Empire of Light

Chapter Four

Next time, the interrogators were different.

The first one to enter Ty's cell was balding and middle-aged, with loose wisps of hair curling around his ears. A younger man closed the door behind him, his own head carefully shaved. The older one had the look of a civil servant, and wore a sombre-looking suit with a high collar. His younger companion was dressed more casually.

'My name is Rex Kosac,' the older man explained, as Ty lifted himself up from the narrow plastic shelf that served as his bed, 'and my colleague here is Horace Bleys.'

Ty gazed at them warily, trying to adjust the thin paper uniform he'd been given to wear. 'You're not part of the staff here, are you?'

Bleys glanced around the tiny cell and wrinkled his nose, perhaps becoming aware of the perpetual scent of detergent and urine that clung to every surface. His flattened nose, thick, muscled hands and general air of barely suppressed violence suggested he was Kosac's bodyguard.

'On the contrary, Mr Whitecloud, I administrate this facility,' Kosac replied.

Ty sat up straighter. 'When they brought me here, they said I would be formally arraigned within a couple of days.'

Kosac shook his head sadly. 'That's not why I'm here, Mr White-cloud. I just wanted the chance to meet you before…' he glanced at Bleys with a smile, as if he'd caught himself on the verge of saying something he shouldn't. 'Well, you're our most famous resident, as a matter of fact.'

A helicopter passed over the prison, the sound of its blades dopplering as it descended towards a nearby landing pad. The muffled sounds of men shouting and trucks pulling up outside continued unabated day and night.

'Would you like to know how we found you so quickly?' asked Kosac, his grin increasingly feral.

Ty cleared his throat, his mouth suddenly dry and his tongue feeling heavy. 'I assumed it was the blood sample.'

Kosac frowned. 'Blood sample?'

'A doctor took it from me at a clinic. I assumed you were ru

Enlightenment crossed Kosac's face. 'Ah! I see. No, on the contrary, we picked up a friend of yours a couple of months back. Ilsa Padel – you know her?'

Ty nodded, a terrible feeling of inevitability begi

'She tried to exit the coreship along with a group of refugees. She almost got past us before we figured out who she was. She was extremely helpful when it came to identifying key members of General Peralta's senior staff in return for certain concessions. Even if we didn't have the blood sample, Mr Whitecloud, it was still only a matter of time. And hiding right there in the clinic! Well,' – Kosac shook his head as if sorrowful, 'that was always going to make it easy for us, wasn't it?'

Ty slumped back against the wall. 'I see.'

Ilsa. Few others could have had the opportunity to betray him so thoroughly. Apart from her, only Peralta had been aware of his true identity. Ty felt a tide of bitter melancholy well up as he remembered all the times he had searched for her, unaware she had already bartered him for a more comfortable cell or a shorter sentence. His first sight of the barracks had been at dawn. The block-shaped prison building was tucked into one corner of a large fenced compound belonging to the permanent Consortium military presence stationed in the coreship. Rover-units with heavy armaments mounted on their backs surrounded it, while supply trucks and transports constantly arrived or departed. The corridors within teemed with black-suited troopers, their faces more often than not hidden behind visors.

His first night in this cell had convinced him that he would not survive to see the morning. The single window above the toilet bowl looked out over a courtyard surrounded by a high concrete wall. An automated gun-tower equipped with IR and motion sensors stood on a skeletal tripod in one corner of the courtyard, while most of the rest of it was stacked with pallets containing emergency supplies, the spaces in between forming narrow corridors.

Ty had watched as guards dragged three men in rags past this maze of pallets and towards the courtyard's rear wall. One of the troopers raised a pistol to the back of the head of each in quick succession, dispatching them with quick and brutal efficiency. The pistol emitted a muted bass thump with each shot that Ty felt more than he heard.

He had soon collapsed on to the plastic shelf and spent the rest of the night waiting for his own turn to come. He could imagine the cold biting wind on his face, the chafing of the plastic ties around his wrists, and his last sight of those cracked grey concrete walls before a single shot took out the back of his skull. Instead he woke to another day, and then another after that. But every night the same drama was repeated: one or more figures would be marched out to the rear of the courtyard and executed. Yet nobody ever came for him.

Not until now. Kosac stepped over to the window and peered out. 'Tell me,' he asked, 'how did you wind up with the Uchidans? I believe you grew up in the Freehold.'

'I grew up on a farm, Mr Kosac. My father was murdered on the orders of a corrupt senator, and I had to stand and watch as an entire agricultural facility and several thousand acres of land that should have been my inheritance were stolen from my family.' He shrugged. 'After that, switching sides was easy.'

'I see.' Kosac stepped away from the window. 'You trained originally in biotechnology, but switched careers. Why?'

'After I arrived in the Uchidan Territories, I developed an interest in the Atn. They're a form of extreme biotech, after all, engineered rather than evolved, so it wasn't really that much of a career change. I obtained a Consortium-funded research grant and made a name for myself studying them. My work took me all across human-occupied space, and I spent several years far from home. But when the war with the Freehold became intractable, I found myself conscripted into Territorial Research and Defence when I finally returned.'

'And so you did your duty, because of your faith in God?'

Ty regarded him with a weary look. 'Uchidanism has nothing to do with faith, Mr Kosac. It has much more to do with logical certainties and inescapable mathematical truths.'

'Really,' said Kosac, clearly unimpressed. 'Perhaps you could elaborate for me.'

'I'd rather not.'

Kosac nodded briefly at his companion. Bleys stepped forward and grabbed Ty's hair, then slammed the back of his head against the wall behind the shelf he sat on. Ty groaned and slithered on to the floor, tasting blood where he'd bitten his tongue.

'Humour me,' said Kosac.

The two men waited while Ty pulled himself back up on to the shelf. He dribbled blood and Bleys handed him a handkerchief. Ty took it, pressing it to his mouth until he was ready to continue.

'Uchidanism is… is based on objective observation and statistical probability.'

'What probabilities?'

'That life, by its very nature, always seeks to preserve itself within a universe that has a finite span, and that the ultimate endpoint of technological development is the direct manipulation of the most fundamental laws that govern nature.'

Ty swallowed again. The words came easily, memorized long ago but still clear in his mind. 'There are good reasons to believe we live not in the original universe but in a simulation, possibly one of many. Reality, at its most base level, is little more than an expression of various mathematical formulae; therefore, once you acknowledge these simple truths, the idea that our world could be anything other than created becomes ridiculous.'

'I'm disappointed, Mr Whitecloud.' Ty looked up at Kosac. 'I don't know much about Uchidanism, but I know something about personal faith. I believe we pay for what happens in this world in the next.'