Empire of Light

'And what about Weil?' Ty asked.

'With any luck, you won't have to worry about him any more.'

'But…'

Shut up and just be glad you're alive, Ty told himself. Anything was better than being trapped in the same building as that knife-wielding madman.

He stared at the ring still sitting on the plate, and impulsively reached out for it.

At the exact same moment as his fingers came into contact with the ring, Ty felt a sharp spike of pain in one temple and squeezed his eyes shut, glimpsing a tiny spark of light in the corner of one eye.

Panic gripped him. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have been so…

The next thing he knew, he was still sitting in the chair, but the avatar was gone and the comms unit had shut itself down.

There had been something that worried him terribly, but he was damned if he could remember what it was.

Ty stared at the ring nestling in his palm, then slid it on to one finger. He felt it contract slightly until it was snug against his flesh.

He then made his way back through the deserted offices the way he had come, disturbed by what he realized was an entirely irrational terror that Weil might suddenly appear from around some corner, blade raised to slash out at him. Ty pushed the fear back, thinking: For one more day I'm still alive. And I'll be alive tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that… It was like putting one foot in front of the other, or even breathing, drawing down each swallow of air and then exhaling it. You did what you had to in order to stay alive, to stay ahead of your enemies.

So he made his way to the elevator, and returned to the taxi.

Chapter Sixteen

The Mjollnir's bow was blunt and rounded, with a thick bulge one-third of the way back, concealing an internal centrifuge that could be spun up to provide artificial gravity. She tapered slightly towards the stern, before flaring out again to accommodate fusion drives powerful enough to push her halfway across a solar system in just days, at maximum burn. At the moment, however, she floated peacefully in orbit above Redstone, caged by a spider's web of pressurized maintenance bays that would be dismantled once the hull repair crews had finished their work.

'Bridge of Mjollnir to the approaching shuttles,' spoke a voice in Corso's ear. 'We need to confirm the details of your manifest. Who am I speaking to?'

Corso glanced at the three other figures seated behind him in the supply shuttle. Like him, they all wore bulky armoured spacesuits, although for the moment they had left their helmets off. He saw Leo Olivarri, Eduard Martinez and Dan Perez. Perez had been the Mjollnir's head of engineering until, like Nancy Schiller, he had been removed from his job for remaining loyal to Martinez.

Olivarri's boss, Ray Willis, was on a second shuttle following a parallel course to their own, which also carried Ted Lamoureaux, Nancy and Ty Whitecloud. The three members of the frigate's crew remained completely unaware that the man they knew as Nathan Driscoll was operating under an assumed identity.

Perez signalled with one hand, and Corso put the Mjollnir link on standby.

'Your name is Herera,' Perez instructed Corso. 'Victor Herera.'

'Why the hell is he asking?'

Perez shrugged. 'It'll be nothing more than a standard security precaution. And it's probably just shitty luck they picked on us.'

Corso reopened the comms link. 'Sorry, bridge, we're getting random system glitches. You're talking to Captain Herera, manifest five alpha zero.' He then added, 'Any problems up there?'

'No problems,' replied a bored-sounding voice at the other end. 'Security's been moved up a couple of notches this morning.'

'Any idea why?' Corso kept his voice casual.

'Damned if I know, but we're requesting you to dock at Bay Three, not Four. Sorry about that. Over and out.'

Corso cut the link and turned to look at the men behind him. 'Do you think they've worked out who we are?'

Perez's reply was blunt and to the point. 'If they had, Senator, we'd already be dead.'

Corso nodded and turned to face the viewscreens once more, while trying to ignore the tension growing in his chest. Whatever lingering doubts Corso still harboured about the Senate's intentions had vanished a few nights earlier, when Marcus Kenley had appeared at his Senate lodgings in a stolen taxi, its electronic brain hacked in order to prevent it from revealing either its occupant or its whereabouts. He brought with him the news that several of Corso's supporters in the Senate had been arrested during the past hour.

Corso had dressed in a hurry, and then discovered Kenley had also hacked the taxi's speed limiter, as the little vehicle accelerated with frightening speed, almost flipping on to its side at a sharp turn.

Following Jarret's defeat in the challenge, Kenley had been instrumental in setting up safe-houses around Unity, and before long they arrived at a colonial-style building on the outskirts of town. It was a huddle of old-fashioned pressure-domes like something out of a historical 'viro.

Griffith and Velardo were already there, using secure data-net co

At first the public news networks told of chaos in the streets surrounding the Senate, but when the networks went offline Corso knew his worst suspicions had come true, and a counter-coup was under way. He kept himself awake throughout the next few nights with a steady diet of coffee and amphetamines, throwing himself into finalizing the details of a plan to take control of the Mjollnir before it could be removed from Redstone's orbital space.

Kenley went off and returned a few hours later with Dan Perez in tow; both men departed once again, this time accompanied by Ray Willis, on a mission to retrieve the Mjollnir's commander. They reappeared with Martinez some hours later, looking dirty and exhausted, Willis's face streaked with blood that was clearly not his own.

By then Whitecloud had been tracked down to a secure government building, but by the time someone went out to try and extract him, the residency building had been bombed and Whitecloud had vanished.

His subsequent reappearance in a Unity police station, kilometres away from the residency, raised questions that Corso did not have the time to try and answer. Sympathetic contacts within the Senate's own security services arranged for Whitecloud to be transferred to a less secure facility, where falsified documentation was all that was needed to extract him and bring him to the safe-house, to join with the rest of them.

But of far greater concern to Corso was Dakota's failure to show, even as the time to launch for the Mjollnir approached. He felt her absence like an ulcer throbbing in his guts, because without her everything he had pla

At one point, looking up from where he had fallen asleep in front of a screen, Corso realized that more than seventy-two hours had passed since his narrowly escaping arrest. He looked around at the people sitting before other screens, or talking quietly on secure links, or sleeping on mats on the floor.

During the next twenty-four hours most of them would scatter, through Kenley's underground network, to other safe-houses, while a very few, himself included, would board a couple of shuttles in place of the team of engineers detailed to check final repairs to the Mjollnir.

That, at least, was the plan. But if Dakota didn't show, that could still undo everything they had worked towards. Corso activated the shuttle's interface, and saw they were only a few minutes away from docking with the frigate. He tapped on a screen before twisting around to face Martinez. 'I'm updating the other shuttle on a course change. But not the one the Mjollnir's expecting.'