Empire of Light

'They're a couple of light-minutes away,' Lamoureaux added. 'That means a couple of hours before we can rendezvous.'

'Is the med-bay prepped for Nancy?' asked Martinez.

Corso didn't miss Lamoureaux's hesitation when he answered. 'I've unlocked the seals and reactivated the medboxes.'

Martinez merely nodded, as if satisfied with this answer, yet Corso knew they were all maintaining a fiction: there was likely very little they could do for Nancy Schiller. Even if by some miracle she was still alive by the time Trader's yacht docked with the frigate, it would almost certainly be far too late to save her. Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair and approached Corso. 'Have you had any more thoughts about what we found back by the reactors?' he asked him quietly.

Corso glanced towards Perez and Martinez, but they had stepped over to a console on the far side of the bridge, and were deep in a discussion over astrogational data.

'I think we're going to have to let Dakota see it,' he replied. 'If we're right about Whitecloud, she should be the first to know.'

'You realize that means telling her who he really is?'

'Yes… yes, I suppose I do,' Corso replied. 'Not that I'm looking forward to it.'

'Rather you than me,' Lamoureaux said softly. 'Rather you than me, any day of any year.'

Chapter Thirty-one

Whitecloud sat staring at a screen and nursing a bulb of coffee as Corso entered the lab a short time later.

'Found anything new?' Corso asked him, shooting a glance at the Mos Hadroch still wedged inside the enormous machine and surrounded by probes.

Whitecloud went on staring at the screen like he wasn't even aware of the man standing next to him.

'Ty?' Corso asked again, this time in a substantially lower voice.

Whitecloud finally turned to face him. Nobody home, thought Corso, chilled by the empty expression on the other man's face.

Whitecloud seemed to come back to life a moment later, and jerked backwards, clearly surprised to find Corso standing in front of him. The bulb of coffee went spi

'I was wondering if you had anything new to report,' Corso started again, keeping his voice level even while his heart hammered inside his chest. It was important not to let Whitecloud suspect anything was amiss. 'You were supposed to file an update this morning, but I didn't receive anything from you.'

In truth, Whitecloud's reports rarely made for good reading. Rather than containing actual information or providing any insights, they tended more to be a list of tests, or variations of tests, that had been run on the artefact, all producing the same dismal results. The only time the derelict had shown any sign of being anything other than a dumb inanimate object had been that first time Corso had laid eyes on it.

Whitecloud blinked and pulled himself out of his chair, grabbing a rung in the low ceiling for support. 'New?' He scratched his head, staring around him as if he had been asleep for a long time. 'Yes. Yes there is, actually. Take a look at this.'

Whitecloud pushed past Corso and headed for a tabletop imager. He activated it first by passing his hand over its plate, then quickly sped through a series of holographic menus until he found what he was looking for.

A few moments later Corso found himself looking at the image of a translucent upright cylinder hovering above the plate, with thousands of hair-thin passageways extending outwards from it horizontally.

'That's a cache, isn't it?' remarked Corso.

'It is,' Whitecloud agreed. 'The one at Tierra, to be precise. I only got a chance to take a look at this for the first time the other night. The main reason I didn't get round to filing your report was because I wanted to check more of the correspondences before discussing it with you. But since you're here…'

Whitecloud reached up towards the floating cylinder and nudged it to one side with an expert flick of his fingers, then he quickly navigated through another menu. A second cylinder appeared, similar to the first except that, rather than having a single primary shaft, this one had two shafts that merged in the middle, forming a cross.

Corso started. 'That's…'

'The interior of the asteroid where we found the Mos Hadroch,' Whitecloud finished for him.

'But they look identical!' Corso exclaimed, coming forward and putting both hands on the rim of the imager's flat plate. 'Well, no, not identical, but…'

'But strikingly similar, wouldn't you say?'

'Yes.' Corso nodded. 'And you only just picked up on this?'

'You'll recall I was working outside on the hull during the briefing about the cache we just visited. A summary was forwarded to me, but I didn't get round to studying it until now. Still, I don't know how I missed it before,' he admitted, a touch of wonder in his voice. 'When I saw this for the first time yesterday, I was thunderstruck. The relationship was immediately obvious. Anyone with enough knowledge of the Atn could have made the co

Corso studied the two images and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the lab. 'Just to be clear, you're saying there's obviously some kind of relationship between the Atn and the machine-swarm that created the caches?'

'You sound surprised, but think about it for a moment. They're both widely distributed, self-reproducing machine species. It's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that they share some common point of origin. Perhaps what we're seeing here is a case of some kind of genuine machine evolution.' Whitecloud paused to think for a moment. 'Or more likely one was created from the other.'

'And the swarm was hunting down and destroying Atn clades.' Corso, too, thought for a moment. 'Can knowing this help us in any way?'

'I don't know,' Whitecloud admitted. 'Just about the first thing I did, once I realized this, was to try and crack the Mos Hadroch with the Atn's own machine-protocols. I got nowhere, though that's not to say there aren't other commonalities between the species that might give us the key we need to understanding how the artefact actually works.'

'We're ru

Whitecloud nodded. 'Did we get what we needed at our last stop?'

'Yes… but there were some problems. Dakota and the others are on their way back right now.'

'What problems?'

Corso briefly summarized the events on the cache-world, including Nancy's radiation poisoning.

Whitecloud paled at this final piece of news. 'Nancy… is dying?'

Corso frowned at his reaction. Whitecloud was clearly severely shaken, more than might be expected given that he hardly knew the woman. 'No, not dead, but it's really not looking good. She's going straight into a medbox as soon as she's back here but, to be honest, the delay before we can rendezvous is just going to further reduce any chance she might still have had to pretty much zero.'

Whitecloud's face became a mask. 'I see,' he said briskly, looking away from Corso. 'That's a matter of some concern, of course.'

Corso nodded, and wondered again just what it was Whitecloud wasn't telling him. 'We need to find a way to activate the Mos Hadroch that doesn't involve Trader,' Corso reminded him. 'Dakota's been down here a couple of times, hasn't she?'

'Yes,' said Whitecloud, 'but we never got a repeat of the phenomenon that occurred the first time she saw it.' He nodded towards the artefact in its cradle. 'It's been inert ever since.'