Empire of Light

Chapter Thirty-one

Whitecloud sat staring at a screen and nursing a bulb of coffee as Corso entered the lab a short time later.

'Found anything new?' Corso asked him, shooting a glance at the Mos Hadroch still wedged inside the enormous machine and surrounded by probes.

Whitecloud went on staring at the screen like he wasn't even aware of the man standing next to him.

'Ty?' Corso asked again, this time in a substantially lower voice.

Whitecloud finally turned to face him. Nobody home, thought Corso, chilled by the empty expression on the other man's face.

Whitecloud seemed to come back to life a moment later, and jerked backwards, clearly surprised to find Corso standing in front of him. The bulb of coffee went spinning out of his hand, but Corso reached out and caught it, then handed it back. His lingering doubts about Whitecloud being under some form of control had now vanished completely.

'I was wondering if you had anything new to report,' Corso started again, keeping his voice level even while his heart hammered inside his chest. It was important not to let Whitecloud suspect anything was amiss. 'You were supposed to file an update this morning, but I didn't receive anything from you.'

In truth, Whitecloud's reports rarely made for good reading. Rather than containing actual information or providing any insights, they tended more to be a list of tests, or variations of tests, that had been run on the artefact, all producing the same dismal results. The only time the derelict had shown any sign of being anything other than a dumb inanimate object had been that first time Corso had laid eyes on it.

Whitecloud blinked and pulled himself out of his chair, grabbing a rung in the low ceiling for support. 'New?' He scratched his head, staring around him as if he had been asleep for a long time. 'Yes. Yes there is, actually. Take a look at this.'

Whitecloud pushed past Corso and headed for a tabletop imager. He activated it first by passing his hand over its plate, then quickly sped through a series of holographic menus until he found what he was looking for.

A few moments later Corso found himself looking at the image of a translucent upright cylinder hovering above the plate, with thousands of hair-thin passageways extending outwards from it horizontally.

'That's a cache, isn't it?' remarked Corso.

'It is,' Whitecloud agreed. 'The one at Tierra, to be precise. I only got a chance to take a look at this for the first time the other night. The main reason I didn't get round to filing your report was because I wanted to check more of the correspondences before discussing it with you. But since you're here…'

Whitecloud reached up towards the floating cylinder and nudged it to one side with an expert flick of his fingers, then he quickly navigated through another menu. A second cylinder appeared, similar to the first except that, rather than having a single primary shaft, this one had two shafts that merged in the middle, forming a cross.

Corso started. 'That's…'

'The interior of the asteroid where we found the Mos Hadroch,' Whitecloud finished for him.

'But they look identical!' Corso exclaimed, coming forward and putting both hands on the rim of the imager's flat plate. 'Well, no, not identical, but…'

'But strikingly similar, wouldn't you say?'

'Yes.' Corso nodded. 'And you only just picked up on this?'

'You'll recall I was working outside on the hull during the briefing about the cache we just visited. A summary was forwarded to me, but I didn't get round to studying it until now. Still, I don't know how I missed it before,' he admitted, a touch of wonder in his voice. 'When I saw this for the first time yesterday, I was thunderstruck. The relationship was immediately obvious. Anyone with enough knowledge of the Atn could have made the connection, but there are so few of us left, really, and with the chaos of the last few years…'

Corso studied the two images and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the lab. 'Just to be clear, you're saying there's obviously some kind of relationship between the Atn and the machine-swarm that created the caches?'

'You sound surprised, but think about it for a moment. They're both widely distributed, self-reproducing machine species. It's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that they share some common point of origin. Perhaps what we're seeing here is a case of some kind of genuine machine evolution.' Whitecloud paused to think for a moment. 'Or more likely one was created from the other.'

'And the swarm was hunting down and destroying Atn clades.' Corso, too, thought for a moment. 'Can knowing this help us in any way?'

'I don't know,' Whitecloud admitted. 'Just about the first thing I did, once I realized this, was to try and crack the Mos Hadroch with the Atn's own machine-protocols. I got nowhere, though that's not to say there aren't other commonalities between the species that might give us the key we need to understanding how the artefact actually works.'

'We're running out of time, Ty. A few more days and we'll be reaching our destination.'

Whitecloud nodded. 'Did we get what we needed at our last stop?'

'Yes… but there were some problems. Dakota and the others are on their way back right now.'

'What problems?'

Corso briefly summarized the events on the cache-world, including Nancy's radiation poisoning.

Whitecloud paled at this final piece of news. 'Nancy… is dying?'

Corso frowned at his reaction. Whitecloud was clearly severely shaken, more than might be expected given that he hardly knew the woman. 'No, not dead, but it's really not looking good. She's going straight into a medbox as soon as she's back here but, to be honest, the delay before we can rendezvous is just going to further reduce any chance she might still have had to pretty much zero.'

Whitecloud's face became a mask. 'I see,' he said briskly, looking away from Corso. 'That's a matter of some concern, of course.'

Corso nodded, and wondered again just what it was Whitecloud wasn't telling him. 'We need to find a way to activate the Mos Hadroch that doesn't involve Trader,' Corso reminded him. 'Dakota's been down here a couple of times, hasn't she?'

'Yes,' said Whitecloud, 'but we never got a repeat of the phenomenon that occurred the first time she saw it.' He nodded towards the artefact in its cradle. 'It's been inert ever since.'

'Do what you can, Ty. It could mean the difference between success and failure. I'll see if I can get Dakota to come back down. Maybe this connection between the swarm and the Atn is what we need to finally get somewhere.'

Ty nodded, but his whole mood had changed dramatically once he'd heard the news about Nancy. Just what have you been hiding from me? Corso wondered as he left. As soon as Trader's yacht had docked, Dan Perez and Ray Willis helped Dakota get Nancy out of her suit. Corso arrived in time to watch the two men lower her into a portable medbox towed away by a spider-mech, before following it back out of the bay.

'Her suit's support systems are keeping her alive, but only just,' remarked Dakota once she and Corso were alone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. 'I know she's not going to make it, but why do I feel so bad? The woman hated my guts. She wouldn't want me to feel sorry for her.'

'Maybe you're still a little more human than you seem to think,' Corso suggested.

Dakota just shook her head, her eyes filled with regret. 'I can't help but blame myself. I let myself get careless.' There was anger in her tone. 'I was in too much of a hurry to get down inside the cache.'

Corso sighed and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him directly. 'There's no way you could have known beforehand what was going to happen, and Nancy knew the risks before she came along on this trip. We all did. You understand that, right?'

Dakota looked away from him again. 'Maybe.'

'Maybe, yes,' he said. 'Now listen, there's something we need to talk about. Something urgent.'

She glanced back at him. 'What?'

'The closer we get to where we're going, the more nervous I get when it comes to letting Trader anywhere near the Mos Hadroch. But I just got back from seeing Nathan Driscoll over in the labs – and it looks like he's finally on to something.'

'A way to activate it?'

Corso hesitated. It had already occurred to him that there was no reason to assume Whitecloud was the only one to have been compromised.

'No, not yet,' he replied, entirely aware of how evasive he was sounding. 'Something else.'

Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. 'Oh, for… You still don't trust me, do you? Listen, I already checked myself out before Olivarri was murdered. I went down to the med-bay and ran a full set of diagnostics on my implants almost as soon as we were under way, because I wanted to be sure. Lamoureaux did the same, and he's never even met Trader. Believe me,' she continued, 'we're both clean, and neither of us is being controlled – not by Trader or anyone else.'

'Why the hell didn't you tell me this before now?'

'Because, after Olivarri was murdered, I knew it wouldn't make the slightest damn bit of difference what I said. You read the report on the med-bay; whoever did the vandalizing, they didn't just smash the physical scanners, they did a good job of wiping the core memory as well. So how could either of us prove that we'd scanned ourselves?'

'All right, I'm sorry for doubting you. Anyway, Nathan now thinks it's possible there's a close relationship between the swarm and the Atn. He thinks one might have split off from the other a very long time ago and, given what he just showed me, I'm inclined to believe it.'

Dakota's eyes widened. 'Shit, that's…' She tailed off into silence.

'Pretty incredible, yeah,' Corso finished for her, then he nodded towards the exit. 'Maybe we should get going.'

Dakota followed him to the nearest transport station. 'I've run into Atn a couple of times on coreships,' she said, as they boarded a car. 'They're harmless, so it's hard to believe they could somehow be related to something as malign as the swarm.'

'It means there's at least the outside chance that Atn protocols might work on the artefact, but the fact is we're almost out of time. We're almost certainly going to need Trader to activate the thing, whether we like it or not.'

'It's strange to hear you saying that, Lucas.'

'Yeah, well, I'm still not too keen on the way you sprung him on us.'

'But I'm not the only one who's been hiding things. How long have you known Leo Olivarri was working undercover for the Legislate?'

Corso stared at her. 'Where did you hear this?'

'Trader told me,' she replied. 'And, no, don't ask me where he heard it. He wouldn't tell.'

'I haven't known about Olivarri that long,' Corso replied. 'There were suspicions, but we had to send a covert signal back home to get any kind of confirmation. It still doesn't tell us why he was murdered.'

'If he was spying on us, maybe he knew something we didn't. I could have worked on finding out more, if you'd only told me. Or do you still not trust me?'

Corso leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her. The transport station lay silent and empty through the curved glass behind him. 'All right,' he said, 'I know who killed Olivarri. Or at least I have a pretty damn good idea. I think it was Driscoll.'

'What makes you think it was him?'

'Whoever sabotaged the ship's stacks didn't do a thorough enough job. It turns out there are memory overflow buffers that can hold partial back-ups in case of a major failure. We managed to retrieve some of the missing hours from the surveillance feeds, and it turns out Driscoll was the last person to see Olivarri alive. We even have partial video of them arguing not long before Olivarri was killed.'

'What were they arguing about?'

He shrugged. 'No idea. We haven't managed to recover the sound yet.'

'That's not necessarily incriminating in itself, is it? I mean, people do argue.'

'There's more. Before we left Redstone, Nathan completely disappeared for several hours. We have no idea what happened to him during that time.'

'Surely you asked him?'

'Yes, but his answer never rang true.'

Dakota leaned back and studied Corso for a moment. 'You're still holding something back, I can tell.'

Corso smiled weakly. 'All right, when the med-bay was vandalized, it made it almost too easy to pin the blame on you or Ted.'

'I think it was deliberate misdirection: a way to take the focus off someone else by making the obvious suspects look like the only suspects.'

'That occurred to me too, but now I think it was vandalized for exactly the reason we originally thought it was – so someone couldn't be scanned for compromised neural implants. But not you or Ted.'

Dakota smiled and shook her head. 'That's ridiculous. If there was another machine-head on board, I'd have known straight away.'

Corso smiled softly. 'Dakota, our friend Driscoll is a Uchidanist.'

'A Uchidanist? Why are you only telling me now?'

'Because I need your help,' Corso replied miserably. 'I'm sure he's under Trader's control.'

'How?'

'Remember, Uchidanists have-'

'Implants,' she finished for him. 'Oh, Jesus and Buddha. But that still doesn't necessarily prove he's responsible, does it?'

'No,' he agreed. 'For that, you need evidence.' He reached up to the car's list of programmable destinations. 'Let's get going. There's something I want you to see.'

She looked at him suspiciously. 'What?'

'The evidence,' he said simply. 'But before we get there, there's something else I'm going to have to tell you about Driscoll. And you're not going to like it.' The frigate's reactor complexes were surrounded by a maze of access tubes narrow and cramped enough to induce any number of claustrophobic nightmares in the minds of anyone traversing them. Corso led the way, once they disembarked, relying on the detailed maps placed at each junction to help him navigate his way to one of the reactor bays.

Dakota followed close behind, a knot of apprehension twisting in her stomach, her mind still numb with shock from what she'd just learned. Before long they reached the main control area for the frigate's fusion-reaction systems. A screen mounted on one bulkhead showed a real time simulation of the fantastically violent processes taking place just a few metres away.

'I still can't believe you kept this from me for so long,' she mumbled, watching as Corso stepped over to a service hatch set into the bulkhead. He entered a code into a panel beside the hatch, and after a few moments it swung open.

'We've been over this before,' he replied testily. 'If I can find a way to work with Whitecloud without throttling him, so can you.'

Dakota didn't reply at first. In truth, what Corso had told her on the way still hadn't quite sunk in.

Whitecloud was, whether directly or indirectly, one of the men ultimately responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life. The Port Gabriel incident had led to the banning of machine-head technology, and that had led to Dakota working for Bourdain – and that had led, one way and another, to Nova Arctis, and finally to the Mjollnir.

'I want him dead,' she announced, her voice wavering.

Corso was halfway inside the hatch as he glanced back at her. 'But we need him alive,' he said, with a warning in his tone.

'You should have told me,' she protested in sudden fury.

'And if I had, would you have been happy about him coming along?'

'No, I wouldn't,' she spat back at him. 'He's a mass murderer, don't you understand? You weren't there, Lucas. You have no conception of what it was like losing your mind like that.'

'And yet we have Trader sitting in his yacht there in the hold, and we all know what he's capable of. I seem to recall he did exactly the same thing to you. So how do you square that with your conscience?'

Dakota's face paled and she fell silent, her eyes round and luminous in the light cast by the reactor simulation.

Corso shook his head in irritation, embarrassed at his own sudden sense of discomfort. A silence stretched between them, but when he ducked to continue through the hatch, she followed after only a moment's hesitation. The area beneath the reactor control room was barely big enough to enable them to crouch together inside it, and the only light came from a single red panel in one corner. Corso pulled out a small flashlight and shone it on to what looked to Dakota at first like a jumble of machinery. He gripped the flashlight in his teeth and used both hands to pull himself closer to it.

As Dakota followed, she saw that a plastic chair had been pushed into one corner, and was covered with matt foil that she recognized as a kind of force-feedback material. A bird's-nest tangle of wiring and circuitry surrounded it, while yet more circuitry and wiring was wrapped around the arms of the chair.

'What is it?' asked Dakota, puzzled.

'See that superconductor cable running through the back? That's so it can tap directly into the reactor power feed without showing up on the logs.'

Suddenly Dakota saw the order in the chaos, and realized she was looking at a home-brew version of the interface chair up on the bridge.

She moved abreast of Corso and brushed the fingertips of one hand along the wiring. 'So why build it at all?' she asked.

'To trigger the shutdown,' Corso explained, 'and to hide the identity of Olivarri's killer. Some of its components were manufactured from the lab's dedicated fabricator. That would nail Whitecloud pretty conclusively.'

'I don't see how,' Dakota muttered. 'Can Uchidan implants even work with an interface chair?'

'Apparently his can. I did a little research into his escape from custody. His implants are a custom job – far from surprising, when you think about it. All the members of his R amp;D unit were regularly tinkering with their own neural hardware to see what results they got.'

'There has to be a reason you're telling me all this now rather than previously.'

'Because it was going to emerge sooner or later, and I'd rather you heard it from me. We're all going to have to make compromises if we're to have a hope in hell of getting out of this mess alive.'

'What compromises?'

'I need you to keep working with Whitecloud.'

She stared at him, totally appalled. 'You've got to be fucking joking.'

'If he's close to some kind of a real breakthrough, you're going to have to. If it makes you feel any better, I've talked with him about what happened at Port Gabriel. He doesn't deny his responsibility for what happened, and I'm not saying he's any less guilty, but I'm beginning to think he's genuinely contrite.'

A sick, acid feeling was building in the pit of her stomach. 'Oh, that's okay then,' she snapped. 'No problem. Let bygones be bygones, right?'

Corso bristled. 'That's not what I meant.'

She stared off past his shoulder for a moment, thinking. 'Look, putting all of that aside just for the moment, one thing occurs to me. If he's under Trader's control, why did he tell you he'd made a breakthrough? Wouldn't that be against Trader's own interests?'

'Trader didn't control your actions every second of every day, did he?'

'Well, no,' she conceded.

'I think it's the same with Whitecloud. That means he's his own man at least some of the time.' He nodded towards the jury-rigged chair. 'All this tells us is that Trader's planning something and, whatever it turns out to be, we're probably not going to like it.'