Empire of Light

He sat back down, feeling obscurely disappointed. Then there was a distant, muffled clang as the airlock door opened and closed again. He swallowed and stared once more at the sprinkle of lights outside, wondering who was looking back, and what they were thinking.

An earth-shattering roar shook the building. Alarms began to clang discordantly both inside and outside.

There were shouts and footsteps in the corridor outside, and he realized with a shock that the window of his room had become badly starred. Already smoke drifted up past it.

Ty lurched upright and headed quickly to the door. The message had instructed that he should be ready to move. But did that mean he should simply wait here, or instead try and see if he could find a way out of the damaged building?

He remembered Weil's promise, and decided not to stay.

Sliding the door open quietly, he risked a glance outside, towards the bank of elevators. Weil was gone from his post. He eyed the elevators hopefully, but hesitated while deciding it might be too dangerous to use them.

Instead he stepped out into the corridor and headed quickly in the opposite direction, making for a door leading into a stairwell. Smoke drifted up from several floors below.

He took the steps downwards three or four at a time, the air growing denser with smoke as he descended. He could distinctly smell burning plastic, but also something else he could not quite identify.

After a moment he realized this was the unique odour of Redstone's air, which meant the building's atmospheric seals had been breached.

He continued down several levels until he came to a glass-fronted box mounted on the wall. It was filled with cheap emergency breathers, so he punched out the glass and quickly pulled on a mask.

Heavy footsteps, approaching from above.

Ty leaned out over the banister and peered up in time to see Weil glaring straight back down at him from several levels above.

Ty bolted down the remaining steps, then burst through a door that led into a ground-floor atrium-style lobby with a reception desk at one end. The bank of elevators was on the opposite side from the desk, and the door of one of them was jammed halfway open. Thick dark smoke billowed from inside it towards the ceiling.

He ran to the centre of the lobby, looking frantically from left to right, but no one else appeared to be around.

Voices sounded somewhere nearby just as his breather gave a beeping sound to warn that the smoke was clogging its filters. He crossed the lobby quickly to where several floor-to-ceiling windows had been shattered, the glass crunching under his feet. He slipped outside through one, and heard sirens in the distance.

He paused there, momentarily indecisive, as the freezing cold wind cut into him like a knife. Where next?

Suddenly a small unma

The vehicle performed a U-turn and accelerated back the way it had come. Ty glanced through the rear window in time to see Weil emerge on to the street. He ducked out of sight and prayed he had not already been spotted.

The taxi headed for the city centre, where the buildings rose higher, manifesting the same blocky and severe architectural style as found in any other Freehold settlement. Perhaps ten minutes after picking him up at the Residency, the taxi cut down a ramp into the underground parking area of a building that was just one of several identical monolithic slabs arranged in a row.

He quickly disembarked and pulled the cheap breather off his face just as an elevator opened, chiming softly. He guessed he was meant to get inside.

It delivered Ty a minute later to an apparently deserted floor several levels up. The walls were bare concrete, with gaping holes where electrical and communications systems still had to be installed. He proceeded down a long corridor, checking through door after door until he at last found an office space containing some furniture: a large leather seat and an expensive-looking imager and tach-net data combo. A mound of packing material was still scattered around.

The imager came to life even as Ty stepped towards the chair. It briefly displayed the manufacturer's logo in iridescent 3D, before that was replaced by the head and upper shoulders of what was obviously a software-generated avatar.

'Mr Whitecloud,' began the avatar. 'Thank you for coming. Please take a seat.'

The voice, too, was synthesized, since there was a discernible pause between each word: as if whoever was speaking to him via the avatar was punching the message into a keyboard rather than allowing his own voice to be processed by the machine's inbuilt privacy circuits.

'I represent the Consortium Legislate's intelligence division,' the avatar continued. 'We have brought you here to discuss the artefact you recovered.'

Ty sat down. 'How do I know you're who you say you are?' he demanded bluntly. For some reason, he was not surprised that whoever he was talking to knew his real identity. 'For that matter, why not just send someone real?'

The avatar ignored his questions. 'We believe Dakota Merrick and Lucas Corso intend to instigate a new expedition, one aimed at penetrating deep inside Emissary territory.'

Ty stared at the image, stu

'They're going to recruit you for the expedition. We want you to accept their proposal and report back to us, as and when required.'

Ty licked his lips and glanced around him. 'Why the hell would I do any such thing? Is that why you brought me here?'

'If you prefer, I'd be happy to transmit your current whereabouts to the Freehold authorities, Mr Whitecloud, along with details of your true identity and your war-crime charges.'

'Wait!' Ty was halfway out of his chair. 'Just wait a minute.' He reached up to clasp his brow with one shaking hand. 'All right. But how am I supposed to contact you?'

'We can maintain contact with you via an encrypted tach-net link, the details of which are stored on the data-ring on the imager before you.'

Ty glanced at the imager's plate and for the first time noticed a silvery data-ring sitting there, but made no move towards it. Not for the first time, he had the sensation of teetering on the very edge of a steep precipice.

'Mr Whitecloud,' the avatar repeated. 'Please pick up the ring. The data contained within it uses an extremely robust form of encryption, which can be used to establish a secure communications link while disguising its own activities.'

Ty didn't move. 'You're serious? They're going on some kind of expedition… to the Emissaries?'

The avatar didn't reply.

Ty let out an angry sigh. 'I'm grateful you got me out of there, but there are going to be people out looking for me now. Where am I supposed to go?'

'Go back to the residency. Tell them you escaped because you believed it was under attack; that much is certainly true. The explosives used will be traced to a Uchidanist undercover tactical unit currently operating out of Unity. In your desperation to escape, you got into the first vehicle you saw. But,' the avatar added, 'you must take the ring with you. That much is vital.'

Ty glanced at the ring. 'It's not safe back there,' he complained. 'There was a man there – Marcus Weil, one of the men guarding me. He said he knew who I was and he'd kill me before he'd ever let me leave.'

The avatar gazed at him, unblinking, for so long that Ty began to wonder if whoever was on the other side of this transmission was in fact still present.

'Go straight back down to the taxi that brought you here, and it will take you to a police station not far from here,' the avatar finally replied. 'Tell them that you got in the taxi outside the residency, asked it for help, and it brought you to them. Mention nothing about coming here, Mr Whitecloud. You will of course give them the name Nathan Driscoll.'