Nova War s-2

by Gary Gibson

  More hissing from behind.

  They were very nearly even, but she was starting to feel nauseous and dizzy despite the best efforts of her implants, which informed her she was suffering from anaphylactic shock, and were trying to counter it by flooding her lung tissue with adrenalin while modulating her serotonin levels. So much for incompatible physiologies.

  She staggered away from the two remaining grubs to the corner of the cell farthest from them, bracing her arms against the two walls on either side while she tried to shake the blurriness out of her head. Whether what Moss had said about her implants was true or not, the fact remained they were still doing what they'd been designed to do.

  She then darted past the nearest grub and stuck her head outside. The lead blimp was a couple of hundred metres away and coming slowly closer.

  But it was also a long way below her cell – enough so she worried about whether she'd injure herself by trying to jump down to it. Ever since she'd formulated her plan for escape, she'd fantasized constantly about being able to step out of her cell and straight onto one of a blimp's gas bags.

  As for what came after, well… she had a pretty good idea of Darkwater's layout, thanks to the derelict's subterfuge, and even an understanding of how to find her way through the streets that wove between the myriad towers. There was a complex subway system too, but she feared they'd be able to trap her there even more easily.

  Beyond that, she would be playing it strictly by instinct.

  She steadied her breath and pushed one foot into a wall-groove just next to the ledge. Her stomach curled at the sight of the ground so far below. She kicked at an approaching grub with her other foot, while tightly gripping onto the frame of the door-opening with both hands.

  'Yeah, and fuck you too,' she snapped in response to the hissing of the two remaining grubs.

  The lead blimp edged closer and closer to the side of the tower and finally began to drift up towards her. She pushed herself out and away from the ledge, gripping onto the narrow grooves in the tower wall with her toes and fingers, and fixed her gaze on the approaching craft.

  A siren began to sound, filling the vast caverns of air between the city towers.

  The grubs mewled and spat at her from the door-lip where she'd been crouching only moments before. From the tentative way they poked their heads out beyond the shadows of her cell, before quickly drawing back again, she guessed they didn't have much of a taste for sunlight.

  She remembered what Moss had told her before vanishing: how he intended to 'lead them on a wild-goose chase'. He had wanted her out of the way while he pursued the derelict for himself – and yet there were clues in what he'd said that made it clear he was, for reasons she didn't yet understand, working for the Immortal Light Hive.

  And as for her implants – well, she'd realized something was different. Ever since the terrible migraines had begun to fade away, she'd felt an enormous sense of presence, as if something greater and more mysterious lay behind the derelict's machine-consciousness.

  The more she learned, the more questions she discovered that still remained unanswered.

  She stared down at the blimp as it slid up next to the wall of the tower below her, the distant siren now joined by others, echoing throughout the river valley, a discordant yet strangely plaintive sound.

  Just a few moments more, just a few moments more…

  No matter what changes might have taken place within her skull, her implants were receiving the same information: they leached data from Bandati weather observation stations and other sources, and used it to make precise calculations based on the current wind speed, local gravity, and the amount of push she would need when she finally jumped off the ledge and onto the blimp.

  All of this was channelled to her in the form of an instinctive foreboding, an acute sense of exactly when she had to jump, and how hard she would have to launch off her perch. And when she did so, the derelict would effectively be controlling her leap for freedom.

  What the hell were those sirens for? Surely she didn't represent that much of a threat that they had to She glanced up to see a brilliant, almost blinding, flash of light high up in the sky. Something was breaking through the clouds overhead, and dropping towards the city…

  She screamed as, reacting in shock, she suddenly slid before managing to grab on hard to the lip. There were platforms below, but a long way down, and at the very least she'd break her neck if she fell onto one of them.

  There were further bursts of light, but closer to the ground this time. Dakota swivelled her head and saw that these flashes were coming from the riverside. A closer look showed her that the points of light each rose upwards on a vertical column of smoke. They were missiles.

  They shot up past the topmost level of the towers, heading for whatever it was that was now dropping down through the clouds: something heavy and black and huge.

  She glanced down again. The blimp was still blithely moving towards her.

  The wind keened high as it swept over her bare skin, filling her with a deep chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. She focused on the wall of the tower just millimetres away from her nose.

  Another flash of light, even more blinding, from high overhead.

  She felt a weird ecstasy take her over, almost indistinguishable from bottomless fear. Without thinking about it, without allowing herself to ponder the decision for even one more second, she launched herself out into the air, as forcefully as she could, and fell headlong.

  She dropped straight towards the blimp, but with only eight, maybe ten metres to go, she wouldn't hit too hard, with any luck.

  She heard explosions far overhead, like balloons popping. More missiles?

  As she dropped, a dark film slid over her vision, softening the brightness above. The something pushing through the cloud overhead had become a burning star dropping straight towards the river below her. The air was suddenly filled with a roar like nothing she had ever heard, drowning out even the ongoing cacophony of sirens.

  She hit the blimp dangerously near its nose and she started to slide, grasping wildly at the netting that held the craft together. Her body was now coated in a black skin, entirely non-reflective, shielding her from both radiant and kinetic energy.

  The breath had frozen in her throat, her lungs had stopped working, and even her heart had ceased its beating. The brightness above faded, the gamma adjusting automatically.

  Somehow, some way, her filmsuit had activated.

  The invader – there was no other way to think of it – continued to drop rapidly towards the city. Her filmsuit had adjusted to the light sufficiently, so she could make out the form of the arrival; a vessel of dark metal, its upper half roughly conical in shape, while its lower half took the form of an inverted bowl. It rode downwards on a tail of fire that pulsed several times a second. It was also, she realized, enormous.

  The heat and light coming off it was so insane that if it hadn't been for her filmsuit, Dakota would very likely be dead already. Platforms up and down the tower immediately next to the blimp burst into flames – as did the blimp on which she crouched.

  And yet, the invading ship had to be still at least a couple of kilometres distant. Her implants told her it was giving off enormous levels of hard radiation, while engaged in some very hard braking.

  Trickles of data about airspeed, along with a chaotic running analysis of the invader, were being supplied by the derelict, but none of that changed the fact that her carefully planned escape route had just turned into a flying bonfire. The other blimps in the train had also caught fire, and had started to drift away from their programmed positions.

  The blimp directly under Dakota began to tilt nose-upwards as flames consumed it. All she could do was stare at the invading spaceship as it dropped down between the towers on a tail of brilliant, flaring fire. Her implants told her it was just shy of eighty metres tall.

  The blaze emanating from its underside pulsed like a strobe. An Orion puls
e-ship, she realized with horror; like some relic out of the early days of human space exploration, the kind of thing that had been planned but rarely built. It was firing miniature nuclear explosives out of its single main nozzle, up to a dozen every second, using sheer brute explosive power to drop it smack in the middle of Darkwater, at enormous cost to the surrounding landscape.

  She spied projections on the upper surface of the invader's hull that looked like mounts for heavy artillery – probably pulse weapons and the like.

  Rising on white columns of smoke, more missiles rocketed upwards from near the river. She saw one or two find their target, but the majority were destroyed by the nuclear inferno jettisoning from the invader's underbelly, inflicting little or no damage on it.

  One missile spiralled off course, rushed straight towards Dakota's tower and hit a cargo blimp at the rear of the train she had diverted.

  The blimp she was on kept tipping more and more away from horizontal. A rigid metal framework encircled the gas bags that gave it lift, and by some miracle not all of them had yet caught fire. She grabbed a metal strut and held on.

  The blimp shuddered, dropping faster as it lost buoyancy, until Dakota lost her grip. She slid a couple of metres and managed to grab another part of the framework. Flames and smoke rushed up towards her. She had minutes, more likely seconds, before the whole damn thing went tumbling down to the river far below.

  The blimp started to rotate around its horizontal axis like a ship capsizing, turning so quickly that Dakota almost lost her grip again. She hooked her arms and legs around the strut and soon found herself hanging upside down over the city of Darkwater. She had a sudden rush of vertigo that made her head swim.

  She felt like she was going to be sick, and it occurred to her that she had absolutely no idea how the filmsuit would react if she vomited. Whatever design limitations it had so far remained a mystery.

  She curled herself tight around the strut, and waited with eyes closed until her vertigo felt like it might be subsiding.

  I can get through this. I've got my filmsuit back and I'm still alive, when by all rights I shouldn't be. I can get through this.

  But why had her filmsuit activated just when it did? She'd spent so many long, lonely weeks staring out at the skies beyond her cell, wishing she could switch it on and throw herself down onto one of the platforms outside.

  She focused on steadying her breathing, using calming exercises she'd learned a long time ago while still a student on Bellhaven. As she thought back to those times, it felt like she was experiencing someone else's memories: someone younger, more idealistic and much more sure of herself. In at least one respect, she was forced to admit Moss had been right: she'd been looking for an opportunity to redeem herself and to find a way back into her own good graces – let alone anyone else's.

  Then she remembered how the filmsuit had worked, very briefly, while she was undergoing interrogation. But the Bandati had somehow prevented it from fully forming, perhaps using some form of remote signal to suppress it, or some other method she simply couldn't imagine.

  But if it indeed was some kind of signal, or – for the sake of argument – some kind of field that prevented her filmsuit activating while she was still inside her cell, then its effect must have been highly localized.

  Which meant all she'd ever needed to do was climb out far enough from her cell, and her filmsuit would have started working again.

  She wondered what would happen if she just let go of the blimp. After all, following the destruction of Bourdain's Rock, her filmsuit had saved her when she'd collided with a chunk of rock the size of a mountain.

  All she really needed to do was to let herself fall, all the way to the ground. The evidence suggested she'd walk away like nothing had happened.

  Doing so was, however, an altogether different matter. Every nerve and muscle in her body screamed at her to hold on.

  Unfortunately, it was starting to look like she might not have much choice. The blimp was sinking faster, and starting to come apart. The invading spacecraft meanwhile was in the process of touching down on a clear spot near the banks of the river, not far from a random collection of buildings and what had once been either gardens or cultivated fields, but were now – in common with much of Darkwater – thoroughly ablaze.

  Fuck it.

  She let out a bellow of frustration and let go of the blimp just as the flames spread to consume the section where she'd been clinging so desperately. She screamed as she dropped free, catching sight of the burning blimp as she fell. It crashed into the tower platform closest to her cell, which was itself already ablaze.

  The air whistled past her ears and she screamed again, suddenly unsure of her filmsuit's ability to protect her from such a long drop.

  As the ground came rushing towards her, spreading ever wider below, she could see the invading ship more clearly now. Tiny figures were emerging from openings in the upper part of its hull, and began gliding around its nose on wings spread wide. That they were Bandati was clear. Some of them broke away from the invading ship and started making their way toward the same stretch of river Dakota was currently dropping towards.

  Coming for me.

  She felt sure of it.

  A pulse cannon must have fired from somewhere, because suddenly one or two of the tiny flying specks were ablaze, tumbling downwards onto rooftops and into narrow alleyways between adjoining buildings.

  It occurred to Dakota that, if she was going to survive this latest crisis, she wanted to land somewhere she could easily evade being caught. Landing in the river or on open ground was just going to make it even easier to pinpoint her.

  Angling her body slightly, effectively swimming through the air, she aimed for a collection of rooftops separated by tightly winding alleyways and passages, and away from the Bandati invaders she'd sighted moments before.

  The ground rushed up, faster and faster. Some of the rooftops directly beneath her burst spontaneously into flames, smoke and heat blooming towards her and obscuring her vision. She guessed a pulse cannon had been fired either directly at her or at the Bandati rushing to intercept her.

  In the last few moments of free fall, prior to impact, she got a look at the nearest of the Bandati that had emerged from the Orion ship. It looked like a remarkably detailed sculpture cut from black stone that had come to life, more like a mobile winged silhouette, incongruous amongst the dozens of bright fires that had broken out across Darkwater.

  They had filmsuits, she realized with a shock, and it was the first time she'd seen anybody else with the technology since the botched deal that had led her to Bourdain's Rock.

  Dakota hit the ground four seconds later. The road surface immediately under her cracked as it absorbed the kinetic energy of the impact, leaving her miraculously undamaged. As in her encounter with a flying mountain, she had failed to feel a thing. Except that this time she had experienced a brief moment of blankness – as if time had skipped ahead half a second at the precise moment of impact.

  Her implants flagged an alert: the internal battery pack that powered her filmsuit was at zero, so she wouldn't be using it again any time soon. Indeed, as this knowledge slipped into her thoughts, she felt the filmsuit pull itself off her bare body, draining back through the pores of her skin and leaving her naked and defenceless on the streets of a burning alien city.

  She crouched like an animal, taking in her immediate surroundings.

  What she hadn't been able to see from way up in the tower was that every building down here at ground level actually stood on stilts several metres high. Yet no two constructions appeared to be alike, and each one was so thoroughly asymmetric as to appear to have been built by a team of blind architects without any prior design specification.

  Hearing some kind of commotion nearby, she moved quickly into the shadows beneath one large habitation, and spied dozens of Bandati gathered together in a narrow open space nearby, all clicking and chittering at once in a great cacophonous racket.


  She crept forward to find several ladders leaning against the side of the neighbouring building. A wide door set into the wall had been pushed to one side, revealing a large warehouse-like space within. Some more Bandati, positioned at the top of these ladders, were lowering bundles of what might have been large fleshy sacs – eggs? – to their companions still on the ground. Others simply spread their wings and hopped up into the warehouse, apparently intent on retrieving what they could. Smoke drifted across this busy scene and the noisy clicking of the Bandati grew more frenetic.

  Dakota whirled around on hearing the sound of something thud into the wet sand behind her. She saw several more Bandati come to land immediately next to the building she'd hidden under, except these newcomers were sheathed in filmsuits identical to her own.

  One of them caught sight of Dakota, and stepped into the shadows surrounding her, his liquid shield quickly draining away to reveal a complicated harness worn over his shoulders and fitting between the two sets of wings sprouting from his back. The Bandati pulled a long pipe from his harness – no, not a pipe, she realized, but a shotgun of some kind, with a trigger and guard clearly visible.

  The newcomer reached up to his throat to activate an interpreter hanging there. 'Dakota Merrick?' he asked.

  She shook her head, desperately wanting just to lie down and rest. 'Who the hell are you?' she snapped tremulously.

  The Bandati stepped closer and Dakota quickly moved backwards, slipping and falling. 'Stay away from me or-'

  'Miss Merrick,' the creature announced, 'my name is Days of Wine and Roses, until recently a representative to the Consortium on behalf of my noble Hive, Darkening Skies Prior to Dawn.'

  To Dakota's amazement, the creature affected something like a bow, its wings crinkling with that distinctive paper-rustling sound. 'I am here to rescue you, Miss Merrick, on the orders of my Queen. I'm afraid we don't have much time before Immortal Light can muster a far more effective counter-defence, so-'

  Pull yourself together, thought Dakota, glancing around. The rest of the Bandati who'd arrived with Days of Wine and Roses were slowly spreading out to totally encircle her hiding place.