Stealing Light Read online

  It was an offer that couldn’t be refused, but there had been stories and rumours of subsequent human attempts to replicate the transluminal drive, regardless of the Shoal’s original threats. But all those attempts had apparently ended in abject failure. Similarly, there was never any public admission that human governments used covert satellites and remote observation technologies to constantly observe Shoal coreships in those vital moments before they translated into transluminal space, yet it was widely believed to be the case.

  Without the Shoal, therefore, there would now be no colonies, no interstellar trade, no carefully licensed alien technologies provided by the Shoal’s other client races, and certainly no original colonists to build Erkinning, the Free States, and all the other human cultures here on Bellhaven.

  Without the magnanimity of the Shoal, none of this would ever have happened.

  Dakota pressed closer against the telescope’s view-finder, feeling the cool circle of plastic against her eyebrow and cheek. Points of light then jumped into sharp contrast. Once again she was made very aware of details concerning the stars she now viewed that she couldn’t possibly have registered without the aid of her implants. But her Ghost was already learning to anticipate her desires, so the information evaporated as quickly as it had appeared.

  It was true that orbital telescopes and distributed radio scanning networks were far more accurate for the business of stargazing, but there was still a visceral rush in the physical act of peering through a simple lens. It made her feel like Galileo looking at the moons of Jupiter for the first time.

  ‘Maybe somebody blew them up,’ Dakota muttered. ‘The Magellanic stars, I mean.’

  Aiden laughed uproariously, and Dakota’s face grew hot with embarrassment.

  ‘If you’ve got any better ideas, feel free to share,’ she snapped. At that point, Marlie, clearly embarrassed by the sniping, stepped forward to take her turn in peering through the telescope.

  Langley’s features had reverted to their usual granitelike impassivity, but he was doubtless taking in every word they said.

  ‘You know, Aiden,’ he said at last, ‘it’s entirely true that the Shoal have us over a barrel. There’s thousands of other species out there, we’re told, but we’ve so far only ever encountered the Bandati and one or two others. But you never know. Maybe it won’t always be that way.’

  Aiden smirked, but Dakota could see he wasn’t so sure of himself anymore. ‘Tutor, those are dangerous words in some places,’ he said quietly.

  Langley’s stony features didn’t even flicker. ‘Then let’s just say that once you, too, realize just how many restrictions the human race labours under, then you’ll know how it feels to dream of changing the status quo. Then you’ll know how frustrating it is to get only so far, and be told you can go no further.’

  ‘Well, it’s still far enough, isn’t it?’ Aiden replied, looking slightly bewildered. ‘I mean,’ he continued, a cocky grin now tugging up one corner of his mouth, ‘it’s still better than sticking around here for the rest of our lives.’

  Dakota caught the look on Langley’s face, even if Aiden was oblivious to it.

  ‘You have,’ Langley muttered, each word rasping as it emerged from his throat, ‘a worrying lack of adventure.’

  Three

  Shoal Homeworld, Perseus Arm

  Consortium Standard Date: 01.02.2542

  The creature’s name was Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals, and he fell from orbit, contained within a field-protected bubble of brackish fluid, towards an unending expanse of blue.

  Far above him, only a very few stars shone down. During its long and lonely flight, the Shoal homeworld had been lost in a dense cloud of interstellar dust for almost ten millennia, and was not expected to emerge from the other side for another millennium at least.

  The part of the homeworld towards which Trader descended was currently in day, the requisite heat and light providing life given not by the long-departed star under which Trader’s kind had first evolved, but instead by a myriad of field-suspended fusion globes arranged in a tight grid hanging a few thousand kilometres above the planet surface.

  The homeworld moved alone through the vast expanse of the Milky Way, heading for the relatively empty spaces between its great spiral arms. There, at least, might be found safety from the war that would surely come one day.

  Oh woe, thought Trader, as the watery surface of the homeworld approached at an alarming speed, that we should ever reach our fabled destination! His manipulator tentacles writhed under his body in an approximation of grim humour, snatching wriggling live-foods from his briny encasement and slipping them into his quivering jaws. Ten thousand years travelling and, with any luck, ten thousand years more, and another ten thousand years after that, and after that, and after . . .

  The world of Trader’s birth was an ocean world. A long time ago there had been continents, too, but careful management of the natural tectonic system had lowered these continental surfaces until they could be safely drowned beneath the life-giving waters. Now all was ocean, for ever and ever, except where carefully shaped energy fields cut great holes down through the surface of the waters: gaping abyssal spaces into which the vast pressures of the ocean yearned to plunge. These fields sliced high up into the atmosphere, generating vast areas of vacuum that led all the way down to the seabed, and even further.

  It was to one of these tunnels running through the world that Trader dropped, his enormous blank eyes staring out from the skull of his piscine form, but safe within his protective bubble.

  The ocean rushed towards Trader and then past, as the creature dropped down one of the vacuum shafts, the blue surrounding waters rapidly turning black as he descended, leaving just a bright circle of light far above to mark his point of entry.

  In the fraction of a moment it took Trader to twitch one of his palpebra, he was plunged into darkness except where the occasional fusion globe hovered in defiance of the laws of nature. These lit the way into sub-aquatic portals where a Shoal-member might pass at last from deadly vacuum and into the slippery embrace of Mother Ocean.

  Down, down, down. Trader fell yet further, then twisted to one side with impossible speed in his inertia-free bubble, a fusion marker reduced to a fleeting point of incandescence as he sped by it in a flash. Then he was deep within the healing waters of Mother Ocean.

  This was the place where the Deep Dreamers dwelt, in unending blackness at the very bottom of the world.

  The decision to remove the Shoal homeworld from its orbit around the star that had birthed it had been made long before Trader had come into existence. But Trader himself was very, very old. He had employed a thousand names but, when he came to dealing with the humans who were his current area of interest and employment, the sobriquet Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals had seemed apposite.

  It was a joke between Trader and the humans, some of whom found the honorific deeply offensive while knowing there was literally nothing they could do about it.

  And neither they nor any other client race had the faintest notion of the deep rifts that ran through Shoal society. Nor would they, ever, if Trader and those of similar employ had anything to do with it.

  Trader drifted further across the sandy ocean floor, where the vast watery spaces were broken into distinct regions by field projections. Massive buildings and administrative blocks grown out of ancient coral rose above the seabed like living colossi, though this was a region to which few were allowed access. Other Shoal-members darted about, following their own paths, busy in the gigantic task of administering to the Dreamers’ needs -feeding and caring for them, aeon after aeon, on and on into a future which the Dreamers had been specifically engineered to detect and analyse.

  The landscape was marked by yet more fusion globes that cast a luminescence over the chillingly vast shapes scattered across the face of the abyss. The Deep Dreamers would be aware of Trader’s approach, as they were aware of so much else in their godlike capacity to see whe
re the roots of coming events lay within the present. Trader drifted on over the edge of a precipice, and then spotted the Dreamers directly ahead, great bulbous shapes with sightless eyes, their gargantuan tentacles draped across and dwarfing the smooth hummocks of what had once been an undersea mountain range.

  The land for hundreds of kilometres around the Deep Dreamers was devoted to sea farms that generated the thousands of tonnes of food necessary to feed them. Hundreds of tenders constantly roamed around the Dreamers, like acolytes waiting to be consumed by vast and terrible black gods.

  —

  ‘If you go among the Deep Dreamers,’ Trader’s superior had warned several days before, ‘it’s very likely an agent of the Mother Star Faction will seek to destroy you.’

  They had met at an arranged rendezvous in an orbital park, a water-filled environment constructed partly from physical materials and partly from shaped energy fields. The homeworld had been visible far below, its waters wreathed in summer storms, lightning flickering across the southern hemisphere where a hurricane raged, whipping the surface waters into foam-capped waves beneath a tight curl of coriolis.

  Above the atmosphere, and beyond the warming light of the fusion globes that surrounded it, the planet was ringed from longitude to latitude by glittering silver bands like a jeweller’s cage. These were manifestations of certain fundamental energies that allowed the Shoal homeworld to be guided through the depths of interstellar space, keeping as far as possible from any neighbouring star systems.

  Trader and his superior—an ancient, leather-skinned individual known to him only as Desire-For-Violent-Rendering, a title reflecting his past involvement in the messier and bloodier affairs of government—had swum in parallel course through the public space, appearing to any casual observer as merely two ancient fish lost in their reminiscences of times long past.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried, I assure you,’ Trader had replied. His answer had been enunciated as a cascade of watery clicks generated by its secondary mouth. ‘I know how to handle myself.’

  Desire-For-Violent-Rendering had clicked assent, but Trader could discern the other’s nervousness manifest from the way he twisted his manipulator tentacles.

  ‘Attention has been drawn to your working methods within higher levels of government,’ Desire continued. ‘Officially of course you are a free agent, long retired from active service. Nevertheless . . .’

  Nevertheless. Trader had felt a certain wry humour listening to Desire’s carefully phrased statement. Even an old murderer like Desire got the shits in Trader’s presence. But as far as Trader was concerned, given that their ultimate purpose was to guarantee the continued survival of their species against so many enemies, real and potential, any successful approach was the right approach.

  ‘You think me amoral and careless?’ Trader had replied casually. ‘Yet if I had not acted in the past according to my own judgement, the outcome might well have been far more terrible than some of our cadre frankly are capable of comprehending. This agent of the pro-solar faction, would its name be Squat-Devourer-Of-Enemy-Corpses, by any chance?’

  Desire-For-Violent-Rendering fell silent, and Trader enjoyed a small flush of triumph at this response.

  General Squat was a Shoal-member with a reputation even more terrifying than that of Desire, who had been taking charge of many a military campaign since long before many of the Shoal’s client species had been huddling around their first self-made fires. Yet Squat seemed to have grown weaker with old age, more . . . liberal.

  At that point, Trader had shot out a tentacle and snatched up a mollusc swimming by, ripping its shell open and stuffing the contents into his primary mouth with particular force. Even thinking about Squat provoked strong feelings of anger.

  ‘Squat is close to the truth,’ Desire-For-Violent-Rendering then warned Trader. ‘We know the General was approached by Mother Star representatives, after making some enquiries of his own, and has since been recruited to their cause. Do not underestimate either the power or the influence that—’

  ‘With respect, I am hardly to be underestimated myself.’

  ‘But you are becoming careless, I think,’ had been Desire’s instant reply. ‘You wouldn’t be the first agent to get swallowed up by his own hubris. This name you have chosen for yourself. . .’

  ‘Trader- In-Faecal-Matter-Of- Animals?’

  ‘Yes.’ Desire-For-Violent-Rendering’s distaste had become clear in the writhing of his manipulator tentacles. ‘A joke for a name, a very human joke at that. You have, I think, spent too long around those wretched creatures. Not only that, your methodology has become eccentric, for want of a better word. As if you’re testing fate by giving those you seek to manipulate the opportunity to uncover your very manipulation. One might believe you to be suffering a certain, well, existential despair, as is not unprecedented amongst agents of the Dreamers.’

  Desire had halted close to the border of a vacuum shaft, clearly waiting for a reply.

  Trader’s own manipulators had writhed in amusement. ‘Are you suggesting I retire?’

  ‘Perhaps not immediately,’ Desire had conceded, ‘since the Deep Dreamers appear to confirm the central nature of your role in coming events. Do you intend to visit them soon?’

  ‘Yes, very soon. I will . . . have to deal with the General, it appears.’

  ‘If word got out of the Great Secret, of the true reason for abandoning our home star and carrying our homeworld so far from any other solar body . . .’

  ‘I understand.’

  Desire appeared satisfied with this reply. ‘It seems more than likely the General will approach you during your visit to the Dreamers, since you’re otherwise unlikely to return to the homeworld again for some time. A meeting there would be . . . efficacious.’

  Trader had flicked his massive eyes to either side of them out of habit. A multitude of peripheral devices scattered throughout the length and breadth of the park made it clear, however, that no one was in a position to overhear anything they said to each other.

  —

  The Deep Dreamers were the result of tens of millennia of selective breeding and genetic manipulation that had resulted in creatures as near to immortal as could be imagined, even by the standards of the exceedingly long-lived Shoal. The Dreamers’ biological neural networks constituted a massive engine of quantum parallel-processing designed to navigate the chaotic foaming surf of the very near future, and thereby discern the rough shape of coming events. They could sift through near-infinite numbers of conflicting and competing quantum uncertainties, and predict where certain trends might bear fruit, or where certain historical processes might either grow in impetus or grind to a halt. They were also one of the Shoal’s best kept secrets.

  Generally, the Dreamers’ predictions produced relatively few real surprises. Trader had long known that the war they all feared was an historical inevitability, something to be postponed as long as possible rather than entirely avoided. Nevertheless, the Dreamers could often produce remarkable—if occasionally unreliable -results on a far more basic and personal level.

  It was for this reason Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals had chosen to make this personal trip to visit the Deep Dreamers for the first time in centuries. Extremely secret communiqués had predicted his prominent role in certain worryingly apocalyptic visions recently generated by the Deep Dreamers.

  Never one happy to accept information at second hand, Trader had naturally requested a direct audition with the Dreamers, in order more accurately to decipher his role in coming events.

  This close to them, it would have been easy to mistake the vast undulating shapes of the Deep Dreamers for a particularly sinuous and disturbingly organic-appearing range of hills and valleys. Hills that, from time to time, moved.

  Occasional tiny sparks of bright energy fizzed around the surface of Trader’s protective field bubble, as it adjusted to a soul-crushing pressure far higher than that in which Trader’s species ha
d first evolved. Other bubbles of bright energy, each containing a Shoal-member, rose up towards Trader from the direction of the Dreamers. These were the priest-geneticists that spent their lives tending and guarding their mountainous oracles here in endless, solemn darkness.

  Trader soon became aware of the presence of another, approaching him rapidly from another direction. Trader slowed, allowing General Squat-Devourer-Of-Enemy-Corpses to come parallel with him. They swam on together, progressing in the direction of the Dreamers.

  ‘There you are!’ cried the General with forced joviality. ‘Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals, eh?’ His manipulators rattled together with a series of clicking sounds, the Shoal equivalent of raucous laughter.

  Trader suffered a momentary frisson of panic. Could the approaching priest-geneticists be fully trusted in their imminent dealings with the General? They were all, supposedly, insiders, loyal to Desire-For-Violent-Rendering’s decision to suppress the unpalatable truth from the likes of General Squat.

  But what if Desire had in fact already betrayed Trader? What if Desire’s warning about Trader’s working methods had really been a kind of ultimatum?

  What if? What if?

  Trader scolded himself even for such a momentary lapse of faith. If death came this day, he would die with the knowledge he had served the Shoal Hegemony far longer than most. There was grace and nobility in that thought for, after all, the notion of dying a natural death seemed preposterous.

  And if not this day, then he would die on another. So be it.

  Trader ceased his worrying. He cast a sideways glance at Squat, noting what an ugly brute the General was, his scaly hide scarred and weather-beaten. One eye—albeit easily repairable—was milky-white and blind, with a visible rent in its surface. A formidable opponent indeed, but Trader had faced worse.