‘All you need to know right now,’ Kieran had explained curtly, ‘is that the craft we found is a derelict of unknown origin. And very old, we assume.’
‘But how old?’ Corso had asked, standing there in the room Kieran had taken for his quarters. Some of the furniture looked like it might even date from before the Freehold migration but, apart from that, the adornments were pretty much what Corso would expect from a member of the Senate’s security team. There were swords mounted on a wall, citations of honour bestowed during the perpetual war with the Uchidans, paintings of ancient battles dating from Ancient Greece right up to the present.
Kieran’s face had remained expressionless, but his irritation with Corso’s constant questioning was evident in the way he studied the blade of a wicked-looking knife he kept, turning it in the light and occasionally stroking along its length with an oiled cloth. ‘Just old,’ he growled dismissively.
‘And I’m not allowed to know which system it’s located in? But it’s in human space, right?’
Before Corso had been brought into matters, those few who’d known about this derelict had begun referring to its builders as the ‘Magi’, after it became clear that it almost certainly predated the existence of the Shoal Hegemony. Even from the little he’d witnessed so far of the derelict’s secrets, Corso had to admit that the name fitted.
‘Of course,’ came the firm reply. ‘But the less people know about it the better. If the Shoal got wind of its existence…’ Kieran shrugged, then opened a lined case and carefully placed the dagger back inside, before closing the lid. ‘You understand me?’ he added, staring back up at Corso.
‘But we’ll still have to hitch a lift on a coreship even to get there, and that means the Shoal will know exactly where we are anyway.’
Kieran clearly wasn’t a man used to having to provide explanations. ‘That’s only partly true,’ he replied, now affecting an air of infinite patience. ‘The Shoal know where we’re going, but they don’t know the real reason. They don’t know about the derelict. You need to know about the derelict, and what we’ve discovered there so far, because you need to be as ready as possible by the time you actually go on board.’
‘All right,’ said Corso, raising both hands in a placatory gesture. ‘The only reason I ask is because anything else you can tell me might have some impact on what I can find out there.’
‘Not likely.’ Kieran shook his head. ‘Just be happy you’re helping your people overcome the greatest challenge they’ve ever faced.’
As flawless as the simulated environment was, Corso noted, the suit he himself wore-entirely real-lent a certain Veritas to the proceedings by virtue of being heavy, uncomfortable and smelling like it hadn’t been washed since worn by its last dozen users.
‘You said something about a particular discovery on board the derelict,’ Corso commented, his voice sounding dull and hollow to him inside the helmet.
Kieran’s voice floated back a moment later. ‘I want you to discover it the way we did. In context, you might say.’
Corso nodded resignedly. His progress across the ledge was hard work. Even though the suit had been set up to respond to his movements as if he were in a low-gravity environment, the extreme pressure of the simulated ocean waters made the going extremely difficult, power-assist or no.
He could see how it wouldn’t take a huge effort to tip the derelict entirely over the edge of the ridge and into oblivion. Some conventional explosives would probably manage that. Probably, the flow and ebb of the chaotic tides inside the vent had slowly pushed it closer and closer to the abyss over many millennia. It would be just his luck for it to finally slide over the ledge the moment he got inside the real craft.
Despite his nervousness, and his resentment of men like Kieran Mansell and Senator Arbenz, Corso had felt a growing sense of excitement ever since he’d realized what he was being asked to do.
Several tiny robot submarines lifted themselves from a charging unit held in a rack mounted next to the airlock. These floated towards Corso, lighting his path as he drew closer to the derelict.
And it really did look like some ancient beast of the deep; it was gigantic. The curving spines rising high overhead bore a clear resemblance to the drive spines that protruded from the hulls of Shoal coreships, too much so for it to be a coincidence.
Any remaining doubts Corso had about whether the derelict was once capable of travelling faster than light finally vanished. He felt a chill rush through his bones: the implications of what he was seeing were staggering.
The robots now swarmed around him, lighting his way towards the airlock that had been welded on to the derelict’s exterior. He clambered up the ladder and stepped inside, allowing himself no pause to think about the vertiginous drop barely a hand-reach away. He waited while pumps noisily laboured to extract the freezing cold water out of the lock.
Once the airlock was fully pressurized, its inner door swung open, and Corso peered inside the derelict itself. The robot submarines had accompanied him into the airlock. They now raised themselves up on insect-like legs and scampered into the darkness ahead, their light revealing a sinuous corridor that twisted out of sight. The robot’s lights then flickered off, and Corso could now see perfectly clearly all the way down the corridor, yet strangely there was no apparent source of light.
He pulled off his suit and dropped it next to the inner airlock, sucking in air that tasted entirely dry. It was the same air as the Hyperion’s environment chamber, since there were, after all, physical limitations to even the most sophisticated holographic projection systems. He found this oddly reassuring.
‘Straight ahead,’ Kieran urged over the comms link. ‘Follow the ‘bots.’
The ‘bots were waiting at the far end of the corridor. He stepped towards them and they again scampered ahead, stopping only to look back towards him once they got a certain distance ahead, like hounds devoted to the chase.
Corso cleared his throat. ‘Those spines projecting out of the hull, they reminded me a lot of-’
‘I know what they reminded you of,’ Kieran interrupted. ‘You wouldn’t be the first to make that comparison.’
‘So do we know for certain…?’
‘Not for certain, no. For that, we’ll need to extract a lot more information from the craft’s data stacks.’