Empire of Light

'Did you know I was conscripted, Mr Corso? The Uchidans put me into military R amp;D and ordered me to work on one tiny part of a project that employed dozens of researchers. I'm not denying I had at least some responsibility for what happened back on Redstone – it was easy to guess the strategists were pla

Corso pushed himself back over towards him. Ty flinched, but the Senator came to a halt a few metres away by placing one hand against a bulkhead.

'I've read your file, Ty. You can't tell me you were only following orders. It's not an excuse, never has been. Hundreds died.'

'If I could go back in time and make things different, I would. I used to fantasize about how things might have been if I'd made different choices. You said I had a chance to exonerate myself, and that's all I've wanted, all these years. I'm not a monster, Mr Corso. I just want you to understand that.'

Ty drew in a breath, and waited. The other man's expression was unreadable.

'Actions count more than words, Ty,' Corso said finally, twisting around until he faced the airlock once more. 'Find out how the Mos Hadroch works, and you'll help save a lot of lives. Maybe that'll give you the peace you're looking for.'

I hope so too, thought Ty, and watched as Corso turned and left. Ty spent the next couple of hours taking his mind off this encounter by familiarizing himself with the upgraded lab equipment before moving the Mos Hadroch out of the isolation chamber and into the main lab. Its faint iridescent glow had long since faded, along with the aural hallucinations that only appeared to affect people with some form of cerebral implant. Now it sat amidst an array of technology that could carry out a much finer analysis than the isolation chamber could possibly manage.

The artefact now sat in a cradle which had, in turn, been mounted in the heart of a gigantic multi-phase imaging unit intended for carrying out almost every conceivable type of material analysis the Mjollnir's scientific and technical staff could hope for. For the moment, some methods were out of the question: for instance, ultrasonic spectroscopy meant hitting the thing with a laser, and Ty was far from sure the Mos Hadroch would not interpret this as a form of attack and thus retaliate.

The lab even contained its own dedicated manufactory for creating yet more gadgets, should they be required; so its dedicated stacks were filled with thousands of blueprints whose components could be manufactured within a matter of hours or days.

And yet Ty hesitated, unsure where to even start. He retreated to a chair and sat staring at the artefact for the better part of an hour, quietly brooding.

I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, he finally admitted to himself.

The Mos Hadroch was, according to Dakota Merrick, alive; it was certainly more than a machine, and clearly something intelligent lurked within its outwardly inert form. But, for all the high-tech tools he had to hand, Ty rather suspected they would be about as much good as trying to reverse-engineer stack circuits by hitting them with a lump of flint.

So instead he sat and reflected, and wondered if that strange intelligence might manifest itself a second time. He settled back, aware that his adrenalin rush of the past few days was finally begi

He only realized he'd fallen asleep, when, several hours later, he woke to the insistent buzz of a comms panel. The lab complex had a small kitchenette, which Ty had stocked with self-heating ready meals from one of the frigate's vast and echoing mess halls. He drank water while he waited for one of them to heat, then swallowed it in a hurry before making his way to the airlock bay where Nancy Schiller and Ray Willis were already getting suited up.

'You're late,' said Nancy, who looked like she hadn't slept since they had left orbit around Redstone. He also noticed she was careful not to meet his eye. 'Where've you been, the last couple of days? Haven't seen you anywhere on the centrifuge at all.'

Ty had been wondering when a moment like this might arrive. He had expected the lifespan of their affair to last only as long as their previous voyage together. It was a matter of some consternation when he had come face to face with her inside the safe-house, after expecting never to see her again.

'In the labs,' he replied, heading for one of the racked suits and lifting it down. 'I had a lot of work to do.'

Nancy and Ray were soon ready, and they stood there with helmets in hand while Ty struggled with the lower half of his suit.

'So what exactly is there to do?' Ray asked him. 'If you're talking about the Mos Hadroch, that is.'

As it recognized that someone was wearing it, Ty's suit automatically began to adjust itself to his body, the shoulders tightening here, the legs growing a few inches longer there.

'Well,' Ty replied, 'for all we know, it might be giving out some kind of signal. Or it might contain readable data, if only I can figure out how it's encoded. But it's definitely not inert: it came to life, just briefly, when we pulled it out of the Atn's body.'

'I remember you said so at the meeting,' Nancy commented, 'but you didn't tell us exactly what happened.'

He shrugged. 'Mostly it just… glowed a bit. And Merrick seemed to be able to pick up some kind of signal coming from it through her implants.'

Nancy and Ray eyed at each other at the mention of Merrick. 'Now there's a weird fish,' commented Ray. 'How much do you know about her?'

'I know she was implicated in that whole, ah, thing that happened on Redstone,' he replied, trying hard to sound casual. 'But shouldn't we be heading out?' he asked, nodding towards the nearby row of pressure doors.

'Not just yet,' said Nancy. 'We're going to be-'

A rumbling alert sounded, three quick blasts like a horn; signifying a jump alert.

'Jumping in just a minute,' Nancy finished with a grin. 'Then we can go out.'

Ty nodded, relieved at the fortuitous change of conversation. When they finally got outside, several specialized spider-mechs were already waiting for them, with toolkits attached, floating a few metres above the hull. The Hyades Cluster now hung in the void far behind the frigate, a distant burst of fireworks caught in one eternal instant.

Ty found he wasn't feeling as nervous as he had expected. In fact, being outside the hull felt no worse than standing on the surface of some clade-world. All he had to do was make sure he didn't make the mistake of thinking of the ship as a huge metal tower with him clinging to its-

Whoops. Vertigo hit Ty, and he focused hard on the hull itself, taking several deep breaths and holding on to them.

Flat ground. That's flat ground underneath you, he told himself, over and over.

Once the attack subsided, he gazed back along the hull, towards the flat dome of a shaped-field generator, only a few metres away. Apart from defensive purposes, these devices were primarily used to deflect interstellar debris that might otherwise tear through the hull. If he relaxed his eyes just a little, he could even pick out the faint sparkle of the combined energy fields surrounding the entire frigate.

Just beyond the field generator rose the first of a forest of drive-spines, curving up and outwards from the hull itself.

'Will you look at that,' said Willis, his voice sounding flat and close inside Ty's helmet. 'All that way in less than a second.'

'It's not such a big deal,' Nancy replied. 'Coreships did it all the time.'