Stealing Light

Despite his nervousness, and his resentment of men like Kieran Mansell and Senator Arbenz, Corso had felt a growing sense of excitement ever since he’d realized what he was being asked to do.

Several tiny robot submarines lifted themselves from a charging unit held in a rack mounted next to the airlock. These floated towards Corso, lighting his path as he drew closer to the derelict.

And it really did look like some ancient beast of the deep; it was gigantic. The curving spines rising high overhead bore a clear resemblance to the drive spines that protruded from the hulls of Shoal coreships, too much so for it to be a coincidence.

Any remaining doubts Corso had about whether the derelict was once capable of travelling faster than light finally vanished. He felt a chill rush through his bones: the implications of what he was seeing were staggering.

The robots now swarmed around him, lighting his way towards the airlock that had been welded on to the derelict’s exterior. He clambered up the ladder and stepped inside, allowing himself no pause to think about the vertiginous drop barely a hand-reach away. He waited while pumps noisily laboured to extract the freezing cold water out of the lock.

Once the airlock was fully pressurized, its i

He pulled off his suit and dropped it next to the i

‘Straight ahead,’ Kieran urged over the comms link. ‘Follow the ‘bots.’

The ‘bots were waiting at the far end of the corridor. He stepped towards them and they again scampered ahead, stopping only to look back towards him once they got a certain distance ahead, like hounds devoted to the chase.

Corso cleared his throat. ‘Those spines projecting out of the hull, they reminded me a lot of-’

‘I know what they reminded you of,’ Kieran interrupted. ‘You wouldn’t be the first to make that comparison.’

‘So do we know for certain…?’

‘Not for certain, no. For that, we’ll need to extract a lot more information from the craft’s data stacks.’

Corso sighed. ‘The reason I’m here, right?’

‘Entirely correct. I’m hoping we’ll have found proof that this derelict contains a salvageable transluminal drive before we bring Senator Arbenz himself on board.’

Corso shook his head, not quite able to believe what Mansell had just said. A transluminal drive. That meant faster-than-light travel. It was like stumbling into some ancient king’s tomb, or finding a lost city: the stuff of boyhood dreams.

He continued onwards, finally finding himself in a room with a ceiling so low he was forced to crouch.

Senator Arbenz’s face kept intruding on his thoughts. Somehow, this far, he’d managed to push that face to the back of his thoughts. The man who imprisoned his father was behind the killing of Cara, whether that happened on his direct orders or not.

And here he was, Lucas Corso, working for the very devil himself. How the hell did that happen?

‘There’s something weird about everything in here,’ said Corso tightly. ‘Everything looks too new. Is that something to do with the simulation?’

‘If you mean a fault in the projection, no. We think the ship is able to renew itself, or parts of itself, anyway. Clearly it can’t entirely fix itself, judging by the broken spines.’

A wall had been torn open to reveal a mess of alien circuitry into which human computer equipment and screens had been wired. This in turn was co

‘What about the bends?’ Corso asked. ‘We’ll be going up and down from the derelict a lot.’

‘We’re already adjusting the atmospheric pressure on board the Hyperion to match that inside the derelict,’ Kieran replied, ‘so nitrogen narcosis shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, the moon we found this derelict on is small, with low gravity. The atmospheric pressure, even under several kilometres of water and ice, is correspondingly lower.’

‘So all I need to do is wander on board the real thing, type in some commands, figure out how to fly it, and away we go. Right?’

Silence.

‘I can tell you’re holding something back from me,’ Corso spoke into the empty air. ‘And I’ll take a guess I won’t like it very much.’

‘Previous attempts to penetrate deeper into the derelict have been… turned back. We had to overcome certain automated defensive systems in order to construct the interfaces you see before you. That came at the cost of some lives. Even so, we only gained limited access to the derelict’s core systems. Finding a way to actually control the craft, to make it follow our orders -well, that’s another matter entirely.’

‘Right.’ Corso clambered laboriously into the newly installed seat and studied the displays in front of him. He noted a series of familiar-looking glyphs aligned in a row on one screen. ‘I recognize these.’

‘Outmoded Shoal protocols. I believe they haven’t been used, according to our available information, since-’

‘Since the earliest days of the Shoal Hegemony-at least according to their own records,’ Corso finished for him, feeling suddenly light-headed. He touched each glyph in turn, watching as submenus sprang into existence. ‘And here they are on a ship that might just have been constructed at some period before the Shoal say they developed transluminal technology-am I right?’

‘That’s the current conjecture.’

Corso blinked several times, a chill of excitement shooting up his spine. An ancient spacecraft capable of travelling between the stars in the blink of an eye, but not of Shoal manufacture. Obviously the Shoal had no idea of the derelict’s existence, or they would never have agreed to deliver the Hyperion to its ultimate destination.

‘You understand what this means,’ said Kieran.

‘Everything changes.’ Corso nodded, thinking along several strands at once as he studied the interfaces.

Senator Arbenz’s researchers had discovered an alien Rosetta Stone inside the least well defended of the derelict’s stacks. The craft had turned out to have dual systems that allowed communication between their own computers and those belonging to the Shoal. Studying those communication protocols-protocols in which Corso was an expert-would allow him to work out how to communicate with the derelict, and ultimately to control it.