Gary Gibson - Stealing Light

‘Because there’s too much valuable information on board the Hyperion. At least, I reckon that’s what they’re assuming.’

‘I didn’t mean the other ships,’ said Corso. ‘I meant the Senator. He’s not the type to go down without a fight.’

‘Assuming he’s even still alive,’ Dakota replied dismissively.

‘You couldn’t kill him that easily. And look.’ He pointed at the screen, as the Piri’s detection systems kicked up and isolated the image of a tiny vehicle exiting the Hyperion.

‘Yeah, he’s up to something,’ Corso mused, leaning in closer.

The Hyperion had been programmed for a basic intercept course with the fleet’s command vessel. Under any other circumstances, the crew of the command vessel would simply have plotted a course that took them out of the ageing warship’s path. But that didn’t take the Agartha into account, preceded by three nuclear-tipped missiles.

Bourdain’s command vessel was now caught in a classic pincer movement. Its beam weapons swivelled in their ports and fired outwards, destroying each of the missiles in a flash of bright fire.

Too late: the command vessel’s crew had hesitated a moment too long. The Hyperion had ramped its engines to maximum acceleration-a far higher rate of gees than could have been possible if anyone on board had still been alive.

The command ship tried to boost itself out of the Hyperion’s path. And it almost made it.

The Hyperion surged forward, slamming into the command vessel, whose hull crumpled like paper under the impact, releasing puffs of atmosphere. To an outside observer, it would have appeared as if the two ships were actually melting into each other.

More missiles had been launched from the Agartha in the meantime, also targeted at the two subsidiary vessels. The command vessel’s fusion propulsion systems meantime exploded under the force of the Hyperion’s impact, releasing all their energy in one single, devastating blast.

Lines of light spread along the length of the Hyperion’s vast bulk, rapidly moving from fore to aft as the craft’s magnetic containment chambers ruptured, spilling raw plasma into space.

Corso chewed at his knuckles as he watched intently on the Piri Reis’s main screen. The destruction of the Hyperion and the largest vessel in the enemy fleet had caused an explosion bright enough to overwhelm the Piri’s filters for a few moments. He was forced to partly rely on numerical feeds and communications traffic analyses to give him a true picture of what had just happened.

The battle thereafter degenerated into a straightforward shooting match. The Agartha, was decelerating now, and one of the remaining two enemy ships was drifting lifeless, set into a slow spin by a missile strike. Judging by the way it had been ripped open, it was extremely unlikely that anyone on board had been left alive. The Hyperion and the command vessel had merged into a tangled, burning mass, twisting slowly as Theona’s gravity sucked them downwards.

Corso next turned his attention to their passage across the Nova Arctis system. The Piri was already moving at enormous speeds, its tiny mass, relative to ships like the Agartha, allowing it to zip between worlds at an almost uncanny pace. The danger of interference from any other ships that might be orbiting Newfall was nonexistent: at the moment, that planet was far on the other side of the system from them, putting any other Freehold vessels far out of reach.

The innermost world, Ikaria, was however a lot more reachable. It lay almost directly ahead, locked into a tight, Mercury-like orbit around its parent star, close enough that any atmosphere it might once have possessed had long since been burned away.

Dakota’s ship was fortunately equipped with a small cache of micro-probes, tiny automated things that could be boosted to far higher speeds than a ship like the Piri Reis or its fragile human crew could withstand. They were already most of the way toward Ikaria, getting ready to dive downwards and relay back images and data pertaining to anything they found or saw.

The battle above Theona was over almost as soon as it had begun, the Agartha firing further missiles that destroyed the remaining enemy ship. The Agartha. was already altering its course to come after the Theona derelict, which had by now left the moon’s orbit. It would inevitably pass within only a few million kilometres of the Piri Reis as it dived towards the heart of the Nova Arctis system.

Long-range detection systems showed the crackle of plasma around the derelict’s skin. The Agartha, meanwhile, was already accelerating so hard it was a wonder its crew could survive on it at all. Regardless of this, the derelict still had the clear advantage.

It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out that the derelict was powering up for a transluminal jump.

Corso was willing to bet any amount of money the alien craft’s destination was the fiery heart of Nova Arctis itself. It seemed Dakota’s Shoal AI was about to destroy an entire system, all to wipe out the evidence that the Shoal had stolen their transluminal technology from a far older civilization.

More information flashed up before him: tachyon relay signals from Newfall were being targeted at the derelict, presumably in a desperate attempt to slow, stop or divert it, using communications protocols he himself had helped develop. Whoever was behind the signals knew what they were doing. Almost certainly that meant other Freeholder scientists like himself. But whoever they were, they surely understood they were fighting for their lives.

Corso stared at the board in front of his acceleration couch, sensing the power in his hands. Using his own copy of the same protocols, he could block those transmissions from Newfall.

He felt a sensation like ice being clamped around his heart. He could do it: he could prevent his own people from finding a way inside the first derelict.

Yet he found he didn’t want to do that.

The extremists back on Redstone had been toppled. There could be no triumphant return for Arbenz, not even with the transluminal drive in hand. Only arrest and disgrace for his murderous ways.

Perhaps, then, there was still the chance the Freehold could rise back up out of obscurity and become part of the Consortium in a way they never had been before.

He carefully pulled his hands away from the board, glancing over at Dakota who lay asleep in her own couch, a remarkable feat considering the gees they were both still subject to as they blasted across a solar system.

But it wasn’t really sleep, she had informed him when her eyes had briefly fluttered open a little while back: more a kind of trance state.

Whatever was happening inside her head, or within the empty vaults of her Ghost circuits, was beyond his comprehension. To Corso that was the most frightening thing of all.

For Dakota, it felt strangely like stepping into someone else’s dreams.

For several hours now, her Ghost had been slowly flickering its way back into life. There was no trace of the highly personalized routines she had built up over so many years-but something was trying to speak to her, its voice reaching out from distant Ikaria.

Most of the sensations she was currently experiencing within her mind were entirely incomprehensible: synaesthetic flurries she strongly suspected were intended for sense organs entirely different to her own. But within that chaos appeared nuggets of information that were startlingly clear.