Empire of Light

Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. 'Thank you for telling me that.' He reached down and activated a switch, and the car's treads ground noisily.

She studied him. 'You didn't believe a word of what I just said, did you?'

'No,' he said, with a broad grin. 'Not a word. But I still had to ask.'

Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.

'Something for you,' he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.

He passed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.

'The weapon is modular,' Rivers explained. 'All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things "ratcatchers". A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it's the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you're going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.'

She gave him a doubtful look. 'Wrong, how?'

'The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypasses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.'

She stared at him. 'And this is seriously the best you could get?'

'Weapons of any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren't exactly lacking in armaments, but they're less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.'

'So they're all home-made efforts like this?' she asked, emptying the bag's contents on the seat between her knees.

'Yes. I think that particular one came from a fabricator originally designed for making customized kitchen components.'

Rivers put the car into reverse, and the tractor treads crunched across the stone floor as he guided it carefully between the close-packed hovels and sleeping bodies, veering close enough to outstretched limbs at times to send Dakota's heart leaping towards her mouth. She studied the weapon's components and then carefully slotted them together, the grip sliding in last. When she held it in her upturned palm it felt light, insubstantial, more like a toy than a real weapon. Hugh Moss would have access to far greater firepower than this.

'I don't mean to pry,' said Rivers, 'but you said at one point you thought you might have trouble finding your way around on your own…?'

'I can't manipulate data the way I used to, Mr Rivers. I'm not much more than a passenger on the Magi ships these days.'

Rivers nodded, looking embarrassed. 'I'm sorry for asking. It seems so many of us are suffering from the bends.'

She frowned. 'The what?'

'That's what some of the other navigators are calling it now,' Rivers explained. 'The bends, or neural burnout – a sickness from diving too deep into the world of data contained inside every Magi ship.'

'Really.'

'I've not been affected myself,' Rivers continued. 'But I suspect it may only be a matter of time.'

'How long have you been a Magi-class navigator?'

'Six months,' he replied. 'Most navigators start suffering the ill effects after seven or eight months.' His smile faded a little. 'We should be going now. I found you a place to stay on a lower level.' Before long they were trundling through a series of endlessly winding passageways. Steps were carved into the stone on either side, every thirty metres or so, leading up to open galleries cut into the side of the passageways, just below the ceiling. Terran flora was everywhere, although much of it had clearly been engineered specially for an underground existence. Vines dropped down from the ceiling to brush against their heads as they drove on, while dwarf trees – oak, ash and a few unidentifiable hybrids – lined every district they passed through. These trees barely came up to shoulder height, and made Dakota feel like she and Rivers were a pair of giants going out for a Sunday drive.

Business districts merged into residential areas, the ceiling sometimes dipping so low that Dakota would have had to stoop if she disembarked, while at other times it soared to cathedral proportions, with tiers of recessed homes and businesses rising up and up, all interco

'Tell me everything you know about Moss,' Dakota asked at one point.

'He turned up here slightly less than five weeks ago and established himself extremely rapidly. It's my understanding that he trains what are intended to be either bodyguards or assassins, depending on your source of information. Killers, certainly,' Rivers added, as they hurtled on.

'Assassins? But to assassinate who?'

'Well, at first the rumours were that Moss was training soldiers to act as protection for black marketeers in Derinkuyu. Then it turned out he was killing off all the black marketeers instead, and taking over in their place. Keep in mind,' he added, 'that much of this remains mere rumour and conjecture. He also supposedly has some arrangement with a tribe of second-stage Skelites living in burrows at a much lower level than this one. It's believed he's aiding them in their war with a neighbouring tribe.'

'What do you mean by "second-stage" Skelites?'

'Skelites go through three distinct stages of development during their lives. The first stage is born in pools of volcanically heated water on the surface. Those who survive go on to stage two, which is large, aggressive, extremely territorial and technologically i

Rivers never got to finish his sentence.

Dakota was not immediately aware that there had been an explosion – or that the car they were riding in had been pushed up from the floor of a tu

She sat up, looking down to see that the black liquid of her filmsuit had spilled out to protect her. Her clothes were torn and ragged, but she herself wasn't even scratched.

She jumped up and ran back to the wrecked vehicle.

Rivers must have died instantly: his head was twisted at an impossible angle, while his eyes stared sightlessly up from out of the wreckage. Dakota looked all around and observed that the tu

She dropped to her knees and scrabbled around with her hands beneath the wreckage of the car, then ducked lower until her chin almost touched the ground. Peering past Rivers's corpse, she finally spotted the home-made pulse-rifle. She flattened herself to the ground and slid beneath the shattered vehicle until she could grab hold of it.