Stealing Light (39 page)

Dakota realized in that moment that Trader was not yet gone. Although possibly the derelict was acting under its own volition, it was much more likely Trader had wormed his way inside the Magi vessel’s computer systems. The alien craft, she didn’t doubt, was entirely capable of supporting the full weight of an alien artificial intelligence.

Dakota experienced a sharp spike of pain in one temple, and glimpsed a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. It was a visual glitch she might have paid little attention to, if she didn’t remember experiencing exactly the same reaction every time Trader had taken control of her during the past weeks.

Piri’s
work on her implants had brought back the clear memory of those minuscule visual glitches, and the horror that had followed each and every time. On such occasions, her conscious mind had entered a kind of unquestioning limbo, reducing her to little more than a somnambulistic flesh puppet.

But this time was different: this time she was more aware of it happening to her than ever before.

Something of Trader still survived inside her implants—and it was trying to gain control of her again.

Arbenz and Gardner were bickering together while a disgusted-looking Kieran Mansell stood over to one side, conferring quietly with the three troopers.

Josef Marados had once said she would be crazy not to acquire some kind of countermeasure against the possibility of someone trying to control her through her implants. He had been right: both right to say so, and right in thinking she’d find a way of dealing with such an eventuality.

The cost, however, was high, and she’d never seriously imagined she might be forced to take such drastic action.

Nevertheless, this was the time.

‘April is the cruellest month,’ she whispered, the words emerging from her throat as a bare whisper. She saw one of the troopers glance towards her suspiciously.

In response, a visual cue flagged up in the corner of her vision, a warning flag she’d put in place long, long ago.

Next, she murmured: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

The trooper who had looked over stepped towards her, and she ducked her head down so he couldn’t see her lips move.

Another warning flag appeared in the corner of her eye, followed by a request for confirmation.

Granting chat request was the simple matter of a half-whispered affirmative.

The trooper lowered the snub nose of his weapon towards her. By now, Kieran glanced around as well.

She said: ‘Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.’

Another flag came up, flashing red in the foreground of her vision. A final warning.

All she needed to do was utter the last sentence.

The
Piri Reis
spoke to her.

Hyperion.
If your implants are destroyed, your ability to interact with the
Hyperion
and carry out defensive manoeuvres against hostile forces will be gone.>

Thank you, Piri,
she replied.
Nonetheless, I confirm.

The trooper stepped forward to where she still crouched, barking something she did not understand, before bringing one booted foot up and using it to nudge her shoulder. Kieran stood staring at her with hard eyes for a moment, then his hand flicked back towards the knife sheath hidden inside his jacket.

She stared up at the trooper.

‘Shantih shantih shantih,’ she snarled up at him, completing the sequence.

The changes inside her skull were abrupt and violent, the higher functions of her implants fading away to leave only a dim, insensate void.

‘Sir,’ one of the other troopers was saying to Arbenz. Theona base camp reports that the enemy fleet is now in range and moving in for an attack.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kieran snapped. ‘If that was the case the
Hyperion
’s automatic systems would have . . .’

Gardner, Kieran and the Senator all stared at each other at that same moment. Suddenly, emergency klaxons began sounding the length of the ship. Kieran shouted something incomprehensible, and stamped over to the door, but it refused to open.

‘We’re locked in.’

‘Bullshit,’ Arbenz retorted. ‘Blow the damned thing open if you have to.’

The troopers exchanged glances with each other, then stepped forward, lowering their weapons to aim at the door’s locking mechanism. A moment later, thunder and light filled the room. As Dakota watched, the door held for just a few moments, before fracturing at the hinges and falling outwards into the corridor.

I’m losing my mind,
thought Dakota miserably, as her Ghost continued its self-immolation.

It felt a lot like dying, like plummeting into an endless abyss where one’s soul had previously resided.

Then, just when she thought it was all over, something else slid into the vacant space inside her skull. Something dark, heavy and alien.

She writhed uncontrollably, gasping for breath.

Whatever this was that had settled into her brain, it wasn’t the Shoal AI. Something entirely different had replaced the higher-level Ghost functions she’d just erased.

From somewhere far down the corridor sounded a series of loud, echoing booms, accompanied by a grating, rolling roar that grew louder second by second. It didn’t take a lot of guesswork to figure they were listening to the sound of explosive decompression. The
Hyperion’s
entire atmosphere was being violently dumped into space.

Dakota had her filmsuit to protect her, but Corso’s pressure suit had been torn from his back and discarded as soon as they’d been brought back on board the
Hyperion.
Keeping him alive over the next few minutes wasn’t going to be easy.

‘Is this your doing?’ Arbenz screamed at Corso. ‘A thousand generations of Freeholders are going to grow up using your name as another word for traitor—or don’t you get that?’

‘You’re
the traitor!’ Corso screamed back. ‘You’re a murderer, a gutless opportunist.’ The roar of air had become deafening. A powerful wind tore at Dakota as she tried, with difficulty, to stand up.

‘It’s no wonder we’re trapped on a useless backwater rock being told what to do by a bunch of psychotic assholes like you,’ Corso continued. ‘The Shoal know everything, Senator. And they probably have ever since you got here.’

Arbenz looked apoplectic. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Listen to him,’ Dakota shouted from behind the Senator.

Arbenz whirled around to face her. ‘They know everything that’s going on,’ she continued. ‘They planted software spies in the
Hyperion’s
stacks long ago.’

There are worse ways to die,
Dakota reflected. It was clear neither she nor Corso was going to leave this room alive. At least, before the troopers blew their heads off or the last of the air was gone, she’d had the satisfaction of seeing the look on Arbenz’s face.

Ignoring them both, Kieran grabbed the Senator’s shoulder. ‘We can get to the bridge!’ he yelled. ‘We can seal it off manually, and try and retake control from there.’

The Freehold troopers had begun pulling breathing apparatus out of their uniforms and fitting masks over their faces. Kieran pointed to two of them. ‘Barnard, Lunghi—you’re coming with me.’

‘What about them?’ Gardner shouted, gesturing at Corso and Dakota.

‘Fuck them,’ Arbenz replied. ‘They—’

Everything went black.

Pandemonium reigned. Dakota blindly fought her way over to Corso, but the darkness went deeper than just the lights going out. There was an emptiness now that Dakota hadn’t felt inside herself since her first set of Ghost implants were ripped out.

Corso fought against her at first, until she identified herself by yelling in his ear over the cacophony of raised voices and howling air. He stopped struggling immediately.

‘This is our chance,’ she urged him, her mouth pressed right up against the side of his head. Her words sounded thin and indistinct as the atmospheric pressure rapidly dropped.

She dragged him away in what she hoped was the right direction, blindly crashing into other bodies. Hands grabbed and punched at her, and she lashed out in return, taking a savage bite at someone’s hand when she felt it grab her face. Despite the near-total darkness, her eyesight was starting to adjust. Something thudded against her shoulder. She reached up, and it felt warm and sticky to the touch.

The confusion got them out through the door, where it was just as impenetrably dark. She could hear Corso’s laboured panting next to her as she took an educated guess on which way to head to get back to the cargo bay. There was a fifty-fifty chance she’d made the wrong decision, but it was still infinitely better odds now than before the lights had gone out.

And all the while, Dakota struggled to understand what had just happened.

She had no doubt Trader was responsible for this shipwide systems failure, yet she was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had destroyed whatever remained of the Shoal AI inside the
Hyperion.
Without the semi-organic machinery she had tracked down and destroyed, the
Hyperion’s
stacks couldn’t possibly allow the alien’s intelligence to function or survive.

Which led her to the conclusion Trader had left boobytraps in case of just such an eventuality. After all, it was exactly what she would have done.

The air got thin enough for Dakota’s filmsuit to activate automatically, swallowing her bruised and battered body in its oily embrace. She felt Corso’s hand jerk away for an instant, as it touched his skin where he clung on to her.

She realized to her chagrin that getting out of the storage room would have been a lot easier if she’d activated the filmsuit as soon as the lights went out, because the lenses over her eyes were starting to pick up the infrared heat signatures of the walls and machinery around them, making it far easier for her to find her way.

Corso’s flesh glowed a dull orange beside her, while the corridor was transformed into a hellish tangle of hidden power conduits and circuitry overlaid with the ghostly cool sheen of the walls. But at least she could see they were heading in the right direction.

Corso was floundering badly, struggling to breathe. The howling sound was becoming fainter. Another minute or so and they’d be in vacuum.

She grabbed hold of Corso, dropping them both straight down the middle of a drop shaft that she remembered would take them most of the way.

Then, thankfully, dull red emergency lighting flickered on.

They got to an airlock, and she hauled both of them inside it, feeling her bruised and exhausted muscles protest. Fortunately the airlocks were all equipped with emergency manual switches that would pressurize them within a couple of seconds, and they ran on circuits independent of the ship’s central stacks.

She hammered at a switch and waited for what felt like long, long seconds before she heard a faint hiss that gradually built up into a roar that lasted several seconds.

She let herself slide down against the wall, almost crying with relief. Corso lay slumped beside her.

That empty silence inside her, where her Ghost had been, was no longer so silent. The alien presence she’d felt entering her now filled up her skull, grating against her senses as if it quite literally didn’t fit.

She listened carefully to its voice, and realized the creature that had entered her mind was the same as the intelligence she’d previously sensed within the derelict’s stacks. And with this came other knowledge.

She could hear other voices—like that of the derelict, but different—calling from deep within the inner system.

It seemed there was more than one derelict in the Nova Arctis system.

Without thinking about it, she tried to summon a mental image of the cargo bay on the far side of the airlock. But instead of the perfect, accurate, three-dimensional map she would once have expected, there was only a half-formed notion drawn from her own frail human memories, inexact and unreliable.

She opened a locker, hoping to find an emergency suit there, but it was empty. She cursed and slammed the door closed. She glanced at Corso lying half dead beside her, and knew they had no choice but to exit into the vacuum of the cargo bay regardless.

If she remembered—if her frail, human memory served her right—the
Piri Reis
was
located very close to their current position.

‘Corso? Corso, can you hear me?’ She shook his shoulder frantically.

His eyelids fluttered, and Dakota thanked the heavens as his eyes focused on her.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘There’s only so much air in here and hard vacuum out there. Understand?’

His head moved slightly in what passed for a nod. ‘I hear you,’ he rasped.

‘The cargo bay is just on the other side of this airlock. We’re going to have to move fast, and I
mean fast.
But it shouldn’t take more than half a minute or so.’ She forced a weak grin. ‘Think you can last that long?’

‘But I don’t have a suit.’ His eyes focused more clearly. ‘Dakota, no—’

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, reaching up to the airlock’s control panel. ‘When I say, take a couple of deep, rapid breaths, OK? Suck it in, hyperventilate, and then let your lungs empty. I’ll get you there in a couple of seconds, I swear.’

‘You’re insane,’ he murmured.

‘Right, and back on your blessed Redstone people don’t try to prove they’re the ultimate flicking warrior by seeing how much poisonous native atmosphere they can breathe without passing out or dropping dead?’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

‘Like hell it isn’t. It’s dangerous, and so is this -except this time you don’t actually have a choice. Unless you’d rather sit here in this airlock and wait for those maniacs to find us again.’

‘There’s no other way?’