Empire of Light

Suddenly Ty heard a sound, like whispers mixed with static, cutting through his thoughts and once again rising to a high-pitched whistle before fading to nothing. He glanced over at Dakota and saw her wince and cover her eyes with one hand.

'I can hear it again,' she murmured. 'The Mos Hadroch, I mean. I think something's just happened.'

Corso put up one hand to touch the comms-bead in his ear.

'That's fine, Dan,' he said after a few moments. 'Thanks for letting me know.'

He turned back to face them. 'Perez says half the primary data stacks just spontaneously rebooted themselves without explanation. It could be there's someone still hidden on the frigate and trying to sabotage us before we can jump out of this system.'

Dakota shook her head. 'No, it's the Mos Hadroch. I'm certain of it.'

'Then what the hell is it doing now?' Corso demanded.

'I think,' she replied carefully, 'it just wants to know who we are.'

Chapter Nineteen

Two hours later, the primary stacks had recovered, whereupon Dakota jumped the Mjollnir half a light-year outside the Redstone system. A day later the frigate jumped more than a hundred and fifty light-years, to a point deep inside the Hyades Cluster.

The frigate's astrogational systems started matching the local stellar population against maps of known stars, quickly identifying a reddish-orange star no more than two or three light-years distant as Epsilon Tauri.

Dakota left the bridge and made her way to a nearby meeting room, where the others were waiting. She smelled food as she entered, unfamiliar spices and odours that made her stomach growl. An image of Epsilon Tauri, the surrounding cluster spread out around it like a sprinkle of multicoloured diamonds, floated above a low table in the centre of the room. The room itself was oval-shaped, with low couches set against curving bulkheads and facing inwards towards the table. The only faces not present were Martinez and Lamoureaux, but Corso had told her they could expect to be decanted sometime in the next twenty-four hours.

Corso himself looked dog-tired and haggard. While Dakota had been busy prepping the Mjollnir for its jump, he and Schiller had got busy moving the bodies of the dead to the ship's morgue. Then they had a go at scrubbing the bloodstains off the deck.

Corso looked at her with raised eyebrows as she lowered herself on to a couch opposite him.

'I just put us about halfway across Consortium territory,' she told him, leaning back, her shoulders cramping with fatigue. 'We can jump again in another day or so, which should take us a long way outside the Consortium.'

Corso handed her a bulb containing some dark liquid. 'Here, Redstone coffee – guaranteed to wake you up.'

She took it and sniffed at it warily, then noticed Perez and Schiller were watching her carefully. She sucked at the straw for a moment, then her eyes widened and her face turned pale.

She dropped the bulb and succumbed to a coughing fit. Someone laughed. When her eyes had stopped watering, she could see that Corso was gri

'What,' she asked, 'the fuck is that?'

'There's this weed, see, grows in water-pipes and plumbing back home,' said Nancy Schiller. 'They've been brewing it up since the days of the first settlers. They made me drink a gallon of the stuff in one go when I first joined up.' She shook her head sadly and gazed at Corso. 'This girl wouldn't last an hour in any regular crew.'

Dakota started coughing again, and Corso passed her a glass of water. She swallowed it all in one go, to clear a little of the sour, gritty taste from her throat. When she looked up, Corso wore a conciliatory grin.

'So,' began Perez, looking around them, 'down to business. First question: do we get to fly a pirate flag on the ship? And second question: who wants to make it?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Schiller. 'I say we paint FUCK YOU on the side and just fly the damn thing into the sun of the first heavily populated Emissary system we find. Besides…' she added, pausing to take a long suck at a bulb, 'I can't sew. Can you?'

Perez shook his head sadly. 'They've got lots more suns where we're headed. I fear they won't miss just the one, Nancy.'

Schiller shrugged. 'Well, that's the flaw in my plan right there. Maybe you could wear an eyepatch, Dan.'

'If you wear a bag over your head, I'll think about it. What do you say, Senator?' Perez looked over at Corso. 'Should we pass a resolution that Nancy has to wear a bag over her head for the rest of the trip?'

Corso shook his head. 'I'd rather wait for Eduard to get better, as I think any bag-wearing decisions should stay strictly with him.'

Perez chuckled, and an awkward silence fell.

Corso put down his bulb – now half empty, Dakota noted – and leaned forward, hands resting on his knees, while making sure to catch each of their eyes in turn. Dakota watched as Driscoll drained a bulb of the foul concoction, and put it down empty with apparent satisfaction. Guy looks like he drinks it every day for breakfast. Maybe he was from Redstone, like the rest of them.

'All right,' said Corso, 'this meeting is about making sure we're all on the same page. That means us talking about what's up ahead.'

'But we're not all here,' said Nancy. 'The Commander's still on ice and your other guy's still in recovery. Don't you think maybe we should wait until they're out of the med-bay?'

'Martinez'll be out of there sometime in the next several days, and Mr Lamoureaux isn't going to be taking up any duties until at least then either. So we'll fill them in when the time comes,' said Corso. 'Look, we're all from different places, some of us from Redstone, some not. The only thing we've really got in common is our reason for being here, and that's the Mos Hadroch.'

He glanced over at Dakota. 'Nathan's filled everyone else in about what we found inside the Atn, while you were still up on the bridge. I can't think of a better time than the present for you to tell us just exactly what it is the Mos Hadroch can do.'

They all looked at her expectantly.

'Okay.' She cleared her throat. 'The main thing you need to know is that every new superluminal drive-core produced by a cache is quantum-entangled with that same cache. That entanglement means any changes you make to the cache can affect any ships carrying those superluminal drives, regardless of how distant they may be.'

Dakota looked around them and noticed that, apart from Driscoll, their expressions ranged from uncomprehending to suspicious.

'Where did you get all this?' asked Schiller.

'From the swarm,' she lied. 'What you need to understand is that the Mos Hadroch is like a key. Take it into a cache and plug it into the cache's drive-forge – that's the device you need to manufacture a superluminal drive – and it gives you control over every one of the superluminal drives that ever came out of it.'

'And what happens then?' asked Willis.

'My understanding is it's possible to trigger a destruct sequence that will destroy not only the drives seeded from the forge, but also the ships carrying them.'

She watched them absorb this information for a moment.

'How quickly does it act?' asked Driscoll.

'Given the entanglement, I'm guessing it's as near as damn instantaneous.'

'What about the Tierra cache?' asked Perez. 'Couldn't the Mos Hadroch be used on that, too?'

'It could,' said Corso, leaning forward. 'That makes it particularly important not to allow it to fall into the wrong hands.'

'And the Shoal?' asked Olivarri. 'Surely it's a threat to them as well.'

'If you can find the cache from which the drives for the majority of their starships were manufactured, then, yes,' said Dakota.