Empire of Light

Chapter Five

The dropship lifted from the concrete not long after they boarded, accelerating hard until it passed through an open portal in the coreship's ceiling, more than a dozen kilometres overhead. A screen mapped the dropship's progress for the benefit of the three men, now strapped into couches in a space not much larger than the rear of the transport that had brought them from the compound. Half an hour later the dropship rendezvoused with a cargo ship that had been commandeered by the Consortium for the relief effort.

Four men were waiting for them as they disembarked. They were all dressed in plain clothes, but their muscular physiques, air of watchful attentiveness, and the zippered jackets that failed to conceal the bulge of holstered weapons, all strongly implied a career in security. Ty himself had been given a jumpsuit three sizes too big for him.

'You're on your own for the next couple of days,' Lamoureaux told him. 'But there's some material I want you to look over in the meantime. You'll find it waiting for you in your berth.'

'Where are we going?'

'Ocean's Deep.'

Ty was then quickly escorted through the vessel's narrow, claustrophobic passageways. It had been some years since he'd last experienced zero gravity, and at first he sprawled about clumsily. By the time his body started to remember how to manoeuvre, he found himself deposited in his home for the next seventy-two hours: a single private berth containing only a heavily padded acceleration seat and a voice-controlled comms unit.

The berth was cramped and utilitarian by most standards, but after the deprivations of life in Ascension it felt almost decadent in its comfort. Ty wedged himself inside the awkwardly tiny toilet and pulled off his jumpsuit, quickly sponging the grime and urine from his skin.

The water was warm and, as he washed himself, he felt some of the tension and horror of the past few years – the slow dying by cold and starvation – begin to drop away like a second skin he could finally slough off.

He then pulled the oversized jumpsuit back on, and tested the door into the berth. He was far from surprised to find it had been locked from the outside.

After a few minutes' experimentation with the comms unit, he discovered that it was linked into both local as well as interstellar public tach-net relays. Before very long, he'd managed to navigate his way to a live feed that showed the coreship's surface.

He gazed down on a forest of shattered and twisted drive-spines. Other ships were visible closer at hand, scattered through the surrounding void, and most were clearly of human construction, but mixed in with them were a few quite unlike anything Ty had seen before.

These latter were equipped with drive-spines that curved out and then forward from a bulbous central hull. Ty realized, after a moment, that these must be the alien Magi ships, news of which had arrived with the first rescue and relief missions.

A heavy cargo lifter drifted in front of the nearest Magi vessel, giving Ty the perspective he needed to see how truly immense the alien craft were. A thrill of awe burned its way up his spine and into his brain. There was a sinuous, organic quality to them that made them look less like something manufactured and more like something that might have evolved in some limitless ocean.

After a while, he managed to drag his eyes away from this spectacle long enough to pull up whatever details he could find concerning the destruction of Night's End, and everything that had happened since. He absorbed the details with the ferocity of a man starved for knowledge, learning of the Fleet Authority based at Ocean's Deep, along with what little was known of the Magi starships – and the rumour and conjecture surrounding those directly or peripherally involved with their discovery. Lamoureaux and Willis's names turned up frequently, though not nearly so often as those of a Dakota Merrick and a Senator Lucas Corso.

He checked the external view to see if anything had changed, and realized the nearest of the Magi ships was drawing closer. By the time it was almost abreast of the cargo ship, the stars were obscured by an energy field.

And then, in something less than the blink of an eye, the coreship was gone, along with its attendant fleet of human and Magi vessels. Instead there was only the broad sweep of the Milky Way, and the diamond sprinkle of stars both near and far away.

A data-file appeared on the display, with a confirmation request. Ty activated it and found himself looking at an up-to-date library of research into the Atn, including not only all of his own published work, but also a set of documents marked 'classified'.

He speed-read through the summaries of several of the classified files, with a fascination that slowly gave way to anger mingled with envy. Clearly some of his fellow exo-anthropologists had been engaged in classified research for the Legislate: work he'd had no inkling of during his long years of exile.

He read the papers in more detail, soon becoming lost in their minutiae, his struggle for survival on the streets of Ascension now slowly fading into a memory. Three days later, the same four security personnel escorted Ty into an orbital station within the Ocean's Deep system. A central hub many kilometres long was surrounded by a series of pressurized rings that spun constantly to provide gravity, all of them connected to the hub by spokes that also served as part of the station's transport system. He stared around, goggle-eyed, as he was taken down one of the spokes and into the interior of a ring, which proved to be dominated by ancient, crumbling towers of Bandati design. The air smelled sour and damp, and slightly foul.

Enormous windows set into the ring's inner rim faced in towards the hub, the gas-giant around which the station orbited intermittently visible as the ring turned on its axis. Ty watched for a few moments as the planet slowly slid past.

A shadow passed overhead, and he caught sight of a Bandati soaring from one tower-platform to another, with wings spread wide. He found Lamoureaux and Willis waiting for him in a prefab admin building located in the shadow of one tower.

'First things first,' said Lamoureaux, once Ty's escorts had departed. 'You read the files I sent you?'

'Yes, yes I did.' Ty gave a little half-laugh. 'I had no idea Laroque was doing any kind of secret research, or that the Atn were involved in the smuggling of restricted technology. Why would they do that?'

'They needed things from us. Access to manufacturing facilities, certain processing technologies they could make use of. Sometimes it's easier for them to barter for what they need than build it from scratch way out there between the stars.'

'And in return?' asked Ty.

'In return,' Lamoureaux replied, 'they'd either give us information about whatever was out there in the greater galaxy that the Shoal didn't want us to know about, or they'd supply us with banned technologies.'

'All right, but Crescent-over-Moon never dealt directly with humanity. We only know they even existed because I found one of their clade-worlds, and that turned out to have been abandoned for tens of millennia. The reference to Mos Hadroch is incredibly obscure. I still don't understand why you care about it so much.'

Willis spoke up. 'First things first, Mr Driscoll. Was there anything at all in the data we gave you that can help us figure out where the Mos Hadroch is, or what it can do?'

'Yes, there was. Particularly the set of stellar coordinates.'

'Coordinates?' Lamoureaux asked, his eyes taking on a faraway look as he accessed remote information being relayed to him.

'Laroque found them on one of the secret expeditions, and dismissed them. He believed Crescent-over-Moon were a dead end. If he'd even bothered just once to try and correlate his findings with my own, he might have been on to something. But he was too shortsighted.'

He paused for breath, aware of the way the two men were staring at him. He'd have to learn to control his outbursts.

'You're saying you might actually know where it is?' asked Lamoureaux.

'May I?' Ty asked, nodding towards a comms unit in one corner of the room. 'If you have a copy here of the same files you sent me, that is.'

Lamoureaux nodded to Willis, who shrugged and palmed the unit awake. Ty stepped past the two men and brought up a series of images of Atn glyphs arranged in tight spirals. Large pieces of these spirals were missing.

'You know the strangest thing about the Crescent-over-Moon?' Ty asked. 'You can sometimes tell you're on one of their clade-worlds just from the sheer destruction that's been visited on them. At first I thought they might be targets of some kind of pogrom from other clades, since that might also explain their relative isolation.'

Lamoureaux got that faraway look again for a moment. 'There's no reference to that in any of your work,' he pointed out a moment later.

'That's because it's unsupported speculation, not fact. It's possible some of their asteroids had merely suffered impacts with other stellar bodies long after they'd been abandoned.'

'But you don't believe that?'

Ty thought for a moment. 'Let's say that the overwhelming consistency with which their clade-worlds appeared to have been targeted suggested other explanations.' Ty manipulated the images until some of the damaged text-spirals were aligned next to each other. 'Some of these partial glyphs were taken from Crescent asteroids found after I went on the run. Bring them together with fragments taken from other Crescent asteroids, and there's a clear match.' Ty caused the fragmentary spirals to slide on top of each other until they clearly matched.

'I'm still not sure what we're looking at,' said Willis.

'These glyphs, when put together, refer specifically to the Mos Hadroch. They're essentially a set of galactic coordinates referring to a region of stars a little over a thousand light-years away,' Ty explained, his finger pointing to different parts of each spiral.

'What about stellar drift?' asked Lamoureaux.

'The Atn coordinate system was designed to take that into account, and as a result it's extremely reliable. The coordinates don't so much refer to a single point in space as a projected path for a star or group of stars. I've identified a white dwarf system in the catalogues that matches the numbers very closely.'

'That still leaves the question of what the Mos Hadroch is,' Willis remarked.

'We need to get this back to Dakota fast,' Lamoureaux muttered to Willis. 'To Senator Corso as well.'

Ty looked between the two men, his throat suddenly tight. 'You're going out there, right?'

'Where?' asked Lamoureaux.

'You've got material proof the Mos Hadroch is something tangible, with a defined location a thousand light-years from here. Until very recently a discovery like that was always going to be of purely academic interest, since the Shoal were never going to let us go that deep into the galaxy. But that's all changed now, hasn't it?'

'That's far from decided,' Willis replied.

'You lifted me out of Ascension, practically kidnapped me out of the hands of the security services. The Legislate is probably at your throats for that, am I right?'

Willis's face was carefully blank, but the look on Lamoureaux's face made Ty sure he was on the right track. 'Get someone else to check the data if you like,' Ty added, 'but there's no one better qualified. If you're going out there, you're going to need to take me with you.'