Stealing Light

‹Roger that, thanks for the info.›

‹Hey Dakota, last time I saw you you looked like you stuck your head up a bear’s butt and fell asleep-›

‹Fuck you too, you lousy shit,› this followed by a braying laugh from Kirov that made her smile. ‹That was your mother’s butt.›

‹Yeah, you need to stop drinking so much, we’re taking bets down here how many bits we find by the time you hit the ground.›

The ride got yet bumpier, the craft tilting nose-up as her Ghost (or was it her? It was almost impossible now to tell the difference) implemented the re-entry procedures. The glow beyond the windscreen brightened, then darkened again as the filters compensated once more: the ship was slicing through the atmosphere at an increasingly sharp angle. Dakota pictured themselves as they might appear from the surface, burning their way across the sky in a fiery hypersonic parabola.

A few moments later heat shields slid down over the windscreen, cutting off any view of the landscape or sky beyond.

Smoke trails bled across the sky around the base of the skyhook, which rose into the blue exactly like a neverending tower. Dakota had been warned that following it with your eyes up and up to its visible vanishing point could make you dizzy. She brought her gaze back down: the advice had been sound. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed more or less on the horizon, where the building housing the lower end of the skyhook-until recently a major military target for the Uchidans-took centre stage. Distant mountains were painted white with snow; even the winters on Bellhaven couldn’t have prepared her for the arctic blast of the Redstone winds or the sheer size of the distant canopy trees, towering over the landscape stretching beyond the buildings and streets.

Severn had called for transport, and Dakota followed him on board an automated vehicle that pulled up next to them. He looked distinctly wobbly from all the chem they’d provided to help him adjust to planetary gravity.

‘Some sight,’ said Dakota, nodding towards the skyhook. Her breather mask felt heavy and uncomfortable. Worse, the relatively higher density of the atmosphere made their voices, as they emerged, sound u

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Severn replied tightly, his knuckles white as they gripped a handhold next to their seats, the ground rolling past them at about forty klicks an hour. Command control lay somewhere up ahead, in a warren of emergency bunkers the Freehold had built beneath the skyhook.

‘Problem?’ asked Dakota.

Severn nodded stiffly. ‘Too big.’

‘What is?’

‘Everything.’ He scowled at her. ‘Why’s it so cold when the atmosphere’s so dense? Shouldn’t that make it warmer?’

Dakota glanced up and saw some kind of vast bird flapping its way slowly across the sky-a one-wing, her Ghost informed her, its vast bulk supported solely by the dense atmosphere.

‘Lots of volcanoes here,’ she replied. ‘All that activity spews ash into the air, and that counterbalances the warming effect of a thick atmosphere, stopping too much heat getting to the ground. So it’s never likely to get very warm.’

Several minutes later they passed through a complex of airlocks and into the command centre itself, which looked like it had started life as a storage facility of some kind, judging by the signs still on the walls. Propaganda posters displayed cartoons of enormous muscular men carrying guns, who were standing in defiant protection of equally idealized homesteads. One such slogan read: ‘Citizenship Is Worth Fighting For’.

And these, she thought with a sour feeling in her gut, are the people we’re supposed to be helping.

The corridors were busy with Consortium staff moving about purposefully. Three separate groups of guards checked their IDs at different checkpoints. Dakota wondered if the paranoia levels normally ran so high.

Severn squinted at her. ‘Banville, he came from your world, right?’

‘Worked on the latest generation of Ghost implants, then lit out. You know the story.’

‘The twist would be if it turned out he went off of his own free will, don’t you think?’

Dakota shook her head. ‘No, that would simply make him a traitor.’

Severn laughed. ‘Guess we’re doing the right thing, then.’

‘Maybe. It’s just that…’

They both paused, as a piece of information entered their minds simultaneously via their Ghost implants. They turned to look at each other.

Severn now wore a shit-eating grin. ‘Josef Marados is in charge of our debriefing, then? Guess you’d better keep your legs closed tight.’

‘Why?’

‘Guy’s got a reputation, is all.’

Dakota held Severn’s gaze. ‘You sound jealous.’

He gave her a long look up and down, as they resumed walking. ‘He gets anywhere near you, damn right I’ll be jealous.’

Seven

En route to Sol System from Redstone, aboard Freehold frigate Hyperion

Lucas Corso moved about cautiously in his diving gear, while skirting the edges of a hydrothermal vent in the ocean floor, trying to remember that hundreds of to

He shuffled towards the edge of this ridge, noting the way the alien derelict teetered on the edge of an abyss that fell away into bottomless depths. The derelict, he thought, looked like some sculptor’s impressionistic rendition of a giant squid, with long spines curving out from a relatively smaller central body. But even that core part of the derelict loomed several storeys above his vantage point.

Some of the spines looked badly damaged, presumably by the impact of landing. Where the hull material had been torn away from their tips, a bone-like structural latticework was visible beneath.

Peering down over the side of the ridge and into the depths beyond-or as far as he could see, before the range of his lights gave out-set Corso’s stomach churning. He was clearly standing at the mouth of a deep vent that had probably been in place for several million years. And if the calculations were correct, the real derelict-as opposed to this onboard simulation-had rested by the vent for over a hundred and sixty thousand years.