Stealing Light

‘And is it really worth it?’ Dakota asked, keeping her eye on Corso who was, after all, a Freeholder like the others. ‘Working with people like that, I mean?’

‘Just remember you’re on their territory here, and we all know why a lot of them don’t trust machine-heads.’

Dakota laughed incredulously. ‘Then why hire me?’

‘If we don’t secure our tender, we don’t have the option of returning home,’ Corso explained. ‘Losing the new colony would be more than our lives are worth. That kind of thing tends to make a man like Udo edgy.’

Dakota looked to both of them, one after the other. ‘Let’s get this straight. If he tries something like that again, I’ll kill him. Got that?’

Gardner’s expression was weary as he moved towards the exit. ‘Then you’d better watch yourself carefully,’ he replied. ‘Do your job, and try and keep the surprises to a minimum. For the sake of my health, too, not just yours.’

Dakota stared at the exit for several seconds after Gardner had gone. To her a

‘What’s so fu

‘Nothing, really. I just have a habit of getting into fights I can’t win.’

She found herself at a momentary loss of what else to say or do before anger took over. ‘How am I supposed to do anything if I have to constantly worry about being attacked by you people? Give me a reason why I should even stick around after what just happened!’

Corso eyed her thoughtfully and shrugged. ‘So why are you sticking around?’

Dakota struggled to find an answer and instead felt an intense wave of embarrassment wash over her. She stepped over to Corso and offered him a hand. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

Corso took the proffered hand and stood up laboriously, wincing as he pressed several fingers to his belly. ‘Forget it,’ he replied. ‘Udo’s a moron. As far as I’m concerned, he shouldn’t even be on this ship.’

‘So…’ she shrugged, ‘why did you help me?’

Corso shot her a curious glance. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

She gave him a bewildered look. ‘You’re on the same side as them.’

‘You think we’re allies?’ Corso laughed. ‘Anything but. These people are my enemies.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You couldn’t have known,’ Corso replied, making to leave the bridge.

‘Wait.’ She put out a hand and stopped him. ‘Should you even have told me that?’

He looked back at her. ‘You mean, will it get me into trouble? Maybe. But I can’t do my job for them if they cut out my tongue.’

She gripped his arm hard. ‘Look, maybe you could tell me some things…’

Corso’s grin lacked sympathy. ‘Just do your job, Mala. Stay out of the way of the two Mansells. They’re killers.’

He made for the exit.

‘Udo said something, just before you walked in on us,’ Dakota called after him in desperation. ‘That if I only knew. Like there was something I haven’t been told about this expedition.’

Corso turned, his face as unrevealing as a mask. ‘Then he was speaking out of turn.’

He exited the bridge and Dakota stood there in silence for several minutes, filled with an unpleasantly familiar sense of foreboding.

Corso found his way partly along a corridor before stopping and leaning his back against a wall with a groan. His whole body hurt.

It was bad enough he was trapped on the Hyperion with men like Senator Arbenz and Kieran Mansell. Now he’d managed to make a deadly enemy of Udo as well. Perhaps I’ve just got a suicidal streak. Well, at least that would explain some things.

People back home were depending on him to do whatever it took, within the bounds of honour, to save them from a very unpleasant fate. Getting into a fight with Udo wasn’t helping them any. He’d acted without thinking…

Face it, you’d have intervened anyway.

He pushed himself away from the wall with a groan, and stared bleakly up and down the corridor. More than any other time since they’d left Redstone, he wanted to be back home.

Every day that passed made it clearer to him just how much Udo was a liability. Only now, he’d as good as told Oorthaus they’d hired her for a job other than the one they’d told her about. And that on top of threatening to kill her. That just made it even more likely she’d try and disappear once they got to the coreship. And then… well, then they’d either have to find another machine-head stupid or desperate enough to accept their terms, or try and figure out some other way of salvaging the Magi derelict when the time came.

And Corso had already learnt enough about the derelict to be certain their chances of salvaging it without Mala were close to nothing.

Still shaking, Dakota found her way back to her quarters, where she dimmed the lights and let her Ghost start to calm and soothe her with a steady trickle of empathogens into her cerebral tissues. Then she slept for a little while, curled up in her cot like a child, lost in the warm ocean tides of her back brain.

After a little while, the Piri Reis came to her, a soft, comforting presence in her thoughts.

‹Dakota, I have made progress in breaking some of the more difficult encryptions used within the shipboard data stacks. I can now make more information available to you concerning the background of the other passengers. However, please note this information is by necessity incomplete due to the nature of the encryptions

Good enough for me, Dakota replied silently.

Fresh knowledge started thudding into her forebrain, in sufficient quantity to overwhelm her Ghost and leave her momentarily disoriented.

According to what Piri had discovered, Lucas Corso was some kind of historian. A ‘xeno-data archaeologist’, to be precise, though she wasn’t at all sure what that was…

Her Ghost obligingly filled her in: xeno-data archaeologists attempted to glean understanding of Shoal super-science, usually by remote analysis. It was often, by necessity, an extremely covert science. In particular, Corso picked apart pieces of programming languages used by the Shoal.

Which sounded dull enough, but Dakota couldn’t begin to imagine what it had to do with exploring a new solar system. Yet she was sure that contained somewhere in this nugget of information lay a clue to what Udo had almost let slip earlier.