Empire of Light

'Do what you can, Ty. It could mean the difference between success and failure. I'll see if I can get Dakota to come back down. Maybe this co

Ty nodded, but his whole mood had changed dramatically once he'd heard the news about Nancy. Just what have you been hiding from me? Corso wondered as he left. As soon as Trader's yacht had docked, Dan Perez and Ray Willis helped Dakota get Nancy out of her suit. Corso arrived in time to watch the two men lower her into a portable medbox towed away by a spider-mech, before following it back out of the bay.

'Her suit's support systems are keeping her alive, but only just,' remarked Dakota once she and Corso were alone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. 'I know she's not going to make it, but why do I feel so bad? The woman hated my guts. She wouldn't want me to feel sorry for her.'

'Maybe you're still a little more human than you seem to think,' Corso suggested.

Dakota just shook her head, her eyes filled with regret. 'I can't help but blame myself. I let myself get careless.' There was anger in her tone. 'I was in too much of a hurry to get down inside the cache.'

Corso sighed and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him directly. 'There's no way you could have known beforehand what was going to happen, and Nancy knew the risks before she came along on this trip. We all did. You understand that, right?'

Dakota looked away from him again. 'Maybe.'

'Maybe, yes,' he said. 'Now listen, there's something we need to talk about. Something urgent.'

She glanced back at him. 'What?'

'The closer we get to where we're going, the more nervous I get when it comes to letting Trader anywhere near the Mos Hadroch. But I just got back from seeing Nathan Driscoll over in the labs – and it looks like he's finally on to something.'

'A way to activate it?'

Corso hesitated. It had already occurred to him that there was no reason to assume Whitecloud was the only one to have been compromised.

'No, not yet,' he replied, entirely aware of how evasive he was sounding. 'Something else.'

Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. 'Oh, for… You still don't trust me, do you? Listen, I already checked myself out before Olivarri was murdered. I went down to the med-bay and ran a full set of diagnostics on my implants almost as soon as we were under way, because I wanted to be sure. Lamoureaux did the same, and he's never even met Trader. Believe me,' she continued, 'we're both clean, and neither of us is being controlled – not by Trader or anyone else.'

'Why the hell didn't you tell me this before now?'

'Because, after Olivarri was murdered, I knew it wouldn't make the slightest damn bit of difference what I said. You read the report on the med-bay; whoever did the vandalizing, they didn't just smash the physical sca

'All right, I'm sorry for doubting you. Anyway, Nathan now thinks it's possible there's a close relationship between the swarm and the Atn. He thinks one might have split off from the other a very long time ago and, given what he just showed me, I'm inclined to believe it.'

Dakota's eyes widened. 'Shit, that's…' She tailed off into silence.

'Pretty incredible, yeah,' Corso finished for her, then he nodded towards the exit. 'Maybe we should get going.'

Dakota followed him to the nearest transport station. 'I've run into Atn a couple of times on coreships,' she said, as they boarded a car. 'They're harmless, so it's hard to believe they could somehow be related to something as malign as the swarm.'

'It means there's at least the outside chance that Atn protocols might work on the artefact, but the fact is we're almost out of time. We're almost certainly going to need Trader to activate the thing, whether we like it or not.'

'It's strange to hear you saying that, Lucas.'

'Yeah, well, I'm still not too keen on the way you sprung him on us.'

'But I'm not the only one who's been hiding things. How long have you known Leo Olivarri was working undercover for the Legislate?'

Corso stared at her. 'Where did you hear this?'

'Trader told me,' she replied. 'And, no, don't ask me where he heard it. He wouldn't tell.'

'I haven't known about Olivarri that long,' Corso replied. 'There were suspicions, but we had to send a covert signal back home to get any kind of confirmation. It still doesn't tell us why he was murdered.'

'If he was spying on us, maybe he knew something we didn't. I could have worked on finding out more, if you'd only told me. Or do you still not trust me?'

Corso leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her. The transport station lay silent and empty through the curved glass behind him. 'All right,' he said, 'I know who killed Olivarri. Or at least I have a pretty damn good idea. I think it was Driscoll.'

'What makes you think it was him?'

'Whoever sabotaged the ship's stacks didn't do a thorough enough job. It turns out there are memory overflow buffers that can hold partial back-ups in case of a major failure. We managed to retrieve some of the missing hours from the surveillance feeds, and it turns out Driscoll was the last person to see Olivarri alive. We even have partial video of them arguing not long before Olivarri was killed.'

'What were they arguing about?'

He shrugged. 'No idea. We haven't managed to recover the sound yet.'

'That's not necessarily incriminating in itself, is it? I mean, people do argue.'

'There's more. Before we left Redstone, Nathan completely disappeared for several hours. We have no idea what happened to him during that time.'

'Surely you asked him?'

'Yes, but his answer never rang true.'

Dakota leaned back and studied Corso for a moment. 'You're still holding something back, I can tell.'

Corso smiled weakly. 'All right, when the med-bay was vandalized, it made it almost too easy to pin the blame on you or Ted.'

'I think it was deliberate misdirection: a way to take the focus off someone else by making the obvious suspects look like the only suspects.'

'That occurred to me too, but now I think it was vandalized for exactly the reason we originally thought it was – so someone couldn't be sca

Dakota smiled and shook her head. 'That's ridiculous. If there was another machine-head on board, I'd have known straight away.'

Corso smiled softly. 'Dakota, our friend Driscoll is a Uchidanist.'

'A Uchidanist? Why are you only telling me now?'

'Because I need your help,' Corso replied miserably. 'I'm sure he's under Trader's control.'

'How?'

'Remember, Uchidanists have-'

'Implants,' she finished for him. 'Oh, Jesus and Buddha. But that still doesn't necessarily prove he's responsible, does it?'

'No,' he agreed. 'For that, you need evidence.' He reached up to the car's list of programmable destinations. 'Let's get going. There's something I want you to see.'

She looked at him suspiciously. 'What?'

'The evidence,' he said simply. 'But before we get there, there's something else I'm going to have to tell you about Driscoll. And you're not going to like it.' The frigate's reactor complexes were surrounded by a maze of access tubes narrow and cramped enough to induce any number of claustrophobic nightmares in the minds of anyone traversing them. Corso led the way, once they disembarked, relying on the detailed maps placed at each junction to help him navigate his way to one of the reactor bays.

Dakota followed close behind, a knot of apprehension twisting in her stomach, her mind still numb with shock from what she'd just learned. Before long they reached the main control area for the frigate's fusion-reaction systems. A screen mounted on one bulkhead showed a real time simulation of the fantastically violent processes taking place just a few metres away.