Stealing Light

Six

Redstone Colony

Consortium Standard Date: 28.05.2538

5 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

Dakota’s shuttle fell out of the infinite night, dropping from orbit in a graceful arc towards a white and blue streaked pearl set against starry velvet.

Until that moment lost in the complex approach vectors her Ghost was channelling through her fore-brain, she glanced back at her sole passenger. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’

Severn had a look on his face like he was waiting for an answer. He popped into his mouth a narrow-bladed green leaf that had the unmistakable patterning of Redstone flora and began to chew on it. The Freeholders had given this mildly narcotic plant the remarkably original name ‘chewleaf’. It seemed to be available everywhere on board the orbital Consortium ships, even though they’d only been in-system for a matter of days. Too little time for anyone with enough authority to get round to banning it.

‘I was saying it feels good, yeah?’ Severn repeated. His face betrayed a Mediterranean ancestry by its pale-olive skin.

Beyond the necessary details of their rapid descent to the planet surface below and the constant dialogue of traffic control, Dakota’s thoughts had been focused on the ice-locked continents below, increasingly visible through the craft’s windscreen. But she didn’t complain about Severn’s interruption. Every now and then, the way she saw it, there were moments when you realized something that was happening was really happening: like a kind of epiphany. This felt like one of those moments.

Shit, I’m really here-and it isn’t all just in my head. That was what she had been thinking: how Bellhaven was a long way away and, even though unfathomable reaches of interstellar space had been crossed, somehow it seemed as if she was only now really coming to terms with the decisions, the life choices that had led to her being here in this place, and at this time.

Dakota shook her head. ‘Sorry?’

Severn sighed dramatically. The craft shuddered around them and Dakota tensed automatically: they were skimming the atmosphere now, surfing the upper levels of the stratosphere at several thousand kilometres per hour, like a skipping stone skimmed expertly across the surface of a lake.

‘I said, it’s good when you finally get to go down below, get walking around on solid ground and, OK, maybe not breathing fresh air, but it’s a lot better than being stuck on a fucking rock for years on end, y’know?’

Severn grinned and reached out with a fist to wallop the bulkhead next to his acceleration couch, presumably in order to emphasize this slice of homespun philosophy. Most of the way down, he’d been talking about the interior of Dakota’s shuttle.

She had decorated the cabin of the little craft with small items originating from the Grover shanties back home. Fetish dolls hung from different points around the cabin. Dakota was hardly the religious type, yet the Revised Catholic icons epoxied on to a shelf above the entrance to the aft bay reminded her strongly of her own formative years in Erkinning-effigies of Peter, Anthony, Theresa, Presley and Autonomous Ethical Device Model 209, all rendered in gaudy clashing colours, their features beatific and childlike.

‘You should know I’m not a Rocker, I’m from Bellhaven,’ Dakota told him. ‘Life on the boosted asteroids isn’t so bad. Is it?’

‘Yeah? Well, the kinds of places I grew up, they don’t have the time or resources for fancy shit like field-retention atmospheres or artificial gravity.’

Dakota shrugged in response, twitching the control stick as the craft juddered. She could have guided the ship down using only her Ghost implants, but the general practice was to keep things reasonably physical. Even with implants, the mind could wander.

She’d left Bellhaven for the very first time three months before, and she was still learning just how adaptive the technology inside her skull could be. Already her ship was starting to feel like an extension of her body.

When it became clear, by the end of the twenty-first century, that anything resembling true artificial intelligence was still a long way off, scientific research had shifted instead to a far greater emphasis on mind-machine interfaces. Dakota’s implants were learning how her mind worked equally as she was learning just how they worked. It was like possessing a backup subconscious-something that could almost anticipate what you were thinking, thus allowing a degree of control and flexibility verging on the superhuman. An extra ghost in the machine.

They had a name for people like her: machine-heads.

‘You’re new to all this, aren’t you?’ Severn asked.

‘Thought we were all new here.’ The shuttle bumped and rattled as it came into closer contact with the atmosphere, the view beyond the windscreen fading as the optical niters reacted to the blazing heat of reentry. A break in the cloud cover far below revealed the ruins of the town that surrounded the Redstone skyhook: this had spent half a year under bombardment by Uchidan forces, using conventional explosives before they’d scraped together enough resources for a couple of nukes.

The nukes had been high in radiation yield, but low in destructive capacity, insufficient to seriously damage the skyhook’s structural integrity. Nevertheless, only the arrival of the Consortium had prevented the Uchidans making one last push and taking away the Freehold’s only remaining link to the rest of the universe.

Dakota flashed a smile over her shoulder. ‘You’re a machine-head too, right?’

‘Wow, how could you tell?’ he replied in mock amazement. ‘Worse. I’m a pilot as well, though this is gonna be the first time I do my job inside an atmosphere. Maybe you should hold my hand ‘case it gets rough on the way down?’ he leered, brushing a hand across the rough stubble of his scalp.

Dakota grinned and shook her head. Severn laughed at his own wit, and she noted they’d be landing in just under thirteen minutes, give or take the vagaries of ground control, and whether they’d managed to find enough secure landing spots for all the hardware currently on its way down from orbit. It would have been easier to ride down on the skyhook, but there was no telling whether the Uchidans might strike again with more nuclear mortar fire. Apparently there were still one or two pockets of resistance holed up down below.

‘I’m Dakota.’ She shoved one hand behind her seat for him to shake, and felt Severn grasp it after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Dakota Merrick.’

‘Chris Severn.’

‘Yeah, you see I knew that.’

‘Mind reader.’

‘Manifest reader.’ She tapped the readout screen printed on the thigh of her trousers. ‘Same thing, just more boring.’

‘Lean forward again so I can see more of your butt, and then I’ll stay interested.’

‘I could tell from how much your hands are sweating. Hang on.’

During the final descent, tortured air ripped around the tiny craft as she manoeuvred them into a tight spiral that factored in Ghost-fed random shifts designed to make it harder for any enemy forces to target them on their approach. She’d heard rumours that the Consortium were bargaining with the Shoal to acquire the same kind of inertialess technology they used on the coreships that had brought her and the rest of the fleet to Redstone, and fervently wished they’d get the hell on with the deal as her insides rattled in their bony cage.

‘Listen, I got a confession to make. This is my first time on the surface,’ Severn murmured.

Dakota took a moment to process this information before it made sense to her.

‘On a planet, you mean?’

Severn nodded.

‘Ever?’

‘Ever,’ he repeated excitedly, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Seventh-generation Rocker. My daddy never set foot on nothing more Earthlike than Mesa Verde. Said he didn’t like the smell of the place. Figured anything green that grew outside of a hydroponics tank wasn’t natural.’

Dakota merely nodded, and sank once more into the multiple Ghost-mediated conversations flowing between herself and traffic control, and included several other pilots at once. Sometimes a dozen separate strands of conversation would merge for a few moments into one babbling cacophony, at other times unravelling and becoming more distinct, the words flowing like some arcane magical tongue.

‹Sittin’ steady guys, can you give me an update on local conditions?›

‹Roger that, your delta vee is good by the way. Patching in weather feed-uh oh…›

‹їCuбl es йl?›

This last from Severn who, Dakota had not noticed until that moment, was hooked into her comms feed. She could hear the tension in his voice, and she realized his Ghost must have picked up on the weather feed reference, subsequently pulling fresh data from a string of appropriated local weather sats.

‹Got converging thermals off the coast,› came the report from Kirov, one of the traffic control staff. Projections show a storm is likely by 1400 hours local time. You’ll be here way before, but we might suggest some course corrections just to stay on the safe side.›

‹Roger that, thanks for the info.›

‹Hey Dakota, last time I saw you you looked like you stuck your head up a bear’s butt and fell asleep-›

‹Fuck you too, you lousy shit,› this followed by a braying laugh from Kirov that made her smile. ‹That was your mother’s butt.›

‹Yeah, you need to stop drinking so much, we’re taking bets down here how many bits we find by the time you hit the ground.›

The ride got yet bumpier, the craft tilting nose-up as her Ghost (or was it her? It was almost impossible now to tell the difference) implemented the re-entry procedures. The glow beyond the windscreen brightened, then darkened again as the filters compensated once more: the ship was slicing through the atmosphere at an increasingly sharp angle. Dakota pictured themselves as they might appear from the surface, burning their way across the sky in a fiery hypersonic parabola.

A few moments later heat shields slid down over the windscreen, cutting off any view of the landscape or sky beyond.

Smoke trails bled across the sky around the base of the skyhook, which rose into the blue exactly like a neverending tower. Dakota had been warned that following it with your eyes up and up to its visible vanishing point could make you dizzy. She brought her gaze back down: the advice had been sound. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed more or less on the horizon, where the building housing the lower end of the skyhook-until recently a major military target for the Uchidans-took centre stage. Distant mountains were painted white with snow; even the winters on Bellhaven couldn’t have prepared her for the arctic blast of the Redstone winds or the sheer size of the distant canopy trees, towering over the landscape stretching beyond the buildings and streets.

Severn had called for transport, and Dakota followed him on board an automated vehicle that pulled up next to them. He looked distinctly wobbly from all the chem they’d provided to help him adjust to planetary gravity.

‘Some sight,’ said Dakota, nodding towards the skyhook. Her breather mask felt heavy and uncomfortable. Worse, the relatively higher density of the atmosphere made their voices, as they emerged, sound unnaturally low-pitched. In fact they both sounded ridiculous, which didn’t encourage elaborate conversation.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Severn replied tightly, his knuckles white as they gripped a handhold next to their seats, the ground rolling past them at about forty klicks an hour. Command control lay somewhere up ahead, in a warren of emergency bunkers the Freehold had built beneath the skyhook.

‘Problem?’ asked Dakota.

Severn nodded stiffly. ‘Too big.’

‘What is?’

‘Everything.’ He scowled at her. ‘Why’s it so cold when the atmosphere’s so dense? Shouldn’t that make it warmer?’

Dakota glanced up and saw some kind of vast bird flapping its way slowly across the sky-a one-wing, her Ghost informed her, its vast bulk supported solely by the dense atmosphere.

‘Lots of volcanoes here,’ she replied. ‘All that activity spews ash into the air, and that counterbalances the warming effect of a thick atmosphere, stopping too much heat getting to the ground. So it’s never likely to get very warm.’

Several minutes later they passed through a complex of airlocks and into the command centre itself, which looked like it had started life as a storage facility of some kind, judging by the signs still on the walls. Propaganda posters displayed cartoons of enormous muscular men carrying guns, who were standing in defiant protection of equally idealized homesteads. One such slogan read: ‘Citizenship Is Worth Fighting For’.

And these, she thought with a sour feeling in her gut, are the people we’re supposed to be helping.

The corridors were busy with Consortium staff moving about purposefully. Three separate groups of guards checked their IDs at different checkpoints. Dakota wondered if the paranoia levels normally ran so high.

Severn squinted at her. ‘Banville, he came from your world, right?’

‘Worked on the latest generation of Ghost implants, then lit out. You know the story.’

‘The twist would be if it turned out he went off of his own free will, don’t you think?’

Dakota shook her head. ‘No, that would simply make him a traitor.’

Severn laughed. ‘Guess we’re doing the right thing, then.’

‘Maybe. It’s just that…’

They both paused, as a piece of information entered their minds simultaneously via their Ghost implants. They turned to look at each other.

Severn now wore a shit-eating grin. ‘Josef Marados is in charge of our debriefing, then? Guess you’d better keep your legs closed tight.’

‘Why?’

‘Guy’s got a reputation, is all.’

Dakota held Severn’s gaze. ‘You sound jealous.’

He gave her a long look up and down, as they resumed walking. ‘He gets anywhere near you, damn right I’ll be jealous.’