Empire of Light

Chapter Thirty-three

The comms terminal in Dakota's quarters began to beep insistently. She accessed the data-space and found a high-priority alert waiting for her from Corso. A moment's mental navigation pinpointed him on Deck C, close by the labs.

Lucas. What's up?

‹Dakota. Where are you?›

There was an edge of panic to his voice.

I'm in my quarters, she replied.

‹I need you to meet me at Deck C, near Transport 55, straight away. There's something you need to see.›

Why don't you just tell me what it is?

‹Just get down here, Dakota. Right now.›

He cut the connection. Dakota checked the time and realized, with a silent groan, that she had been asleep for less than two hours. On getting there, she found Lamoureaux waiting by the entrance to a storage room, halfway between the transport station and the labs.

He nodded towards the open door, his expression grim. 'Take a look.'

She stepped inside, but her nose had already told her everything she needed to know. The bulkheads were stained red with blood, and the air smelled of copper and rust.

She saw Corso and Martinez kneeling on either side of Ray Willis, who had been pushed into the space between two tall metal equipment bins. It was clear from the deep gashes in his throat and chest that he was very dead.

Corso glanced up at her as she entered. 'Did you see anyone else on the way here?'

'No, I came straight away.'

Corso and Martinez exchanged a look. 'Four of us here-'

'And Dan on the bridge,' Martinez finished for him. 'We should get back there as soon as we can.'

Just five of us left, Dakota thought numbly. Ray, Nancy, Leo – all dead.

'What about – what about Driscoll?' she asked. She had almost said, what about Whitecloud?

'Now there's a question I'd like to answer,' said Martinez, straightening up. He grabbed hold of one side of a storage module to keep himself standing the right way up. 'He's gone.'

'Not only that, it looks like he took the Mos Hadroch with him,' Corso added. 'And… Dakota, Eduard knows about Whitecloud. Or he does now, at any rate.'

'Please tell me you only found that out recently,' said Martinez. His tone was calm, but something in the way he looked at her made it abundantly clear he was suppressing a great deal of anger.

'I swear, I only just found out myself.' She glanced at Corso. 'You know, maybe you should have told all of us a long time before now.'

'Maybe I should,' Corso agreed, but she knew he was dissembling.

She couldn't stop staring down at Willis's face; he wore an expression of mild surprise that seemed utterly at odds with the violence that had been done to him. The gashes in his body were horrible, and yet she couldn't look away.

'I guess it's pretty conclusive now that Whitecloud killed Olivarri,' she said.

'I'm still not making any assumptions until we find him,' replied Martinez.

'What about Willis here? Who found him?'

'We were getting unexplained major power surges from the labs,' Corso explained. 'Driscoll… Whitecloud,' he corrected himself, 'didn't answer our calls, so Ray came down here to check things out. That was the last we heard from him.'

Dakota dipped back into the data-space and checked on Trader's yacht.

'Trader's where he should be,' she announced. 'His yacht hasn't budged, and he hasn't tried to link up to any of the airlocks.'

Lamoureaux leaned in through the doorway and caught her eye. 'You think Whitecloud might be on his way to the hold?'

'How the hell does Trader come into this?' Martinez demanded.

'How much did Lucas tell you about Whitecloud?' Dakota asked him.

'Enough to make me a very unhappy man, Miss Merrick.'

'Well… he has a customized Uchidan implant, and it's possible Trader's using it to exert some kind of control over him. It's also possible he doesn't even know what's happening to him.'

'That might be the case,' Martinez growled, 'but if I happen to accidentally blow the bastard's head off, I won't cry about it.' He nodded towards the corridor outside. 'There's an arms locker near here. We get armed and we go looking for him.'

'No. No firearms,' said Corso firmly. 'We can't take a chance that the artefact might get damaged.'

Martinez pulled himself upright, took hold of a metal shelf bolted to the bulkhead behind him, and used it for leverage as he planted one booted foot on Corso's shoulder and pushed hard. Corso was sent skidding across the floor until he hit the bulkhead opposite.

'I should kill you now,' the Commander rasped. 'You've lied to me too many times, Lucas, and it's getting people killed. This is still my command, my ship, my crew. Therefore we carry arms.'

He glanced around them all with an expression of disgust. 'Nothing would make me happier than to shove the whole fucking lot of you out the nearest airlock and watch you wriggle, but right now you're going to get yourselves armed and start looking for Whitecloud. I don't care how big the fucking ship is, this time I want him found.' By the time Dakota made it back to the bridge some hours later, Lamoureaux had just completed the latest in a series of jumps that had shifted the frigate deep inside the Perseus Arm. They were now only twelve hundred light-years from the target system.

She lowered herself on to a couch near Martinez and Perez, and saw they were all present for once – excepting Trader and Whitecloud, of course. Lamoureaux sat in the interface chair and looked so tired that she wondered if he might pass out. Corso perched on the edge of the dais, by Ted's feet, facing towards the rest of them. They all looked just as exhausted as she felt.

Corso nodded to her. 'Think you can stay awake a few minutes more?'

'Sure,' Dakota muttered hoarsely. A numbness, like thick black cotton pressing against the inside of her skull, kept threatening to swallow her thoughts. She had enjoyed maybe a couple of hours' sleep at most out of the last seventy-two. Her implants could modulate her hormone and adrenalin levels to give her the occasional boost, but there was only so much abuse her body could endure.

Lamoureaux climbed down from the interface chair and sat beside her. Corso now stood up and faced them all.

'First,' he said, 'there's still no sign of Whitecloud. It's the same problem as before: this ship's just too big. We've set the fabs to manufacturing a couple of dozen stripped-down spider-mechs to take over the search, but they won't be much more than a camera mounted on a navigational platform. They'll search the ship systematically, and at speed, starting at the bow and finishing at the stern.'

'Who's going to be running them?' asked Dan Perez.

'No one,' Martinez replied. 'We can't afford the spare hands, not with only five of us to do all the work. The spiders will maintain their own network, cross-check everything they see, and flag anything even slightly out of the ordinary.'

'But that's still going to take too much time,' Lamoureaux protested.

'I agree,' Corso nodded. 'What we really need to be doing is using our heads to try and figure out another way to track Whitecloud and the artefact down. While he was rooting around in the lab computers, Dan found something you really need to see. Over to you, Ted?'

Lamoureaux nodded, and a moment later an image of the Mos Hadroch appeared overhead, still suspended inside the imager array in the lab.

Dakota leaned forward. There seemed to be something wrong with the artefact, as if the air around it had become distorted.

'The video you're about to see was made before the Mos Hadroch was removed from the lab, obviously,' Corso explained. 'Dan came across several crushed fab-manufactured cameras, while the rest of us were out searching the ship. He's found a few more since, still intact and apparently deliberately hidden in secluded parts of the lab where you wouldn't find them unless you looked pretty hard. Dan also found some video files that Whitecloud had apparently deliberately distributed through the ship's stacks. Run the first one, Ted.' The image jerked into life.

As Dakota watched, the Mos Hadroch appeared to explode in extreme slow motion, glittering shards diverging outwards from its central mass and twisting slightly as they did so. The central core – the artefact itself – was meanwhile changing shape, seeming to twist apart and then fold in on itself every few seconds, in a way that challenged her senses. It literally hurt her eyes to watch.

There were hints of what might be shadows, as if the artefact were trapped at the centre of a tangle of struts and mechanisms, most of which were invisible, or very close to invisible. An eerie and overwhelmingly alien throbbing accompanied these contortions.

She finally tore her gaze away and pressed her fingers to her eyes. When she looked back up, Lamoureaux had stopped the video.

'We also found this,' said Lamoureaux. 'Lucas?'

'Run it, Ted.'

A new video began. This time Whitecloud stared into the lens of the lab's main console, a wild look about his eyes.

'My name – my real name – is Ty Whitecloud,' he announced. 'I suspect I may be dead by the time you see this. The files accompanying this message include a command structure I believe can be used to control the artefact. I…'

The image jerked momentarily as Lamoureaux jumped it forward.

'… artefact is composed of some form of non-baryonic material imbued with a highly self-organizing principle, possibly hylozoic in nature, in essence a classical model of a Wheeler-Korsh engine. This is the only way I can begin to comprehend the nature of the communication between myself and the Mos Hadroch.'

'Communication?' exclaimed Perez.

Dakota sat up, her fatigue suddenly forgotten.

'What you must understand is that the Mos Hadroch is more than just a simple weapon. It will not function for just anyone who happens to come into possession of it. If the communication I shared with it is anything to judge by, it is entirely capable of making its own decisions. It knows everything about us – about the Shoal, their war with the Emissaries, our purpose in being here.'

'He's babbling,' said Perez. 'None of this makes any sense.'

'Shut up,' said Corso.

'Someone – something – has been exerting control over me against my will, and the only reason for doing so is because they want the artefact. But what you must understand…' Whitecloud paused to clear his throat, clearly at his wits' end '… what you must understand is that whether the artefact fulfils its purpose or not will depend on the artefact's own judgement of anyone who tries to activate it.'

Whitecloud slumped at the console and brushed one shaking hand through his unkempt hair. 'You must understand that it will destroy us, if it finds sufficient reason.'

For a moment he looked like he was thinking of adding something, but then appeared to change his mind, stepping back from the console.

'He's crazy,' said Perez.

'I agree,' said Martinez. 'He's clearly lost his mind.'

'I'm not so sure,' said Dakota.

Lamoureaux pointed upwards. 'There's more.'

Dakota looked back to see that Whitecloud had splayed one of his hands across the surface of the console, while the other gripped a knife with its blade aimed at one of his fingers.

Jesus and Buddha, she thought, horrified but unable to look away. Whitecloud kept shaking badly, muttering under his breath and clearly in great distress.

He stood like that for several seconds, then his behaviour changed abruptly. His face grew expressionless, in a way that sent cold prickles of horror up Dakota's spine. He stared towards the lab entrance, which was out of sight of the console's recording lens, then himself stepped out of view, the knife still clutched in one hand.

'Talk about timing,' Perez muttered. 'This must be when Ray turned up.'

'Yeah, I think you're right,' agreed Corso. 'Whitecloud killed him before he could see what was happening to the artefact.'

'No, Trader killed him,' said Dakota, turning to eye him pointedly. 'The fact that it was Whitecloud's hands actually holding the knife doesn't mean anything. You saw the way he was struggling with himself

'I'll move it forward by a few minutes,' said Lamoureaux, and Whitecloud reappeared overhead once again. He was now covered in blood that was not his own, and he was panting hard, his chest rising and falling. Ray Willis would not have been an easy man to kill, even if caught by surprise.

Dakota watched Whitecloud pull the Mos Hadroch out of its cradle and stuff it into a bag. There was something monstrous about his eyes, as if they had been drained of any humanity.

'Does this mean he had the command structure for the Mos Hadroch the whole time?' asked Perez, in a subdued tone.

'There's a bit earlier on where he describes finding it hidden deep inside the stacks. How it got there, he doesn't know.'

Something clicked into place inside Dakota's head. 'I know,' she said, thinking furiously.

Corso stared at her. 'How do you know?'

'By putting two and two together. I don't have a shred of doubt anymore that he's under Trader's control. But here's the thing. We didn't let Trader come on board because we didn't want him getting anywhere near the Mos Hadroch, right? At least, not in person.'

'So he used Whitecloud to get to it?' said Lamoureaux, his eyes widening.

'And used him as well to run his own experiments on the artefact,' Dakota continued. 'He transferred copies of the command structure into the lab, where he could test it out and see if it worked. But, somehow, Whitecloud stumbled across the command structure and figured out what was going on.'

'But why take the Mos Hadroch now? Why not before?'

'I don't know,' Dakota admitted. 'But once Trader discovered Whitecloud had distributed copies of the command structure throughout the ship, he'd have realized we wouldn't need him any more.'

Martinez stood up, his expression grim. 'Which means right now Whitecloud is on his way to Trader's yacht – if he isn't there already.'

He stepped over to a console and a moment later a wire-frame of the frigate appeared above them. 'We'll resume the search, but this time we'll focus exclusively on the aft airlocks, and on every access route leading to the main hold and Trader.'

'But he could be there already,' said Perez. 'He probably went straight there after killing Ray.'

'Not necessarily,' said Corso. 'As soon as we found Ray, I programmed the surveillance feeds to send me an alert the moment Whitecloud showed up on a camera.'

'Except that the cameras don't cover the whole ship,' Martinez pointed out. 'Just the main passageways and bays.'

'But including every access point leading directly to the hold,' said Corso, nodding in agreement. 'Except we haven't caught him on camera yet, which means he – meaning Trader – is staying away from the parts of the ship under surveillance.'

'Then he must still be hiding somewhere on board the ship,' said Dakota.

'Listen,' said Perez, 'there's something else you have to keep in mind before we go running off looking for him. Right now we're down to less than fifty per cent jump capacity. There are also hull defects that need serious attention. We'd be at a huge disadvantage if we tried to jump into the target system right now.'

'Dan's right,' Dakota said to Martinez, 'and I understand you want to let the spider-mechs hunt for Whitecloud on their own and free the rest of us up for essential work, but we've still got a much better chance of catching him if you let me or Ted run the spiders. No amount of repair work is going to make a damn bit of difference if we don't have the Mos Hadroch when we reach that cache.'

Martinez closed his eyes for a moment, then took a deep breath before opening them again. 'All right, fine. I guess we don't have any choice.' He fixed Dakota with a look. 'As long as you understand we're running out of time.'

Dakota nodded gravely. 'I understand. But maybe once we've got enough spider-mechs out and looking for Whitecloud, we can flush him out sooner rather than later.'