Gary Gibson - Stealing Light

A blip was closing fast on the Piri Reis. Corso didn’t even have time to open his mouth to scream.

A thousand hammers slammed into the hull.

Dakota looked up at a tiny flash of light far above.

Oh please no, she thought. Piri›.

‹I am here, Dakota.›

Dakota had never felt more relieved. Where’s Lucas?

‹I am not sure. We were fired upon by the Agartha and subsequently hit by a missile. I have lost contact with the cargo area, and analysis of footage recorded at the moment of impact suggests it may have either been damaged beyond repair or entirely sheared off. There has been loss of pressure from some internal spaces, and internal communications are currently offline. It may take fifteen minutes at current estimates to re-establish contact with the command module and ascertain if he is still alive.›

Dakota felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Find out now, Piri.

‹Until contact with the command module is reestablished, I cannot-›

I get the idea, she replied, cutting the connection.

Light filled the chasm.

The edges of the valley were thrown into stark relief. Her eye filters dimmed to their very darkest, but even at that setting she was blinded. Every surface, every grain of rock and sand was brilliantly lit up.

At the very edge of the horizon, she thought she saw the edge of a mountain melt.

The third missile’s guidance systems were sent into confusion by the sudden, overwhelming increase in albedo from the direction of Nova Arctis. The missile strayed towards the edge of the cone of shadow cast by Ikaria, and was turned to a puff of superheated gas in a fraction of a second. This was carried outwards by the advancing storm of energy expanding in a shell around the neutron core where a star had been.

The expanding wave front of plasma rushed on towards the Agartha.

Kieran stepped towards the Senator, who looked up at him.

‘We only have a few moments, Senator,’ he said. ‘The wave front will reach us very soon.’

The Senator nodded tightly; it was clear he was barely holding himself together. ‘I hope it’s-’

He shook his head. I hope it’s quick, Kieran knew he’d meant to say.

Kieran reached out, almost lovingly, and cradled the surprised man’s face in his hands.

‘I hope it is, Senator. But it may not be.’

He broke Arbenz’s neck with a sudden, swift twist. The Senator didn’t even have time to look surprised.

Kieran lowered the dead man’s body to the deck with due love and respect, before standing up straight again to wait for the end with the rest of the crew.

The shell of plasma swallowed the Agartha totally, tearing it apart and transforming it into superheated vapour in barely more time than it had taken to envelop the missile.

It continued to expand, racing towards Newfall, a hundred and thirty million kilometres distant, carrying the gaseous remains of the Freehold ship and its crew ever outwards, as it would continue to do for many tens of thousands of years.

On the sunward side of Ikaria, the effect was devastating. The amount of energy slamming into the planet was equivalent to several thousand nuclear warheads exploding every few seconds, as plasma that had been trapped within the photosphere of a star for untold epochs was unleashed instantaneously.

Ikaria’s crust literally began to melt away, turning white-hot and then vaporizing, the overwhelming fire digging deeper into the planetary crust at a rate of hundreds of metres every second. Ragged mountain peaks, which had formed long ago during asteroid impacts, exploded under the pressure as they slowly turned from the night side to face the rage of the dying sun.

Within hours, rather than days, the planet would cease to exist, joining the wave of expanding gas as it was reduced to its constituent atoms and spread through the local constellation.

The ground trembled under Dakota’s feet. She broke into a run, bounding under the low gravity straight towards the skeletal alien ship.

She couldn’t help but feel, as she approached, that she was somehow tumbling into a trap. The ship’s spines were too much like the reaching cilia of some hungry sea creature. The beckoning space that had opened beyond the spines in anticipation of her arrival was too much like a gaping, expectant maw.

She kept her eyes half-shut and focused on the ground, her thoughts filled with the terrible, pervasive light slowly seeping over the horizon and turning the top of the valley a dull orange-red.

‹Dakota. I am maintaining a position as close to directly above you as possible. However, it may be only minutes before there is insufficient fuel to prevent drifting sunward. My records indicate there is further danger in the form of sunlight reflected from the dust and debris now being thrown up around Ikaria. The energy output from Nova Arctis is currently several billion times the average, and when reflected from clouds of particles it may prove extremely lethal.›

Almost there.

She threw herself forward, as the terrible light began to overrun even the filmsuit’s filters, dashing through the derelict’s spines and into its interior.

The impossible light began to fade as the entrance behind her flowed shut. There were no open spaces beyond the entrance. Instead, the body of the derelict began to enclose her, entombing her like a dinosaur that had stumbled into a swamp.

She felt it cool and soft against her skin and realized in a moment of terror that her filmsuit had somehow shut off by itself. She struggled to draw breath as her lungs kicked back into action, but there was no air in here to breathe.

She was buried alive, deep within a chasm on a dead world orbiting a dying sun.

Madness began to seep into her thoughts.

Then she saw stars rushing towards her.

Several minutes later, the shockwave reached Newfall.

Shallow oceans were turned to superheated steam, and the very atmosphere burned. As one hemisphere facing Nova Arctis dissipated under the equivalent of ten billion suns beating down on it, Newfall began a process of losing mass that would last, at most, a day or two.

It was like taking a flamethrower to a crumpled ball of paper. As gases burned away and the nova dug deeper towards the planetary core, Newfall’s gravity would drop, making it easier for burned-away atoms and molecules to achieve escape velocity under the intense pressure of nova heat.

Newfall would soon be little more than a memory.

Corso had cried out in terror as the Piri lurched. Then he heard a high-pitched whistling that tore at his nerves, and felt air rush past his face, tousling his hair.

The Piri was losing atmosphere. The lights had gone out.

He grabbed fistfuls of wall-fur as the air vented, sucking him in the direction of Dakota’s sleeping compartment. If he didn’t do something now, he’d be dead in seconds.

He let go of the fur, twisted around and landed just next to the entrance to the space where Dakota slept. He saw where the hull had been ripped open, sucking out half the contents of the room. He found the emergency-seal button and slapped it, waiting while the compartment was sealed off.

The howling ceased abruptly and he gasped for air. Automatic pressure sensors had picked up the oxygen drop, and hissed quietly as they replenished the supply from the Piri’s depleted supplies.

Corso paused there for the next minute or so until he had stopped shaking too violently. Then he pulled himself over to a console that still appeared to be active, though unresponsive. He couldn’t even tell if the Piri’s stacks were still functioning.