Stealing Light Read online

  General Squat rammed his field bubble into Trader’s, and the water around them boiled as their energies clashed. Trader rapidly skipped his protective field away from the General, taking a moment to realize Squat was not in fact attempting to kill him.

  ‘General—’

  ‘Caught you there, eh?’ The General came rushing back up, ancillary mouth snapping and tentacles writhing. ‘Need to stay sharp! Never know when you might get a knife between the fins.’

  ‘And you, General’—Trader was regaining some of his composure—‘what brings you to the Deep Dreamers?’

  ‘Well, you see, the future’s been rather on my mind of late too,’ Squat replied.

  At this comment, Trader kept his tentacles noncommittally bundled.

  Something very like a human shrug rippled across the General’s scarred exterior. ‘There are rumours . . . very dark rumours, my friend.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Trader replied.

  ‘I hate to listen to unfounded gossip, but you’d be amazed the things that are presently being muttered in some very high-ranking circles.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Trader looked askance at his companion. They were close enough now to the Dreamers to see the sheer scale of the beasts; each tentacle-sucker could easily consume a hundred Shoal-members all at once. They were deep within the Dreamer’s influence now, caught in the eddying tide of the very near future, even as it prepared to crash into the present.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t care to elaborate,’ Squat replied in a conspiratorial tone. ‘And if I did, I might subsequently be forced to kill you.’ The General’s tentacles swirled around with humourless mirth.

  ‘I have heard rumours myself,’ Trader replied, ‘that the Dreamers all predict a war is coming.’

  ‘Yes!’ The General seized upon this. ‘Now don’t get me wrong, war is a wonderful thing—in the right context, with the right enemy, and as long as you win. But these rumours, they concern an unwinnable war, as preposterous as that notion seems. Unwinnable?’

  ‘Perhaps some of our associates have been talking too freely, General. It really wouldn’t do to frighten the ordinary population.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the General replied.

  Trader glanced ahead and noticed the priest-geneticists were almost upon them.

  ‘Have you heard about old Rigor-Mortis?’ asked Squat. ‘Dead, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Trader failed to conceal his surprise. Rigor-Mortis had long been a prime mover among those who, like Trader, were privy to the Great Secret.

  ‘Yes. Rigor gave himself to the Dreamers not so long ago, apparently unable to bear the burden of some preposterous secret he had carried all his life. Or so the old fool told me, before he became voluntary squid food.’

  ‘I see. And what might this secret be?’

  ‘Preposterous nonsense, obviously. But I wanted to ask you about it, considering you were close pals with old Rigor for, oh, so many centuries. He claimed he knew the real reason we’ve been fleeing our own sun for so long. What he said was . . . remarkable. Of course, if you were to lend credence to such stories, it would raise rather a whole slew of other questions, wouldn’t it?’

  Trader steeled himself. ‘I wouldn’t know, General. What secret? Which questions?’

  ‘Officially, the decision to remove our world from the original home system was due to inherent instabilities within our own star, which were likely to result in particularly destructive solar flares. Correct?’

  ‘This is old news, General.’

  ‘For this reason,’ Squat blithely continued, ‘we have since been travelling through the eternal darkness of space at a sublight crawl for millennia. Yet there are plenty of viable and stable star systems we could have guided our world toward before now. But we haven’t done so. Why?’

  ‘General—’

  The General ignored Trader and continued. ‘Yet we continue eternally on this quixotic quest, believing misguidedly that it wouldn’t possibly occur to any of the tens of billions of Shoal-members living today that this story doesn’t hold up nearly as well as a bucket of fish guts on the sunniest day of the year. Otherwise, why would the Mother Star Faction have gathered so much support for the idea of simply finding a viable star and going there! And then, of course, there remains the question of why we don’t simply construct the biggest transluminal drive in the galaxy, and just fly this bloody great mudball to some other perfectly compatible star in an instant. Oh, so many questions, my dear Trader. And yet old Rigor seemed remarkably certain he had all the real answers.’

  ‘General, Rigor believed in a lot of things, but his mind became increasingly addled since he was forced to retire. You’ll recall he was captured in some middle-of-nowhere conflict and came very close to being made into a stew’

  ‘Be that as it may, everything the General told me made perfect sense. And don’t keep trying to play the innocent, Trader. Your own name turned up often enough during his confessions.’

  Trader sighed inwardly, and mentally prepared himself to murder General Squat at the nearest convenient moment. Now, however, he would have to listen to his idiotic heresies for a few minutes more, until the priest-geneticists were close enough for Trader to flash them the prearranged signal.

  Squat continued in his blustering way. ‘Remarkable, Rigor’s revelations, particularly his suggestion that our faster-than-light technology was in fact stolen from another species.’

  ‘General, would you really see the Shoal Hegemony collapse after half a million years? Is that what you’re seeking? Would you still be proud of giving away the secrets of some dried-out old idiot too tired of life to stick around to see what damage he could do before he died?’

  ‘Of course not. The days of our earliest interstellar travels are now long ago and half-forgotten. And, as we know, the few records that still exist are sketchy at best. Yet he didn’t stop there. According to Rigor, the transluminal technology has other uses so remarkable that merely possessing the knowledge of it would entirely explain our long flight from the home star . . .’

  The dozen priest-geneticists, in their bright, colour-coded pressurized bubbles, were almost upon them, feigning as if to pass on by in the opposite direction. Trader watched the General glance towards them, and struggled not to do the same.

  ‘All right, General, tell me what your price is. Please don’t tell me it’s anything as banal as power and influence. I’d be disappointed.’

  ‘Half a million years of unbroken rule would hardly become unbalanced by a more candid attitude towards our fellow citizens,’ came Squat’s immediate reply. ‘If the Mother Star Faction’s demands can’t be met, then at least give them a reasonable explanation of why they can’t.’

  ‘That won’t happen, General. Those to whom I answer will have none of it.’

  ‘Then you’re facing the risk of revolution, Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals,’ came General Squat’s immediate reply. ‘Now that I think of it, perhaps your chosen ambassadorial name sounds more appropriate than I realized. Most Shoal-members live far from the homeworld, but they would all rather see it orbiting securely around a stable star than lost for ever in a frozen dust cloud. Otherwise . . .’

  Otherwise, what? was Trader’s unvoiced reply. It was clear the General was not going to listen to reason.

  ‘Otherwise,’ General Squat concluded after a pause, ‘others like me will be sure to disseminate the truth -particularly if anything drastic were to happen to me.’

  Trader gave the signal. Suddenly the dozen priest-geneticists came rushing forward. Their energy bubbles flashed as they collided with the General’s, while Trader himself retreated to a safe distance.

  Thirteen balls of coloured light suddenly merged into one, with General Squat caught in the middle. The priest-geneticists now fell on the old warrior-fish, their tentacles ready-tipped with diamond-edged blades. The General fought valiantly, but he was old, and had been taken by surprise.

  Your a
gents, dear General, are compromised, Trader thought to himself. Squat’s plans stank of rank amateurism.

  It was over so quickly. After a few moments the priest-geneticists fell away from the General’s ripped-up corpse, which began spiralling down towards the seabed, preceded by a field disrupter weapon the old fool had kept concealed about his person.

  ‘Feed the General’s remains to the Dreamers,’ Trader instructed one of the priests, a near-albino known as Keeper-Of-Intimate-Secrets-Of-The-Unwittingly-Compromised. ‘They can enjoy his memories.’

  Keeper blinked his massive eyes at this request. ‘If we submit the General’s remains to the Deep Dreamers, his once-conscious matrix will merge with and further inform the Dreamers. The memory of what has happened here would survive and, so long as it remains within the matrix of the Dreamers, what he knew at the time of his death might be rediscovered by others.’

  Trader sighed, emitting a long stream of bubbles. ‘And it is your duty to sift through, interpret and censor such information as it comes to light, is it not? Rigor-Mortis gave himself to the Deep Dreamers precisely because he believed the truth would emerge just as you describe, and it’s your duty to ensure this never happens. Is that understood?’

  ‘Understood, yes,’ the priest-geneticist replied, with a rapid string of clicks.

  ‘Very good. Now take me to the Deep Dreamers.’

  —

  For some reason, some of the priests—including Keeper-Of-Secrets—appeared to regard Trader as almost as much of an oracle as the Deep Dreamers themselves.

  ‘And you truly believe the war to end all wars is upon us?’ Keeper-Of-Secrets asked yet again, as General Squat’s body was delivered to the vast spirochetes of the nearest of the Dreamers.

  Trader’s reply was dismissive. ‘What the Dreamers tell us is. . . well, it’s rarely conclusive, is it? Sometimes, sad to say, it’s even useless.’

  Keeper was clearly scandalized by this suggestion, but Trader blithely continued: ‘Instead the Dreamers give us clues vague enough to appear to mean one thing, then turn out to have a wildly different interpretation once it’s too late to influence the course of events. Keeper, I think we rely on them too much. They’re just a convenience the Hegemony can point to so they can abdicate all responsibility for their own actions. Look, they just say the Deep Dreamers predicted this, and the outcome was inevitable, whatever they might have done.’

  Trader flicked his tentacles in a shrug. ‘So ultimately that means an unfortunate few like myself are forced to take on responsibility for what must be done, and divert the flow of history.’

  ‘Perhaps, but it must be . . .’ Keeper hesitated.

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘I’m afraid of speaking out of turn.’

  ‘You have my permission.’

  ‘It strikes me as a lonely and thankless occupation,’ Keeper-Of-Secrets continued. ‘So few are permitted to know that such as yourself must manipulate events throughout the galaxy for the general benefit of our species. Yet, since such manipulations are based on the Dreamer’s own predictions, and you appear not to think highly of the Dreamers . . .’

  ‘I couldn’t live with myself, if I thought any inaction on my part led to our destruction,’ Trader replied. ‘So, you see, to act is morally unavoidable, whatever the source of the intelligence.’

  They had by now almost reached the first of the Dreaming Temples—a hovering robot submarine that granted the privileged few the means to interface directly with the Dreamers.

  Trader made his farewells to his new partners in murder before finally slipping into the wet embrace of the Temple. The machine’s innards opened up automatically at his approach, mechanical mandibles reaching out and securing his field bubble, which merged on contact with the Temple’s own energy fields.

  Trader found himself in absolute darkness, greater even than that prevailing beyond the Temple’s hull. This hiatus lasted only seconds, however, before the Temple made contact with the Dreamer’s collective consciousness.

  Trader felt as if his mind had expanded to encompass the entire galaxy within a matter of seconds. Powerful images and sensations assailed his mind, far stronger than those faint intimations he had sensed on his journey here. He witnessed a hundred stars blossoming in deadly fire across the greater night of the Milky Way, a wave of bright destruction unparalleled in all of Shoal history, outside of the Great Expulsion.

  Trader felt sickening despair. This was the worst possible outcome: a seething wave of carnage sweeping the Shoal Hegemony into dusty history. To become a had-been and never-would-be-again civilization, forgotten in the annals of the greater history of the cosmos.

  Yet hope could still be detected even in the face of apparently unavoidable doom. Over the next few hours, working within the Temple, Trader was able to identify potential key factors: individuals, places and dates that might well influence the initiation of the conflict.

  And even if war could not be prevented, it might still be reduced in the scale of its destructive impact. With gentle manipulation, it might even be contained, rendered harmless: turned into a historical footnote rather than a final chapter.

  Sometimes, Trader had found, fate really did lie in the hands of a few sentients such as himself.

  He began to make plans to ensure he would always be present in the right places to witness—and influence—these pivotal events. And perhaps even divert them away from an astonishingly destructive war that otherwise threatened to erase life from the galaxy.

  Four

  Trans-Jovian Space, Sol System

  The Present

  Warm, naked, her muscles tense with anticipation, Dakota floated in the cocoon warmth of the Piri Reis and waited for the inevitable.

  Ever since she’d departed Sant’Arcangelo, the ship had gone crazy at precise thirteen-hour intervals: lights dimmed, communications systems scrambled and rebooted, and even her Ghost circuits suffered a brief dose of amnesia, while heavy, bulkhead-rattling vibrations rolled through the hull.

  Every incidence was worse than the last. And every time it happened, Dakota thought of jettisoning the unknown contents of her cargo hold, only to end up reminding herself just why that was a really bad idea.

  Twenty seconds to go. She put down her rehydrated black bean soup and flicked a glance in the direction of the main console. Streams of numbers and graphs appeared in the air, along with the image of a clock counting down the last few seconds. She stared at the numbers, feeling the same flood of despair she’d felt every other time this disruption had happened.

  Deliver the cargo. Ignore any alerts. Don’t interfere with either the cargo bay or its contents. That’s what Dakota had been instructed, and that was exactly what she intended to do.

  Absolutely.

  ‘Piri,’ she said aloud, ‘tell me what’s causing this.’

  , the ship replied in tireless response to a question she’d already asked a dozen times,

  Yes. ‘No.’ This wasn’t the way her life was meant to work out. ‘Just leave it.’

  The clock hit zero, and a sonorous, grating vibration rolled through the cabin. Floating ‘alert’ messages stained the air red. Meanwhile her Ghost implants made it eminently clear the source of the vibrations was the cargo bay. ‘Alerts off,’ she snapped.

  Everything went dark.

  Piri?

  No answer.

  Oh crap. Dakota waited several more seconds, feeling a rush of cold up her spine. She tried calling out to the ship again, but it didn’t respond.

  She felt her way across the command module in absolute darkness, guided by the technological intuition her Ghost implants granted her, pulling herself along solely by her hands, while her feet floated out behind her. The bulkheads and surfaces were all covered with smooth velvet and fur that was easy to grip. Cushions, meal containers and pieces of discarded clothing wh
irled in eddies created by her passage, colliding with her suddenly and unavoidably in the darkness.

  The only sound Dakota could hear was her own panicked breathing, matched by the adrenaline thud of her heart. Convinced the life support was about to collapse, she activated her filmsuit. It spilled out of her skin from dozens of artificial pores, a flood of black ink that cocooned and protected her inside her own liquid spacesuit, growing transparent over her eyes so as to display the darkened space around her in infrared.

  Instrument panels glowed eerily with residual heat, and she saw hotspots where her naked flesh had touched heat-retaining surfaces, making it easier for her mind to wander into fantasies of being trapped on a deserted, haunted ship.

  She found herself at the rear of the command module. Three metres behind her lay its cramped sleeping quarters, two metres to the right, the head. Nine metres in any direction, the infinity of space beyond the hull. She ducked aft, into the narrow access tube leading to the overrides.

  Piri?

  She tried switching to a different comms channel but still couldn’t get an answer.

  ‘Fucking asshole Quill!’ she shouted into the darkness, her fear rapidly transmuting into anger. At least her Ghost circuits were still functioning: she let them flood her brain with empathogens and phenylethylamine, brightening her mood and keeping outright terror at bay.

  Dakota started to breathe more easily. It was only a minor emergency, an easily fixable systems fault. She soon found the first of several manual override switches and punched it a lot harder than necessary. Emergency lights flickered on, and a single klaxon alert began to sound from the direction of the command module. The life support, however, remained resolutely inactive.

  One thing she was certain of. Whatever the source of her present troubles, it was surely within the cargo bay.

  —

  ‘I can’t take that kind of chance,’ Dakota had warned Quill several days earlier.