Empire of Light

'I still can't believe you kept this from me for so long,' she mumbled, watching as Corso stepped over to a service hatch set into the bulkhead. He entered a code into a panel beside the hatch, and after a few moments it swung open.

'We've been over this before,' he replied testily. 'If I can find a way to work with Whitecloud without throttling him, so can you.'

Dakota didn't reply at first. In truth, what Corso had told her on the way still hadn't quite sunk in.

Whitecloud was, whether directly or indirectly, one of the men ultimately responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life. The Port Gabriel incident had led to the ba

'I want him dead,' she a

Corso was halfway inside the hatch as he glanced back at her. 'But we need him alive,' he said, with a warning in his tone.

'You should have told me,' she protested in sudden fury.

'And if I had, would you have been happy about him coming along?'

'No, I wouldn't,' she spat back at him. 'He's a mass murderer, don't you understand? You weren't there, Lucas. You have no conception of what it was like losing your mind like that.'

'And yet we have Trader sitting in his yacht there in the hold, and we all know what he's capable of. I seem to recall he did exactly the same thing to you. So how do you square that with your conscience?'

Dakota's face paled and she fell silent, her eyes round and luminous in the light cast by the reactor simulation.

Corso shook his head in irritation, embarrassed at his own sudden sense of discomfort. A silence stretched between them, but when he ducked to continue through the hatch, she followed after only a moment's hesitation. The area beneath the reactor control room was barely big enough to enable them to crouch together inside it, and the only light came from a single red panel in one corner. Corso pulled out a small flashlight and shone it on to what looked to Dakota at first like a jumble of machinery. He gripped the flashlight in his teeth and used both hands to pull himself closer to it.

As Dakota followed, she saw that a plastic chair had been pushed into one corner, and was covered with matt foil that she recognized as a kind of force-feedback material. A bird's-nest tangle of wiring and circuitry surrounded it, while yet more circuitry and wiring was wrapped around the arms of the chair.

'What is it?' asked Dakota, puzzled.

'See that superconductor cable ru

Suddenly Dakota saw the order in the chaos, and realized she was looking at a home-brew version of the interface chair up on the bridge.

She moved abreast of Corso and brushed the fingertips of one hand along the wiring. 'So why build it at all?' she asked.

'To trigger the shutdown,' Corso explained, 'and to hide the identity of Olivarri's killer. Some of its components were manufactured from the lab's dedicated fabricator. That would nail Whitecloud pretty conclusively.'

'I don't see how,' Dakota muttered. 'Can Uchidan implants even work with an interface chair?'

'Apparently his can. I did a little research into his escape from custody. His implants are a custom job – far from surprising, when you think about it. All the members of his R amp;D unit were regularly tinkering with their own neural hardware to see what results they got.'

'There has to be a reason you're telling me all this now rather than previously.'

'Because it was going to emerge sooner or later, and I'd rather you heard it from me. We're all going to have to make compromises if we're to have a hope in hell of getting out of this mess alive.'

'What compromises?'

'I need you to keep working with Whitecloud.'

She stared at him, totally appalled. 'You've got to be fucking joking.'

'If he's close to some kind of a real breakthrough, you're going to have to. If it makes you feel any better, I've talked with him about what happened at Port Gabriel. He doesn't deny his responsibility for what happened, and I'm not saying he's any less guilty, but I'm begi

A sick, acid feeling was building in the pit of her stomach. 'Oh, that's okay then,' she snapped. 'No problem. Let bygones be bygones, right?'

Corso bristled. 'That's not what I meant.'

She stared off past his shoulder for a moment, thinking. 'Look, putting all of that aside just for the moment, one thing occurs to me. If he's under Trader's control, why did he tell you he'd made a breakthrough? Wouldn't that be against Trader's own interests?'

'Trader didn't control your actions every second of every day, did he?'

'Well, no,' she conceded.

'I think it's the same with Whitecloud. That means he's his own man at least some of the time.' He nodded towards the jury-rigged chair. 'All this tells us is that Trader's pla

Chapter Thirty-two

Another jump, at only 50 per cent capacity, carried the Mjollnir several hundred light-years further across the gulf separating the spiral arms. The Perseus Arm grew to fill more of the sky, while patterns of dust and light began to reveal themselves to the Mjollnir's crew over the next several days, as they worked to keep the frigate's jump capacity above a certain critical level.

Ty's dreams became stranger and more frequent whenever he slept, sometimes almost taking on the nature of visions. At one point he dreamt that a powerful storm roared out of the Mos Hadroch, where it sat in its cradle, commanding him in a voice expressed in the form of thunder and gales.

Now she was back on board, the prognosis for Nancy was far from good; the radiation had caused deep and irreversible cellular damage. He found he dreamt of her also, suited and tumbling out of his reach, until she was lost in the depths of interstellar space. He had visited her in the med-bay a couple of times, and gazed at her through the transparent lid of her medbox, wishing his need for her could somehow bring her closer to life.

He studied his personal logs of the tests he had run on the artefact, and in them found inexplicable gaps. He was by nature a meticulous record-keeper, going so far as to date and time-stamp even his personal observations and thoughts on the tests he ran. But the more he dug, the more he discovered periods where the logs and his own memory now clearly disagreed. He found no records of certain procedures on days when he would have sworn that they had been carried out, but the more he tried to recall the specific details of what had taken place, the more his memory failed him.

Ty experienced a cold tightness in his chest when he discovered that these inexplicable blank spots displayed their greatest frequency around the time of Olivarri's murder.

He sat for a long time, his right hand splayed on the surface of a greyed-out console, the data-ring on his index finger gleaming dully in the low light of the laboratory. Then he activated the console and, from the lab's dedicated fabricator, ordered up a dozen micro-surveillance cameras with broad-spectrum capability. The request would be logged, and he might have difficulty explaining it if it was ever questioned, but that was another risk he was willing to take.

The cameras were manufactured within the hour, whereupon he spent the afternoon positioning the tiny devices in dark and secluded corners of the lab where he was sure they couldn't be spotted at a casual glance. A short time later, Ty found himself back out on the hull as part of another repair shift. He watched Corso drill a hole into the hull itself with a custom-made mechanism he had ordered up from the fabs. The frigate was bathed in the ruby light of dozens of young stars shrouded in nebulae that marked the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm. It was a tremendous spectacle but, after nearly twelve straight hours on EVA, nobody was in a mood for star-gazing.