Stealing Light

‘I’m going to see an old friend. Another machine-head. If I don’t show my face at all, he’ll start wondering why I never leave the Hyperion. Given it’s owned by the Freehold,’ she continued with a shrug, ‘any machine-heads in Ascension might draw the conclusion I’m being held prisoner, don’t you think?’

She got her way.

Dakota immediately made her way straight back to the aft airlocks. The frigate had been designed with coreships in mind: a wide lip had extruded itself from the hull, below the airlock, so passengers could simply step outside and feel a fresh breeze against their skin.

It was like standing inside a roofed canyon the size of a continent. As she looked up, Dakota saw fusion globes dotting the underside of the coreship’s outer crust. A couple of dozen metres below where she stood, a floor carpeted with grassland extended all the way to the outer suburbs of the city of Ascension, a sprawling metropolis that filled half of the space allocated to humanity. But instead of solid walls separating them from the rest of the vessel’s interior, there were instead sheets of faintly flickering semi-opaque energy that were anchored beneath the ceiling’s massive supporting pillars.

She turned to see Udo step out through the airlock, accompanied by Lucas Corso.

‘I want to take a look at Ascension,’ Corso explained, on seeing Dakota’s a

Dakota cocked her head to one side, puzzled. ‘Why not?’

Corso shrugged, and she guessed he wasn’t comfortable talking about himself. ‘Too busy with my work.’

And wouldn’t I like to know just exactly what you’re doing here, Mr Data. Archaeologist.

‘Your first time anywhere other than your homeworld, and you were too busy?’

Corso flicked a glance towards Udo, who glared back at him in response. Neither of them replied.

‘I don’t have time to play tourist guide,’ Dakota snapped at Corso. ‘I have…’ Further words stalled in her throat.

Udo gave her a toothy smile. ‘People to see? Places to go?’

Fuck you. ‘What do you think I’m going to do then, run away?’

‘You could, but I can run faster.’ Udo laughed at his own bad joke. ‘What’ve you got against my brother, anyway?’ he added. ‘Seeing as you asked for me specially.’

‘How does it feel being such a shithead, Udo?’

‘It feels great, Mala.’

‘You’ve visited this particular coreship before?’ Corso asked her, clearly trying to break the current thread of conversation.

‘I’ve been in Ascension a few times in the past, yeah.’

And I’m not the only one who’s familiar with this place, she thought, shooting a glance at Udo and remembering what she’d discovered.

She spared him a thin smile.

An air taxi had been hovering in the vicinity of the Hyperion ever since it had docked. Udo beckoned it down, and made a show of getting in first and taking the front seat directly behind the dashboard unit that housed the craft’s cheaply manufactured brain. He wasn’t as subtle as Kieran, either, Dakota reflected. There was too much of a swagger in Udo Mansell.

Ascension was soon spread out below them in all its seedy blackened glory. If the view from a couple of hundred metres up was anything to judge by, it had changed little since her last visit there.

She surveyed a landscape of grey and black concrete interspersed with open areas of patchy green-fire zones from the civil war of fifty years before. In the further distance the city came to an abrupt halt against the shaped fields that kept humanity separate from other species inhabiting the coreship, but with different atmospheric and gravitational requirements.

These days, two-thirds of the city was back under Consortium control, while a few remaining warlords still claimed control over a few outlying districts. The Shoal didn’t appear to give a damn what went on inside their coreships, at least up to a certain point. Fission weapons remained a big no-no, even though there were a thousand urban myths about people somehow stumbling into otherwise forbidden alien sectors of the coreships and finding there only sterile, irradiated ruins.

Some humans lived their entire lives on board a core-ship, never seeing beyond these narrow slivers of apportioned living space. The coreship might travel the length and breadth of the galaxy, but once it left the minuscule portion of the Milky Way humanity was permitted to see, the surface ports were sealed until it returned to within Consortium space. Whatever lay beyond would therefore always remain a mystery even to its most long-term inhabitants.

‘What happened to this place?’ asked Corso in awe, peering down through the taxi’s wraparound windscreen. They were passing over occasional pockets of devastation, now half overgrown with weeds.

‘Power struggle,’ Dakota replied. ‘The Consortium won, but only just.’

‘So the Consortium is still in charge here?’

Dakota shrugged. ‘Nobody’s strictly in charge. It depends which part of the city you’re in.’

Corso looked disbelieving. ‘But someone must be in charge of keeping this place in order-the Shoal at the very least. It’s their ship, so where are they anyway?’

‘Corso, they don’t care about anything but their trade agreements.’

‘Well, then-’

‘No one is in charge here,’ Udo muttered, his voice full of distaste, ‘because no one here has the honour or strength to do something about it. This whole place is a monument to the very worst aspects of human nature.’

‘-what exactly do the Shoal get out of all this?’ Corso continued, despite Udo’s interruption. ‘With all their technology, all their advanced might-as-well-be-magic science, what do we have they could possibly want from us?’

‘That’s the eternal question, Corso,’ Dakota answered. ‘Nobody knows, and the Shoal aren’t telling. Maybe they just like being in charge, full stop.’

‘But they’re just, just… fish!’ Corso cried. ‘How in God’s name do fish come up with all this?’

Dakota shrugged again, but offered him a small smile. ‘Same answer.’

The air taxi had now dropped below the level of the tallest buildings surrounding the city centre. The rooftops of some of these buildings stretched all the way to the coreship ceiling, where they were securely anchored. Dakota noted some of the lower structures still retained Consortium gun posts on their rooftops, their weapons aimed permanently towards the rebel districts beyond. The momentary brush of their security systems against her implants came to her like a faint mental tickle.