Empire of Light (29 page)

Very certain. I’m picking them up right now.

Close to the mouth of the cache, about where the field-defences are. They’ve buried themselves deep in the ground.

‘Who are you talking to?’ Schiller demanded.

‘I’m talking,’ Dakota replied testily, ‘to Trader.’

‘Did you know your mouth moves when you talk in your head like that?’

‘It does?’

Schiller nodded slowly. ‘Makes you look like an idiot.’

Chapter Twenty-nine

They made landfall not long afterwards, the yacht settling on to a cushion of shaped fields just a few kilometres from the mouth of the cache. Dakota pulled off the standard-issue jumpsuit she had been wearing, and folded it into a wad before dropping down from the yacht’s open hatch, relying once more simply on her filmsuit for protection.

Her black-slicked toes kicked up a cloud of dust as she hit the ground, before she took a few bounding steps in the low gravity. She glanced behind her in time to see Nancy hit the ground only to be immediately swallowed in another billowing dust cloud that coated her pressure-suit in grey.

Dakota took a look around her. Outcrops of granite rose from a sea of dust that extended to the north, only coming to an end at the ridge-wall of a crater about ten kilometres away. To the west, and in the direction of the cache itself, the ground rose and fell in gentle inclines, like waves sculpted in stone. The overhead sun was bright enough to blot out the stars.

Trader emerged last, followed by the spider-mechs. One by one, the spiders skittered around the edge of the hatch, in an eerily lifelike way, before jumping down and flexing their elongated legs as they scanned the horizon. They looked very different in a gravity environment: they now used most of their limbs to walk on, with just one set raised above them, so that they now looked more like six-legged mechanical crabs than spiders.

Trader led the way, his brine-filled bubble hugging the curve of a nearby slope up to its peak. Dakota trudged through the dust after him and on up the side of the hill.

he sent to Dakota as she came abreast of him.

Dakota glanced back at Nancy, who had just reached the foot of the hill. Her pressure-suit clearly made the going harder for her.

Officially, she’s here to give us a hand. Unofficially, I’m top of their list of suspects for Olivarri’s murder.
She waited a beat.
After yourself, of course.

The alien swivelled within his field bubble to study Schiller more closely as she struggled uphill, the spiders racing past her towards the peak.

Did you kill Olivarri, Trader?

The Shoal-members manipulators writhed beneath the wide curve of his belly.

Dakota frowned.
What secrets?

The manipulators writhed again, and Dakota couldn’t help but wonder if he was laughing at her.

Dakota actually took a step back.
What? Where did you get this
from?

If you’re lying to me—

Trader moved off again, his bubble following the contours of the incline as he descended the other side of the hill. Dakota stayed where she was, staring off across the hilltops and brooding.

Who else, she wondered, was something other than what they appeared to be? She knew almost nothing about most of the
Mjollnir
’
s
contingent, particularly Perez, Driscoll and Nancy Schiller herself-all strangers to her until she boarded the frigate. They had each been vetted personally by Corso, but if Trader turned out to be telling the truth, what did that mean about the rest of them?

Who else might not be who they seemed?

Nancy finally came abreast of her, closely trailed by the spiders; her faceplate had polarized until it was nearly opaque beneath the bright glare of the sun overhead.

Dakota followed in Trader’s path, soon leaving Nancy and the spiders behind once more. From the top of the next hill she could make out a low dome squatting on the wide flat plain surrounding the mouth of the cache, several hundred metres away. The dome’s grey colouring made it almost invisible against the surrounding landscape, and there were the ruins of other buildings all across the plain.

Looking closer to hand, she saw Trader forging ahead of her, and jogged down into the next valley to catch up with the alien halfway up the next rise.

That dome. Is that where we’re heading?

Trader turned in his bubble to look back towards Nancy, still making her way down the slope of the hill behind.

Dakota ignored this remark as she watched Nancy laboriously make her way towards them.

That’s not the way to do it,
Dakota sent to her.
Run on your toes, like you’re skipping.

Then you won’t mind if we leave you behind.

Nancy swore, then pushed up and off the ground with both feet. She came sailing back down in a low arc and landed on her hands and knees. Dakota watched as she picked herself up and tried again. This time it looked like she tripped over in slow motion, but managed to catch herself on the way back down.

I’m surprised you’re having such a hard time. You were pretty nimble during the hull repairs.

Nancy replied.

How?

Dakota followed Trader downhill, herself bounding in long, low, skipping strides. Despite her mood and the shock of Trader’s revelation, not to mention Nancy’s seemingly boundless hostility, a part of her was actually beginning to have fun. She made good time, looking behind her once or twice to check on Schiller, who was trailing huge dust clouds behind her.

She could see the dome more clearly from the next hilltop, beyond which lay only level plain stretching towards the cache’s abyssal pit. She saw now that, mixed in with the ruined buildings, there were what appeared to be the remains of a huge spacecraft broken into several sections and half buried in the dust.

As Dakota jogged down to the edge of the plain, she realized the dome was a lot bigger than it appeared at a distance. It had to be at least a hundred metres across, but no more than twenty in height, and it had presumably been designed to withstand whatever forces had destroyed the buildings surrounding it. Trader was well ahead of her by now and, as she started to make her way across the level ground, she saw him pass inside an entrance in one side of the dome, the sparkle of his field-bubble faintly illuminating the interior of the passageway beyond.

She soon reached it herself and stepped into its interior, noting how the relatively tiny inner space emphasized just how thick the walls were.

Dense drifts of dust gradually began to appear out of the gloom, as the filters over her eyes adjusted for the lack of light. She saw waist-high racks stretching from wall to wall in orderly ranks, with wide aisles running between. Identical flat, smooth plates were mounted in haphazard order within the racks, though, at a glance, less than a third of the racks contained them.

Is this what we’re here for?

Trader guided his bubble down a side aisle, his huge eyes swivelling from left to right.

Dakota turned in time to see the spiders were now threading their way in through the entrance, sending brilliant beams of light cutting through the darkness. Nancy followed them in soon afterwards.

Nancy sent.

The Meridians slaughtered each other over possession of the cache,
Dakota replied.
But it all happened a long, long time ago.

Nancy merely watched at first as Dakota started pulling the disc-shaped field devices out of their slots, dropping them to the ground for the spiders to collect. Then she started to help, pulling the discs loose and placing them where the spiders could get to them easily. Trader meanwhile simply hovered in his bubble; in truth there wasn’t much he could do but watch them.

said Nancy after they’d been working away for a few minutes.

What about them?

A couple of dozen,
Dakota sent back.
Why?

Why are you so suddenly keen on giving me your opinion?

Nancy stopped working and stared over at Dakota.

A long time ago, Nancy.

why
were they just left here? Are they guarding something? Just waiting for something? What?>

Dakota directed an angry glance towards her.
They were at war. Shit happens.

the other woman replied,

Dakota picked up one of the field-generators and studied it for several moments, thinking.

Trader, when I met you on that other world, were the drones you gave me . . . guarding anything?

You said you didn’t hear back from some of the probes you sent down into the cache. Any idea why?

As Trader floated in his bubble, his manipulators remained immobile for at least half a minute. he replied.

The discs were a lot heavier than they looked, and Dakota’s implants had picked up faint queries coming from them, which were interpretable thanks to the Meridian command structures Trader had given her. Once she had built up an idea of their internal structure, she transmitted this data back to Lamoureaux on the
Mjollnir.

Ted, take a look at this. What do you make of it?

His reply came barely a moment later.

According to Trader, it is. And the interface seems to be straightforward enough, so it shouldn’t be a huge problem setting up an interface with the
Mjollnir’s
defence stacks.

Hang on, I’m going to try activating one myself first.

Dakota lugged the device over to a clear spot between two rows of racks, and triggered it by depressing a button on one side. The shaped field that surrounded her a moment later sparked and crackled with light.

The effect was so startling that Dakota almost dropped the device; the field was far brighter – and therefore more powerful – than anything she had so far encountered. It had started out as a sphere about four metres across, centred on herself, but then it began to shrink, slowly at first but with increasing speed. She quickly deactivated it before it could shrink any further and crush her to death.

Trader warned her, from where he hovered near the dome’s entrance.

Lamoureaux asked.

Two aisles over, Dakota could just make out an expression of shock on Nancy’s face through her faceplate.

I think it’s safe to say they work just fine,
she sent back.

Chapter Thirty

They had to abandon a number of the field-generators after they proved to be broken on closer inspection, their outer shells cracked and brittle. But at least fifty appeared to be undamaged.

After a couple of hours’ work, the last of these were secured on top of some of the spiders, and sent back over the hills to Trader’s yacht. Dakota took one last look around the interior of the dome, wondering what it must have been like in those last hours before the colony was obliterated, and if the creatures who had built it had realized what was coming. Then she stepped back outside to join Trader and Nancy, who were waiting for her amongst the ruins.

Dakota watched as the machinery-laden spiders followed one another up the slope of the nearest hill.
Maybe it’s time to activate those drones I detected, see if they wake up.

Trader’s manipulators wriggled underneath his belly.

The Meridian drones had either burned or dug their way deep beneath the surface long ago. As the three of them now started moving towards the foot of the nearest hill, Dakota sent out a command-level activation signal that she hoped would override whatever instructions the drones had been left with.

Less than a minute passed before she was rewarded with a faint tremor that rippled the dust beneath her feet. Dakota stopped and turned in time to see rock and gravel fountaining upwards from all around the cache-mouth, as drone after drone punched its way back out of its hiding place. They rose quickly, spinning and glittering in the harsh sunlight, with debris sliding off of their mirrored carapaces as they accelerated away from the surface.

Nancy exclaimed, her voice full of terror. that?>

Dakota realized she had forgotten to warn Nancy what she was intending to do.

Sorry, I should have warned you. Those are the drones I detected on our way here. I’ve ordered them to head for the frigate, but they had to dig their way out of the ground first.

Nancy raged.

Hey, I said I was sorry.

Yes, Nancy, I hear you.

Dakota did her best to ignore the flash of resentment she felt at Nancy’s tone, as she headed for the nearest slope. The spiders had already scaled the summit and were well on their way back to Trader’s yacht.

Trader himself kept abreast of her as she ascended the hill, Nancy not so far behind them this time. Dakota glanced back and saw that debris was still slowly raining down on the ancient ruins. The drones were by now out of sight.

Dakota turned away and pinged the drones, finding they were functioning at peak capacity, and all accelerating hard towards the frigate. She fired a warning to Lamoureaux to make sure the others understood they were not being attacked.

Nancy sent, her tone almost bordering on respect.

Just doing my job,
Dakota sent.
Once we’ve got these field-generators back on board, I want to take the ship down inside the cache. We should take a good look at it while we’ve got the chance. Do you have any objections to that?

Yes, why?

inside
the cache?>

Dakota stopped to look back at Nancy, who was standing just a little further downhill, with one foot up on a boulder. Beyond her, the interior of the cache had indeed become brighter, emitting light that flickered as if derived from a hundred different sources, each one moving constantly in relation to the rest. It was as if a horde of giant fireflies was flying up the mouth of the cache from somewhere deep inside.

Dakota loped up to the crest of the hill with long, striding bounds to look back down at the cache from a slightly higher vantage point. When she looked again, the light had grown brighter, becoming noticeably more so even as she watched. Another tremor rolled through the ground beneath her feet. She glanced over at Trader, who had also turned to look back, and she felt an unpleasant churning sensation inside her chest.

Trader, what the hell is that light?

Dakota felt a chill.
Those probes you said you’d lost, is it possible they ran into something down there?

The sense that something very bad was about to happen overwhelmed Dakota, and she turned to look the other way, to where she could just see the uppermost spines of Trader’s yacht poking up above the crest of a hill about a kilometre distant. She also spotted the train of spiders, still making their way back, in an undulating file, across the intervening hills and valleys.

She queried the recovered Meridian drones, hoping that they might be able to tell her what was going on. It took a few attempts to navigate her way to some kind of answer, and her eyes opened wide in horror when she got it.

We have to get out of here,
she sent to the others.
We have to get out right now.

She started running down the other side of the hill, desperate to get away from the cache, her legs moving with what felt like dreamlike slowness. She ordered the drones to reverse their trajectory and to return to the vicinity of the cache, but they had already lost precious seconds.

asked Trader.

There are hundreds of unmanned Emissary scouts inside the cache, Trader, and we just woke them up.

Trader started heading back towards his yacht without further hesitation.

I already called them back, but I don’t know if they can get here in time.

Dakota stumbled once, picked herself up and kept going. She could hear from Nancy’s panicky breathing that she had finally taken the hint and started running as well.

On reaching the crest of the final hill before they arrived at the yacht, Dakota paused to glance behind her. She saw Nancy approaching the foot of the same hill, but Trader had already overtaken them both. She turned back towards the yacht in time to see him slip through the open hatch, and for one terrible moment she wondered if he meant to abandon them.

By now the spiders had neatly stacked the field-generators beneath the open hatch, in which two of them stood waiting as their brethren began passing the generators up to them with their instantly extendible arms.

As she reached the yacht, she swiftly climbed up on top of one of the spiders and pulled herself through the hatch. The two spiders already inside scuttled back into the yacht’s interior to get out of her way. Once inside, she accidentally crashed into a pile of field-generators, and just managed to stop them toppling back out of the hatch. At that moment, she spotted Nancy making her way down the final slope, kicking up a huge cloud of dust that must surely have been visible for kilometres around.

A torrent of dark shapes shot upwards from the location of the cache, moving with such colossal velocity that Dakota barely had time to register their passage. Part of her attention was now focused on the approach of the Meridian drones, as she caught an equally brief glimpse of them vectoring in towards the Emissary scouts.

Around the yacht, the ground began to quiver yet again, sending up thick, choking clouds of dust that soon obscured the summits of the nearby hills.

Nancy stumbled and flailed about, and Dakota heard her yelling over the shared comms.

It’s the Emissary scouts,
Dakota replied.
Get back here as fast as you can.

Nancy picked herself up hurriedly, staggering past a shoulder-high boulder. She was almost at the yacht.

she yelled over the comms.

You were right. We should have checked things out more thoroughly.

Incandescent light suddenly blazed from the direction of the cache, as a beam of focused energy struck the crest of a distant hill, which erupted in a terrifying display of violence. At that same moment, something dark and oblong flew close above them, followed by a wave of intense heat that briefly overwhelmed Dakota’s filters.

Nancy?

Dakota dropped from the hatch to the ground, and darted over to where the other woman had collapsed. Gravel pattered down all around them, falling slowly in the low gravity. The dust was so thick it made it nearly impossible to see more than a couple of metres in any direction. Dakota finally stumbled across her where she was crouching on her hands and knees, her breathing sounding ragged over the comms link.

Dakota hooked one arm around the woman’s shoulder and pulled her upright, hearing her moan in pain. Together they managed to stumble back to the yacht, where Nancy almost collapsed again once Dakota let go of her.

C’mon Nancy, need to get you inside.

She hoisted Nancy on top of one of the spiders, then climbed on behind to get a secure hold of her under both arms.

Grab hold of the lip of the hatch, and then I can help heave you up.

Just get inside so I can take a look at you.

With a groan, Nancy reached out with both hands and grabbed the rim of the hatch. She started to pull herself up, as Dakota pushed her by grabbing her hips. Fortunately, the low gravity made things a lot easier, but Dakota still had to command one of the spiders already inside the hatch to grab hold of Nancy and help her up.

Dakota pulled herself in next, feeling the subtle transition from low to zero gee as she entered the ship.

We’re all on board. Let’s get out of here, Trader.

The Shoal-member didn’t reply, but the hatch spiralled shut behind them, sealing out the dust. Dakota pulled the other woman’s helmet off and found Nancy had passed out. Her skin was looking horribly red and blistered.

Finally Dakota answered a priority signal from the
Mjollnir,
that had been hovering at the back of her attention for the past minute or so.

Lamoureaux yelled when she opened the link.

There were Emissary scouts hiding in the cache, and they just got loose. We’re back on board Trader’s ship with the field-generators, but Nancy’s been hurt.

She opened up a visual link to let Lamoureaux see what she herself was seeing. She could sense his horror when he saw just how bad a state Schiller was in.

A lot of this is radiation damage,
Dakota sent.
If you haven’t already, you need to get
Mjollnir
prepped for an emergency jump. I don’t know just how well the Meridian drones are going to hold up against a couple of hundred Emissary scouts, but if those scouts reach the frigate, we’re in serious shit.

Dakota glanced around the crowded chamber, where everything seemed perfectly still and silent. There wasn’t the slightest clue to suggest the ship had so much as moved. Spotting her wadded-up jumpsuit, she started to pull it on, while letting the filmsuit drain itself back inside her body.

Then, for the first time, the ship rocked gently around her, sending fresh beads of moisture caroming through the air.

Trader?

Dakota closed her eyes and locked into the drones, immediately finding herself submerged in a chaotic whirl of data. The drones had reverted to their original programming, and were now fighting to push the Emissary scouts back down inside the cache.

She felt one of the Meridian drones die; they were a superior technology, but the Emissary scouts had the advantage of sheer numbers.

Dakota concentrated on protecting the yacht, keeping her eyes tightly closed and letting her limbs float out around her, her fingers jerking spasmodically as she directed her side of the battle raging outside. Trader’s yacht looked tiny and fragile compared with the bristling black mass of the pursuing scouts. Yet more of the Emissary scouts were pouring out from the mouth of the cache, their skins flickering with multiple bright energies as they repelled tightly focused bursts of energy directed towards them. The hulls of the machines on both sides of the battle crackled as their outer layers were burned off, while the complex nanomolecular circuitry within attempted to repair the constant damage.

Lamoureaux sent to her.

Dakota swore silently to herself for not having thought of that already. She opened her eyes and quickly activated the data screen printed on the sleeve of the other woman’s spacesuit.

It says she’s absorbed more than fifty grey of radiation,
Dakota sent in reply. She was far from sure whether even the wonders of modern medical technology could combat such a huge dose of ionizing radiation.

Nancy coughed, and Dakota studied the other woman’s face. Her lips moved soundlessly, and her eyes had rolled halfway up into her head.

Lamoureaux remarked.

Understatement of the fucking century.