Nova War s-2

by Gary Gibson

  The Queen made a gesture of annoyance. 'You found more than you bargained for, Remembrance. There was other information of far greater interest contained within their stacks.'

  Remembrance could not contain his surprise. 'There was?'

  'As necessary as it was for you to find the source of the Giantkillers, even that is not reason enough for me to come personally to Night's End for the first time in three millennia – and in strictest secrecy'

  'I see.'

  'To be specific, Remembrance, it appears my dear sister the Queen of Immortal Light is involved in much more than mere technology-smuggling. It appears she may have entered into negotiations with a species known as the Emissaries.'

  'I… am not familiar with that name.'

  'They are one of the Shoal's best-kept secrets: a rival interstellar empire with its own faster-than-light technology, viciously expansionist and constantly encroaching upon the Shoal's own domain. The Shoal have their own good reasons for hiding the very existence of the Emissaries. I myself encountered an Emissary, a very long time ago, when I was barely a young proxy, and the possibility of an alliance between our race and theirs seemed at that time less than remote.'

  Remembrance stared at her. 'You met these creatures?'

  'And pray you never have to,' she added. 'They are… formidable. And not so congenial as the Shoal, by a very long way.'

  'I see.' It was an enormous revelation; coming from anyone but his Queen he would have taken the story as an outright lie. And yet – 'Why did this alliance not take place?'

  'Put simply, we had nothing to offer them and they had nothing as yet to gain. We might as well have been pre-Reformation primitives offering glass beads to the Shoal.'

  Remembrance clicked and chittered to himself for a moment, while thinking out loud. 'Then your sister presumably does have something to offer them now?'

  'Correct, my dear Remembrance. The Queen of Immortal Light has been smuggling couriers into extremely distant areas of the galaxy not normally permitted to our species.'

  'And they managed that without the Shoal even becoming aware of it?'

  'As far as we know, yes, although, from what we gather, at least one of their envoys disappeared en route. My sister clearly has something unique to bargain with this time round. Something that's hidden, I believe, within this very system.'

  Lust faded in the face of overwhelming curiosity. 'Something hidden. What?'

  The Queen paused briefly. 'The details will be ready for you before your departure. You have a new mission, Remembrance, one of the most vital urgency, and it requires you to return to Ironbloom at once.'

  'The peace between you and your sister is over, I fear.'

  'You are correct, Remembrance. Too much is at stake now to allow the filial bonds of sister Hives to interfere. One piece of vital information concerns two humans currently being held in the city of Darkwater. There is extremely good reason to believe they are closely involved with these matters, so they will be the focus of your next mission.'

  The vast, fleshy arm reached out once again and stroked Remembrance's wings, making him shiver with delight. 'We will need to transmute you,' she murmured, 'as Immortal Light know your current scent too well. You will have a new identity.'

  'I have a scent and name ready,' Remembrance replied quickly, producing the bottle the Physician had given him. He opened the tiny flask and held it before his Queen.

  The Queen cocked her enormous head to one side and regarded him. 'Let me guess, another human name?'

  'I know you disapprove, my Queen, but I cannot deny my fondness for certain of their arts.'

  'Yet their scents are so bland – if unusual in some respects,' she murmured, favouring the open flask with a glance.

  'Precisely. Which means they are forced to express themselves in ways that supersede their sensory limitations, and to my tastes they do so most frequently through their arts.'

  'I sometimes fear I have made you altogether too human,' the Queen replied, drawing closer to the edge of the platform – and therefore closer to Remembrance.

  'Perhaps, my Queen,' Remembrance replied, growing glassy-eyed.

  It was true that his Queen's attentions on previous occasions had made him sufficiently different from his own species that other Bandati now seemed strange to him. For all that Honeydew was a member of a rival Hive, Remembrance felt a curious kinship. They had both, after all, been made over by their respective Queens in order to communicate more easily with other species.

  Remembrance waited patiently as his Queen inclined her head to run her long tongue across his wings and back. He felt an icy coldness sinking rapidly into his flesh, triggering physiological changes at the most fundamental level. It was a process that – given only a little time – would alter his scent and even his Hive rank. A Bandati Queen was the only one equipped to do such a thing.

  'And your chosen spoken name is?' she asked, her voice growing thick with desire.

  '"Days of Wine and Roses",' he told her.

  'What a strange name,' she murmured, as long-chain molecules modelled after highly mutable infectious viruses continued to work their transformative magic on him. 'It paints a picture without relying on scent, and yet it still somehow feels as typically human as your previous name. Where did you find it?'

  'I stumbled across it while engaging in cultural research before taking up my post as assistant economic adviser to your previous ambassador to Earth. The words are pleasing to my ear.'

  'As they are to mine,' she concurred. 'And now to me, my love,' she added, reaching towards him with her tree-trunk limbs, lifting him entirely off the platform and into her giant embrace. 'You will serve me well.'

  'That I will,' Remembrance-soon-to-be-Roses replied as the haze of lust finally overwhelmed him. 'That I will.' Five The next morning Dakota and Corso lay curled together on the floor, her back pressed against his belly, head resting on the inside of his arm, the door and the vertiginous drop beyond it barely half a metre away. She remembered the low grunts he'd made as they'd coupled in the half-light of dawn, the whispered conversations earlier as he explained how he'd been kept in a cell identical to her own.

  She wondered if their gaolers had been watching them the whole time, if their lovemaking had made any kind of sense to them.

  He shifted behind her, and she wondered if she smelled as bad to him as he did to her, because it wasn't like there were any washing facilities handy. He stumbled to his feet and she guessed he was heading for the ambrosia pipe.

  'Don't drink it,' she warned him.

  He shook his head. 'It's safe now.'

  'Bullshit. It numbs your mind and makes it easier for them to deal with you. We have a better chance of figuring our way out of here if we can both think straight.'

  He bent down to the pipe and touched its flexible tip before looking back over at her. 'Starving to death isn't going to help us either. Were you serious last night when you said you wanted to try and climb out of here?'

  She pushed herself up onto one elbow and regarded him. 'Yeah.'

  He shook his head. 'Well, don't. Where would you go, anyway?'

  'Jesus, don't you want to get out of here?'

  'I already tried.'

  She frowned at him.

  'Climbing out, I mean. I already tried. All I managed was to nearly get myself killed.'

  'Lucas-' she began in alarm.

  'I don't want to talk about it, okay? And, as far as the ambrosia goes, trust me when I tell you it's not an issue any more. Seriously.'

  'It'll put you to sleep.'

  'It won't.' He bent down to suck on the pipe and Dakota stared as he swallowed several mouthfuls. She half expected him to slump there like a junkie after a new fix, but he just stared back, as bright-eyed as ever.

  He nodded down towards the pipe. 'I know you don't trust me, but…'

  'You tried to steal the derelict from me. I didn't forget that, at least.'

  'Look, trust me this one time. If I'm l
ying, fine, hold it against me for ever more. But look at you! Your ribs are showing. You need to drink, Dak. Or you're going to die.'

  She rocked back on her haunches, feeling warm sunlight play against the curve of her spine, and buried her head in her arms folded over her shoulders. 'I don't want to drink that stuff and then wake up back in that fucking chamber being tortured,' she replied, her voice muffled. 'It feels like that's what happens every time I go near that pipe.'

  'But not this time, Dakota,' Corso insisted. 'This time is different. Look at me. Do I look like I'm going to pass out?'

  'Shit.' Dakota unfolded herself and propped her head on one arm, staring at a man who was equal parts friend, lover and enemy. There had been times when he'd saved her life – and times when he'd been ready to kill her.

  'Shit,' she said again, sounding even more miserable. She fell onto her hands and knees and crawled the short distance over to the food pipe. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

  She drank the ambrosia, staring up at Corso with a murderous expression.

  It tasted different. Sweeter somehow, and grittier. She didn't experience the wash of euphoria she'd felt before. She pulled away from the pipe and coughed hoarsely.

  'Easy,' said Corso, kneeling beside her and gently prying the pipe from her fingers. 'Not too much or you'll just bring it all back up again. How long have you been starving yourself like this?'

  'Not sure. Several days, maybe.'

  'What, you're trying to kill yourself?'

  'I feel like I'm already dead, being stuck in here.' She glanced up at Corso.

  He looked troubled. 'It was pretty bad for me too,' he said, glancing away from her.

  'Corso, how did you know-?'

  'Drink a little more now,' he replied, cutting her off. Some time later that same day she glanced over to see him standing by the door-opening, framed by stars. She watched him for a while, and realized she was starting to feel better than she had in days. Even the migraines were beginning to tail off, and her mind remained clear despite the ambrosia.

  A voice she hadn't expected to ever hear again spoke inside her mind.

  ‹Dakota, I am still analysing the Bandati security protocols, but my current estimates for gaining limited control over city-wide systems are positive to a higher percentile than previously.›

  How come?

  ‹The security protocols are constructed over legacy systems, some several thousand years old. I have found a means to penetrate the tower defence stacks by disguising aggressive query strings as legacy protocols, thereby-›

  It's okay, Piri, I get it. Things are going okay for once.

  ‹Thank you. I should point out that I will shortly be passing around to the dark side of the gas giant, and therefore-›

  See you when you come back round. Over and out.

  It had been a moment of revelation when the Piri Reis had successfully piggybacked its signal on the derelict's own, more esoteric, system of communication. It had taken serious willpower earlier in the day not to punch the air in triumph, as it would have been hard to come up with an appropriate excuse to give Corso for such exultant behaviour.

  The facility containing both the Piri and the derelict spacecraft orbited a moon whose Bandati name translated as 'Blackflower'. This in turn orbited Dusk, the nearest of two inner-system gas giants known to the Bandati as the Fair Sisters. The farther gas giant was called Dawn. At the moment, the orbits of both Dusk and Ironbloom had brought them relatively close to each other, although Ironbloom's greater orbital velocity would soon widen the gap.

  Unfortunately, there were limitations to Dakota's ability to communicate with the two vessels. For the moment the signal had to remain, by necessity, entirely line-of-sight. Both Piri and the derelict communicated via highly directional tach-transmissions that could pass through planetary bodies with ease, but the resulting interaction with ordinary matter generated enough Cerenkov-Mahler radiation to draw the attention of Bandati monitoring systems entirely capable of identifying a rogue transmission's point of origin and its destination.

  Blackflower completed a fast orbit around its parent, Dusk, roughly once every twenty-seven hours, which meant Dakota could only make contact with the Piri and the derelict for about half of that time – and only after dark, when the part of Ironbloom on which her tower stood was facing the right way.

  But still, there were satellites orbiting both worlds on which signals might be piggybacked. Consequently the derelict was hijacking the Bandati's own communications grids bit by bit – but that was taking time.

  And Dakota wasn't sure how much time they had left.

  Corso turned and saw she was watching him. She caught his eye and immediately he looked away, a look of regret and guilt crossing his face as he did so.

  In that moment, she realized he was keeping something from her. They had clung together the previous night, still desperately glad to see each other, but as the following day progressed, Corso's continued refusal even to discuss what had happened to him before he appeared in her cell both worried her and made her suspicious.

  Her gut feeling that he was keeping something back increased every time she caught his furtive glances. By the time evening began to draw in the atmosphere had become badly strained, and Corso had taken up residence at the rear of the cell, silent and brooding.

  She remained close by the door-opening, facing outwards, her attention on events that were literally a world away. She had her own secrets to keep, after all.

  The Piri Reis had apparently been taken inside a Bandati ship, a huge dreadnought that had only recently docked with the facility.

  Why this had happened was a question she couldn't answer; but it was clear the Piri was under attack.

  Her ship had been placed in a maintenance cradle in what appeared to be an engineering bay, while a team of Bandati huddled next to the hole that had been blown in its side back in Nova Arctis. The Piri was designed for electronic subterfuge and sabotage rather than physical defence, and yet her ship's own surveillance systems made it clear several more Bandati lay dead nearby. They looked like they'd been blown apart.

  That made her wonder if the Bandati were fighting amongst themselves for possession of the Piri – and presumably for possession of the Magi protocols still held within the Piri's stacks.

  She fought down a surge of panic at the thought. She wasn't sure if the Bandati could actually use the protocols Corso had developed to take the derelict away from her – but neither was she certain they couldn't.

  In her distracted state, she hadn't at first realized that more heavily-armed Bandati were now approaching from a platform at the far end of the bay, moving cautiously and setting up defensive posts as they did so – small, portable barriers behind which they could hide. But that made no sense, since the Piri had no weapons to use against them.

  Yet, as she watched, soap bubbles began to appear everywhere throughout the bay, each one lasting barely a second before it shrank almost immediately to a brilliant white point, before exploding with the force of a grenade. More and more of them appeared, ripping apart both the Bandati warriors creeping towards the Piri and the ones still crouching by the rip in its hull.

  But they weren't really soap bubbles. They were shaped fields – each one popping into existence around nothing but air before shrinking, compressing the atmosphere inside to a white-hot plasma that exploded outwards with devastating force when the field dissipated barely a second later.

  Shrink and blow. She'd first heard of this tactic during her pilot training.

  The Shoal had used it to wipe out half a Sun-Angel fleet that made the mistake of trying to smuggle nukes on board a coreship at the height of the Erskine Offensive. The Consortium didn't have access to field-generators half as sophisticated as those used by relatively senior races like the Bandati. What made things more confusing now was that the Piri didn't have any field generators at all…

  But the Bandati dreadnought did, she realized. The Piri – or whatever else might
be controlling it – was using the Bandati ship's own field-generators to blow its crew to smithereens.

  Piri., I want you to tell me exactly what the fuck has been going on. I want to know ‹I'm afraid I am not permitted to tell you, Dakota.›

  Dakota blinked, stunned. It was like Bourdain's Rock all over again. Who says?

  ‹I am only permitted to tell you that my actions are currently being directed by the one who is waiting for you.›

  What? Do you mean the Bandati? Are they telling you what to do?

  But that didn't make any sense, with almost a dozen dead Bandati scattered around the Piri – did it?

  ‹It is not the Bandati. Do you still want me to test the base alterations to the cargo blimp's programming? I have less than one hundred and thirty seconds before I will pass back around the far side of Blackflower.›

  To hell with that, she almost said aloud. She wanted to know what was happening to her ship; she wanted to know But all the same, she was running out of time.

  'Dakota?'

  She turned to see Corso standing and watching her with some apprehension.

  'Dakota? Who are you talking to?'

  She turned away again and focused her attention instead on a train of blimps weaving their way between two neighbouring towers, following each other in tight, computer-controlled lines that reminded her of the motion of a snake undulating across desert dunes. She felt a powerful sense of satisfaction as the lead blimp in the procession suddenly changed course. Dozens of identical blimp-trains passed through the city day and night, always sticking to the same pre-programmed routes, without varying once.

  Until now.

  The lead blimp began to tack directly towards their own tower, getting closer over the next few minutes until it was no more than a few hundred metres away. She could make out strange markings on the side of its unmanned gondola, complex sigils whose meaning was lost on her, but bore some resemblance to those decorating her cell.

  It was more than enough. She grinned like a maniac as the blimp suddenly shifted back onto its original course, the rest of the train automatically shifting to follow it in its sudden, unintended course change.