Stealing Light

Fifteen

In a few days’ time, the coreship would reach what Lucas Corso now knew to be the Nova Arctis system. The great vessel would make the briefest stop to unload them, barely braking as it momentarily dropped out of transluminal space. From that point on, the Hyperion would use up a sizeable fraction of its remaining fuel in the process of decelerating from a significant percentage of the speed of light, until they reached their target.

Corso had endured sleepless nights, and longer days, sustained only by his work. He fell into a rhythm, leaving his quarters within the Hyperion’s gravity wheel only when absolutely necessary.

One evening he came across Mala by chance in another part of the ship, and he faltered, unsure what to say to her.

The best course of action, he’d already decided, following his first interrogation, would be to maintain a discreet and polite distance from her, if humanly possible. Several days after the incident in Severn’s bar, relationships on board the Hyperion were at best tense, at worst edging towards violence.

She brushed straight by him and-since they were in a part of the ship that didn’t benefit from centrifugal gravity-continued floating down the corridor as if she hadn’t seen him. Corso had no idea what to think of that: part of him felt intensely relieved, but a larger part was annoyed as hell. Surely he deserved a bit more consideration?

Maybe he was suffering from a crisis of conscience. He’d stood by and watched as his own worst enemies had hired her, an outsider, under false pretences. Did that make himself and Mala allies by default-or, at best, potential co-conspirators?

Rather than deal with such complex considerations, Corso dived back into his research work: endlessly investigating, teasing information apart, driving himself to understand, to see into the mind of a species so long departed from the galaxy.

And then the first of two strange events occurred.

Within the bridge was a planetarium simulator, a piece of equipment a lot more recent than almost anything else on board the ship. Even better, its databases were well up to date. That day he was intending to make use of it to check and double-check the fragments of the drive records aboard the derelict spacecraft which hinted at an extra-galactic origin.

Corso arrived at the entrance to the bridge only to find Mala already seated in the interface chair, running the same planetarium program. The chair’s petals were neatly folded up at the base of the chair. She was facing away from him, so wouldn’t have seen him enter.

The program had meanwhile transformed the bridge into a god’s eye view of the Milky Way. Images of star clusters slid past Corso’s nose as they rotated across Dakota’s viewpoint. The images filled the entire chamber.

As he watched, the Milky Way suddenly shrank, Dakota’s viewpoint zooming outwards, until the two dwarf Magellan galaxies accompanying the Milky Way suddenly hove into view. Corso was startled to see lines of trajectory suddenly flare out from the larger of these dwarf galaxies, multiplying until thousands upon thousands of such lines reached deep into the heart of the Milky Way.

He stepped forward, fascinated. This wasn’t so far from his own speculations regarding the derelict craft’s origins.

And yet…

This couldn’t possibly be a coincidence: there was no way Mala could have already discovered the derelict’s existence, or become aware of Corso’s carefully accumulated researches.

But the evidence was there in front of him, arcing across the curving empty space of the bridge.

The simulation suddenly shut down, reverting the bridge to all its mundane normality. Corso moved forward around one side of the interface chair, where…

He took a step back.

Mala lay slumped in the seat, her head lolling against the headrest, her jaw slack and drooling, as if she had completely lost her mind. Her eyes had rolled up in their sockets, apparently seeing nothing. He stared down at her, dumbfounded.

Then, as her eyes suddenly focused on him, Corso had the eerie sensation that something inhuman was staring back at him. When he had time to think about it later, it was as if some subtle shift had taken place in the way her face muscles moved. As if someone or something else briefly inhabited her skin.

Of course, he could have merely imagined it, the impression was so fleeting. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the eerie sensation he’d seen something he wasn’t meant to see.

Then Mala’s eyes cleared and her head straightened up as if she’d just awoken. She blinked and gave him a curious smile, as if pleasantly surprised to find him standing there.

‘What were you doing just then?’ Corso asked her, keeping his tone casual. It was the most he’d managed to say to her in several days.

‘I…’ Her face clouded for a moment as if trying hard to remember. ‘Just routine stuff. I was reconfiguring some of the ship’s systems.’

‘And nothing else?’ Corso could feel his heart hammering. ‘What about the planetarium program?’

‘What about it?’

‘You were running it just now.’

Mala gave him a blank look. ‘I told you what I’ve been doing. I don’t have time for this. You look like you’re accusing me of something.’

Corso felt his frustration grow, yet she appeared genuinely to have no idea what he was talking about.

‘Does Arbenz know you’re here?’

Mala looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘Corso, being here is my job. There’s no point in my being on board if I’m not.’

His second bizarre encounter with her took place a day or two later.

They were within a few hours of the Hyperion’s departure from the coreship. Arbenz’s frequent trips into Ascension had meanwhile begun to tail off. Kieran Mansell ran continuous, obsessive security checks that required frequent attendance from everyone on board -more for Kieran’s own peace of mind than anything else, Corso suspected.

Udo, meantime, floated dreamless and insensate within his medbox, as his flesh repaired itself with the help of cloned grafts and neuro-enhancements. The worst part for them all was the waiting. Udo was unpredictable enough already, and Corso had no real idea what the man might say once he regained consciousness. But good sense seemed to prevail in the end, and Mala had been right in suggesting Udo would have too much to lose in speaking out against her.

Corso finally tired of the claustrophobic confines of his quarters and would go for long tours through the ship, wandering its deserted corridors and drop shafts. Part of the Hyperion’s zero-gee environment, the drop shafts had been transformed into vertical wells by the coreship’s induced gravity. Pulling himself up and down the rungs was hard work, but it served to take his mind off his other worries.

Ever since he had found Mala in the interface chair surrounded by images of the Magellanic Clouds, Corso had been working hard on all the data assembled, increasingly convinced, no matter how impossible it appeared, that the key to the derelict’s final secrets lay in the images he had seen so briefly there on the bridge.

During his wanderings, in the final few hours before their departure from the coreship, Corso had again found his way aft when he heard the distinctive whine of the airlock servos in operation. He had previously been delivering a verbal progress report to Gardner, the Senator, and Kieran Mansell, so knew that none of them was likely to be down this way.

Puzzled, he made his way towards the airlocks: they were the same ones they’d used on exiting the Hyperion for their trip into Ascension. But when he got there moments later, he found no one in sight. So what had he heard just a few moments before?

Then he heard a clang of metal coming from not so far away, and followed the sound fruitlessly down a passageway. He suspected it could only have been caused by Mala, but there was no sign of her.

By chance he glanced up, and caught sight of her lithe form clambering silently up the rungs of a drop shaft. She swiftly hoisted herself into the corridor of the next level up and disappeared from view.

‘Hey!’ Corso shouted.

Moving fast, he pulled himself up after her, breathing hard by the time he reached the top. He emerged into the same corridor only to catch sight of her rapidly retreating figure.

‘Hey!’ he shouted again, and began running after her. Dakota kept moving as if she hadn’t heard him.

He caught up with her and grabbed her arm, pulling her around. She blinked in surprise and seemed to recognize him only after a long moment.

‘What? What is it?’ She sounded flustered.

‘Where were you?’ Corso gasped. ‘I heard the airlock working, and… were you outside the ship?’

Mala stared at him like he was mad. ‘No, I was right here, checking the manual systems prior to launch.’

‘Mala, I heard the airlock closing. That means somebody came in from outside, and you’re the only one around. If it wasn’t you, who was it, then?’

She shook her head like she was tired of talking. ‘You’re getting paranoid, Lucas. It wasn’t me. Go check the onboard records if you like.’

When he did so, what he found there was frustrating-and worrying.

The security logs showed his recent encounter with Mala, but that was all. There was nothing to suggest anyone apart from Arbenz had either entered or departed the Hyperion for days. Mala was clearly shown walking directly from her quarters towards the aft engines and right past the airlocks. Three of the others were already accounted for, while Udo remained lost to the world in his chemically induced sleep within the medical bay.

But he’d definitely heard the airlock mechanisms operating, whatever the security records showed. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could imagine.

There was something too convenient about it all. Was it possible, he wondered, for the logs to be faked? Or was he himself simply descending into irretrievable paranoia and madness?

Corso debated taking his doubts to Arbenz, but decided against that. Despite everything, Mala Oorthaus was not his real enemy here. She was not in any way responsible for the predicament facing his family, and he was increasingly ashamed to acknowledge how thoroughly complicit he had been in sealing her fate in a way not likely to be pleasant. In truth, he was no better than Senator Arbenz.

True, she was strange, but Freehold society placed clear formal limits on any social contact between men and women, so for him there was something brazenly different about Mala that made her seem far more attractive than any of the Freehold women Corso was used to.

Her obvious terror of what secrets Arbenz might be keeping from her had awoken within Corso an increasing awareness of their joint insignificance in the scheme of things. Once Arbenz and Gardner had achieved what they wanted, he himself would become an unwanted witness to a crime as yet uncommitted. Yet they meanwhile depended on him to open the treasure box.

What to do then, Corso wondered? Was the Senator a man he could trust to keep his word and give him as well as his family their freedom? Or was holding on to that belief just a way to keep himself sane?

And so he decided to remain silent, and bide his time.