Empire of Light

He left the video feed ru

Eventually he gave up, turning back to the console where he had left the video ru

His own face – somehow inhuman in its lack of any discernible human emotion – filled the screen. The eyes were wide and blank, as if staring off at some infinitely distant horizon. It seemed the monster had found the camera he had hidden in a recess to one side of the stack system, and crouched down to take a close look at it.

Ty moved over quickly to forward the video feed another hour. Nothing changed: the monster was still crouching next to the stack-unit, staring directly into the lens. Its slack-muscled features betrayed all the warmth and compassion of a reanimated corpse. He – no, it – must have been standing there during all that time, just staring into the lens.

Ty knew he was being sent a message here. No wonder he felt like he hadn't been getting any sleep; because he hadn't.

He slammed the console with his open palm so hard that it stung. The video feed blanked, but he could still see his own traitorous face reflected back at him in the smooth black glass.

He snatched his gaze away, suddenly sober again, and now filled with a terrible, skin-crawling chill. He hunted about for the hidden cameras and soon discovered most, but not all, were missing. He repositioned the undamaged ones in places where he hoped they might be harder to find, then he took a seat, opened another squeeze-bottle and began drinking with grim determination. At first, the others didn't notice his condition when Ty arrived in the airlock bay for his next shift on the hull.

That was fine by him, since he felt wrung out after spending the night vomiting into a vacuum hose, and tiny gold-plated hammers still pounded with an unwavering rhythm against the inside of his skull. Conversation was certainly not something he was looking forward to, but it looked like he would once again be working with Corso and Lamoureaux, who usually spent most of the time just talking between themselves.

The two men were standing almost head-to-head, already deep in discussion. Ty paused by the entrance, where they couldn't yet see him, and listened quietly.

'So you think we can still recover more data?' Corso was asking.

'The Mjollnir has a lot of inbuilt redundancy,' Lamoureaux replied, keeping his voice low – but sounds tended to carry easily inside the frigate. 'There's a chance we can recover the rest of the lost data from the surveillance systems.'

'You mean the overflow buffers?'

'No,' Lamoureaux shook his head, 'we've got everything we can from them. But some of the core stack arrays can act as virtual buffers in an emergency. So it's possible there's still…'

Lamoureaux glanced to one side, spotted Ty and fell immediately silent. Corso turned and scowled when he saw him.

But Ty didn't care, and he headed for one of the suit racks, his mind suddenly racing with possibilities. Over the next several hours, he had plenty of opportunity to mull over the brief snatch of conversation he had overheard.

Memory overflow buffers. He guessed they were talking about the data lost during the catastrophic systems failure around the time of Olivarri's murder. Clearly there was a way of recovering at least some of that data. And what else might be hidden in those buffers?

Later, on his way back to the labs, Ty once again stopped off at the mess hall, an idea forming in his head. One bulkhead was dominated by a display of ceremonial weapons: a dozen long knives of the type used in challenge fights were arranged in a circle, their blades all pointing inwards.

It took a little effort, but he managed to prise one loose, then concealed it inside his jacket and returned to the labs. He found several messages waiting for him, including a new shift-schedule put together by Willis, who had taken over that particular duty following Nancy's death.

He activated the back-up stack system, and dug deep into its operational guts. He felt a flush of triumph when he traced the files he had seen on the video feed to a virtual buffer located in a linked stack in an entirely separate part of the ship. What those files might actually be was a question he couldn't yet answer, but a lot of time and effort had been taken to hide them somewhere neither he nor anyone else might think to look.

He thought again of the monster staring at him from out of his own eyes, and felt a second flush of triumph: I'm on to you now.

Ty now used a set of software tools to study the contents of the files, and found them to be lightly encrypted command structures of a type he had never seen before, carefully modified to run on the imager array in which the Mos Hadroch still sat.

He regarded the unmoving artefact for a moment, and felt an uneasy chill. Surely it couldn't be this easy.

He spent a few minutes loading the command structures into the imager array, set the probes to start recording, and activated them.

What happened next was far more than he could possibly have anticipated. A bass moaning sound filled the air, modulating every few seconds. The sound seemed to penetrate deep inside his body and mind, in a way that was far from pleasant.

At the same time, the artefact appeared to come apart – no, unfold – in some way that his human eyes couldn't make sense of. He stared, utterly transfixed, as it appeared to grow larger over the next few minutes, its shape now constantly morphing and shifting. Jewel-like shards appeared all around it, hanging in the air, and glistening and twisting like a kaleidoscope projected in three dimensions.

A message alert flashed, but he ignored it.

The only way he could explain what he was seeing was by assuming the Mos Hadroch existed in more than three spatial dimensions. What appeared to be disparate shards might instead be components of this device that normally existed only in the other, higher dimensions, but were now briefly flickering into view.

The throbbing became more intense, driving itself deeper into his mind and making it hard to think clearly. He found himself involuntarily re-experiencing key events in his own life in flashes of almost hallucinatory detail, as if the Mos Hadroch were pulling them out of his subconscious and attempting, in its alien way, to understand who and what he was.

A machine for passing judgement: that's what he had told Lamoureaux and Willis, back in Ascension. It was trying to find out if he was worthy of it.

He relived his days in the hidden R the celebrations when the Legislate-backed strike against the Uchidan Territories floundered; the sense of betrayal when his Uchidan masters had decided to hand him over to the Legislate.

Despite his terror at what was happening to him, Ty laughed. The irony was inescapable: for all his abortive attempts at understanding the artefact, it was doing a much better job of understanding him. Finally, mercifully, the Mos Hadroch reverted to something closer to its normal appearance. Meanwhile the monstrous noise that had accompanied its transformation decreased to a quieter pitch.

Ty remembered the ceremonial knife. Splaying his right hand flat on the console, he held the blade in his left so that it hovered over the finger wearing the data-ring.

If he could just do it quickly enough, the ring might not have the opportunity to send a signal through his nervous system. All he had to do was strike down, a single slash, and it would all be over…

His hand trembled as a cold wash of fear passed through him. He sobbed and let go of the knife, unable to go through with this act of self-mutilation; not when he knew the action might kill him.