Stealing Light

Dakota’s ship was fortunately equipped with a small cache of micro-probes, tiny automated things that could be boosted to far higher speeds than a ship like the Piri Reis or its fragile human crew could withstand. They were already most of the way toward Ikaria, getting ready to dive downwards and relay back images and data pertaining to anything they found or saw.

The battle above Theona was over almost as soon as it had begun, the Agartha firing further missiles that destroyed the remaining enemy ship. The Agartha. was already altering its course to come after the Theona derelict, which had by now left the moon’s orbit. It would inevitably pass within only a few million kilometres of the Piri Reis as it dived towards the heart of the Nova Arctis system.

Long-range detection systems showed the crackle of plasma around the derelict’s skin. The Agartha, meanwhile, was already accelerating so hard it was a wonder its crew could survive on it at all. Regardless of this, the derelict still had the clear advantage.

It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out that the derelict was powering up for a transluminal jump.

Corso was willing to bet any amount of money the alien craft’s destination was the fiery heart of Nova Arctis itself. It seemed Dakota’s Shoal AI was about to destroy an entire system, all to wipe out the evidence that the Shoal had stolen their transluminal technology from a far older civilization.

More information flashed up before him: tachyon relay signals from Newfall were being targeted at the derelict, presumably in a desperate attempt to slow, stop or divert it, using communications protocols he himself had helped develop. Whoever was behind the signals knew what they were doing. Almost certainly that meant other Freeholder scientists like himself. But whoever they were, they surely understood they were fighting for their lives.

Corso stared at the board in front of his acceleration couch, sensing the power in his hands. Using his own copy of the same protocols, he could block those transmissions from Newfall.

He felt a sensation like ice being clamped around his heart. He could do it: he could prevent his own people from finding a way inside the first derelict.

Yet he found he didn’t want to do that.

The extremists back on Redstone had been toppled. There could be no triumphant return for Arbenz, not even with the transluminal drive in hand. Only arrest and disgrace for his murderous ways.

Perhaps, then, there was still the chance the Freehold could rise back up out of obscurity and become part of the Consortium in a way they never had been before.

He carefully pulled his hands away from the board, glancing over at Dakota who lay asleep in her own couch, a remarkable feat considering the gees they were both still subject to as they blasted across a solar system.

But it wasn’t really sleep, she had informed him when her eyes had briefly fluttered open a little while back: more a kind of trance state.

Whatever was happening inside her head, or within the empty vaults of her Ghost circuits, was beyond his comprehension. To Corso that was the most frightening thing of all.

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 ru

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.