Empire of Light

'Who's going to be ru

'No one,' Martinez replied. 'We can't afford the spare hands, not with only five of us to do all the work. The spiders will maintain their own network, cross-check everything they see, and flag anything even slightly out of the ordinary.'

'But that's still going to take too much time,' Lamoureaux protested.

'I agree,' Corso nodded. 'What we really need to be doing is using our heads to try and figure out another way to track Whitecloud and the artefact down. While he was rooting around in the lab computers, Dan found something you really need to see. Over to you, Ted?'

Lamoureaux nodded, and a moment later an image of the Mos Hadroch appeared overhead, still suspended inside the imager array in the lab.

Dakota leaned forward. There seemed to be something wrong with the artefact, as if the air around it had become distorted.

'The video you're about to see was made before the Mos Hadroch was removed from the lab, obviously,' Corso explained. 'Dan came across several crushed fab-manufactured cameras, while the rest of us were out searching the ship. He's found a few more since, still intact and apparently deliberately hidden in secluded parts of the lab where you wouldn't find them unless you looked pretty hard. Dan also found some video files that Whitecloud had apparently deliberately distributed through the ship's stacks. Run the first one, Ted.' The image jerked into life.

As Dakota watched, the Mos Hadroch appeared to explode in extreme slow motion, glittering shards diverging outwards from its central mass and twisting slightly as they did so. The central core – the artefact itself – was meanwhile changing shape, seeming to twist apart and then fold in on itself every few seconds, in a way that challenged her senses. It literally hurt her eyes to watch.

There were hints of what might be shadows, as if the artefact were trapped at the centre of a tangle of struts and mechanisms, most of which were invisible, or very close to invisible. An eerie and overwhelmingly alien throbbing accompanied these contortions.

She finally tore her gaze away and pressed her fingers to her eyes. When she looked back up, Lamoureaux had stopped the video.

'We also found this,' said Lamoureaux. 'Lucas?'

'Run it, Ted.'

A new video began. This time Whitecloud stared into the lens of the lab's main console, a wild look about his eyes.

'My name – my real name – is Ty Whitecloud,' he a

The image jerked momentarily as Lamoureaux jumped it forward.

'… artefact is composed of some form of non-baryonic material imbued with a highly self-organizing principle, possibly hylozoic in nature, in essence a classical model of a Wheeler-Korsh engine. This is the only way I can begin to comprehend the nature of the communication between myself and the Mos Hadroch.'

'Communication?' exclaimed Perez.

Dakota sat up, her fatigue suddenly forgotten.

'What you must understand is that the Mos Hadroch is more than just a simple weapon. It will not function for just anyone who happens to come into possession of it. If the communication I shared with it is anything to judge by, it is entirely capable of making its own decisions. It knows everything about us – about the Shoal, their war with the Emissaries, our purpose in being here.'

'He's babbling,' said Perez. 'None of this makes any sense.'

'Shut up,' said Corso.

'Someone – something – has been exerting control over me against my will, and the only reason for doing so is because they want the artefact. But what you must understand…' Whitecloud paused to clear his throat, clearly at his wits' end '… what you must understand is that whether the artefact fulfils its purpose or not will depend on the artefact's own judgement of anyone who tries to activate it.'

Whitecloud slumped at the console and brushed one shaking hand through his unkempt hair. 'You must understand that it will destroy us, if it finds sufficient reason.'

For a moment he looked like he was thinking of adding something, but then appeared to change his mind, stepping back from the console.

'He's crazy,' said Perez.

'I agree,' said Martinez. 'He's clearly lost his mind.'

'I'm not so sure,' said Dakota.

Lamoureaux pointed upwards. 'There's more.'

Dakota looked back to see that Whitecloud had splayed one of his hands across the surface of the console, while the other gripped a knife with its blade aimed at one of his fingers.

Jesus and Buddha, she thought, horrified but unable to look away. Whitecloud kept shaking badly, muttering under his breath and clearly in great distress.

He stood like that for several seconds, then his behaviour changed abruptly. His face grew expressionless, in a way that sent cold prickles of horror up Dakota's spine. He stared towards the lab entrance, which was out of sight of the console's recording lens, then himself stepped out of view, the knife still clutched in one hand.

'Talk about timing,' Perez muttered. 'This must be when Ray turned up.'

'Yeah, I think you're right,' agreed Corso. 'Whitecloud killed him before he could see what was happening to the artefact.'

'No, Trader killed him,' said Dakota, turning to eye him pointedly. 'The fact that it was Whitecloud's hands actually holding the knife doesn't mean anything. You saw the way he was struggling with himself

'I'll move it forward by a few minutes,' said Lamoureaux, and Whitecloud reappeared overhead once again. He was now covered in blood that was not his own, and he was panting hard, his chest rising and falling. Ray Willis would not have been an easy man to kill, even if caught by surprise.

Dakota watched Whitecloud pull the Mos Hadroch out of its cradle and stuff it into a bag. There was something monstrous about his eyes, as if they had been drained of any humanity.

'Does this mean he had the command structure for the Mos Hadroch the whole time?' asked Perez, in a subdued tone.

'There's a bit earlier on where he describes finding it hidden deep inside the stacks. How it got there, he doesn't know.'

Something clicked into place inside Dakota's head. 'I know,' she said, thinking furiously.

Corso stared at her. 'How do you know?'

'By putting two and two together. I don't have a shred of doubt anymore that he's under Trader's control. But here's the thing. We didn't let Trader come on board because we didn't want him getting anywhere near the Mos Hadroch, right? At least, not in person.'

'So he used Whitecloud to get to it?' said Lamoureaux, his eyes widening.

'And used him as well to run his own experiments on the artefact,' Dakota continued. 'He transferred copies of the command structure into the lab, where he could test it out and see if it worked. But, somehow, Whitecloud stumbled across the command structure and figured out what was going on.'

'But why take the Mos Hadroch now? Why not before?'

'I don't know,' Dakota admitted. 'But once Trader discovered Whitecloud had distributed copies of the command structure throughout the ship, he'd have realized we wouldn't need him any more.'

Martinez stood up, his expression grim. 'Which means right now Whitecloud is on his way to Trader's yacht – if he isn't there already.'

He stepped over to a console and a moment later a wire-frame of the frigate appeared above them. 'We'll resume the search, but this time we'll focus exclusively on the aft airlocks, and on every access route leading to the main hold and Trader.'

'But he could be there already,' said Perez. 'He probably went straight there after killing Ray.'

'Not necessarily,' said Corso. 'As soon as we found Ray, I programmed the surveillance feeds to send me an alert the moment Whitecloud showed up on a camera.'