Empire of Light

Chapter Thirty-two

Another jump, at only 50 per cent capacity, carried the Mjollnir several hundred light-years further across the gulf separating the spiral arms. The Perseus Arm grew to fill more of the sky, while patterns of dust and light began to reveal themselves to the Mjollnir's crew over the next several days, as they worked to keep the frigate's jump capacity above a certain critical level.

Ty's dreams became stranger and more frequent whenever he slept, sometimes almost taking on the nature of visions. At one point he dreamt that a powerful storm roared out of the Mos Hadroch, where it sat in its cradle, commanding him in a voice expressed in the form of thunder and gales.

Now she was back on board, the prognosis for Nancy was far from good; the radiation had caused deep and irreversible cellular damage. He found he dreamt of her also, suited and tumbling out of his reach, until she was lost in the depths of interstellar space. He had visited her in the med-bay a couple of times, and gazed at her through the transparent lid of her medbox, wishing his need for her could somehow bring her closer to life.

He studied his personal logs of the tests he had run on the artefact, and in them found inexplicable gaps. He was by nature a meticulous record-keeper, going so far as to date and time-stamp even his personal observations and thoughts on the tests he ran. But the more he dug, the more he discovered periods where the logs and his own memory now clearly disagreed. He found no records of certain procedures on days when he would have sworn that they had been carried out, but the more he tried to recall the specific details of what had taken place, the more his memory failed him.

Ty experienced a cold tightness in his chest when he discovered that these inexplicable blank spots displayed their greatest frequency around the time of Olivarri's murder.

He sat for a long time, his right hand splayed on the surface of a greyed-out console, the data-ring on his index finger gleaming dully in the low light of the laboratory. Then he activated the console and, from the lab's dedicated fabricator, ordered up a dozen micro-surveillance cameras with broad-spectrum capability. The request would be logged, and he might have difficulty explaining it if it was ever questioned, but that was another risk he was willing to take.

The cameras were manufactured within the hour, whereupon he spent the afternoon positioning the tiny devices in dark and secluded corners of the lab where he was sure they couldn't be spotted at a casual glance. A short time later, Ty found himself back out on the hull as part of another repair shift. He watched Corso drill a hole into the hull itself with a custom-made mechanism he had ordered up from the fabs. The frigate was bathed in the ruby light of dozens of young stars shrouded in nebulae that marked the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm. It was a tremendous spectacle but, after nearly twelve straight hours on EVA, nobody was in a mood for star-gazing.

Once the plate-like Meridian field-generator had been plugged into the hull, Corso stepped back, allowing Lamoureaux room. Ted squatted beside it, laying the flat of one gloved hand on its slightly convex surface. A moment later, a flickering dome of light flared into life around them, which had to be at least fifty metres across.

'All right, I guess that's the last one for today,' Lamoureaux announced over the shared comms, fatigue reducing his voice to a dull monotone. The field shut off once more as he stood upright again.

'How much longer before we get the last one into place?' asked Corso.

'If we can keep to our schedule, it'll be another two days before the last of them is fitted to the hull,' Lamoureaux replied. 'With the spider-mechs doing a lot of the prep-work, we can speed things up, but we're still going to have to spend some time calibrating them.'

'And how long is that going to take?'

'Another day, maybe.' Lamoureaux turned and gestured at the newly installed field-generator. 'They're powerful, mind you. Whole orders of magnitude stronger than anything the Shoal let us get our hands on.'

Corso nodded. 'Ted, I need to check some diagnostics with you. So Nathan, if you don't mind-' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, then pointed at Lamoureaux, signalling they were going to talk over a private channel.

'By all means,' said Ty, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'Don't let me stop you.'

Ty simmered in silence while the other two men got to talking about whatever it was they didn't want him to hear. Paranoia made him sure that he was the subject of their conversation, and he wondered if they had finally picked up on his long-range tach-net communication with the avatar.

The two men's comms icons changed back to public mode a few minutes later.

'I'm going to take a look at the rest of the field-generators we planted,' Lamoureaux announced. 'Might be able to speed up the calibration if I double-check them.'

Ty frowned behind his visor. 'You could do that just as well from the bridge.'

'Well, since I'm out here, I might as well grab the opportunity,' Lamoureaux replied, trying so hard to sound casual that it aroused Ty's suspicions further.

Lamoureaux moved away from them, carried along the hull by the thin silver wires of his spacesuit's lanyard, and followed by a small retinue of spider-mechs.

'Ty,' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, 'switch to a private channel, please.'

With some reluctance, Ty switched to a one-on-one channel with Corso.

'I wanted to talk to you about Nancy, Ty. Word gets around.'

Ty opened his mouth and closed it. He almost blurted out a denial, then relented. 'It started long before we even got to Redstone. I-'

'Forget it,' said Corso. 'That doesn't matter. When I told you to stay away from the rest of the crew, I didn't know you were already involved with her.'

'Is she…?'

'She didn't make it, Ty. I'm sorry.'

Ty nodded inside his helmet, his throat suddenly tight. 'I see. There was never really any hope of recovery, was there?'

'No,' Corso admitted. 'But you have to make the attempt, anyway.'

Ty listened to the sound of his own breathing, close and loud within his helmet. Corso moved as if to turn away.

'Then there'll have to be a funeral service?' Ty asked.

Corso stopped and looked back at him. 'No, not yet, anyway.'

'Why not?' Ty demanded, scandalized.

'This isn't the time to be burying any more of our dead. Not when we're this close to our goal. The last thing the others need is to be reminded just how dangerous this job is. There's a real chance none of us is going to come back alive.'

'You have to hold a service,' Ty rasped. 'There was one for Olivarri.'

'That was different,' Corso snapped. 'He was murdered. Nancy's death is a direct result of our mission. We'll mark her passing properly, but not until this is over.'

'And is that what the others think, too?'

'I'm not here to debate the issue with you. I'm just telling you how it is.'

'Good of you to let me know,' Ty replied sarcastically.

'She had no idea who you really were, did she?'

'It wasn't the kind of thing that came up in conversation,' he replied, unable to keep the acid out of his voice.

'Ty, didn't it ever occur to you what you were actually doing by deceiving her like that? Did you really think I instructed you to stay away from the crew just to punish you? I've been deceiving people who would give their life for me, and for this mission, by not telling them who you really are. I wanted you to stay away because I didn't want to make that lie any bigger than it already is.'

'I thought of telling her,' Ty confessed, 'but I couldn't face the idea of her hatred.'

Corso chuckled. 'Keep saying things like that, and I might end up mistaking you for a human being one of these days.' Once he was back inside, Ty slept for a solid ten hours before waking with aching muscles and skin that had become infuriatingly itchy from pressure sores. He dragged himself into the lab's minimal toilet facilities, turned on a tap and watched a ball of water form at the end of the nozzle. Once it was about the size of his fist, he pulled it free and pushed his face into it, gasping at its icy coldness against his skin. He felt like he hadn't slept at all.

It was time to take a look at what the cameras he'd positioned around the lab had recorded. But first he was going to fix himself a drink.

Ty could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had ever touched alcohol, but some compulsion born of fatigue and grief, as well as the fear of what he might find when he reviewed the video feeds, made it easier to break what had until now been a habit of lifelong abstinence. Before long he was heading for an echoing, empty mess hall not too far away, where he breakfasted on freeze-dried crackers and reconstituted yoghurt. Once he had finished eating, he wandered through the kitchen area until he found the liquor cabinet he had spotted previously and randomly picked out a few squeeze-bottles of wine of indeterminate vintage and quality.

He broke the plastic seal on one of them, loaded the rest into a shoulder bag, then took a few sips from the open squeeze-bottle, careful to keep his thumb over the seal to prevent it spilling out in the zero gee. He grimaced at the taste, but kept drinking until a comfortably mellow feeling had begun to permeate into his tired limbs and his brain.

Back in the lab, Ty loaded the video feed and ran it from the beginning, watching himself go round the lab to check the cameras were properly networked before he sat down at the console and began typing some notes.

He fast-forwarded the feed an hour, and saw himself still thoughtfully typing or else pulling up data from the stacks.

And there was still another thirty hours of video to go through.

He sighed and fast-forwarded again, watching himself stand up and propel himself over to the far side of the lab, where a dedicated stack system maintained a real time back-up of all the experimental data gathered so far.

Ty frowned: this was something he definitely didn't recall doing. The only reason ever to use the back-up stack at all was because something had gone wrong with the primary system: and there had been no such issues that he could recall.

He switched views so that the feed from another camera allowed him to look over his own shoulder at the screen positioned above the back-up unit.

He leaned forward as the view zoomed in, and beads of sweat prickled his forehead when he saw nothing on that screen but seemingly unintelligible garbage. It no longer felt like he was actually watching himself; this was someone else looking out at the world through his own eyes – a monster hiding inside his own head.

He left the video feed running and headed over to the back-up stack to run a quick search. But he couldn't find any clue there as to just what he'd been staring at so intently: the data had either been wiped or hidden. Nonetheless, he spent the better part of the next hour running increasingly aggressive queries that got him nowhere.

Eventually he gave up, turning back to the console where he had left the video running, and froze.

His own face – somehow inhuman in its lack of any discernible human emotion – filled the screen. The eyes were wide and blank, as if staring off at some infinitely distant horizon. It seemed the monster had found the camera he had hidden in a recess to one side of the stack system, and crouched down to take a close look at it.

Ty moved over quickly to forward the video feed another hour. Nothing changed: the monster was still crouching next to the stack-unit, staring directly into the lens. Its slack-muscled features betrayed all the warmth and compassion of a reanimated corpse. He – no, it – must have been standing there during all that time, just staring into the lens.

Ty knew he was being sent a message here. No wonder he felt like he hadn't been getting any sleep; because he hadn't.

He slammed the console with his open palm so hard that it stung. The video feed blanked, but he could still see his own traitorous face reflected back at him in the smooth black glass.

He snatched his gaze away, suddenly sober again, and now filled with a terrible, skin-crawling chill. He hunted about for the hidden cameras and soon discovered most, but not all, were missing. He repositioned the undamaged ones in places where he hoped they might be harder to find, then he took a seat, opened another squeeze-bottle and began drinking with grim determination. At first, the others didn't notice his condition when Ty arrived in the airlock bay for his next shift on the hull.

That was fine by him, since he felt wrung out after spending the night vomiting into a vacuum hose, and tiny gold-plated hammers still pounded with an unwavering rhythm against the inside of his skull. Conversation was certainly not something he was looking forward to, but it looked like he would once again be working with Corso and Lamoureaux, who usually spent most of the time just talking between themselves.

The two men were standing almost head-to-head, already deep in discussion. Ty paused by the entrance, where they couldn't yet see him, and listened quietly.

'So you think we can still recover more data?' Corso was asking.

'The Mjollnir has a lot of inbuilt redundancy,' Lamoureaux replied, keeping his voice low – but sounds tended to carry easily inside the frigate. 'There's a chance we can recover the rest of the lost data from the surveillance systems.'

'You mean the overflow buffers?'

'No,' Lamoureaux shook his head, 'we've got everything we can from them. But some of the core stack arrays can act as virtual buffers in an emergency. So it's possible there's still…'

Lamoureaux glanced to one side, spotted Ty and fell immediately silent. Corso turned and scowled when he saw him.

But Ty didn't care, and he headed for one of the suit racks, his mind suddenly racing with possibilities. Over the next several hours, he had plenty of opportunity to mull over the brief snatch of conversation he had overheard.

Memory overflow buffers. He guessed they were talking about the data lost during the catastrophic systems failure around the time of Olivarri's murder. Clearly there was a way of recovering at least some of that data. And what else might be hidden in those buffers?

Later, on his way back to the labs, Ty once again stopped off at the mess hall, an idea forming in his head. One bulkhead was dominated by a display of ceremonial weapons: a dozen long knives of the type used in challenge fights were arranged in a circle, their blades all pointing inwards.

It took a little effort, but he managed to prise one loose, then concealed it inside his jacket and returned to the labs. He found several messages waiting for him, including a new shift-schedule put together by Willis, who had taken over that particular duty following Nancy's death.

He activated the back-up stack system, and dug deep into its operational guts. He felt a flush of triumph when he traced the files he had seen on the video feed to a virtual buffer located in a linked stack in an entirely separate part of the ship. What those files might actually be was a question he couldn't yet answer, but a lot of time and effort had been taken to hide them somewhere neither he nor anyone else might think to look.

He thought again of the monster staring at him from out of his own eyes, and felt a second flush of triumph: I'm on to you now.

Ty now used a set of software tools to study the contents of the files, and found them to be lightly encrypted command structures of a type he had never seen before, carefully modified to run on the imager array in which the Mos Hadroch still sat.

He regarded the unmoving artefact for a moment, and felt an uneasy chill. Surely it couldn't be this easy.

He spent a few minutes loading the command structures into the imager array, set the probes to start recording, and activated them.

What happened next was far more than he could possibly have anticipated. A bass moaning sound filled the air, modulating every few seconds. The sound seemed to penetrate deep inside his body and mind, in a way that was far from pleasant.

At the same time, the artefact appeared to come apart – no, unfold – in some way that his human eyes couldn't make sense of. He stared, utterly transfixed, as it appeared to grow larger over the next few minutes, its shape now constantly morphing and shifting. Jewel-like shards appeared all around it, hanging in the air, and glistening and twisting like a kaleidoscope projected in three dimensions.

A message alert flashed, but he ignored it.

The only way he could explain what he was seeing was by assuming the Mos Hadroch existed in more than three spatial dimensions. What appeared to be disparate shards might instead be components of this device that normally existed only in the other, higher dimensions, but were now briefly flickering into view.

The throbbing became more intense, driving itself deeper into his mind and making it hard to think clearly. He found himself involuntarily re-experiencing key events in his own life in flashes of almost hallucinatory detail, as if the Mos Hadroch were pulling them out of his subconscious and attempting, in its alien way, to understand who and what he was.

A machine for passing judgement: that's what he had told Lamoureaux and Willis, back in Ascension. It was trying to find out if he was worthy of it.

He relived his days in the hidden R the celebrations when the Legislate-backed strike against the Uchidan Territories floundered; the sense of betrayal when his Uchidan masters had decided to hand him over to the Legislate.

Despite his terror at what was happening to him, Ty laughed. The irony was inescapable: for all his abortive attempts at understanding the artefact, it was doing a much better job of understanding him. Finally, mercifully, the Mos Hadroch reverted to something closer to its normal appearance. Meanwhile the monstrous noise that had accompanied its transformation decreased to a quieter pitch.

Ty remembered the ceremonial knife. Splaying his right hand flat on the console, he held the blade in his left so that it hovered over the finger wearing the data-ring.

If he could just do it quickly enough, the ring might not have the opportunity to send a signal through his nervous system. All he had to do was strike down, a single slash, and it would all be over…

His hand trembled as a cold wash of fear passed through him. He sobbed and let go of the knife, unable to go through with this act of self-mutilation; not when he knew the action might kill him.

He moved his shaking fingers across the surface of the console and set it to record, then began to speak. He did his best to summarize what he'd discovered, and what he thought they were dealing with. He tripped over his own words but pushed on regardless, knowing he was babbling but afraid that his mind might be stolen away from him before he had a chance to finish. He knew the monster inside his head could come back at any time.

Ty took the command structure he'd discovered and attached both his message and the video footage of the artefact's sudden transformation to it, then distributed multiple copies throughout the ship's networks. He left the console to continue recording in the meantime.

Even if the monster managed to track down some of the copies of the command structure, it couldn't find or delete them all. All Ty needed to do now was…

A glint of light suddenly manifested in the corner of his vision, like a ray of sunlight reflecting off glass.

The monster had woken up.

Ty scrabbled for the knife and splayed his fingers across the console once more, just as he heard the heavy door behind him begin to open. He took a firm grip on the knife and prepared to strike down at his finger.

Something stopped him, and he cried out. It felt like the air around him had solidified, freezing him in place.

The monster crawled back inside his skull, just as he heard someone call his name.