Empire of Light

'I don't know. Maybe it's simply a burial chamber, and this was one of their leaders. That would explain the story of the Mos Hadroch, wouldn't it? Maybe that thing's what the Atn regarded as a king or hive-queen?'

'You're talking nonsense,' Ty snapped, ru

'I'm just telling you what I see here,' Nancy insisted, and he could tell he'd sounded too harsh. 'A dead Atn, that's it.'

Ty stood up and looked around. All he could see were smooth, unblemished rock walls, entirely devoid of glyphs, amid swirling dust. 'All the evidence points right here,' Ty reaffirmed, thinking out loud.

'All right, and maybe it's a deliberate red herring set up to misdirect anyone coming looking for the Mos Hadroch, and we fell for it.'

The same thought had already occurred to Ty, but he didn't care to admit to it.

Commander Martinez's icon blinked back into life at the bottom of Ty's visor. 'We just picked up a mass of gravity-traces located no more than three or four AUs from here,' he informed them. 'Whatever you think you have, grab it and get out, or you risk being left behind.'

Ty could feel the blood pounding in his head, and he felt suddenly sick with anxiety. He leaned forward, again shining sharp-edged light on the dead alien's carapace markings, while he studied it for long seconds.

Think, he told himself. All they had so far was a name… they had no idea what the Mos Hadroch might look like, how big it was, or how small…

A sudden sense of excitement gripped him and he pinged Nancy with a request for a secure one-on-one link, at the same moment he severed his comms link with the Mjollnir 's bridge.

Nancy accepted the link, and her voice came through a moment later. 'What the hell, Ty?' she asked. 'Why did you just cut off the ship? Martinez'll throw a fit.'

'We can't go back yet.'

Her shoulders slumped, her expression more puzzled than angry.

'Look around you,' he demanded. 'What do you see?'

'An empty passageway – and a dead alien.'

The Atn were a cyborg species, and only part organic, of course; that much was well known. Not that anyone had ever managed to prove it, but the general consensus was that their long-term memories and any other data stored in their brains could be passed from one individual to the next. That way you got creatures whose individual identities constantly shifted and changed, as they each accumulated the experiences of their brethren. What if he wondered, the Mos Hadroch was nothing more than some form of information, carefully hidden inside some dormant circuitry located somewhere inside what passed for this creature's brain?

Ty shook his head, thinking hard and fast. No, that couldn't be it. If that had been the case, they'd have done as well to hide the actual stack-discs here, too, rather than destroy them in their storage chamber.

He let out a snarl of exasperation and squatted on his haunches. 'X marks the spot,' he muttered.

'What?'

'Everything points to here,' he said, unable to contain his exasperation. 'The records I found way back when, the spiral texts we discovered here, and even this Atn.'

Nancy said nothing, simply stood there waiting, while he stared at the Atn's metal carapace. They were hardly elegant creatures: slow and ponderous, the size of a small car. There was, he suddenly thought, a lot of room in there.

He bent down again to read more closely at the creature. There was something, he was sure, wrong with its head. He put both hands under it and tried to lift it. It moved with surprising ease, as if it were nothing more than an empty casing.

He stood up again. 'It's in there,' he declared, flushed with sudden and overwhelming certainty.

'Excuse me?'

'The smashed discs, the walled-off passageway… none of it makes sense unless there's something inside the body.'

He stared at Nancy, his eyes bright, while she gazed back at him in mystified, thin-lipped silence. 'How can you be sure?'

'Frankly, I can't. There's just nowhere else it could be. Nobody's been in here since that false wall was put up, so it has to be inside that thing.'

'We don't have time to break it open,' Nancy replied decisively. 'We'd need cutting tools for that, which means we're going to have to get it back to the Mjollnir.'

Ty nodded. 'Tell Martinez we're coming out.' The Atn lay with its head pointing in the direction of the main shaft, the bulk of its massive body pushed up against the wall on one side. Deciding to move it was one thing, but managing it was another. Ty got in touch with Cesar and told him what he was pla

Ty glanced down at the image of the swarm's movements projected on the interior of his visor, and saw that some of its members were converging on the Mjollnir's location a lot sooner than he had expected.

Nancy signed off and just stood there, looking tense and angry. 'How long did Martinez give us?' he asked her.

'Thirty minutes, that's it. And then they jump without us.'

'I just talked to Cesar,' Ty explained, 'and he's got an idea he wants to try.'

'Fine. In the meantime, let's get this thing hooked up to the spiders, then haul it the hell out of here.'

Some of the spiders were equipped with additional bits of equipment, among them a powerful oxyacetylene torch and several winches that spooled out super-strong cable. While he talked with Cesar over the comms, Ty unwound the cable from one of the spiders and fixed the carabiner lock attached to it around the dead alien's neck like a noose. Nancy did the same with another, and after a few minutes' work they'd secured the body to three separate cables.

'We're going to have to set them all to maximum burn,' Nancy muttered, surveying their work. 'But at that rate they've only got fuel for thirty seconds.'

'Is that going to be enough?'

She thought for a moment. 'Maybe. I think we should set them up for two separate burns, of fifteen seconds each.'

'Why?'

'In case we don't get it moving the first time, or if something goes wrong, we'll still have a second chance. And if this works the first time, that leaves us with extra fuel.' She gave him a steady look. 'But that only gets it out into the shaft, not up to the surface, or into the launcher.'

'Cesar's moved the launcher over the shaft mouth. He's also taken a winch off one of the other spiders, and by the time we've got our friend here out into the shaft itself, he'll have lowered that cable from the launcher, and we can just winch the damn thing up to the surface.'

'Sounds like a plan,' she admitted, but her tone gave away her doubt. 'But we might be cutting this far too close, Nathan.'

'We can do this,' he insisted.

'Yeah, well, I just hope you're right.'

The spiders were soon in place, all facing towards the shaft entrance almost a hundred metres away, their cables now knotted tightly around the alien's body. As Ty got into position behind the body along with Nancy, he glanced at her and saw her lips set in a thin, hard line behind her visor, her gaze fixed on the far end of the passageway.

'Fifteen seconds, with an initial three-second delay,' he reminded her. 'Ready?'

'Ready as I'll ever be,' she muttered.

Ty braced himself, knees bent, the soles of his boots pressed hard against the scuffed stone floor, and then he initiated the first burn.

Moments later, the thrusters of all three spiders flared in unison, and Ty's visor quickly darkened in response. Seeing the winch-lines draw taut, he put his shoulder against the Atn's inert form and pushed with all his strength. His feet almost slipped out from under him and he quickly sought fresh purchase, wondering if he'd been a fool to think something like this might actually work.