Stealing Light

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Fine.’

‘Lucas,’ she whispered, ‘I mean it.’

It was obvious he didn’t believe her.

‘OK,’ she replied wearily. ‘So you think this thing does date from the same time as the Magellanic Novae?’

Corso’s expression became wary. ‘Looks that way.’

‘If you’re seriously suggesting this thing came all the way from a neighbouring galaxy, it would have taken centuries to get here, transluminal drive or not.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s another reason I more or less discounted it at first. Why come all this way at all? But when I saw…’ He glanced at her and sighed again.

‘Look, there’s no longer any question what direction it came from. The real question is, how far did it come?’

‘But why come all that way in the first place?’ she echoed. ‘What would make them want to… oh.’

‘Exactly. If they were ru

‘Like a lot of stars blowing up?’ she said.

He moved back round in front of her and shrugged, apparently satisfied with the minute adjustments he had just made. ‘Until I find out more, it’s still only speculation.’ He stepped back.

‘Are they going to let either of us live once we’ve done our jobs?’ she asked. ‘Do you really want a man like Arbenz to get his hands on a working transluminal drive? What makes you think the Shoal won’t just raze your people entirely from the surface of Redstone once they know what you’ve done?’

‘There’s a dead man’s handle built into the chair,’ he explained, ignoring her questions. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘If anything unexpected happens, take your fingers off it, and it breaks the co

‘Just supposing for a second your failsafe decides not to work and you can’t prevent me suddenly assuming full control of this vessel. What will you do to stop me?’

‘Answer one, either the Agartha or the Hyperion would shoot you down before you got up sufficient power, and that’s assuming you can somehow blast your way through a couple of kilometres of ice we’ve still barely managed to scratch the surface of. Two’-he flashed her a sardonic grin-‘nobody, including yourself, actually knows how to operate a transluminal drive.’

‘We have to talk, Corso.’ It didn’t take much effort to inject the right degree of urgency into her words. ‘I don’t know what happened to Josef Marados. I swear I had nothing to do with that. Whatever Arbenz has been saying to you, he’s not intending to let either of us live.’

‘I already told you, I don’t have any choice in the matter. So you’re telling me Arbenz is lying when he claims someone’s been altering the shipboard records to cover your tracks?’

Dakota couldn’t find a reply that didn’t sound thoroughly incriminating.

‘Fine.’

She saw Corso’s expression change as his eyes flicked towards the entrance. Dakota glanced over and saw Kieran had stepped inside.

‘All right,’ said Corso, suddenly all business. ‘First we need to run some calibrations.’

The chair’s petals folded in over Dakota, entombing her and blanking out her senses, so that the only information she received would come directly through her Ghost circuits.

‘I’m activating the co

‘I’m fine.’

In truth, part of her was excited by what she might now find.

She sensed the co

… knowledge rushed in towards her in a great tide, a vast, near-indistinguishable mass out of which only a few clear details could be barely discerned. As if from a great distance she felt her fingers trembling as they gripped the dead man’s handle.

Sense-impressions slammed through Dakota’s cerebrum, a howling maelstrom of loss and regret. Stars tumbled past, their shape and light twisted and warped through the lens of transluminal space.

Light filled the sky above an alien shore, a million years of sunshine released in one terrible instant, transforming an ocean to steam while rocks and soil caught fire, all in one consuming wave of carnage. Then more images tumbled past her mind’s eye: other worlds, all imbued with a sense of the very ancient.

She saw creatures like nothing she could have ever imagined, dead and forgotten for longer than she could comprehend. She experienced memories of places that had fallen to dust countless aeons before. As she watched, worlds that had once been the centres of vast empires were reduced to blackened carbon corpses orbiting the burned-out shells of dead suns.

Within the confining petals of the interface chair, she struggled to breathe, her chest heaving as if she were drowning.

Dakota struggled to absorb the tidal wave of information being thrust upon her. Mercifully the myriad impressions began to fade, and the seeping omniscient light of the derelict surrounding her crawled back under her eyelids. The petals of the interface chair had folded down and Corso was leaning in over her, pulling the neural cap away from her skull.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Corso, letting out a shaky breath as he moved out of Dakota’s way. ‘I’d call that a resounding success. Judging by the measurements, you were in full neural lock with the derelict.’

‘I’m OK,’ she mumbled.

‘I don’t know what it was hitting you with, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in half-measures.’

Dakota glanced over Corso’s shoulder and saw Kieran watching her carefully. She decided not to reveal too much about just what she’d experienced. ‘I’m fine. I just couldn’t make much sense out of anything.’

‘What happened?’ Kieran asked Corso, as Dakota slowly lifted herself out of the chair.

‘Calibration,’ Corso replied. ‘It means the derelict accepts her input.’

‘But she was only in there for a second or two.’

Corso shrugged. ‘That’s all it takes.’

‘So she can fly the ship now?’

‘No, not straight away. But in the next few days, hopefully, yes.’

‘Let’s say “definitely”,’ Kieran replied tersely.