Stealing Light (32 page)

‘In fact,’ he said with a grin, ‘the evidence makes it more likely the Shoal
stole
the transluminal technology from the Magi.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘It’s all in here,’ he continued, still with a faint smile, tapping further at the workscreen. ‘I think I’ve even stumbled across a potted history of the Magi. Trust me, though, when I say I’m making some wild leaps of interpretation.’

Dakota remembered that sense of witnessing the passing of entire civilizations while she’d been in the interface chair on board the derelict.

‘Interpret away,’ she said.

‘I managed to narrow down the time the derelict was built by a little more,’ he continued. ‘And it was created at least a few millennia
before
the Shoal claim they developed the transluminal drive.’

‘So that nails it pretty conclusively. Some other species possessed the transluminal drive—’

‘And then they encountered the Shoal, who now claim to be the only species in the entire Milky Way to have the technology,’ Corso confirmed.

‘And you’re sure about that?’

Corso shrugged. ‘Hard to say without getting a lot more time to go over the data. There’s decades of work still in there.’

An overwhelming sense of weariness came over Dakota. She was still badly rattled from Kieran’s assault, and there were times when she felt overwhelmed by the constant flow of recent events.

‘Fuck it,’ she said, her voice small and quiet, and pushed herself over to where Corso sat. She laid her head against his chest. After his initial surprise, he let one hand fall down to rest on her shoulder.

‘You know,’ she murmured at length, ‘I hate Freeholders. I mean, I really, really hate the fucking lot of you. You realize that, don’t you?’

‘I could tell,’ came Corso’s dry response, ‘from the way you seem to have your hand on my dick.’

—

It started with an awkward fumbling during which Corso managed to bash his elbow hard on the corner of the seat. Then they both slid further down, both laughing, and Dakota pressed her face against his. That was how she remembered it: a classic first-kiss scenario after a stumbling beginning, so different from the artificial attentions of the
Piri’s
faux-human effigy. From the enthusiasm with which Corso responded to her advances, it was clear it had been some time for him too.

In fact, over the next several minutes, her suspicion grew that it had been a very long time indeed for Corso. His technique didn’t exactly match his enthusiasm, but Dakota couldn’t care less. She shouldered her way out of her clothes in record time while Corso still fumbled with his belt, a hilariously embarrassed look on his face.

In the end, once he’d finally got out of his clothes, she climbed on top of him, despite the look of clear puzzlement on his face. She guessed he wasn’t very likely to be familiar with sex in zero gravity.

He grunted with surprise when she twisted her hips in a practised way (some things, she mused, you never really forgot) and found himself deep inside her.

Corso cleared his throat in between deep, shuddering breaths. ‘Back home, you know, usually the man—’

‘Where I come from, usually the man shuts the fuck up,’ Dakota gasped.

Completely nonplussed, Corso looked so ridiculous she giggled, as if the air in the cabin had suddenly been flooded with nitrous oxide.

Shame,
she thought,
to have forgotten how good sheer, wild abandonment feels.
Revelations of the senses: a cool flush presented itself deep between her thighs and she realized he’d come already. Yet she didn’t feel disappointed: she stayed where she was, balanced on top of him, leaning forward to put her hands on his chest for traction while he gripped onto a furry bulkhead (having almost floated off him a couple of times to begin with), and after several more seconds she came herself.

The orgasm rattled through her, peaking in an explosion somewhere behind her eyes and deep within her brain. Her skin was now flushed and beaded with perspiration. She held onto him for a few more moments, despite the pained expression on his face as her fingernails dug in.

When she finally let go, he emitted a small, almost silent sigh of relief.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she breathed.

Corso cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded thick and broken. ‘I ... no problem. I didn’t even notice.’

‘Liar.’

The beginnings of a grin tweaked the edge of his mouth. ‘Harlot.’

She grinned back. ‘Yes?’

—

A while later they floated together in the deep cocoon darkness of Dakota’s sleeping quarters.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked, sensing his restlessness.

‘Can’t sleep easily in zero gee,’ he explained. They floated against one fur-lined wall. ‘And to be honest, this fur stuff creeps me out a little.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘Haven’t really been able to sleep ever since I got on board the
Hyperion.
I keep waking up and thinking I’ve fallen out of bed back home—but I’m still falling . . .’

‘Yeah. That’s a familiar one.’ By now, sleeping in zero gee felt like the most natural thing in the world to Dakota. The only possible improvement on it was having a warm naked body next to hers, so all her bases were pretty much now covered.

‘You know, I’ve been thinking,’ he mumbled.

‘Yeah?’

‘If the
Hyperion
is compromised the way you say it is, any data I’ve recovered from the derelict is probably accessible to your alien friend by now.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Perhaps it was the Shoal-member that somehow caused the derelict to attack us, by using what it found in the
Hyperion’s
stacks. But that’s all conjecture: there’s no way of being sure.’

‘Remember what I told you, Lucas. The
Piri Reis
is stealthed to the eyeballs. There’s no reason you couldn’t read the same data into the
Piri’s
stacks, and bypass the
Hyperion
altogether.

‘Think about it.’ She really had his attention now. ‘You could query the
Hyperion’s
stacks from here, even send low-level commands from here direct to the derelict. Everything would be disguised as routine subsystem comms and, frankly, your people don’t have the means to spot the deception.’

Corso unravelled himself from her, clearly thinking hard. ‘You know, I wasn’t entirely being honest when I said we couldn’t pilot the derelict just yet.’

Now he had
her
full attention.

‘Do you mean . . .?’

‘I lied, yes.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I wanted to make things as hard for the Senator as possible. Maybe you can understand that. But you could hypothetically control the derelict from the
Hyperion’s
bridge. I mean, you could link the
Hyperion’s
interface chair to the one on board the derelict.’

‘But that chair was torn apart by the derelict, the same time it attacked you. I saw the recordings.’

‘That’s one reason I said “hypothetically”. And, for what it’s worth, every time a team has gone back on board the derelict following previous attacks, they found that any pieces of equipment left behind were still completely intact. The
Hyperion
doesn’t appear to recognize inanimate objects like interface chairs as hostile, possibly because they’re inorganic. Technically, you
could
set up a direct chair-to-chair link from the bridge and control the derelict that way.’

‘So what are you saying?’ she asked him excitedly. ‘We could just... fly it out from under Arbenz’s nose?’

He frowned. ‘Whether it’s practical or possible is another matter. And even if we could somehow pull it off, there are other things we’d have to think about, such as what to do with the derelict if we got away with it? And that’s not even taking into account the fact we’d still need to get ourselves on board the derelict in order to make an escape. And we already know that it can be lethally dangerous, even at the best of times.’

Dakota’s eyes gleamed with the possibilities. ‘I don’t have to be inside the bridge interface chair to control the
Hyperion,
you know.’

Corso looked confused. ‘You don’t?’

‘Look, there are good reasons for using interface chairs. If anyone with the appropriate implants is able to control a ship without resorting to its interface chair, then you’re faced with the risk of an enemy machine -head slipping on board and taking it over instantly. So the chairs are there as a kind of security measure, to prevent that happening. But that’s not to say one can’t be bypassed. However, the only one who has the necessary stack permissions to do that is a ship’s designated pilot.’

‘Which is you.’

‘Which is me.’

‘And that way you can control the
Hyperion
without actually being anywhere near the bridge?’

‘More than that. If I can run the
Hyperion
from elsewhere, it means that once I have a ship-to-ship link set up from the bridge, I might be able to run the derelict remotely as well.’

Corso laughed and shook his head in wonder.

‘Things have come a long way since the
Hyperion
was built,’ she explained. ‘The interface chairs we have now are a lot newer and more advanced than anything else originally existing on the bridge. We can take advantage of that fact.’

‘OK,’ he said, thinking ahead. ‘That still doesn’t get us on board the derelict without risking another attack from it, though.’

She’d already managed to think of this problem in a sudden blaze of creativity. ‘The
Piri
is tiny next to the derelict. Why not secure the
Piri
to the derelict’s hull before we use it to make a transluminal jump? There are buckytube cables on board for securing it to small asteroids, or to the surface of larger ones. No reason I couldn’t do the same, in this case.’

‘But that’s not all we’d have to do,’ he argued. ‘Even if you manage all this, and create an uplink with the derelict, it doesn’t matter how stealthed the
Piri Reis
is, because everyone on the
Agartha,
on the
Hyperion
and on Theona will soon know what you’re doing. And that doesn’t even take into account how the alien hiding in the
Hyperion’s
stacks would react. Or the fact you’ll still have to be physically on the bridge and in the chair before you can create the uplink in the first place, and that means somehow getting past the crew.’

Corso had momentarily forgotten the incongruity of the situation: the two of them discussing life and death matters while floating naked together in a fur-lined spaceship. Dakota took his face in her hands, an almost feral expression of glee on her own.

‘You’re altogether too much of a defeatist. If we induce a general systems failure in the
Hyperion’s
stacks, same as the one I had to deal with just after I got on board, every sensor, every security system and every piece of recording equipment on the
Hyperion
is going to have a brainstorm. The Shoal-member would be deaf, dumb and blind for at least a couple of minutes, while the stacks were down. That would give us just enough time to create a cloaked uplink before the
Hyperion’s
systems have time to reboot.’

‘You’re still taking a hell of a risk,’ Corso argued, trying to sound calm and reasonable but in fact clearly more stressed with each passing second. ‘You still haven’t told me how you’ll get past the crew.’

‘There’s no reason they wouldn’t assume I was just doing my job if I got in that chair.’

She sat back and studied Corso’s glum expression. He wasn’t happy—but she knew she’d won this one.

—

Dakota could feel the Shoal-member’s presence as she found her way back into the main body of the
Hyperion,
navigating a central drop shaft running the entire length of the ship’s spine on her way to the bridge.

‘You,’ she said quietly to the empty air, ‘have got something to hide.’

‘Blunt accusations, much foaming of water,’ the reply boomed through hidden speakers in the walls of the shaft. ‘To accuse is to diminish within eye of beholder fish.’

She grabbed hold of a rung and made a right-angle turn, letting herself drop at a steady, graceful pace down another shaft until she snagged a convenient handhold with one foot.

She wondered if the crew could hear the alien speaking to her over the comms system, and why he would therefore choose to announce his presence in this way. If they could hear him, they’d probably be panicking by now, which meant she’d find it that much harder to slip by them. She began to really wish she’d kept her mouth shut.

‘You know, I think you’re trying too hard. Care to answer a riddle?’ she asked, adrenalin pumping through her head. She felt like she could climb outside the hull and run sprint marathons around its circumference. But she was terrified beyond words.

‘Riddles, yes? A conundrum to while away eternity’s hours,’ came the answer.

‘Two riddles, really. Here’s the first one. There’s been very little real contact with individual members of the Shoal since we first encountered your species—probably no more than a couple of dozen times in all. Everything pivotal that’s ever happened in the history of the Consortium, there’s been one of your kind present, almost as if you’re somehow making things happen.’

It was a popular conspiracy theory, and not one Dakota might normally subscribe to. However, under the present circumstances, she found herself prepared to entertain wilder ideas than she might do otherwise.

‘First you boot the Uchidans off their homeworld without explanation. Then they land on Redstone and try to throw the Freehold off theirs, something I’d have thought way beneath your interest. Yet one of your people was present, for some reason, in the Central Command ring the day before the massacres at Port Gabriel.’

She continued: ‘Then the next time I see one of you, it’s on Bourdain’s Rock, and people want to blame
me
for what happened there. And now, suddenly, here we are almost literally in the middle of fucking nowhere, a derelict but viable alien starship under our feet, and . . . big surprise, here you are, too. It was you every time, wasn’t it?’