Stealing Light s-1, page 34
part #1 of Shoal Series
The alien was covering its tracks, so that it would appear only she was responsible for the destruction of the derelict and the murder of the Hyperion’s crew: a wake of death and destruction, indeed. Corso hadn’t been so far off the mark then.
‘In order to achieve maximized disaster,’ the creature continued, ‘and to prevent immediate discorporation of Dakota most delightful, absolute cooperation is presently necessitated.’
Her Ghost flagged up a message from Corso. But before she had a chance to read it, she felt something pressing in on her thoughts…
She shook her head, feeling dizzy. She looked up and saw a computer-generated image of Trader, floating in the screens arranged all around the bridge.
‘My life won’t be worth shit if I do what you want. I…’
She stopped. There was something she had to do, something very urgent. She -
– was standing next to the open interface chair, one hand resting on the folded shape of a steel and plastic petal. She couldn’t even remember having crossed the bridge to reach the chair.
There was another message from Corso now, this one marked highest priority. She faltered, and there it was again, pressing in on her thoughts -
– she found herself in darkness.
Dakota reeled, and realized she was seated inside the activated interface chair, with no memory of having climbed inside it or of the petals enfolding her. She gasped with the shock of this sudden dislocation. It felt like being buried alive.
More, she was mind-linked into the second interface, the one on board the derelict. For a moment it lay wide open to her, a universe of data waiting to be pored over -
And then it was gone.
She gasped as the connection was suddenly, deliberately cut.
‹Dakota!› It was Corso, speaking from inside the Piri Reis. ‹I went ahead and activated the systems crash myself once you were in the chair. What happened up there? Why didn’t you respond? I thought I’d lost you.›
I’m not sure. I… I just blacked out for a second, or something. The Shoal-member was talking to me from inside the stacks. The crew are all dead.
‹What? Hang on a second while I… oh shit.› Clearly he’d accessed the bridge video feed recorded a few moments before crashing the onboard systems. ‹What happened in there?›
Nothing to do with me, I assure you.
‹I-shit, have you made the uplink yet?›
No. But I will now.
‹Listen, it’s not about to get any better. There’s a shuttle up from Theona, way ahead of schedule. It should be docking about now.›
They’ve probably come looking for the crew. I don’t even know how long they’ve been dead.
‹Then you’re going to have to get the hell back here before they find you.›
There. Barely a thought and the derelict was now linked directly into the Piri Reis, without first passing through the Hyperion. In data terms it was like turning a tap and getting a trickle compared to the ocean of data she’d just tasted for one mesmerizing moment. It was a bare snatch of what she’d experienced while on board the derelict itself.
Even so, she reached out with her senses, and felt the control data from the interface chair aboard the derelict smoothly mesh with her Ghost. It felt like gaining a new set of limbs-but limbs that felt numb and weak and sluggish in their response.
But she still had control of the derelict.
It’s done, Lucas. The uplink is in place.
Except, against all her expectations, nothing felt different. Instead of feeling victorious, Dakota felt mildly disappointed.
The chair’s petals unfolded from around her. The image of Trader had gone. Overhead displays and status lights around the bridge had fallen into grey, unresponsive dullness. Pale red emergency lighting lent an awful, surreal quality to the horror and carnage that surrounded her.
‹All right. Looks like we’ve got more problems,› Corso informed her. ‹The Hyperion is recovering far faster than I’d have expected.›
Are you serious?
At that moment, she sensed the Hyperion’s few still-active systems disappearing out of reach of her Ghost.
‹Never been more serious. There’s what looks like a list of potential trajectories and orbits being run through the stacks right now. There’s something big in there sucking up most of the processing power, which I guess proves what you were telling me about the Shoal AI.›
She gripped the arms of the interface chair in shock.
Well, it’s nice to know you believed me in the first place.
‹Fine, I apologize. The question now is, how much control do you actually have over the derelict?›
I can’t be sure, Dakota replied. It feels… different.
‹You don’t say›
Shut up, Lucas. I can…
Dakota closed her eyes and concentrated on the uplink: a long and fragile chain of communication.
The derelict became like an immense presence, brooding and dark, like a haunted house waiting to be explored. Immense energies flowed through it, yet it responded only sluggishly to her mental queries.
If I didn’t know better, she told Corso, I’d say something was deliberately trying to block my control of the derelict.
Corso snarled with exasperation. ‹I’m going to pull as much data off the derelict as I can in the meantime, in case we lose the link. Guess we underestimated your friend. The best thing you can do is get back here before whoever’s on that arriving shuttle finds you.›
* * * *
Corso watched as a tsunami of information poured up and into the Piri’s stacks from deep under the moon’s ice. Yet, rather than celebrating, he felt merely haggard, run down and exhausted. The few hours he’d spent asleep, curled up with Dakota, hadn’t been nearly enough. That, plus nearly getting killed on board the derelict-and that following the torture and beating of Dakota herself-conspired to wipe away his remaining ability to concentrate.
He located the Piri’s autodoc menu and dialled up an amphetamine concoction, hoping it might do the trick for him. Dakota’s little ship could do a hell of a lot on its own, but there were limits to all things. He had to be awake and aware in order to supervise the uplink as long as it lasted.
The Piri pinged him a minute later. He’d earlier programmed it to let him know if it stumbled across anything particularly interesting, or plain coherent, among the data delivered from the derelict. He touched a screen and scanned the information appearing there. Ah.
It had found what appeared at first glance to be a narrative: a myth cycle, perhaps, or maybe a simple record of events. It possessed the grandeur of the former, yet the brief, synopsized facts before him now suggested the latter.
He took a closer look, and what he saw appeared to confirm the Magi had, indeed, originated from a specific section of the Larger Magellanic Cloud.
Come on, come on. He rubbed his hands impatiently through his hair as he waited. There were gaps of inactivity, lasting seconds long, as the Piri jumped from one set of incoming data to another.
Corso could discern that whatever was lurking deep within the Hyperion’s data stacks was recovering a lot faster than he could possibly have anticipated. He meanwhile sat at a console, muttering, as he tried to coax the Hyperion’s emergency support systems into accepting his override commands, in an attempt to prevent or at least stall the alien intelligence inside the stacks…
The Piri spasmed. A screech of static lasting perhaps all of a second burst out through the speakers, and the main screen went black for several moments before reasserting itself.
‘Piri! Status report!’
‘All systems operational,’ came the verbalized reply.
‘What just happened? Everything went crazy for a second.’
‘All systems operational,’ came the Piri’s reply again. ‘Levels of data being drawn into my stacks are sufficient to cause resource allocation problems. This is forcing periodic outages.’
Sweat prickled Corso’s skin. The Piri’s primary systems were like nothing they had back on Redstone; its inherent skills of machine deduction and analysis were light years ahead of anything Corso had ever worked with before. It was possible the Piri was having problems with the sheer quantity of data available to it, but somehow he found it all too easy to believe Dakota’s invisible intruder was trying to subvert the Piri.
‘Piri! Use the interpretation protocols to grab anything else deemed relevant, download it now, and abort the rest!’
Better safe than sorry, he had decided, and, besides, time was running out before the alien would regain control of the Hyperion and then realize that the termination point for the current flood of data lay in the cargo bay.
‘Cease interface in a maximum of fifteen seconds, no traces. Got that?’
‘Understood,’ came the reply.
Now he just had to wait for Dakota to make it back aboard.
He cast his eye over the fresh data drawn from the derelict and, as he read it, almost forgot how to breathe.
* * * *
Dakota made to exit the bridge, and found Udo Mansell approaching down the corridor towards her. A long scar cut across his forehead, now pink and smooth from an autodoc’s booster treatments. Patches of skin on his face looked new and shiny.
She gasped in astonishment, taking a step back as he moved in on her.
‘When did you-’
He punched her hard, and she stumbled back in surprise, sprawling across the metal grilles that comprised the deck of the Hyperion’s bridge.
She rolled on all fours and put a hand to her nose in shock. At least, she thought, it wasn’t bleeding.
Udo looked unfocused, clearly still fighting off the side-effects of his medication. She guessed that he’d climbed out of his medbox only in the last few minutes. How stupid, exactly, do you think I am?’ he roared, bunching his fists again. ‘How often do you think you can pull off shit like this and get away with it?’
‘I haven’t-’
Udo stepped forward, then swung his leg back and delivered a tremendous kick to Dakota’s ribs. She bounced off a bulkhead, too little air left in her shocked lungs to scream.
‘Oh, I’m up to date on everything that’s going on around here, and you can thank my dear brother for that. He came and visited me in the medical bay and we talked. How we talked. He told me of all your deceptions, even your murder of one of your own. Now he’s in the medical bay himself and barely able to stand. So, tell me,’ Udo screamed, ‘where is Corso? Where-the fuck-is-he?’
‘I don’t know, Udo,’ she pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, did Kieran tell you to-’
‘I don’t need my brother to tell me anything, you implant-ridden whore. Where is Corso?’ Udo bellowed, fists clenched at his sides. ‘He doesn’t appear on the monitoring systems, so where the fuck is he?’
* * * *
Corso stepped back from the console, feeling stiff and sore after spending long minutes rigid with shock.
He rubbed at his eyes, thinking it strange how the woman who owned this ship had started out as his enemy, yet he now felt closer to her-felt more in common with her-than any other human being he’d ever met.
That was when he noticed the figurine for the first time.
Dakota was far from being tidy-natured. Anyone moving through the cramped interior of her ship was continually banging into things: small decorative items pinned to the walls, or bizarrely floating on strands of fine filigree. Other mementoes and objects that might be tiny pieces of artwork had been epoxied, apparently at random, to every surface. Others floated free, waiting to smack the unwary in the head when least expected.
He instantly recognized the figurine as of Uchidan origin, and suddenly recalled Dakota telling him how she had received it on her first encounter with the Shoal-member on Bourdain’s Rock. It was clearly modelled on the famous statue of Belle Trevois.
Belle Trevois herself had been a thirteen-year-old girl born to a family on Leverrier II during the Diaspora Conflict, more than a century before. Her parents, previously devout members of Moscba Org, lost everything they possessed during the siege on the Hubbard Spaceport, and then converted to the Uchidan faith, which required accepting the Light Of Truth implants central to the Uchidan belief system.
That could hardly have been an easy decision, considering several other Uchidan converts had already been murdered on Leverrier. It was the height of the war, and Uchidans in general were widely suspected of being spies. Yet their conversion could easily have been an entirely pragmatic decision, since the Uchidans had no involvement in the Org’s conflict, and therefore could obtain free passage into orbit.
Unfortunately for Belle, her parents made the stunningly inept decision to permit the Uchidan medician-priests to also place implants inside the skull of their daughter. These implants subsequently took control of Belle’s limbic system, generating the same technologically induced sense of perpetual spiritual ecstasy that her parents had already embraced. Word got out, and what had been merely sporadic violence against the Uchidans on Leverrier II escalated exponentially over the following weeks, fuelled by moral outrage.
Up to that point, Belle and her family had been taking refuge in an Uchidan temple in the heart of Leverrier’s capital city, Ville d’Aiguille. Consortium-mediated negotiations failed to resolve the political situation and wide-scale rioting broke out. As things turned rapidly ugly, rioters broke into the temple and murdered everyone they found, including Belle and her parents, a few hours before they’d been due to finally be lifted into orbit aboard neutral tugs.
Overall, it had been an ugly, nasty business and, in the following decades, Uchidans everywhere had raised Belle Trevois to the status of a martyr, a symbol of their repression. Statues of her, with arms flung outwards, could be found in most Uchidan temples throughout the Consortium, or at least in those still allowed to exist. Even Corso, a loyal Freeholder, had to admit that the crimes committed against the Uchidans were far worse than those they were accused of.
And here she was again, on Dakota’s ship of all places. Belle Trevois, in the form of a simple religious icon…
He stared at the figurine. Something wasn’t right.
‘Piri,’ Corso asked aloud, ‘where did Dakota acquire this?’
‘On Bourdain’s Rock.’
‘Remind me how.’
‘It was given to her by one of the Shoal race.’
Corso exhaled long and slow. ‘Was that interaction recorded in any way? Sight and sound, visuals, anything like that?’
‘Yes,’ the ship replied with typical machine-like pedantry.
‘Can I see those records?’
‘No. Dakota’s direct permission is required.’
Scratch that then. But so far the ship had supported what Dakota had told him.
Let me think. Let me think… Belle was an involuntary martyr, because she hadn’t chosen her faith. Instead, it had been imposed on her, like a kind of mental rape.
‘Port Gabriel,’ said Corso. ‘Dakota was at Port Gabriel, correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘There was a massacre.’
‘Correct.’
Feeling fairly hopeless, Corso tried acting on a hunch. ‘Piri, is there anything at all in that incident pertaining to Belle Trevois?’
‘A Uchidan military transport named the Belle Trevois crashed there during the first war with the Freehold, but some years prior to the incident in question.’
Corso nodded, finally recalling old, half-forgotten history lessons. The Uchidans had long ago placed a small statue of Belle on the exact same spot where their transport had crashed. The statue still stood, even now, having become famous after the massacres. For years afterwards it kept cropping up again and again in news reports and articles about the Port Gabriel incident.
‘How about records of when Dakota placed that figurine on the imaging plate in the bridge?’
‘Those records have been deleted.’
He hadn’t expected that. ‘Deleted by whom?’
‘By Dakota.’
‘Don’t you think it’s strange that an alien would give a statue of Belle Trevois, of all people, to a woman whose implants had been forcibly compromised by Uchidan ideology? Why would it do that?’
‘This question is not understood.’
Corso had forgotten he wasn’t talking to a true intelligence, just to a machine. He carried on thinking aloud regardless. ‘None of this would be remarkable except for her telling me she didn’t know what the figurine represented or where it came from. But how could she not know?’
