'Well, one way or another, there are changes.'
'Will Ted be okay?'
Corso shrugged. 'We won't know until the medbox is finished with him. How are you feeling?' he asked, looking at her with a curious expression.
'About what?'
'I know you were…'he struggled to find the right word '… attached to your ship; to the experience of being joined with it.'
'I'll deal with it,' she said abruptly. 'I'm not going to crack up like I did before.' She nodded towards the med-bay entrance. 'You said we should take a look at what we've gone to all this effort for. How about now?' Ty Whitecloud looked up at the sound of the lab's airlock cycling, and realized he still had no idea if the Senator's plan to hijack the frigate had been successful. He sat at the lab's primary console, sudden tension knotting the muscles of his back.
The inner airlock door finally sighed open and Senator Corso entered the lab in the company of a woman he felt certain he had never seen before, but who looked familiar. After another moment, he recognized her from news archives as Dakota Merrick.
Her eyes were wide and dark, and she hardly seemed to blink. Her hair stood up in spiked tufts, giving the impression of someone who didn't get much sleep, and she was attractive, in a half-starved-looking sort of way. Had she, he wondered, already been on board the frigate when they arrived?
'Dakota, this is Nathan Driscoll,' said Corso, fixing Ty with a peculiar stare, as if to put particular emphasis on Ty's nom de guerre. Corso had so far spoken to Ty only when absolutely necessary, and as on those occasions the Senator's distaste for him remained entirely evident. 'Nathan's responsible for the original research that led us to the Mos Hadroch. Without his help, we wouldn't have got this far.'
Ty nodded wordlessly to Dakota, and crossed his hands on his lap so that the ring he had been given by the Consortium agent, and which he wore on his right hand, was hidden under the left palm.
He heard that high-pitched static-like sound again, but it rapidly increased in pitch until it passed beyond his ability to hear it. He saw Merrick wince in that same moment, pressing the fingers of one hand against her temple.
She heard it too, he realized. A glance at the Senator confirmed that he appeared unaware of her distress.
'I think it's time we had a look at exactly what we came here for,' said Corso. 'Mr Driscoll?'
Ty nodded and stood up. 'This way,' he said. They passed through another room, then came to the isolation chamber containing the Atn's remains.
Ty tapped some commands into a terminal mounted next to a sheet of polycarbonate armoured glass, through which the alien remains were visible. A moment later a long robot arm slid out from a recess in the chamber's ceiling, turning this way and that as it reached downwards, its machine-fingers spreading wide, each one of them tipped with a different kind of probe or instrument. It came to a halt just a few inches above the dead alien's carapace.
Ty inhaled deeply and stared at the alien body through the glass. I've waited a long time for this, he thought, then he exhaled slowly.
He quickly typed more commands into the terminal, and in response the upper right corner of the window darkened to show an image of the Atn's remains as seen from directly above. After another moment, this image was replaced by a series of vague outlines rendered in grey, which constantly shifted and altered.
Ty pointed to the monochrome images. 'This is from a multisystem scan I managed to run on the thing's body before they locked me out of the lab,' he explained. 'X-ray, muon, the works. Look here.' He pointed to a black shadow at the core of the image. 'There's something lodged inside the Atn's carapace, but it's completely opaque to everything I can throw at it.'
'And that's the Mos Hadroch?' asked Corso.
'I'm rather hoping it is, yes,' Ty replied, glancing at the Senator.
Merrick was frowning, clearly distracted by something. 'It's the Mos Hadroch, all right,' she said. 'It's been scanning me from the moment we walked into this lab.'
The two men stared at her.
'I'm serious,' she continued. Her eyes lost focus for a moment, and Ty thought she might faint. 'I think it's trying to find information about the swarm.'
'Maybe bringing you here wasn't such a good idea.' Corso began moving towards her.
She put up a hand. 'Wait, Lucas.'
'What does it want to know?' asked Ty, deeply fascinated.
She moved back against one wall, pressing a hand against the bulkhead behind her. 'The swarm's purpose,' she replied. 'Its reason for being.'
'Do you actually know that?' Corso asked, just beating White-cloud to it.
'Sure.' She shrugged. 'There are millions of swarms scattered all across the face of the universe, all in long-range contact with each other via tach-comms. They want to manipulate the underlying structure of reality.'
Corso laughed dismissively. 'Come on, that's ridiculous. Who ever-?'
'It's not ridiculous,' Ty interrupted him. 'Not if they're Wheeler-Korsh engines.'
Corso shook his head. 'Wheeler what?'
A hypothetical technology that manipulates the fundamental properties of space at its lowest possible level, where matter and information cease to be distinguishable,' Ty explained, glancing back into the chamber. He touched the terminal and several tiny cutting tools swung down until they almost touched the carapace. Wheeler-Korsh engines? Incredible. 'And if matter is only an expression of information,' he continued, 'then the universe itself is ultimately programmable, an infinitely complex computational system. Subatomic particles aren't really anything more substantial than a collection of data concerning spin, angle of momentum, location… that kind of thing. Some might say that this means there is no such thing as death, only iterations of a program that started running at the beginning of time.'
'That sounds almost like religion,' said Dakota.
Ty froze for a moment, realizing how close he was coming to describing Uchidanism. 'It's pure speculation, of course,' he said, turning and forcing a smile. 'Unless one actually finds a Wheeler-Korsh engine, in which case it ceases to be just speculation.'
'It sounds pretty far-fetched,' said Corso, glaring.
Ty ignored him. 'How did you find this out?' he asked Dakota.
'I tapped into the swarm's collective mind when I went out to investigate it,' she explained. 'It's how I found out about the Mos Hadroch.'
'Wait a minute,' said Ty. 'You said they communicated by tach-comms, but if they're spread all across the universe, how could they power the signals to reach that far? You'd need power on an astronomical level to pull off something like that.'
'I watched them use the energy of a nova,' she explained, 'just to power a signal to a swarm located in another galaxy.'
Both men stared at her in silence for several moments.
'I should be used to having you completely fuck with my head by now,' the Senator finally grumbled, then turned to look at Ty. 'Mr Driscoll, I think it's time we cut that thing open and looked inside, don't you?'
Ty nodded and set to work. Tiny precision plasma jets began to cut into the Atn's carapace with smooth efficiency. Multi-jointed manipulators reached down, securing pieces of metal shell as the jets sliced through them.
The internal biological components of the Atn had long since turned to dust, though Ty made a mental note to analyse the remains of the brain when he had the time and opportunity. There was a chance that useful data might have survived.
'I can't tell you,' he muttered, 'how much I've been looking forward to this.'
Once a large enough hole had been cut, Ty stepped away from the terminal, and the entrance to the isolation chamber slid open. 'Let's take a look,' he said, stepping through.