Empire of Light

Corso studied the two images and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the lab. 'Just to be clear, you're saying there's obviously some kind of relationship between the Atn and the machine-swarm that created the caches?'

'You sound surprised, but think about it for a moment. They're both widely distributed, self-reproducing machine species. It's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that they share some common point of origin. Perhaps what we're seeing here is a case of some kind of genuine machine evolution.' Whitecloud paused to think for a moment. 'Or more likely one was created from the other.'

'And the swarm was hunting down and destroying Atn clades.' Corso, too, thought for a moment. 'Can knowing this help us in any way?'

'I don't know,' Whitecloud admitted. 'Just about the first thing I did, once I realized this, was to try and crack the Mos Hadroch with the Atn's own machine-protocols. I got nowhere, though that's not to say there aren't other commonalities between the species that might give us the key we need to understanding how the artefact actually works.'

'We're running out of time, Ty. A few more days and we'll be reaching our destination.'

Whitecloud nodded. 'Did we get what we needed at our last stop?'

'Yes… but there were some problems. Dakota and the others are on their way back right now.'

'What problems?'

Corso briefly summarized the events on the cache-world, including Nancy's radiation poisoning.

Whitecloud paled at this final piece of news. 'Nancy… is dying?'

Corso frowned at his reaction. Whitecloud was clearly severely shaken, more than might be expected given that he hardly knew the woman. 'No, not dead, but it's really not looking good. She's going straight into a medbox as soon as she's back here but, to be honest, the delay before we can rendezvous is just going to further reduce any chance she might still have had to pretty much zero.'

Whitecloud's face became a mask. 'I see,' he said briskly, looking away from Corso. 'That's a matter of some concern, of course.'

Corso nodded, and wondered again just what it was Whitecloud wasn't telling him. 'We need to find a way to activate the Mos Hadroch that doesn't involve Trader,' Corso reminded him. 'Dakota's been down here a couple of times, hasn't she?'

'Yes,' said Whitecloud, 'but we never got a repeat of the phenomenon that occurred the first time she saw it.' He nodded towards the artefact in its cradle. 'It's been inert ever since.'

'Do what you can, Ty. It could mean the difference between success and failure. I'll see if I can get Dakota to come back down. Maybe this connection between the swarm and the Atn is what we need to finally get somewhere.'

Ty nodded, but his whole mood had changed dramatically once he'd heard the news about Nancy. Just what have you been hiding from me? Corso wondered as he left. As soon as Trader's yacht had docked, Dan Perez and Ray Willis helped Dakota get Nancy out of her suit. Corso arrived in time to watch the two men lower her into a portable medbox towed away by a spider-mech, before following it back out of the bay.

'Her suit's support systems are keeping her alive, but only just,' remarked Dakota once she and Corso were alone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. 'I know she's not going to make it, but why do I feel so bad? The woman hated my guts. She wouldn't want me to feel sorry for her.'

'Maybe you're still a little more human than you seem to think,' Corso suggested.

Dakota just shook her head, her eyes filled with regret. 'I can't help but blame myself. I let myself get careless.' There was anger in her tone. 'I was in too much of a hurry to get down inside the cache.'

Corso sighed and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him directly. 'There's no way you could have known beforehand what was going to happen, and Nancy knew the risks before she came along on this trip. We all did. You understand that, right?'

Dakota looked away from him again. 'Maybe.'

'Maybe, yes,' he said. 'Now listen, there's something we need to talk about. Something urgent.'

She glanced back at him. 'What?'

'The closer we get to where we're going, the more nervous I get when it comes to letting Trader anywhere near the Mos Hadroch. But I just got back from seeing Nathan Driscoll over in the labs – and it looks like he's finally on to something.'

'A way to activate it?'

Corso hesitated. It had already occurred to him that there was no reason to assume Whitecloud was the only one to have been compromised.

'No, not yet,' he replied, entirely aware of how evasive he was sounding. 'Something else.'

Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. 'Oh, for… You still don't trust me, do you? Listen, I already checked myself out before Olivarri was murdered. I went down to the med-bay and ran a full set of diagnostics on my implants almost as soon as we were under way, because I wanted to be sure. Lamoureaux did the same, and he's never even met Trader. Believe me,' she continued, 'we're both clean, and neither of us is being controlled – not by Trader or anyone else.'

'Why the hell didn't you tell me this before now?'

'Because, after Olivarri was murdered, I knew it wouldn't make the slightest damn bit of difference what I said. You read the report on the med-bay; whoever did the vandalizing, they didn't just smash the physical scanners, they did a good job of wiping the core memory as well. So how could either of us prove that we'd scanned ourselves?'

'All right, I'm sorry for doubting you. Anyway, Nathan now thinks it's possible there's a close relationship between the swarm and the Atn. He thinks one might have split off from the other a very long time ago and, given what he just showed me, I'm inclined to believe it.'

Dakota's eyes widened. 'Shit, that's…' She tailed off into silence.

'Pretty incredible, yeah,' Corso finished for her, then he nodded towards the exit. 'Maybe we should get going.'

Dakota followed him to the nearest transport station. 'I've run into Atn a couple of times on coreships,' she said, as they boarded a car. 'They're harmless, so it's hard to believe they could somehow be related to something as malign as the swarm.'

'It means there's at least the outside chance that Atn protocols might work on the artefact, but the fact is we're almost out of time. We're almost certainly going to need Trader to activate the thing, whether we like it or not.'

'It's strange to hear you saying that, Lucas.'

'Yeah, well, I'm still not too keen on the way you sprung him on us.'

'But I'm not the only one who's been hiding things. How long have you known Leo Olivarri was working undercover for the Legislate?'

Corso stared at her. 'Where did you hear this?'

'Trader told me,' she replied. 'And, no, don't ask me where he heard it. He wouldn't tell.'

'I haven't known about Olivarri that long,' Corso replied. 'There were suspicions, but we had to send a covert signal back home to get any kind of confirmation. It still doesn't tell us why he was murdered.'

'If he was spying on us, maybe he knew something we didn't. I could have worked on finding out more, if you'd only told me. Or do you still not trust me?'

Corso leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her. The transport station lay silent and empty through the curved glass behind him. 'All right,' he said, 'I know who killed Olivarri. Or at least I have a pretty damn good idea. I think it was Driscoll.'

'What makes you think it was him?'

'Whoever sabotaged the ship's stacks didn't do a thorough enough job. It turns out there are memory overflow buffers that can hold partial back-ups in case of a major failure. We managed to retrieve some of the missing hours from the surveillance feeds, and it turns out Driscoll was the last person to see Olivarri alive. We even have partial video of them arguing not long before Olivarri was killed.'