Gary Gibson - Stealing Light

She remembered the plaza ripping apart down the middle, with a sound like an army of gods grinding their teeth in unison. She recalled seeing rivers of silver work their way through the ancient exposed rock, as she’d been carried upwards in a rushing tornado of air. Then a chunk of mountain had come flying towards her, lines of silver spreading through that too, before it visibly dissolved into gravel before her eyes.

The filmsuit, she knew, had kept her alive. She’d been aware that it could absorb kinetic energy to some fantastic degree, but ensuring her survival after colliding with a mountain was on a whole new level of scary

A section of slowly tumbling debris about the size of a stadium came rushing up towards her. There was no way she could avoid it, but she braced herself nevertheless, hoping against hope.

She came into contact with the hurtling debris at bowel-emptying speed, yet she felt nothing. For a few moments, her filmsuit glowed a dull red while the rock underfoot began steaming and cracking. It seemed the filmsuit could somehow reflect the enormous kinetic energy of the impact back into itself.

Dumbfounded at this knowledge, Dakota bent her knees and kicked, pushing herself away from the shattered asteroid fragment. Her filmsuit slowly faded to its usual black, any remaining energy radiating back into space. It was hard to believe the Bandati liquid shield could be capable of so much.

Gradually she built up a momentum taking her away from Bourdain’s Rock by pushing herself off other chunks of passing debris. Once she was far enough away, she finally took the opportunity to look back. Patches of dying forest were still visible, clinging to shattered asteroid-fragments that spun slowly away from each other or else collided and continued to disintegrate.

Dakota didn’t even want to think about what had happened to the people left behind.

As she watched, a huge chunk of the Rock’s shattered horizon split apart in a shower of grey and black dust. Trees and lichens still clung to one segment and, against all the odds, some localized emergency power circuits were still functioning, illuminating the interiors of ripped-open corridors, equipment bays and living quarters. Combined with the glow of sporadic electrical fires here and there, these lights gave the impression of a hellish grotto. She caught glimpses of the flash-frozen corpses of deer and horses floating near by, then they were gone, caught in a disintegrating maelstrom of dust and rock that was likely to grind them down to nothing.

Piri was feeding her news reports of the disaster, as local ships escaping from the Rock continued firing live feeds into the local tach-nets. Her Ghost subsequently picked out a description of a woman urgently being sought for questioning. A woman carrying illegal machine-head implants.

But I didn’t do anything, she protested within the safety of her own thoughts. Maybe they were talking about some other machine-head.

They were going to kill me. I had no choice…

But no choice as to what? She hadn’t followed through on her threat. She’d tried to bluff Moss, and failed pathetically.

But someone had followed through. She had absolutely no doubt the Rock had been destroyed by the same GiantKiller she’d transported here earlier.

The appalling notion that she had been set up oozed into Dakota’s thoughts like a pool of coagulating blood. People were looking for her, people who thought she was responsible for this outrage.

But who could be easier to blame than a machine-head, an illegal?

Old anger and frustration flared deep inside her thoughts. She remembered all too clearly the day they’d forcibly removed her original Ghost implants, after the fatal flaw in the technology had become clear. Just as vivid was the memory of her subsequent near-suicidal depression, a bleak period that had lasted several months. Then came her decision to acquire some crude black-market clones, furtively installed in a backstreet surgery, before slowly starting to piece her life back together.

Without doubt she was the perfect scapegoat, for no one really trusted machine-heads. Not after…

For a long moment, Dakota imagined her broken and beaten body being tossed aloft by a jeering mob.

Come and get me, Piri.

‹I am already on the way, Dakota. It may take me some time to reach you, however, due to the risk of compromising hull integrity through further impacts. It is therefore advisable for you to maximize distance between yourself and any debris.›

That’s fine, Piri. Just make sure you get here before my filmsuit runs out of juice.

She was drifting towards a boulder measuring about a hundred metres across. As she got closer, she recognized the tiles adorning part of its surface: it was a fragment of the Great Hall. Both she and it were moving in the same direction at roughly similar velocities, so she managed to land on it gently. She was about to push away again when she caught sight of a human body floating nearby-a partly naked woman, with the few remaining scraps of an evening dress still straggling from her torso.

The corpse’s eyes were glassy and frozen, the mouth open in a soundless scream. Dakota recognized her as the avatar of Pope Eliza.

As Dakota finally pushed off into the darkness her Ghost circuits tugged her gaze in a particular direction, where she saw light glinting from the rapidly approaching shape of the Piri Reis.

It would take days for her to shake the hideous memory of the avatar’s corpse from her restless dreams.

The Piri hove closer, changing from a dull silhouette barely visible against the stars to a grey hull comprised of three joined-up sections. From a distance it resembled a fat metallic insect. From the ship’s underbelly, a forest of grapples extended, seeking her out.

Dakota fell into her ship’s machine embrace, like a swaddled child falling into the arms of its mother. At that moment she became aware of the Shoal’s gift still clutched, by some miracle, in one black-slicked hand.

Freehold Democratic State

Redstone Colony, 82 Eridani

Lucas Corso blinked, trying to stay alert, and focused again on the bleak landscape beyond the windscreen. He was getting tired after the long drive, the snowy vastness merging into an unending pale void as he aimed the tractor transport at a point midway between two distant volcanic peaks from which thin trails of smoke dribbled.

Fire Lake was visible to the east, spreading beyond the horizon, its icy foam-topped water crashing against a desolate shore. Canopy trees towered in the near distance, like black umbrellas sprouting from the corpses of buried giants. The largest and oldest of them easily reached fifty or sixty metres into the air. One-wings circled around the high, veined shrouds of the trees, their organic photovoltaic upper-wing surfaces sparkling as they circled in the fading light.

Corso checked the co-ordinates they’d been given: almost there now.

Sal was asleep beside him in the passenger seat, arms folded over his chest, head back, occasionally blinking awake and peering around for a few moments as they trundled across the frozen landscape. He’d long since given up arguing with Corso, of trying to prevent him -as Sal put it-from committing suicide.

‘Nothing you do will bring Cara back or get your father out of jail,’ Sal had repeated for the hundredth time. ‘Not even murdering Bull Northcutt. God knows I’d like to see the psychotic son of a bitch dead and skewered, but the fact is, if either one of you is going to wind up in a coffin, it’s probably not going to be him.’