Empire of Light

'Well, yeah, but…'

But Ty knew what he meant. You didn't see or feel anything when inside a coreship; it was the same rocky sky held up by pillars you looked at, wherever in the galaxy you might actually happen to be. Being able to step outside and see where you were could be an awe-inspiring experience.

'All right,' said Nancy, suddenly all brisk efficiency. 'I had to lead a bunch of repair crews the last trip out, so just follow my lead and do what I tell you, and it'll all be fine.'

'What about the spiders?' asked Willis. 'Couldn't we just run them from inside the frigate and get them to do the work?'

'We tried that,' Nancy replied, 'but there's always something finicky that needs a pair of hands to deal with. But, with any luck, the spiders will still end up doing most of the work. Now check your HUDs for the schedule.'

Ty dutifully brought up his suit's display, which indicated a list of repairs to be made, ordered by priority.

'That's three drive-spines in need of immediate repair, all on this section of the hull,' said Nancy. 'Follow me.'

Ty used lanyards, coiled silver lines that shot out of the rear of his suit just below the air tanks and attached themselves to the hull. All he had to do was lean one way or the other and the lanyards would carry him along at a couple of kilometres an hour, rapidly retracting or reaching out to grip the hull in a steady rippling motion. As Willis and Nancy did the same, Ty was reminded of how comical the lanyards looked, as if each of their suits had suddenly grown spindly cartoon legs.

Nancy had slaved the spiders to her own suit, so that they followed a short way behind her, propelled on tiny puffs of gas.

They soon reached the first drive-spine. In that brief, barely measurable moment when a craft passed through superluminal space, electrical systems often failed and the molecular bonds of the hull began to crumble at the extremities. Nobody knew what would happen to a ship if it stayed in superluminal space for a few seconds longer, but Ty strongly suspected that it would disintegrate entirely.

At the base of the first drive-spine was a tangle of power cables leading inside the hull, ultimately terminating at one of the plasma conduits. Some of the cables had worked loose, which was easy enough to fix.

The drive-spine arching above them looked grey and dusty towards its tip, like it had become badly corroded. Ty could see where a panel had come loose about halfway up, exposing naked circuitry beneath.

'Ray, will you go ahead and take a look at the other spines?' suggested Nancy. 'We only need two pairs of hands for this one, and it might speed things up if we know what else we're going to have to deal with, okay?'

'Uh… sure,' said Willis, after a moment. 'Are you sure you wouldn't rather-'

'No, I wouldn't,' she replied, just a little bit too sharply. 'Besides, myself and Nathan need to talk over some of the… some of the technicalities.'

Uh-oh, thought Ty.

'Yeah,' said Willis, sounding far from pleased. 'Yeah, I'll do that.'

'Thanks,' said Nancy.

'Yeah. You kids have fun,' Willis grumbled.

Ty watched as he moved away across the surface of the hull, dragged along by his suit's smart lanyards, whipping in and out.

A moment later a one-to-one cha

'Quite something, isn't it?' asked Nancy. 'The view, I mean.'

'Yes, quite so,' Ty replied. 'How have you been, Nancy?'

Things had been cordial in the safe-house, but it was best, he felt sure, to nip this in the bud. Corso had warned him to stay away from the rest of the crew, and he had little doubt how the Senator might react if he discovered Ty had once been sleeping with the Mjollnir's head of security.

'Good enough,' Nancy replied. 'Kind of crazy how we both wound up here, yeah?'

'I guess so,' he replied, finding himself suddenly stuck for words.

A silence followed, seeming deeper and wider than the void around them. Ty felt an urgent need to fill it. 'I think it was a surprise for both of us,' he said, and then laughed.

Nancy's own laugh sounded more than a little forced. 'Yeah,' she said. 'About that.'

'About what?' Were they ever going to get these repairs done?

'About us. Back on the… back on that last trip. That whole thing.'

'It's all right, Nancy,' he said. 'I don't think either of us was looking for much more than-'

'No, it's not that. I mean, that's what I was going to say, right? There's no expectations, since I don't think we thought we'd ever see each other again.'

'No,' he replied, 'I guess not.'

'But… we are here, and maybe we won't make it back. Yet I don't know if there's any of us wouldn't rather be somewhere else.'

But you still have a choice, Ty almost said. Every step he had taken was either due to a gift from providence or through a desperate clutching at life. The alternatives had been stark: stay in Unity and risk execution, or board the Mjollnir and take his chances with the Emissaries. So here he was.

'I guess not,' he replied. 'I won't bother you, Nancy, if that's what you're afraid of

She came closer. 'That's not what I meant.'

Something in the tone of her voice made it clear she was struggling to find the right words. Nancy was, Ty had found, not the type to reveal her feelings except in the most intimate of circumstances.

'I don't know what we're going to face out there,' – she waved one gloved hand towards the stars, – 'and… when I think about it, I don't want to be alone.'

Something made him reach out and touch one gloved hand to the arm of her suit. He stared at his spread fingers, contemplating this unexpected betrayal by one of his own limbs.

'You won't be,' he said finally.

'I'm glad, Nathan.' She then moved away, sounding more subdued now. 'I… you know where I am. Just drop by sometime.'

'I'll do that,' he heard himself reply.

Ty watched her go, suddenly back to her brisk efficient self.

He had actually meant to cut things short; that being the easiest way to deal with such things. He had opened his mouth intending to say one thing, but something else entirely had emerged.

He summoned one of the spiders and started to rummage inside its toolbox, feverishly thinking all the time. What, he wondered, could Corso actually do to him by way of punishment? Very little, he suspected.

Ty called up his suit's menu and put in a call to Nancy, and she replied almost immediately.

'Tonight,' he said. 'Ship time. Come down to the labs.'

'You… need help with something?'

'Yeah,' he replied with a grin. 'Something like that.'

Chapter Twenty-two

'This is where we are just now,' indicated Lamoureaux.

Dakota leaned back in her seat on the bridge and stared up at the overhead simulation: a view of the Milky Way as it might be seen from roughly twenty thousand light-years above its ecliptic plane. A small point of light representing the Mjollnir blinked constantly from deep within the Orion Arm.

From the perspective Lamoureaux had chosen, it was clear the Orion Arm was not so much a true spiral arm in its own right, but more a broad streak of stars caught midway between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

'And this,' Lamoureaux continued, from the interface chair, 'is our first stop. After that we're in for the really long haul.'

A line reached out from the icon representing the Mjollnir, and came to an end at a star fifteen hundred light-years from their current position. A second line grew from there, stretching across a relatively starless gulf before terminating at a point deep within the Perseus Arm.

Dakota studied Lamoureaux, who had tipped the interface chair all the way back to a forty-five-degree angle, until he was looking almost straight up at the simulation. He still seemed frail, and when he glanced at her she could sense the pain and loss he was feeling. Sometime soon, she was going to have to explain to him just why she had destroyed her ship.