But Arbenz still hadn’t finished talking. ‘You want to get away from Bourdain. We want the transluminal drive. Help us get it, and you’re free. More, you’ll be a hero, liberating mankind from the oppressive restrictions of the Shoal’s technology embargo. You could be part of something glorious.’
She realized he was waiting for an answer. While she summoned the strength to speak, the cabin was filled with a silence as deep as the void between the stars.
‘You’ll just kill me then,’ she managed to say. ‘You’re Freeholders. So nobody trusts anything any of you say.’
Arbenz grinned. ‘Then you’ll just have to learn to trust me, Dakota. Whatever you think of us, we do believe in honour. You’re just as much a victim of the Consortium as anyone back on Redstone. The war with the Uchidans would never have happened if the Shoal hadn’t invoked their embargo clause. It hurt you just as bad as it hurt us. The Consortium let the Uchidans steal our world, and they took away the one thing you’d worked all your life towards: your implants.’
His tone had grown softer and more intimate, which somehow made it sound all the worse. Her thoughts became filled with revenge fantasies of the most exquisite complexity and savagery.
‘So when I say you’ll be safe,’ Arbenz finished, ‘I speak as a man of honour-and as a Senator in the Freehold Senate. You have my word, and all you have to do now is help us.’
Dakota listened to all this without comment. After a moment she felt Kieran’s grip on her relent. She looked up and saw Corso’s silent, appalled expression. Kieran and Arbenz had simply returned to their seats as if nothing had happened.
She began to get up. Corso tried to help her but she pushed him away. She pulled herself into her seat, fighting back tears of rage and horror and shame. The more she fought the feelings down, the more she hated herself for her own weakness.
She focused on the backs of her tormentors’ heads and decided she was going to kill them.
‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Corso from beside her.
‘What for? You knew all along,’ she whispered.
‘I didn’t know any of it until just recently.’ Kieran and Arbenz were once again head to head in conversation with the two surface station staff, while static-racked voices briefly squalled over the comms system. Dakota suspected none of them really cared what either she or Corso now said to each other.
‘You’re a spy,’ she hissed at Corso. ‘Your job is to report everything I say and do.’
‘No!’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m here to find a way to salvage the derelict. That’s all I’m interested in doing.’
Something in the throb of the submersible’s engines had changed. They were slowing. The sonar maps on the displays showed a steep precipice that fell off into darkness: they were rapidly approaching the submerged slopes of a mountain. A strange, alien-looking shape was clearly visible dangerously close to the edge of the rocky precipice-not quite near enough for it to tumble over into the depths below, but almost.
It wasn’t long before the submersible shuddered to a halt. The hatch clanged open and Arbenz and Gardner took the lead, closely followed by the two ground-station staff. Kieran came last, behind Dakota and Corso.
They entered a steel-walled cylindrical tube immediately beyond the submarine. The sound of their boots clanging on the walkway echoed harshly, and Dakota winced, as if the sound were something physical and sharp driving into the soft tissues of her brain. Intermittent stabbing pains manifested in her shoulder and back, and she dug her nails into the palms of her hands until it hurt.
A screen bolted onto the wall at the far end of the passageway displayed an enhanced external view of the derelict. In profile the centre part of the craft resembled a fat teardrop, with a series of bumps around its hull, scattered with apparent randomness. There were no visible windows or any external instrumentation. Long curving spines, much longer than the central body, curved upwards and out, and Dakota suspected they were deceptive in their apparent fragility. It looked more like some piece of abstract sculpture than anything she might conceive of as an interstellar vessel. The passageway in which they now stood was also visible as a narrow snake of bolted-together segments connecting the submersible to the derelict itself. In terms of relative size, the submersible looked like a minnow escorting a whale.
‘This is your moment, Mr Corso,’ said the Senator, turning to face him. ‘You’re the expert here. Show us what you know.’
Lucas nodded and waited as the hatch leading into the derelict’s interior slowly swung open. Dakota saw another passageway beyond, but this had pale, mostly featureless walls, apart from long, twisted bands of some material that reminded her of muscles, around which the passageway walls appeared to have been moulded.
It was, in every way, profoundly alien, but strangely beautiful, too. The only thing marring this impression was an ugly rent torn out of one wall, where clearly human instrumentation had been inserted.
But the thing that struck her the most, as she followed the others inside, was that even though there was no apparent source of lighting, she could see perfectly well for the entire length of the passageway, up until it twisted out of sight.
After a moment’s hesitation, Corso moved ahead with a purpose that suggested he was already familiar with his surroundings. Dakota watched with the rest as he brought images up on a screen comprising part of the base staff’s crudely wired-in instrumentation, and saw what she guessed must be a map of the derelict’s interior. It didn’t take much guesswork to realize that the colour-coded corridors and rooms marked there represented only a tiny portion of the derelict’s interior.
Corso’s expression remained nervous and tense. Something still lurked within these walls, and Dakota could sense its intelligence somewhere deep behind the pale surfaces either side of her. The ubiquitous light made her feel increasingly vulnerable and naked. Without any shadows, where could any of them hide?
Corso tapped at a panel set below the screen, with expert ease. New images flashed up one after the other, appearing to be closed-circuit views of other parts of the derelict’s interior. Screeds of unreadable gibberish that she guessed were some form of alien language accompanied these images. After a moment her Ghost tentatively identified parts of the text as an archaic form of the Shoal machine language.
Corso took off his gloves, wiped his bare hands on his gel suit and muttered something to himself. It was already getting too warm for the gel suits: one more sign that the derelict’s main systems were still functioning.
‘OK,’ said Corso, pulling something out of his pocket. ‘Moment of truth time.’
He placed the object-a slender grey box scarcely larger than a human thumb-into a niche just below the screen. A moment later a faint but discernible hum filled the air. Dakota half-expected some monster to come rampaging down one of the corridors, angry at being woken from its aeons-long sleep. Instead, nothing happened bar a succession of new images and mostly incomprehensible data flickering across the screen like lightning.