him with a weary look. ‘Uchidanism has nothing to do with faith, Mr Kosac. It has much more to do with logical certainties and inescapable mathematical truths.’

‘Really,’ said Kosac, clearly unimpressed. ‘Perhaps you could elaborate for me.’

‘I’d rather not.’

Kosac nodded briefly at his companion. Bleys stepped forward and grabbed Ty’s hair, then slammed the back of his head against the wall behind the shelf he sat on. Ty groaned and slithered on to the floor, tasting blood where he’d bitten his tongue.

‘Humour me,’ said Kosac.

The two men waited while Ty pulled himself back up on to the shelf. He dribbled blood and Bleys handed him a handkerchief. Ty took it, pressing it to his mouth until he was ready to continue.

‘Uchidanism is . . . is based on objective observation and statistical probability.’

‘What probabilities?’

‘That life, by its very nature, always seeks to preserve itself within a universe that has a finite span, and that the ultimate endpoint of technological development is the direct manipulation of the most fundamental laws that govern nature.’

Ty swallowed again. The words came easily, memorized long ago but still clear in his mind. ‘There are good reasons to believe we live not in the original universe but in a simulation, possibly one of many. Reality, at its most base level, is little more than an expression of various mathematical formulae; therefore, once you acknowledge these simple truths, the idea that our world could be anything other than
created
becomes ridiculous.’

‘I’m disappointed, Mr Whitecloud.’ Ty looked up at Kosac. ‘I don’t know much about Uchidanism, but I know something about personal faith. I believe we pay for what happens in this world in the next.’

Bleys had turned away slightly, reaching up to touch the side of his head. Ty noticed for the first time the man wore a comms bead in one earlobe.

Ty looked back at Kosac. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

‘Because I’m probably the last person you’ll ever speak to, and I wanted to know what kind of man does the things you’ve done.’

Ice gripped Ty’s heart. ‘I’m to be arraigned. Taken off the coreship to be tried.’

Kosac smiled sadly. ‘In a less imperfect world, perhaps.’

‘Sir?’ said Bleys, and Kosac turned to him. ‘We got a report that the Authority’s people are on their way here. I think we should hurry.’

The ice spread long frozen fingers deep into Ty’s bowels. ‘I’m too valuable for you to just shoot,’ he croaked.

‘No, Mr Whitecloud, you’re not going to have a chance to escape a second time.’

Ty stared backwards and forwards between the two men. ‘Escape?’

A moment later two armed and visored guards appeared at the cell door, and Ty knew the worst was yet to come.

The two guards entered the cell and dragged Ty out into the corridor, where one slammed a shock-stick into the back of one knee. He collapsed on to all fours. A second blow sent him sprawling on his belly.

A moment later his arms were twisted painfully behind his back, and he felt the plastic ties being clipped into place around his wrists. He was pulled upright a moment later and pushed towards a service elevator at the far end of the corridor. His legs gave way under him, but the guards dragged him along between them, regardless.

They pushed him inside the elevator and forced him to his knees, then hauled him back out, once they had arrived at the ground floor. Ty managed to find his feet, and was shoved towards a steel door at the far end of the corridor, a thin but freezing trickle of cold air seeping past its frame and carrying with it the scent of oiled metal and decay. One of the guards stepped forward and unlocked the door, revealing stacked pallets as it swung open.

Ty clenched his teeth at the blast of frozen air and tried to hunch up, his paper uniform providing him with so little protection that he might as well have been naked.

He realized he was weeping as they dragged and shoved him out into the courtyard. Everything seemed to get a little farther away, as if he were experiencing the world at one remove, reduced to being a passenger within his own skull.

They pulled him towards the wall at the rear of the courtyard. He was close enough now that he could make out the dark stains where the wall met the ground. For the first time, he saw a door set into the wall over to his right, where it had been hidden from his view in the cell by a pile of crates. It stood open, a military transport parked on the street outside. A guard stood by the door, his visor pushed up, arguing with two men who looked too healthy and well fed to come from Ascension.

One had a thick woollen hat pulled down over his stubbled skull, but Ty still saw the irregular grooves and bumps disfiguring his cranium, which marked him out as a machine-head. He was tall and gangly, with a worried expression, whereas his companion was small but wiry and muscular-looking. The second one’s gaze locked on to Ty the instant he came into view.

‘That’s him,’ Ty heard him say, over the unending hubbub of activity. The machine-head glanced first at his companion, then at Ty. Then they both pushed past the guard they’d been talking to and headed straight for him.

‘Hey!’ the guard shouted, dropping his rifle from his shoulder and following them. ‘You can’t—’

‘The fuck?’ said the machine-head’s companion, stopping for a moment to glare back at the guard. ‘What was it about our authorization you
didn’t
understand?’

Ty’s own guards had halted at the commotion, but then they seemed to come to some mutual, unspoken decision and resumed pushing him towards the wall.

‘Hey, stop right there!’ shouted the small, muscled man. ‘Don’t take another single fucking step. Do you understand?’

‘We have orders,’ one of Ty’s guards grated. ‘If you’ve got a problem with it, take it up with Director Kosac’

‘Oh, we will,’ said the other man, coming closer. ‘You,’ he said, turning back to the guard who’d tried to stop them. ‘Tell them who I am.’

‘Commander Willis, sir,’ the guard replied with clear reluctance. ‘Head of Ocean’s Deep security.’

‘That makes me one of the people responsible for the entire relief operation out here. And that,’ he continued, coming up closer to one of Ty’s would-be executioners, ‘means you do
exactly
what I say. So here’s the deal,’ he continued, his voice softening now into an agreeable we’re-all-friends-here tone of conciliation. ‘We want this man for questioning.’ He glanced briefly at Ty. ‘Your name is Ty Whitecloud, isn’t it?’

Ty managed to nod.

‘Those aren’t our orders, sir,’ one of Ty’s guards said. ‘Our instruction is immediate execution.’

‘Who told you that? Director Kosac?’

Ty glanced to one side, just in time to see the guard nod.

‘Well, Director Kosac is about to get a spiked boot up his ass that’s going to bounce him all the way out of Ascension and into a job someplace that’s going to make his time here look like a fucking holiday.’ Willis smiled broadly. ‘And if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, and I mean
to the fucking letter,
I’ll make sure you’re there to keep him company. Now,’ he added, gesturing to Ty, ‘since you’ve already seen our credentials, how about you do precisely what we tell you to, before you make things worse than they already are?’

Ty felt the grip on his shoulders tighten for a few seconds, then relax.

‘Sir,’ said one of his guards, before letting go of him altogether.

‘This way,’ said Willis, taking Ty’s elbow and leading him towards the waiting vehicle.

Ty followed in a daze, as the machine-head moved up on his other side.

‘Mr Whitecloud,’ said the machine-head, leaning down a little to speak to him, ‘My name is Ted Lamoureaux and you are a very, very lucky man. I hope you’ll be grateful enough to be as cooperative as we’re going to need you to be.’

Lamoureaux touched a panel on the side of the transport and a door slid open, warm air wafting out from within. Ty drew in the smell of oiled leather and cheap plastic, and felt tears prickling the corners of his eyes.