He thought again of the monster staring at him from out of his own eyes, and felt a second flush of triumph: I'm on to you now.
Ty now used a set of software tools to study the contents of the files, and found them to be lightly encrypted command structures of a type he had never seen before, carefully modified to run on the imager array in which the Mos Hadroch still sat.
He regarded the unmoving artefact for a moment, and felt an uneasy chill. Surely it couldn't be this easy.
He spent a few minutes loading the command structures into the imager array, set the probes to start recording, and activated them.
What happened next was far more than he could possibly have anticipated. A bass moaning sound filled the air, modulating every few seconds. The sound seemed to penetrate deep inside his body and mind, in a way that was far from pleasant.
At the same time, the artefact appeared to come apart – no, unfold – in some way that his human eyes couldn't make sense of. He stared, utterly transfixed, as it appeared to grow larger over the next few minutes, its shape now constantly morphing and shifting. Jewel-like shards appeared all around it, hanging in the air, and glistening and twisting like a kaleidoscope projected in three dimensions.
A message alert flashed, but he ignored it.
The only way he could explain what he was seeing was by assuming the Mos Hadroch existed in more than three spatial dimensions. What appeared to be disparate shards might instead be components of this device that normally existed only in the other, higher dimensions, but were now briefly flickering into view.
The throbbing became more intense, driving itself deeper into his mind and making it hard to think clearly. He found himself involuntarily re-experiencing key events in his own life in flashes of almost hallucinatory detail, as if the Mos Hadroch were pulling them out of his subconscious and attempting, in its alien way, to understand who and what he was.
A machine for passing judgement: that's what he had told Lamoureaux and Willis, back in Ascension. It was trying to find out if he was worthy of it.
He relived his days in the hidden R the celebrations when the Legislate-backed strike against the Uchidan Territories floundered; the sense of betrayal when his Uchidan masters had decided to hand him over to the Legislate.
Despite his terror at what was happening to him, Ty laughed. The irony was inescapable: for all his abortive attempts at understanding the artefact, it was doing a much better job of understanding him. Finally, mercifully, the Mos Hadroch reverted to something closer to its normal appearance. Meanwhile the monstrous noise that had accompanied its transformation decreased to a quieter pitch.
Ty remembered the ceremonial knife. Splaying his right hand flat on the console, he held the blade in his left so that it hovered over the finger wearing the data-ring.
If he could just do it quickly enough, the ring might not have the opportunity to send a signal through his nervous system. All he had to do was strike down, a single slash, and it would all be over…
His hand trembled as a cold wash of fear passed through him. He sobbed and let go of the knife, unable to go through with this act of self-mutilation; not when he knew the action might kill him.
He moved his shaking fingers across the surface of the console and set it to record, then began to speak. He did his best to summarize what he'd discovered, and what he thought they were dealing with. He tripped over his own words but pushed on regardless, knowing he was babbling but afraid that his mind might be stolen away from him before he had a chance to finish. He knew the monster inside his head could come back at any time.
Ty took the command structure he'd discovered and attached both his message and the video footage of the artefact's sudden transformation to it, then distributed multiple copies throughout the ship's networks. He left the console to continue recording in the meantime.
Even if the monster managed to track down some of the copies of the command structure, it couldn't find or delete them all. All Ty needed to do now was…
A glint of light suddenly manifested in the corner of his vision, like a ray of sunlight reflecting off glass.
The monster had woken up.
Ty scrabbled for the knife and splayed his fingers across the console once more, just as he heard the heavy door behind him begin to open. He took a firm grip on the knife and prepared to strike down at his finger.
Something stopped him, and he cried out. It felt like the air around him had solidified, freezing him in place.
The monster crawled back inside his skull, just as he heard someone call his name.
Chapter Thirty-three
The comms terminal in Dakota's quarters began to beep insistently. She accessed the data-space and found a high-priority alert waiting for her from Corso. A moment's mental navigation pinpointed him on Deck C, close by the labs.
Lucas. What's up?
‹Dakota. Where are you?›
There was an edge of panic to his voice.
I'm in my quarters, she replied.
‹I need you to meet me at Deck C, near Transport 55, straight away. There's something you need to see.›
Why don't you just tell me what it is?
‹Just get down here, Dakota. Right now.›
He cut the connection. Dakota checked the time and realized, with a silent groan, that she had been asleep for less than two hours. On getting there, she found Lamoureaux waiting by the entrance to a storage room, halfway between the transport station and the labs.
He nodded towards the open door, his expression grim. 'Take a look.'
She stepped inside, but her nose had already told her everything she needed to know. The bulkheads were stained red with blood, and the air smelled of copper and rust.
She saw Corso and Martinez kneeling on either side of Ray Willis, who had been pushed into the space between two tall metal equipment bins. It was clear from the deep gashes in his throat and chest that he was very dead.
Corso glanced up at her as she entered. 'Did you see anyone else on the way here?'
'No, I came straight away.'
Corso and Martinez exchanged a look. 'Four of us here-'
'And Dan on the bridge,' Martinez finished for him. 'We should get back there as soon as we can.'
Just five of us left, Dakota thought numbly. Ray, Nancy, Leo – all dead.
'What about – what about Driscoll?' she asked. She had almost said, what about Whitecloud?
'Now there's a question I'd like to answer,' said Martinez, straightening up. He grabbed hold of one side of a storage module to keep himself standing the right way up. 'He's gone.'
'Not only that, it looks like he took the Mos Hadroch with him,' Corso added. 'And… Dakota, Eduard knows about Whitecloud. Or he does now, at any rate.'
'Please tell me you only found that out recently,' said Martinez. His tone was calm, but something in the way he looked at her made it abundantly clear he was suppressing a great deal of anger.
'I swear, I only just found out myself.' She glanced at Corso. 'You know, maybe you should have told all of us a long time before now.'
'Maybe I should,' Corso agreed, but she knew he was dissembling.
She couldn't stop staring down at Willis's face; he wore an expression of mild surprise that seemed utterly at odds with the violence that had been done to him. The gashes in his body were horrible, and yet she couldn't look away.
'I guess it's pretty conclusive now that Whitecloud killed Olivarri,' she said.
'I'm still not making any assumptions until we find him,' replied Martinez.
'What about Willis here? Who found him?'