Empire of Light

He moved his shaking fingers across the surface of the console and set it to record, then began to speak. He did his best to summarize what he'd discovered, and what he thought they were dealing with. He tripped over his own words but pushed on regardless, knowing he was babbling but afraid that his mind might be stolen away from him before he had a chance to finish. He knew the monster inside his head could come back at any time.

Ty took the command structure he'd discovered and attached both his message and the video footage of the artefact's sudden transformation to it, then distributed multiple copies throughout the ship's networks. He left the console to continue recording in the meantime.

Even if the monster managed to track down some of the copies of the command structure, it couldn't find or delete them all. All Ty needed to do now was…

A glint of light suddenly manifested in the corner of his vision, like a ray of sunlight reflecting off glass.

The monster had woken up.

Ty scrabbled for the knife and splayed his fingers across the console once more, just as he heard the heavy door behind him begin to open. He took a firm grip on the knife and prepared to strike down at his finger.

Something stopped him, and he cried out. It felt like the air around him had solidified, freezing him in place.

The monster crawled back inside his skull, just as he heard someone call his name.

Chapter Thirty-three

The comms terminal in Dakota's quarters began to beep insistently. She accessed the data-space and found a high-priority alert waiting for her from Corso. A moment's mental navigation pinpointed him on Deck C, close by the labs.

Lucas. What's up?

‹Dakota. Where are you?›

There was an edge of panic to his voice.

I'm in my quarters, she replied.

‹I need you to meet me at Deck C, near Transport 55, straight away. There's something you need to see.›

Why don't you just tell me what it is?

‹Just get down here, Dakota. Right now.›

He cut the co

He nodded towards the open door, his expression grim. 'Take a look.'

She stepped inside, but her nose had already told her everything she needed to know. The bulkheads were stained red with blood, and the air smelled of copper and rust.

She saw Corso and Martinez kneeling on either side of Ray Willis, who had been pushed into the space between two tall metal equipment bins. It was clear from the deep gashes in his throat and chest that he was very dead.

Corso glanced up at her as she entered. 'Did you see anyone else on the way here?'

'No, I came straight away.'

Corso and Martinez exchanged a look. 'Four of us here-'

'And Dan on the bridge,' Martinez finished for him. 'We should get back there as soon as we can.'

Just five of us left, Dakota thought numbly. Ray, Nancy, Leo – all dead.

'What about – what about Driscoll?' she asked. She had almost said, what about Whitecloud?

'Now there's a question I'd like to answer,' said Martinez, straightening up. He grabbed hold of one side of a storage module to keep himself standing the right way up. 'He's gone.'

'Not only that, it looks like he took the Mos Hadroch with him,' Corso added. 'And… Dakota, Eduard knows about Whitecloud. Or he does now, at any rate.'

'Please tell me you only found that out recently,' said Martinez. His tone was calm, but something in the way he looked at her made it abundantly clear he was suppressing a great deal of anger.

'I swear, I only just found out myself.' She glanced at Corso. 'You know, maybe you should have told all of us a long time before now.'

'Maybe I should,' Corso agreed, but she knew he was dissembling.

She couldn't stop staring down at Willis's face; he wore an expression of mild surprise that seemed utterly at odds with the violence that had been done to him. The gashes in his body were horrible, and yet she couldn't look away.

'I guess it's pretty conclusive now that Whitecloud killed Olivarri,' she said.

'I'm still not making any assumptions until we find him,' replied Martinez.

'What about Willis here? Who found him?'

'We were getting unexplained major power surges from the labs,' Corso explained. 'Driscoll… Whitecloud,' he corrected himself, 'didn't answer our calls, so Ray came down here to check things out. That was the last we heard from him.'

Dakota dipped back into the data-space and checked on Trader's yacht.

'Trader's where he should be,' she a

Lamoureaux leaned in through the doorway and caught her eye. 'You think Whitecloud might be on his way to the hold?'

'How the hell does Trader come into this?' Martinez demanded.

'How much did Lucas tell you about Whitecloud?' Dakota asked him.

'Enough to make me a very unhappy man, Miss Merrick.'

'Well… he has a customized Uchidan implant, and it's possible Trader's using it to exert some kind of control over him. It's also possible he doesn't even know what's happening to him.'

'That might be the case,' Martinez growled, 'but if I happen to accidentally blow the bastard's head off, I won't cry about it.' He nodded towards the corridor outside. 'There's an arms locker near here. We get armed and we go looking for him.'

'No. No firearms,' said Corso firmly. 'We can't take a chance that the artefact might get damaged.'

Martinez pulled himself upright, took hold of a metal shelf bolted to the bulkhead behind him, and used it for leverage as he planted one booted foot on Corso's shoulder and pushed hard. Corso was sent skidding across the floor until he hit the bulkhead opposite.

'I should kill you now,' the Commander rasped. 'You've lied to me too many times, Lucas, and it's getting people killed. This is still my command, my ship, my crew. Therefore we carry arms.'

He glanced around them all with an expression of disgust. 'Nothing would make me happier than to shove the whole fucking lot of you out the nearest airlock and watch you wriggle, but right now you're going to get yourselves armed and start looking for Whitecloud. I don't care how big the fucking ship is, this time I want him found.' By the time Dakota made it back to the bridge some hours later, Lamoureaux had just completed the latest in a series of jumps that had shifted the frigate deep inside the Perseus Arm. They were now only twelve hundred light-years from the target system.

She lowered herself on to a couch near Martinez and Perez, and saw they were all present for once – excepting Trader and Whitecloud, of course. Lamoureaux sat in the interface chair and looked so tired that she wondered if he might pass out. Corso perched on the edge of the dais, by Ted's feet, facing towards the rest of them. They all looked just as exhausted as she felt.

Corso nodded to her. 'Think you can stay awake a few minutes more?'

'Sure,' Dakota muttered hoarsely. A numbness, like thick black cotton pressing against the inside of her skull, kept threatening to swallow her thoughts. She had enjoyed maybe a couple of hours' sleep at most out of the last seventy-two. Her implants could modulate her hormone and adrenalin levels to give her the occasional boost, but there was only so much abuse her body could endure.

Lamoureaux climbed down from the interface chair and sat beside her. Corso now stood up and faced them all.

'First,' he said, 'there's still no sign of Whitecloud. It's the same problem as before: this ship's just too big. We've set the fabs to manufacturing a couple of dozen stripped-down spider-mechs to take over the search, but they won't be much more than a camera mounted on a navigational platform. They'll search the ship systematically, and at speed, starting at the bow and finishing at the stern.'