Empire of Light Read Free

make sure they receive the message.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘It’ll take the ship days to claw that energy back out of the vacuum, and until then she won’t be able to carry out any superluminal jumps. We’ll be at the swarm’s mercy, if it decides to turn on us.’
    ‘We’re at a dead end here, anyway,’ Dakota insisted. ‘We have to act now.’
    ‘It’s a mistake,’ the ghost warned her.
    ‘No. It’s a risk, but one we’re still going to have to take.’

Chapter Two
    Nathan Driscoll looked up and noted that one of the suns had gone out.
    He stepped back, his hands greasy with gore and his nostrils full of the scent of burned flesh, and watched as an evac team carried away the injured soldier he had been tending, and then loaded him into a waiting air-ambulance. The medbox units that had once been an integral part of the ambulance’s interior had long since been stripped out, so the soldier’s stretcher was instead slotted into one of several brackets, the rest of them already occupied by other injured men and women.
    Nathan studied the pattern of dim red balls that clung to the coreship’s curving ceiling, a dozen kilometres above the city of Ascension, his breath frosting the air. He couldn’t work out precisely which of the thousands of fusion globes had just failed, but he had sensed the sudden, marginal drop in ambient light; the world had just become a little bit darker than it already was. He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck in a futile attempt to counter the biting cold.
    He brought his gaze back down, and in that moment saw her.
    A group of refugees – perhaps a dozen men, women and children in all – was making its way past the ruined façade of a mall about half a block away. Probably they’d been forced to abandon their homes as the fighting between the Consortium and Peralta’s terroristas spread along the banks of First Canal. Despite the half-light, Nathan had spotted a woman with long brown hair gathered up in a band, her terrified features smeared with dirt.
    It was only the briefest of glimpses, but his heart leapt nonetheless.
    Ilsa.
    Almost as soon as he’d spotted her, a cadence of ground-rattling thumps heralded the return of a four-legged rover-unit from the battle, troopers clinging to its sides while the most seriously injured were lifted on to pallets mounted on top of the rover itself. Nathan rushed forward with the other two volunteer medics, and helped to load the wounded into another air-ambulance that had dropped to the fractured tarmac almost as soon as the previous one had lifted off.
    Nathan began to doubt himself, even as he worked. It had been the merest, most fleeting glimpse: only part of her face had been visible. She had been wrapped up in layers of clothing, a rag pulled tight around her neck to ward off the plummeting temperatures; because, ever since the Shoal had abandoned them, the temperature had dropped even as the light failed. It didn’t take a genius to realize the coreship was dying.
    Nathan pulled himself up inside the second air-ambulance, along with Kellogg and the other new volunteer whose name he’d already forgotten. The ambulance’s jets began to whine, preparing for takeoff, but his mind was on other things.
    He was almost certainly mistaken, of course, as he imagined he saw Ilsa everywhere he looked: in the faces of the troopers and volunteer aid workers, or among the refugees who vastly out-numbered them all; or the corpses that had come to fill the streets and canals as the fighting intensified.
    But then again, this might have been her. It might have been Ilsa. If he could find her . . . if she was still alive . . .
    Nathan hopped back down from the open rear of the ambulance. He could see no sign of the refugees, but he guessed they were heading for the shores of the canal. His fluorescent plastic waistcoat – meant to identify him clearly as a non-combatant – flapped around his waist in the backwash from the jets.
    ‘Nathan!’