Stealing Light (8 page)

Dakota opened her mouth, closed it again, opened it again. ‘Why?’

‘Beneficence of Shoal-member,’ the creature replied. ‘Much of existence is mysterious. Accept fate as fickle -or determined by whim. To gift Miss Merrick is pleasing.’

Dakota felt the cool texture of the gift wrapping against her hand, slick and waterproof. ‘And in return—you’re going to help me to escape?’

‘Affirmation with pleasure.’

As soon as she passed through the archway the alien halted, placing itself between Dakota and her pursuers.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘What’s in this box?’

‘A gift,’ the alien replied obtusely.

She heard shouts from somewhere beyond the antechamber, echoing in the complex of tunnels and caverns that threaded their way through the immensity of Bourdain’s Rock. The alien was clearly going no further.

Run. Run now.
She stuffed the box in a convenient pocket and fled, soon leaving the Shoal-member in its containment field far behind her.

—

A minute or two later Dakota found herself in a crystal-roofed forest, under a starry night. Winding paths cut lazily through dense green foliage and between vast tree trunks with a too-regular mottled bark that indicated high-speed vat growth. Her Ghost circuits guided her back along the exact route she’d followed on her way to meet Bourdain, and she jogged down a lane that snaked between tall trunks looming on either side.

It didn’t take long for her to sense that someone was coming after her. She could hear the twigs snapping underfoot as an unseen pursuer moved towards her at an angle through swaying grasses, but avoiding the path itself and staying out of sight.

Birds suddenly scattered in an explosion of wings, vanishing far above Dakota’s head as they sought new perches higher up. She pushed between a couple of benches and darted aside, behind the cover of some high bushes, crouching there in the grass and peering through dense foliage back the way she had come.

Moss emerged a moment later from the depths of a copse, and began looking around wildly. Blue flashes flickered around his lightning gloves, starkly visible in the artificial night of the surrounding forest. It lent him the appearance of some primeval nightmare god of electricity.

By the faint glow of his eyes, Dakota could tell his sight had been artificially enhanced. She watched as he scanned the trail just a few metres away from her, and when his eyes locked on the bushes that concealed her, it was as if nothing stood between them.

‘Come out, Miss Merrick,’ he ordered calmly.

She was so distracted she almost didn’t hear someone else sneaking up on her from behind.

She stood, turned and kicked hard, catching the side of a helmet as one of Bourdain’s security men moved towards her in a crouch. Burning pain flashed up her leg and she yelled out loud. The guard leapt forward and made a grab for Dakota. Ghost-boosted instinct caused her to let herself fall backwards as he slammed into her, his own forward momentum sending the guard sailing over her head.

She rolled back on to her feet by the edge of the path, almost colliding with one of the benches. She watched the guard as he crashed into his superior. Moss clutched at the tumbling man in surprise, and lightning snapped from his steel-meshed fingers. The guard screamed hideously, and Dakota caught the unmistakable stench of burning flesh.

She turned and dived along a different path, running blind now. As more shouting erupted nearby, she could hear Moss scream and curse somewhere behind her.

A moment later she realized that the local net was denying her Ghost access. And she was lost.

Piri, I need you to get me out of here.

The forest gave way to an arcade of empty shop fronts strung along a wide walkway that eventually disappeared out of sight as it followed the natural curve of the asteroid’s circumference. It was like a street constructed up and over the summit of a rounded hill.

Shots whined from somewhere behind her, sending more birds flying upwards in panic from their nesting places in numerous sculpted nooks. She heard the sound of running feet, coming from the far end of the arcade that was still hidden from her by the curve of the asteroid.

She slid into deep shadow between two shop fronts, then noticed that it was the mouth of a narrow alleyway. She ran further into it, and paused.

‘Get the lights up!’ somebody yelled. ‘Get them up now!’

Panting hard, Dakota crouched with hands on knees. She guessed they were trying to get the main lights of the arcade switched on: the only illumination at present came from faintly glowing globes placed at discreet intervals, and which were clearly intended to be decorative rather than practical.

With one hand, she touched the alien’s gift in her pocket.

Piri, why can’t they turn the main lights on? Are you the reason?

Then she noticed Moss’s eyes flickering, luminous and satanic, in the dim light of the arcade beyond. They turned in her direction and he started straight towards her.

Dakota hauled herself back upright, wondering how much longer she could keep going like this, and why she was even bothered to try. They’d never allow her to get near the docks. Never.

At its far end the alleyway opened on to a covered plaza. This wide open space was filled with yet more trees whose dense foliage reached up towards narrow walkways that ringed the lofty surrounding walls. Drunk on adrenalin, she scrambled up a tree trunk, and then dropped off a branch and on to one of these walkways, water dripping on her from the wet leaves surrounding her. She hurriedly looked around, her head spinning from so much physical effort.

Muffled shouts as figures began to emerge at the far end of the plaza below. A sudden shot whined off the stonework of the wall, just inches from her head.

There’s something I want you to do, so listen carefully, Piri. Apparently we were carrying a GiantKiller in the hold.

Yes! I need to know if there’s a way we can trigger it. Can you trace the GiantKiller itself, since it was unloaded?

She continued at a crouch towards the far end of the walkway, then saw to her horror that Moss was already waiting for her there. Torchlight flickered below, its narrow beam shining in her eyes for a moment. She ducked away from it, desperate to find some kind of cover.

Ahead of her, Moss held his hands out and blue sparks flickered through the gloom, crossing and spitting between the lightning gloves. His enhanced eyes glowed as dim ovals in the dark silhouette of his face.

He started towards Dakota, moving fast. She scrambled back the way she had come, then pulled herself up a stairway towards the roof. It brought her to the entrance of a wide gazebo set astride the wall at one corner of the plaza. Below its roof stood an intricate water sculpture.

Water gushed from the mouth of a marble dolphin set high on a plinth of finely sculpted rock, tinkling as it descended and splashed into a wide but shallow pool through which myriad finned shapes darted incessantly. Grassy ferns and occasional palm trees surrounded the fountain, dripping water like rain on to the sculpture so that it constantly glistened.

There were no other exits from the gazebo. Dakota turned to see Moss appear at the entrance, his unnaturally illuminated eyes finding her instantly in the dim half-light. She felt a sudden, terrible despair flood through her. She was trapped.

How long exactly?

Dakota felt all hope evaporate. She’d been planning on a complex bluff, in case Bourdain might back down if she threatened to set off the device.

Someone else, she didn’t doubt, had scanned the contents of the
Piri’s
cargo hold on its voyage to Bourdain’s Rock. The critical question now was,
who?

It had to be the same Shoal-member that had spoken to her in the Great Hall. How else could it have known what was inside her ship?

GiantKillers were a near-mythical technology, supposedly originating from a Shoal client race somewhere else in the galaxy, which humanity hadn’t yet been allowed to come into contact with. It was a tool of reportedly enormous destructive power, supposedly designed to reduce large bodies—such as asteroids, heavy with valuable mineral resources—to dust within mere minutes. Her Ghost’s knowledge stacks were filled with a century of wild speculation concerning how such a technology might work.

As Moss moved slowly toward her, she decided to take a chance.

‘Back off!’ she yelled. ‘Let me through to the dock or, I swear on the Pope’s tits, I’ll activate the GiantKiller from here!’

Moss paused. ‘Nice bluff, but it really won’t work.’

‘I mean it!’ she yelled in terrible despair. ‘I’ve got the activation protocols uploaded to my Ghost circuits,’ she lied. ‘I can read every last fucking one of them back to you right now, or I can blow the shit out of this asteroid. Got a preference?’

‘Lying slut, I’ll open you from neck to navel and devour your innards while you watch.’ Deadly blue sparks leapt lazily from one hand to the other as he again moved cautiously forward.

‘Do you really want to try me, Moss?’ she screamed, backing around the fountain, away from him. ‘Seriously?’

Then something remarkable happened.

—

The GiantKiller had already been moved to its new home in a secure storage facility deep inside the body of the asteroid, several kilometres below its outer surface. The
Piri Reis
had meanwhile been monitoring the Rock’s communication channels, disguising its presence from moment to moment by simulating any one of thousands of maintenance programs, with a degree of sophistication equal to the covert systems used on board many of the Consortium’s finest military vessels.

Suddenly, the
Piri
was no longer alone in its explorations. Something vast came crashing through the Rock’s data stacks, devouring information like a lumbering virtual behemoth. For a few moments the
Piri
became deaf, dumb and blind as this new presence swept through the Rock’s computer systems with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer being used to smash a doll’s house.

By the time Dakota’s ship recovered, the Giant-Killer’s protocols had been wiped clean from the records. Alarm circuits blazed throughout the asteroid.

In appearance, the GiantKiller itself was little more than a mottled silver ball several centimetres in diameter, still held in the same field containment chamber it had been placed in prior to its trip aboard the
Piri Reis.
A casual observer might notice that this silver ball appeared to be flickering in and out of existence from moment to moment. But, rather than flickering, this was in reality a series of rapid expansions and contractions occurring almost too fast to register with the human eye. The GiantKiller was in fact testing its prison walls, lashing out in its pre-programmed desire to consume.

A microscopic analysis of the GiantKiller’s surface would reveal something very like capillaries inside an organic body, channelling resources and information through a highly complex bundle of exotic matter held in check only by the shaped fields that contained it.

Without warning, the shaped fields that surrounded the GiantKiller vanished, and the silver ball now dropped to the floor of its containment chamber deep within the heart of Bourdain’s Rock.

That same microscopic analysis would have then revealed those containment fields dissipating without warning, allowing a torrent of programmed matter to crack through the dense walls of the chamber, in just a few millionths of a second.

It was exactly as if a bomb had gone off.

The alien device underwent explosive decompression, extending microscopic feelers deep into the ancient flesh of the asteroid, spreading and dissolving the molecular bonds of almost everything it touched, reducing the solid matter of Bourdain’s vast, pressurized folly to dust and gravel in an instant.

The irony was that the GiantKiller had been intended as a practical resource for mining rather than as a weapon. And now it was transforming the asteroid into essential components that could, under more typical circumstances, be more easily collected by mining ships.

—

Dakota kept edging backwards, keeping the fountain between her and Moss. She was pretty sure he’d be careful about getting too close to running water while he was wearing . . .

And then it came to her. Everything here, the trees above, the ground under her feet, was wet, so there must be some kind of sprinkler system, some method of generating artificial rain . . .

Piri! If there’s any way to turn the water on in here, do it now!

In response,
Piri
fired fresh instructions into the local network, again feeding false information to the asteroid’s computer systems.

Dakota hauled herself up over the lip of the fountain and dropped into the pool, standing up again next to the splashing foam emerging from the dolphin’s mouth. Moss stood scowling at her, but kept his distance.

Something rattled and spat in the dimness overhead.

They both glanced up.

All at once, throughout the entire Rock, it began to rain from ten thousand steel nozzles.

A torrent descended from the dome above, soaking them both immediately. Dakota propelled herself instantly away from the fountain and hit the ground rolling. Moss began screaming as the artificial rain shorted his lightning gloves, and she almost gagged from the awful stink as he jerked and writhed in an expanding cloud of steam. Fresh torrents continued to drench him from above.