Empire of Light

Once the plate-like Meridian field-generator had been plugged into the hull, Corso stepped back, allowing Lamoureaux room. Ted squatted beside it, laying the flat of one gloved hand on its slightly convex surface. A moment later, a flickering dome of light flared into life around them, which had to be at least fifty metres across.

'All right, I guess that's the last one for today,' Lamoureaux a

'How much longer before we get the last one into place?' asked Corso.

'If we can keep to our schedule, it'll be another two days before the last of them is fitted to the hull,' Lamoureaux replied. 'With the spider-mechs doing a lot of the prep-work, we can speed things up, but we're still going to have to spend some time calibrating them.'

'And how long is that going to take?'

'Another day, maybe.' Lamoureaux turned and gestured at the newly installed field-generator. 'They're powerful, mind you. Whole orders of magnitude stronger than anything the Shoal let us get our hands on.'

Corso nodded. 'Ted, I need to check some diagnostics with you. So Nathan, if you don't mind-' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, then pointed at Lamoureaux, signalling they were going to talk over a private cha

'By all means,' said Ty, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'Don't let me stop you.'

Ty simmered in silence while the other two men got to talking about whatever it was they didn't want him to hear. Paranoia made him sure that he was the subject of their conversation, and he wondered if they had finally picked up on his long-range tach-net communication with the avatar.

The two men's comms icons changed back to public mode a few minutes later.

'I'm going to take a look at the rest of the field-generators we planted,' Lamoureaux a

Ty frowned behind his visor. 'You could do that just as well from the bridge.'

'Well, since I'm out here, I might as well grab the opportunity,' Lamoureaux replied, trying so hard to sound casual that it aroused Ty's suspicions further.

Lamoureaux moved away from them, carried along the hull by the thin silver wires of his spacesuit's lanyard, and followed by a small retinue of spider-mechs.

'Ty,' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, 'switch to a private cha

With some reluctance, Ty switched to a one-on-one cha

'I wanted to talk to you about Nancy, Ty. Word gets around.'

Ty opened his mouth and closed it. He almost blurted out a denial, then relented. 'It started long before we even got to Redstone. I-'

'Forget it,' said Corso. 'That doesn't matter. When I told you to stay away from the rest of the crew, I didn't know you were already involved with her.'

'Is she…?'

'She didn't make it, Ty. I'm sorry.'

Ty nodded inside his helmet, his throat suddenly tight. 'I see. There was never really any hope of recovery, was there?'

'No,' Corso admitted. 'But you have to make the attempt, anyway.'

Ty listened to the sound of his own breathing, close and loud within his helmet. Corso moved as if to turn away.

'Then there'll have to be a funeral service?' Ty asked.

Corso stopped and looked back at him. 'No, not yet, anyway.'

'Why not?' Ty demanded, scandalized.

'This isn't the time to be burying any more of our dead. Not when we're this close to our goal. The last thing the others need is to be reminded just how dangerous this job is. There's a real chance none of us is going to come back alive.'

'You have to hold a service,' Ty rasped. 'There was one for Olivarri.'

'That was different,' Corso snapped. 'He was murdered. Nancy's death is a direct result of our mission. We'll mark her passing properly, but not until this is over.'

'And is that what the others think, too?'

'I'm not here to debate the issue with you. I'm just telling you how it is.'

'Good of you to let me know,' Ty replied sarcastically.

'She had no idea who you really were, did she?'

'It wasn't the kind of thing that came up in conversation,' he replied, unable to keep the acid out of his voice.

'Ty, didn't it ever occur to you what you were actually doing by deceiving her like that? Did you really think I instructed you to stay away from the crew just to punish you? I've been deceiving people who would give their life for me, and for this mission, by not telling them who you really are. I wanted you to stay away because I didn't want to make that lie any bigger than it already is.'

'I thought of telling her,' Ty confessed, 'but I couldn't face the idea of her hatred.'

Corso chuckled. 'Keep saying things like that, and I might end up mistaking you for a human being one of these days.' Once he was back inside, Ty slept for a solid ten hours before waking with aching muscles and skin that had become infuriatingly itchy from pressure sores. He dragged himself into the lab's minimal toilet facilities, turned on a tap and watched a ball of water form at the end of the nozzle. Once it was about the size of his fist, he pulled it free and pushed his face into it, gasping at its icy coldness against his skin. He felt like he hadn't slept at all.

It was time to take a look at what the cameras he'd positioned around the lab had recorded. But first he was going to fix himself a drink.

Ty could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had ever touched alcohol, but some compulsion born of fatigue and grief, as well as the fear of what he might find when he reviewed the video feeds, made it easier to break what had until now been a habit of lifelong abstinence. Before long he was heading for an echoing, empty mess hall not too far away, where he breakfasted on freeze-dried crackers and reconstituted yoghurt. Once he had finished eating, he wandered through the kitchen area until he found the liquor cabinet he had spotted previously and randomly picked out a few squeeze-bottles of wine of indeterminate vintage and quality.

He broke the plastic seal on one of them, loaded the rest into a shoulder bag, then took a few sips from the open squeeze-bottle, careful to keep his thumb over the seal to prevent it spilling out in the zero gee. He grimaced at the taste, but kept drinking until a comfortably mellow feeling had begun to permeate into his tired limbs and his brain.

Back in the lab, Ty loaded the video feed and ran it from the begi

He fast-forwarded the feed an hour, and saw himself still thoughtfully typing or else pulling up data from the stacks.

And there was still another thirty hours of video to go through.

He sighed and fast-forwarded again, watching himself stand up and propel himself over to the far side of the lab, where a dedicated stack system maintained a real time back-up of all the experimental data gathered so far.

Ty frowned: this was something he definitely didn't recall doing. The only reason ever to use the back-up stack at all was because something had gone wrong with the primary system: and there had been no such issues that he could recall.

He switched views so that the feed from another camera allowed him to look over his own shoulder at the screen positioned above the back-up unit.

He leaned forward as the view zoomed in, and beads of sweat prickled his forehead when he saw nothing on that screen but seemingly unintelligible garbage. It no longer felt like he was actually watching himself; this was someone else looking out at the world through his own eyes – a monster hiding inside his own head.