Empire of Light

Chapter Twenty-eight

Less than an hour later, Dakota reached the bridge just in time for Olivarri's funeral service.

The rest of the crew was already there – even Driscoll, who had been hiding in the labs ever since leaving Redstone. The overhead display was filled by an external image of the Mjollnir, as seen through the lens of a surveillance-drone trailing the frigate at a distance of a couple of kilometres. Floating a few metres away from the drone, and in full view of its sensors, was a single spider-mech holding a jar delicately in its multiple arms.

Martinez was in full dress uniform, as were Nancy Schiller and Dan Perez. Corso wore a formal suit, his shirt a swirl of various shades of grey. Dakota, by contrast, felt distinctly underdressed in her usual casual uniform of T-shirt and work trousers, but dealing with formal occasions like this was very far from being one of her strong points.

She watched Corso mount the dais, resting one hand on the arm of the vacant interface chair as he waited until the conversation died down. Dakota tried to listen to his brief eulogy, and then that of Willis, but waves of fatigue kept washing over her, and her attention kept slipping. All she could see when she briefly closed her eyes were the grey and black plates of the Mjollnir's armoured hull.

Her mind drifted further, speculating on what the next generation of human-built superluminal ships might be like, assuming they ever survived the onslaught of the Emissaries. She decided their best option would still be to find some way to power up the Ascension coreship, or one of the other coreships abandoned in the vicinity of the Long War…

Dakota snapped awake and realized the service was finishing. She looked around warily, wondering if anyone else had noticed her practically sleepwalking through the whole event.

She glanced back up at the image overhead. The spider-mech had now opened the jar, spilling grey ashes out into the vacuum, where they hung in a slowly expanding cloud. She imagined Olivarri's essence spreading ever outwards until it filled the void between the spiral arms.

'Dakota.' A hand touched her shoulder.

She turned to see it was Corso.

'We're going to be reaching our goal in a little under twelve hours' time. I really think it's time you got some sleep, don't you?' Dakota awoke, entangled in her hammock, to the sound of a pre-jump alert. There had been several since she had stumbled back into her cabin, but she had managed to sleep through most of them.

Keeping her eyes closed, she linked into the data-space. Lamoureaux was already there, of course.

‹Looks like you're just in time for the show,› he sent.

She switched over to the flow of data coming in from the ship's external arrays. The Orion Arm had already vanished behind dense dust clouds, while the band of the Perseus Arm, in the other direction, was becoming brighter and more detailed. A star barely an AU away bathed the frigate in a pale golden light.

Then the stars shifted, suddenly, jarringly, and that same star was now much closer. It formed a bright round disc, while a dark shape closer to hand partly occluded it – the dwarf planet Trader had directed them to.

Post-jump analyses started pouring in, and she skimmed over them, picking out the main details and discarding the rest. The star had thirteen planets, and a brown dwarf binary partner less than two light-years away.

Dakota untwisted herself from her hammock, despite the protest of her tired and aching muscles. She kicked herself over to an exercise frame designed for zero gee, and did some gentle stretches before hitting the shower, though half her attention was still focused on the updates still flooding in. Initial analyses showed all the planets to be either frozen balls of gas or sterile rocks, most with only a few thin vestiges of atmosphere. If there was anything more evolved than lichen to be found in this whole system, she would be greatly surprised. Half an hour later she made her way to the nearest transport station, and was surprised to find Nancy Schiller waiting there with a pulse-rifle slung menacingly over one shoulder. Dakota just stared at her with a bleak expression.

'I'm coming with you,' Schiller announced. She reached out and slapped the access panel on the nearest car, and its door slid open. 'But don't think I like having to babysit you.'

Dakota didn't move towards the car. 'Nancy, why are you here? It's meant to be just me and Trader going down to the planet surface. Whose idea was this?'

'Martinez.'

The two women regarded each other with the keen attention of soldiers on opposite sides in a war caught in the same foxhole.

Ted, are you getting this?

‹Sorry. Not my idea,› he sent back.

Dakota shook her head with a sigh and stepped past Nancy and into the car. Schiller followed a moment later, her mouth set in a thin line, and pulled herself into the couch facing her. The car began to accelerate down the transit tube, heading for the stern.

'I know you don't like me,' Dakota said carefully, 'but if we're going down there together, you're going to have to at least try and be civil. We're all on the same side.'

'What about whoever killed Olivarri?' Nancy replied. 'Whose side are they on?'

Dakota shook her head, as if to say I give up, and stared fixedly at the ceiling for the remainder of their short journey, feeling disproportionately grateful when the car slid into the station closest to the main hold. As they reached the airlock bay, they found a dozen spider-mechs waiting, floating patiently just to one side.

'What do we need those for?' asked Nancy.

'For grunt work,' Dakota replied, noting with approval that the spiders had been modified for low-gravity work, as she had requested. 'We're going to be doing a lot of lifting and carrying, according to Trader, so we're going to need them. You want more details, ask him when you meet him.'

'Huh.' Nancy headed to the nearest rack and pulled down a pressure suit.

Trader's yacht was, for the first time, linked to the frigate via a pressurized tube. As before, Dakota herself did not bother with a pressure suit. Once Nancy was ready, Dakota hit the cycle button on the airlock door, and then waited until the safety light turned green and the door hissed open. The spiders followed them in, unfurling their arms to push themselves away from the sides of the tube and into the yacht's interior.

Trader had already drained his vessel's liquid atmosphere, in anticipation of their arrival, but the damp air still had a briny scent to it that made Dakota think of sunken wrecks and weed-strewn shorelines. The chamber they currently found themselves in was barely capacious enough to hold the two of them, all twelve of the spider-mechs, and a tiny, glowing, insect-sized device that hovered before them for a few moments before darting away around a corner.

Dakota glanced at Nancy, then nodded towards the departing beacon. 'Let's go,' she said.

'You first,' Nancy muttered uneasily. They followed the beacon to an egg-shaped chamber about eight metres in length. The wall surfaces were shiny with moisture, and tiny beads of liquid still spun through the air around them. They found Trader waiting there inside a field-induced bubble of water. Nancy stared at the alien with a shocked expression, making Dakota remember the first time she herself had set eyes on a Shoal-member, when she had probably looked just as flustered.

Several holographic projections of varying size floated close to the walls, rippling whenever Dakota and Nancy or the spiders passed through them. Most consisted of indecipherable Shoal iconography rendered in three dimensions, but one showed a real time image of the interior of the hold.

Unlike human-designed ships, there was nothing there that could be called furniture, nor were there any convenient handholds to grip on to. Similarly there was nothing that might be designated a ceiling or a floor; indeed, there were very few right angles, and most of the bulkheads simply curved into each other.

Dakota ordered the spiders to go into sleep mode, whereupon they powered down, folding themselves into multifaceted polygons that took up far less room.

Dakota moved closer to Trader. 'Did you get my briefing?'

'Received with delight,' the alien replied, manoeuvring within his ball of water until he directly faced Nancy.

His manipulators, suspended beneath the wide curvature of his lower body, twisted with what Dakota chose to interpret as distaste. 'I see we have company.'

Nancy glanced questioningly at Dakota. 'Briefing? What briefing?'

'I gave Trader a summary of what he's been missing while he's been stuck away here in the hold,' Dakota explained. 'Murder, sabotage, intrigue. The usual.'

'Life aboard the frigate is filled with much excitement, yes?' said Trader.

'Call me crazy,' Dakota replied, staring fixedly at the alien, 'but I had an idea you just might be able to throw some light on it all.'

'Most distasteful dis-corporation upon us all grants few hopes for the future.' Trader's artificially generated voice took on a harsher quality inside the metal-walled chamber. 'One assumes you are already hard upon the scent-path of those responsible?'

'What?' Nancy stared back and forth between them, her expression incredulous. 'What the hell did he say?'

'He said he hopes we catch whoever did it really soon,' Dakota replied, without taking her eyes off the alien.

Trader moved closer to them both. Though Nancy didn't move from where she still floated close to a wall, Dakota looked over in time to see a muscle in one of her cheeks begin to twitch spasmodically.

'We swim towards the world below,' explained Trader, 'where we will find the defensive systems we need. I have probes already performing reconnaissance, so perhaps we should take a look at what they've found.'

Dakota glanced towards the live video feed and realized with a start that they were already moving. The hold's open doors were receding into the distance, the yacht's inertialess systems dampening the effects of its acceleration.

Another projection now appeared in the air in front of Trader, taking the form of a flat black rectangle. A yawning, glass-walled abyss appeared inside this rectangle, falling away into darkness. It looked like images Dakota had seen of the Tierra cache. As the viewpoint rushed headlong into the mouth of the cache and into sudden darkness, she felt a strong urge to look away.

Some kind of filter kicked in, so that the cache's walls became visible. There were oval openings ranged on all sides, blurring together initially as the viewpoint descended at speed. But then the viewpoint suddenly slowed and veered aside into one of the doorways, moving rapidly along a smooth-walled tunnel until it arrived in a long, narrow chamber filled with the blackened ruins of some kind of machinery.

The projection then faded to black. Dakota glanced to one side and saw the Mjollnir receding into the distance with increasing speed.

'And it's the same throughout the cache?' asked Dakota.

'As far as can be determined,' Trader replied. 'Contact with some of my probes was lost after a certain depth, but that may be down to the sometimes unusual gravitational conditions to be found inside caches. The Meridian defence systems, however, are located near the mouth of the cache.'

'I still want to see inside the cache at the first opportunity,' insisted Dakota.

'But of course,' Trader replied, his manipulators wriggling like hungry worms. The idea that Trader might actually provide better company than another human being would never before have occurred to Dakota, and so she found herself tremendously irritated when Trader left her alone with Nancy in the egg-shaped chamber. All she could do was crouch in the inertialess zero gee, and try to ignore Nancy's embittered gaze. But before very long the sheer tension, enhanced by boredom, drove her to at least make an attempt at conversation.

When that failed, Dakota finally lost her temper.

'Just what is your fucking problem?' she seethed. 'I used to own a cargo ship that was easier to talk to.'

Nancy's eyes darted away from hers. 'There's things you don't know about me. That make it hard for me to talk to you.'

'What? What things?'

Nancy swivelled her gaze back around, her shoulders rising and falling as she took a deep breath. 'I lost family in Port Gabriel,' she replied.

Dakota felt her face go red. 'I'm sorry, I-'

Nancy burst out laughing. 'No, no… I mean that's just the kind of bullshit you want to hear, right? I didn't lose anyone. I just…' the other woman shrugged and shook her head. 'I just really fucking hate machine-heads. You and the Uchidans, you're all the fucking same to me, you know that? Even that hole in the ground we're headed for isn't deep enough for you all.'

Dakota stared at her, speechless.

'Look,' Nancy went on, 'if Commander Martinez wants you on board with us, that's up to him, not me, but I don't have to pretend I like you, or that I trust you, or that I'm not sure you had something to do with Olivarri's murder. Are we clear on that?' 'As daylight,' Dakota replied through gritted teeth. After that, Dakota kept her mouth shut and her eyes fixed on the projections all around. Nancy crouched in a similar pose, her helmet resting nearby. They had a spectacular view of their approach to the cache-world: the curving limb of the planet rose towards them at a terrific speed and, as they drew nearer, Dakota studied with interest the great rifts and valleys and ancient impact craters that spoke of a violent past. The mouth of the cache became visible as a perfectly round circle of black punched through the tiny world's outer crust.

Dakota felt the tug of something familiar from the surface below.

'There's more drones here,' she muttered out loud.

Nancy shot a glance at her. 'What?'

'More Meridian drones. Trader! Where the hell are you, Trader! There's-'

‹I am here.› Trader replied to her directly through her implants. ‹Are you certain?›

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

‹An unexpected surprise, then. Do you have a location?›

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.'