Empire of Light

Chapter Four

Next time, the interrogators were different.

The first one to enter Ty's cell was balding and middle-aged, with loose wisps of hair curling around his ears. A younger man closed the door behind him, his own head carefully shaved. The older one had the look of a civil servant, and wore a sombre-looking suit with a high collar. His younger companion was dressed more casually.

'My name is Rex Kosac,' the older man explained, as Ty lifted himself up from the narrow plastic shelf that served as his bed, 'and my colleague here is Horace Bleys.'

Ty gazed at them warily, trying to adjust the thin paper uniform he'd been given to wear. 'You're not part of the staff here, are you?'

Bleys glanced around the tiny cell and wrinkled his nose, perhaps becoming aware of the perpetual scent of detergent and urine that clung to every surface. His flattened nose, thick, muscled hands and general air of barely suppressed violence suggested he was Kosac's bodyguard.

'On the contrary, Mr Whitecloud, I administrate this facility,' Kosac replied.

Ty sat up straighter. 'When they brought me here, they said I would be formally arraigned within a couple of days.'

Kosac shook his head sadly. 'That's not why I'm here, Mr White-cloud. I just wanted the chance to meet you before…' he glanced at Bleys with a smile, as if he'd caught himself on the verge of saying something he shouldn't. 'Well, you're our most famous resident, as a matter of fact.'

A helicopter passed over the prison, the sound of its blades dopplering as it descended towards a nearby landing pad. The muffled sounds of men shouting and trucks pulling up outside continued unabated day and night.

'Would you like to know how we found you so quickly?' asked Kosac, his grin increasingly feral.

Ty cleared his throat, his mouth suddenly dry and his tongue feeling heavy. 'I assumed it was the blood sample.'

Kosac frowned. 'Blood sample?'

'A doctor took it from me at a clinic. I assumed you were running automatic gene-profiling and matched it to a sample that was taken from me before I was due to be handed over by the Uchidans.'

Enlightenment crossed Kosac's face. 'Ah! I see. No, on the contrary, we picked up a friend of yours a couple of months back. Ilsa Padel – you know her?'

Ty nodded, a terrible feeling of inevitability beginning to overcome him.

'She tried to exit the coreship along with a group of refugees. She almost got past us before we figured out who she was. She was extremely helpful when it came to identifying key members of General Peralta's senior staff in return for certain concessions. Even if we didn't have the blood sample, Mr Whitecloud, it was still only a matter of time. And hiding right there in the clinic! Well,' – Kosac shook his head as if sorrowful, 'that was always going to make it easy for us, wasn't it?'

Ty slumped back against the wall. 'I see.'

Ilsa. Few others could have had the opportunity to betray him so thoroughly. Apart from her, only Peralta had been aware of his true identity. Ty felt a tide of bitter melancholy well up as he remembered all the times he had searched for her, unaware she had already bartered him for a more comfortable cell or a shorter sentence. His first sight of the barracks had been at dawn. The block-shaped prison building was tucked into one corner of a large fenced compound belonging to the permanent Consortium military presence stationed in the coreship. Rover-units with heavy armaments mounted on their backs surrounded it, while supply trucks and transports constantly arrived or departed. The corridors within teemed with black-suited troopers, their faces more often than not hidden behind visors.

His first night in this cell had convinced him that he would not survive to see the morning. The single window above the toilet bowl looked out over a courtyard surrounded by a high concrete wall. An automated gun-tower equipped with IR and motion sensors stood on a skeletal tripod in one corner of the courtyard, while most of the rest of it was stacked with pallets containing emergency supplies, the spaces in between forming narrow corridors.

Ty had watched as guards dragged three men in rags past this maze of pallets and towards the courtyard's rear wall. One of the troopers raised a pistol to the back of the head of each in quick succession, dispatching them with quick and brutal efficiency. The pistol emitted a muted bass thump with each shot that Ty felt more than he heard.

He had soon collapsed on to the plastic shelf and spent the rest of the night waiting for his own turn to come. He could imagine the cold biting wind on his face, the chafing of the plastic ties around his wrists, and his last sight of those cracked grey concrete walls before a single shot took out the back of his skull. Instead he woke to another day, and then another after that. But every night the same drama was repeated: one or more figures would be marched out to the rear of the courtyard and executed. Yet nobody ever came for him.

Not until now. Kosac stepped over to the window and peered out. 'Tell me,' he asked, 'how did you wind up with the Uchidans? I believe you grew up in the Freehold.'

'I grew up on a farm, Mr Kosac. My father was murdered on the orders of a corrupt senator, and I had to stand and watch as an entire agricultural facility and several thousand acres of land that should have been my inheritance were stolen from my family.' He shrugged. 'After that, switching sides was easy.'

'I see.' Kosac stepped away from the window. 'You trained originally in biotechnology, but switched careers. Why?'

'After I arrived in the Uchidan Territories, I developed an interest in the Atn. They're a form of extreme biotech, after all, engineered rather than evolved, so it wasn't really that much of a career change. I obtained a Consortium-funded research grant and made a name for myself studying them. My work took me all across human-occupied space, and I spent several years far from home. But when the war with the Freehold became intractable, I found myself conscripted into Territorial Research and Defence when I finally returned.'

'And so you did your duty, because of your faith in God?'

Ty regarded him with a weary look. 'Uchidanism has nothing to do with faith, Mr Kosac. It has much more to do with logical certainties and inescapable mathematical truths.'

'Really,' said Kosac, clearly unimpressed. 'Perhaps you could elaborate for me.'

'I'd rather not.'

Kosac nodded briefly at his companion. Bleys stepped forward and grabbed Ty's hair, then slammed the back of his head against the wall behind the shelf he sat on. Ty groaned and slithered on to the floor, tasting blood where he'd bitten his tongue.

'Humour me,' said Kosac.

The two men waited while Ty pulled himself back up on to the shelf. He dribbled blood and Bleys handed him a handkerchief. Ty took it, pressing it to his mouth until he was ready to continue.

'Uchidanism is… is based on objective observation and statistical probability.'

'What probabilities?'

'That life, by its very nature, always seeks to preserve itself within a universe that has a finite span, and that the ultimate endpoint of technological development is the direct manipulation of the most fundamental laws that govern nature.'

Ty swallowed again. The words came easily, memorized long ago but still clear in his mind. 'There are good reasons to believe we live not in the original universe but in a simulation, possibly one of many. Reality, at its most base level, is little more than an expression of various mathematical formulae; therefore, once you acknowledge these simple truths, the idea that our world could be anything other than created becomes ridiculous.'

'I'm disappointed, Mr Whitecloud.' Ty looked up at Kosac. 'I don't know much about Uchidanism, but I know something about personal faith. I believe we pay for what happens in this world in the next.'

Bleys had turned away slightly, reaching up to touch the side of his head. Ty noticed for the first time the man wore a comms bead in one earlobe.

Ty looked back at Kosac. 'Why are you asking me these questions?'

'Because I'm probably the last person you'll ever speak to, and I wanted to know what kind of man does the things you've done.'

Ice gripped Ty's heart. 'I'm to be arraigned. Taken off the coreship to be tried.'

Kosac smiled sadly. 'In a less imperfect world, perhaps.'

'Sir?' said Bleys, and Kosac turned to him. 'We got a report that the Authority's people are on their way here. I think we should hurry.'

The ice spread long frozen fingers deep into Ty's bowels. 'I'm too valuable for you to just shoot,' he croaked.

'No, Mr Whitecloud, you're not going to have a chance to escape a second time.'

Ty stared backwards and forwards between the two men. 'Escape?'

A moment later two armed and visored guards appeared at the cell door, and Ty knew the worst was yet to come. The two guards entered the cell and dragged Ty out into the corridor, where one slammed a shock-stick into the back of one knee. He collapsed on to all fours. A second blow sent him sprawling on his belly.

A moment later his arms were twisted painfully behind his back, and he felt the plastic ties being clipped into place around his wrists. He was pulled upright a moment later and pushed towards a service elevator at the far end of the corridor. His legs gave way under him, but the guards dragged him along between them, regardless.

They pushed him inside the elevator and forced him to his knees, then hauled him back out, once they had arrived at the ground floor. Ty managed to find his feet, and was shoved towards a steel door at the far end of the corridor, a thin but freezing trickle of cold air seeping past its frame and carrying with it the scent of oiled metal and decay. One of the guards stepped forward and unlocked the door, revealing stacked pallets as it swung open.

Ty clenched his teeth at the blast of frozen air and tried to hunch up, his paper uniform providing him with so little protection that he might as well have been naked.

He realized he was weeping as they dragged and shoved him out into the courtyard. Everything seemed to get a little farther away, as if he were experiencing the world at one remove, reduced to being a passenger within his own skull.

They pulled him towards the wall at the rear of the courtyard. He was close enough now that he could make out the dark stains where the wall met the ground. For the first time, he saw a door set into the wall over to his right, where it had been hidden from his view in the cell by a pile of crates. It stood open, a military transport parked on the street outside. A guard stood by the door, his visor pushed up, arguing with two men who looked too healthy and well fed to come from Ascension.

One had a thick woollen hat pulled down over his stubbled skull, but Ty still saw the irregular grooves and bumps disfiguring his cranium, which marked him out as a machine-head. He was tall and gangly, with a worried expression, whereas his companion was small but wiry and muscular-looking. The second one's gaze locked on to Ty the instant he came into view.

'That's him,' Ty heard him say, over the unending hubbub of activity. The machine-head glanced first at his companion, then at Ty. Then they both pushed past the guard they'd been talking to and headed straight for him.

'Hey!' the guard shouted, dropping his rifle from his shoulder and following them. 'You can't-'

'The fuck?' said the machine-head's companion, stopping for a moment to glare back at the guard. 'What was it about our authorization you didn't understand?'

Ty's own guards had halted at the commotion, but then they seemed to come to some mutual, unspoken decision and resumed pushing him towards the wall.

'Hey, stop right there!' shouted the small, muscled man. 'Don't take another single fucking step. Do you understand?'

'We have orders,' one of Ty's guards grated. 'If you've got a problem with it, take it up with Director Kosac'

'Oh, we will,' said the other man, coming closer. 'You,' he said, turning back to the guard who'd tried to stop them. 'Tell them who I am.'

'Commander Willis, sir,' the guard replied with clear reluctance. 'Head of Ocean's Deep security.'

'That makes me one of the people responsible for the entire relief operation out here. And that,' he continued, coming up closer to one of Ty's would-be executioners, 'means you do exactly what I say. So here's the deal,' he continued, his voice softening now into an agreeable we're-all-friends-here tone of conciliation. 'We want this man for questioning.' He glanced briefly at Ty. 'Your name is Ty Whitecloud, isn't it?'

Ty managed to nod.

'Those aren't our orders, sir,' one of Ty's guards said. 'Our instruction is immediate execution.'

'Who told you that? Director Kosac?'

Ty glanced to one side, just in time to see the guard nod.

'Well, Director Kosac is about to get a spiked boot up his ass that's going to bounce him all the way out of Ascension and into a job someplace that's going to make his time here look like a fucking holiday.' Willis smiled broadly. 'And if you don't do exactly what I tell you, and I mean to the fucking letter, I'll make sure you're there to keep him company. Now,' he added, gesturing to Ty, 'since you've already seen our credentials, how about you do precisely what we tell you to, before you make things worse than they already are?'

Ty felt the grip on his shoulders tighten for a few seconds, then relax.

'Sir,' said one of his guards, before letting go of him altogether.

'This way,' said Willis, taking Ty's elbow and leading him towards the waiting vehicle.

Ty followed in a daze, as the machine-head moved up on his other side.

'Mr Whitecloud,' said the machine-head, leaning down a little to speak to him, 'My name is Ted Lamoureaux and you are a very, very lucky man. I hope you'll be grateful enough to be as cooperative as we're going to need you to be.'

Lamoureaux touched a panel on the side of the transport and a door slid open, warm air wafting out from within. Ty drew in the smell of oiled leather and cheap plastic, and felt tears prickling the corners of his eyes.

Lamoureaux gestured inside.

'My hands,' said Ty. 'Please.'

'Shit,' he heard Willis mutter behind him, and a moment later he felt the plastic ties fall away from his wrists. He brought his arms back around, wincing at the pain in his shoulders, and climbed inside the vehicle.

The interior was cramped, and the air felt hot and close to him, after being out in the freezing cold. There were two rows of seats facing each other, and Lamoureaux and Willis sat down opposite Ty. The transport started to move a moment later.

'Where are you taking me?' Ty asked.

'Well, that depends on exactly how cooperative you're feeling,' Lamoureaux replied.

'Kosac told me someone was coming for me, but he wasn't going to let me escape.'

He watched the two men exchange glances.

'Well, that's it,' Willis muttered. 'I'm going to get a kick out of burying that little shit up to his neck in trouble.'

'Mr Whitecloud,' said Lamoureaux, his tone dry, 'can you tell me if the term "Mos Hadroch" means anything to you?'

Ty nodded slowly. 'It's an Atn term: a transliteration based on an analysis of ancient Atn sound recordings. It means a machine for passing judgement.'

'And you've been living under the "Nathan Driscoll" identity for some years now, isn't that correct?' Lamoureaux prompted.

Ty nodded slowly, unsure what to admit to just yet.

'We'll stick with the Driscoll identity for now,' said Willis. 'Seems you've had quite the varied career, haven't you, Ty?'

Ty shrugged uneasily and still said nothing.

Lamoureaux's eyes became momentarily unfocused. He's accessing data from somewhere, Ty realized.

Lamoureaux blinked and looked at Ty. 'You have an implant,' he remarked.

'You can tell?' Ty asked.

Lamoureaux shook his head. 'No, not that it stopped me trying to detect one. But it's noted in your records. Is it still active?'

'No,' Ty replied. 'The Uchidan authorities disabled its higher-level functions before I was to be handed over to the Legislate. You should know that Uchidan implants aren't programmed like the machine-head variety. Spontaneous networking isn't what they're designed for.'

'I'm aware of that, Mr Whitecloud.'

'Why are you asking me questions about the Atn? Nobody cares about them except a few underfunded university departments.'

Lamoureaux responded by pulling a case out from under the seat beside him. He opened it and extracted a bundle of printouts and handed them to Ty.

'Can you identify these?' he asked.

Ty studied the documents for a good minute or two before looking up again. 'These are the spiral forms of the wall-glyphs found inside almost every Atn clade-world,' he said. One set of glyphs – a crescent placed next to a full circle, both of them at the centre of a tight spiral of lines and squiggles – was immediately familiar. 'If all you wanted to do was identify the Atn clade-family concerned, I could have told you as soon as you said the words "Mos Hadroch".' He tapped the crescent and circle. 'This is the identifier for Crescent-over-Moon. They're the only clade with which that term is associated.'

Willis leaned forward. 'What exactly is a "clade"?'

'The Atn have clans, or clades, distinguishable by small differences in their written languages. They appear to be quite distinct from each other, and rarely interacting.'

Lamoureaux fixed him with an intense stare. 'What we want to know, Ty, is whether the Mos Hadroch is a tangible artefact. Can you tell us that?'

A tide of fatigue threatened to swamp Ty. Living in a state of perpetual terror, he had found, required a great deal of constant energy. 'Look, Mr…'

'Lamoureaux.'

'Mr Lamoureaux, I can't tell you how grateful I am for what you did back there, but what happens if I answer your questions? Are you going to take me back to be executed, once you've got what you need?'

'No,' Willis replied. 'You're under our jurisdiction now, but we're going to have to get you out of Ascension before Kosac or someone like him figures out a way to change that. But in return we expect your full and unhesitating cooperation. If we think you're holding out on us, or being less than honest for one second, then, yes, you go straight back where we found you.'

'Why,' asked Ty, 'is it so important that you know about the Mos Hadroch?'

'Tell us exactly what you think it might be, for a start.'

The transport took a series of fast turns, slinging the three men from side to side. Whoever was in the driver's seat – assuming the vehicle wasn't automated – was in a hurry to get to their destination.

'I said it referred to a machine for passing judgement, but the modifier "Mos" could mean "weapon" equally as much as it does "machine". The Atn are a notoriously uncommunicative species, and that fact unfortunately means that sometimes all we have to go on is educated guesswork.'

'There are academic papers that seem to suggest the Mos Hadroch is some kind of god,' said Lamoureaux.

Ty made a dismissive noise. 'Laroque's idea. The man's an idiot. There's nothing to suggest the Atn share our concept of deities. I'm not sure they're even really sentient, at least not in any way we ourselves can understand. Where I do agree with Laroque is that they're an artificial species of some kind, but if there was ever a purpose behind their creation, it's either been lost to time or they just don't want to tell us. All the evidence suggests they haven't evolved or changed in any significant way in millions of years. They're more akin to intelligent space-going termites than anything else.'

The transport came to a sudden stop, and Ty nearly slid out of his seat. The hatch clanged open and Lamoureaux climbed out first, while Willis gestured for Ty to follow the machine-head into the bustling noise beyond.

He saw they were at an airfield, where the cold hit him like a wall. Helicopters were parked in ranks, and guarded by rover-units whose electronic eyes constantly scanned the nearest rooftops. A world-pillar rose in the near distance, dwarfing the buildings clustered around its base. Near the helicopters were several heavy air-transports, from whose open bellies packages and crates were being lowered to waiting trucks. There were even a few dropships nearby, the concrete beneath them blackened and cracked.

The driver turned out to be a guard wearing a Legislate trooper's uniform. He exited the front cabin and took hold of Ty's right arm.

Willis led the way, and it was soon clear they were heading for one of the dropships.

Lamoureaux kept pace with Ty and his guard. 'Remember, as far as anyone's concerned, your name is still Nathan Driscoll.'

'I'll need a change of clothes,' said Ty. He could hardly speak for his teeth chattering.

Lamoureaux and Willis exchanged a glance. 'Should have thought of that,' Willis muttered, as if it were the machine-head's own fault.

'Okay,' said Lamoureaux, looking annoyed. 'There's probably spare engineering jumpsuits on board the dropship. If I can find one, you can use it.'

Ty nodded in a daze, half-convinced some unbelievably cruel trick was being played on him.

Either that, or he really was about to finally leave Ascension behind for ever.