Stealing Light

He landed hard, the impact knocking the wind out of him. But he had managed to get a grip on the jamb of the doorway, and clung on for all his life. After a few moments he managed to pull himself up and hook an arm fully over the edge, reaching down into the corridor beyond. The gel suits looked like they’d been glued into place, an affront to his already shattered sense of gravity.

A moment later an awful, lurching weight began to pull him back into the room, and he realized Kieran was hauling himself over his body to reach the entrance.

‘Stay right where you are, Corso, and hold on tight,’ Kieran grunted.

The pain Corso felt was indescribable, and he felt his hold begi

He glanced back down into the room and saw the walls, floor and ceiling had transformed into a mass of waving spines that made him think of sea anemones. He moaned, which became a grunt of pain as Kieran pulled himself right over him before falling back out into the corridor.

For a sickening moment Corso wondered if the other man was going to leave him there. But a moment later Kieran, now standing firmly upright in the corridor, grabbed his shoulders and heaved him out.

Corso felt his own weight shift as he fell into a normal-looking corridor that, until a moment ago, his senses had insisted was a vertical shaft. He gasped from the intense pain racking in his shoulders and chest, and Kieran didn’t look much better.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Kieran gasped, ‘or we’re dead for sure.’

‘What about Lunden and-?’

‘What about them?’ Kieran snarled. ‘They’re soldiers. They know how to take care of themselves.’

Low vibrations had begun to roll along the corridor. Corso glanced hastily back into the room and saw his tools in the grip of tendril-like spines. The room now resembled the digestive organs of some sea-going invertebrate, and his stomach somersaulted at the thought of being left in there even a few seconds more…

Kieran began to head off, clumsily treading on hard-copy data with his boots. Images of crystal arrays and interface algorithms flickered and spasmed on the hard-copies as they scattered underfoot.

Moving slowly, they made their way back to the original entrance. Behind them, the vibrations transformed into a deep, guttural roar, as if some creature older than human civilization had begun stalking them through the passageways.

The derelict had finally given up its silence.

At first, it appeared to Dakota to be loudly radiating its presence to anyone or anything that cared to listen. But then it became rapidly clear that the signal was manifesting on an extremely obscure frequency not used by any of the known interstellar tachyon transceiver relays. She would never even have noticed it if her Ghost hadn’t been engaged in the process of monitoring the derelict across every conceivable transmission spectrum.

Even so, what was emerging was presumably highly encrypted, since it appeared to her Ghost as untranslatable gibberish. The resulting signal was of such low power and limited range it was hard to guess what it might be trying to communicate with.

Is there any way we can figure out what it’s saying, and who to? she asked of Piri Alpha.

‹No. However, the signal is extremely directional in nature. ›

Directional? You mean it’s deliberately aiming at something?

The ship replied by displaying maps of the Nova Arctis system. Lines stabbed out from Theona and Dymas towards one of the i

What the hell was to be found there?

Two six-man squads were scrambled from the Agartha in response to the sudden breakdown in communications with the derelict, dropping down on tails of chemical fire to Theona’s icy surface in combat pods that spilled the pressure-suited figures inside on to the ice immediately adjacent to the surface base.

By now less then twenty minutes had passed since the loss of communications with the derelict.

Should have brought more than one sub, thought Gardner, standing back and watching the rescue operation being mounted from inside the ground base. But everything had been so rushed… they’d been working hard and fast, fearful that the Shoal might already be on to them, or if not yet, at least soon. There simply hadn’t been enough time to acquire all the resources they really needed.

Gardner could happily live without Kieran Mansell -a murderous, psychotic son of a bitch, if ever there was one-but Lucas Corso was indispensable. His specialist knowledge was the key to the derelict’s secrets. Leaving him down there with only Kieran to guard him seemed the sheerest blind folly.

Now, they had to wait for the squads to cycle through and get on board the sub. Then the long journey down again-and only then would they begin to glean any idea of what had happened.

This whole operation reeked of disorganized panic.

He glanced over at Senator Arbenz: a strutting, stiff-lipped, pumped-up little man; quite a ridiculous figure if Gardner hadn’t already been aware just how dangerous he could be. A few months ago the Freehold had been a defeated people on the verge of absolute retreat, but now they operated under the delusion they were the children of destiny, forged in war (or some such chauvinistic baloney Arbenz had spouted during one of his frequent rants) and destined to conquer the stars.

If the whole thing weren’t so pathetic, Gardner would have laughed. He needed the Freehold for now… but at some point something would have to be done. Leaving the transluminal drive in the hands of the Senator and his cronies was like placing a rocket launcher in the hands of a child. It was just asking for trouble.

Laden beneath their heavy vacuum-equipped combat gear, the troops entered the base, and began trudging through the network of clanging corridors and down to the submersible waiting for them in its pool. Along with the Senator, Gardner followed them.

‘Something must have been triggered by whatever Corso fed into the derelict’s computer systems,’ Gardner muttered. ‘God knows what’s happening down there now. I said all along we didn’t have enough contingency plans in place for unexpected major setbacks.’

Arbenz merely shot him an a

‘God indeed only knows what’s happening down there, Mr Gardner, but remember God is on our side.’