by Gary Gibson
She put one hand up and Days of Wine and Roses halted in mid-flow.
'Hold that thought,' she said, and darted away quickly, past the egg-gatherers, who milled in frightened consternation as she ran right through the middle of them and then underneath the adjacent warehouse.
'Stop!' she heard a voice call out behind her. 'I insist-'
The Night's End system was right on the edge of Consortium territory, and had a small but sizeable human colony, though this was something she'd previously long been only vaguely aware of. Nevertheless the derelict's analysis of local communications traffic had confirmed a human population several kilometres east of her current location, conveniently near a spaceport. There she could get someone to help her hide – or help get her off Ironbloom altogether.
Unfortunately, she hadn't accounted for the possibility that Darkwater might be invaded, irradiated and set ablaze in the middle of her grand escape attempt. As it was, her original plan was proving to be a less than workable proposition.
The ground underfoot was uneven. Dakota soon hit an incline, a low, soft dune of sand and pebbles that crunched painfully under her bare feet and came to a peak beneath a huddled collection of raised huts and a few larger buildings whose roofs were fiercely ablaze.
The darkness of the city's stilted underbelly was cut through here and there by shafts of light that slanted through gaps in the superstructure. Thick, cloying smoke began to billow towards her, making her cough and gasp uncontrollably. She worked her way up the incline until she was forced to get down on her knees and crawl through a narrow gap where the floor of the building above her almost met the soil beneath.
She squeezed through, then ran in a half-crouch down the far side of the slope, nearly smashing her head on a stilt in the process. She could hear the tick-tack of Bandati voices right behind her and to both sides.
She sprinted on through a maze of struts and supports, trying to lose herself in the smoke and darkness.
Dakota felt scorching heat on her skin as she ran through a narrow, sun-filled gap between two buildings and back into another darkened forest of struts. Part of the floor of an overhead building had collapsed, sending smoke and flames twisting and turning against its underside. She changed direction, running to one side and covering her mouth, afraid of losing her direction and running back towards Days of Wine and Roses.
The fire was spreading almost as fast as she could run, jumping from support to pillar at an increasing rate, the heat searing her bare skin even at a distance. The whole building was going to come down on top of her if she didn't soon find her way to safety. The smoke suddenly billowed around her. She choked, trying to hold her breath, her eyes stinging until she was half-blind.
Got to get out of here, lady.
She was completely disoriented. She'd hoped she might spot a way up – a ladder, anything – but there was nothing. All she could do was keep running.
There! Through watery eyes she squinted at sunlight dead ahead. She sprinted towards it, wishing she could reactivate her filmsuit, aware it was much too soon. She bent low as she ran, desperate now to get some clean air into her lungs.
She emerged into an open space between buildings mostly ablaze. Standing on waterlogged sand, she must be getting close to the river. Nearby was a tangled mess of curved metal struts draped with rags of material that were still burning; after a moment this vision resolved itself into the ruins of one of the cargo blimps.
She could still see the top of the Orion ship peeking up over the rooftops. It was so big that at first she mistook it for just another building.
Something hit Dakota hard from behind, pressing her face down into the wet sand. She yelled and kicked, but whoever – or whatever – it was, they had her arms locked behind her back so she couldn't move. She pulled her face up out of the sand just to snatch air, and saw dark shadows moving across the sand, accompanied by the dry-paper rustle of wings.
'Miss Merrick.' Did she hear a certain impatience seeping through the synthesized voice? 'My name is Days of Wine and Roses and, as an agent of the Hive of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk, I am here to rescue you whether you like it or not. Your cooperation is mandatory.'
'Fuck y-'
A small black hand reached out and pushed her face back into the wet earth. She kicked again in outrage, feeling her anger taking over. She swore and cursed, spitting the mud out of her mouth. A moment later she was dragged upright and found herself surrounded by another three heavily armed Bandati, in addition to the one who still had her pinioned.
They crowded in close, and Dakota felt something wrap around her wrists, then waist and thighs, making it totally impossible to move. Small limbs grabbed at her extremities, holding her tight. She yelled with fright.
'Please shut up,' said a synthesized voice.
Two of them had taken an arm each, while a third had hold of her legs. She was suspended between them. Then the sound of their beating wings filled her ears, as they skimmed so low over the rooftops that she was convinced they were bound to collide. Despite her terror, a part of her mind marvelled at how they could fly so close together without crashing into each other.
They were only airborne for a minute before they came to a hard landing in an alleyway where several large vehicles were parked, crude-looking things with heavy caterpillar tracks and weapons mounted on the back.
Dakota was unceremoniously dumped into the back of one of these vehicles. It roared into life, swivelling a hundred and eighty degrees before tearing off through a maze of stilts at high speed, bouncing violently as it went.
It didn't take much guesswork to realize they were heading for the Orion ship.
She caught glimpses of the enormous spacecraft, where it squatted close by the river, right next to the still-burning ruins of several buildings. Beams flickered from its upper hull nacelles, striking faraway targets, while the occasional missile was fired at it in retaliation from the neighbouring towers.
Dakota's transporters came to an open patch of ground and she saw now just how far the conflagration had spread. She spied a dozen dirigibles in the distance, with water gushing down from them in a half-hearted attempt to put out the flames.
Then the Orion ship filled her view. It rested on massive struts, the sands beneath it steaming. Her escort accelerated towards the ramp and shot up into its darkened interior. Twelve Less than ten minutes later, the nuclear pulse-ship lifted back up into the skies above Darkwater, with Dakota and Days of Wine and Roses now safely on board. It left behind it a shallow, irradiated crater and a circle of devastation almost two kilometres across, with fires still raging across its perimeter. The ship rose fast, spitting out nuclear fire as it accelerated towards escape velocity.
It came under heavy bombardment from orbital defence platforms as it burned its way through the upper stratosphere; beams of directed energy – ionized hydrogen accelerated close to the speed of light – played across it, its outline blurring as protective shaped fields flickered on and off, deflecting the brilliant focused energies before they could compromise the vulnerable hull beneath.
Dakota had been forcibly strapped into a gel-chair that sheltered her from the worst effects of this enormously high acceleration. She was surrounded by other gel-chairs in a tiny cabin that also carried the four Bandati responsible for capturing her. She stared upwards at a grey metal ceiling just above her head, feeling like a thousand hands were pushing her deeper into the chair. The ship's commander was an ancient Bandati whose scent-name might be loosely translated as 'The Victorious Aroma of the Bodies of My Enemies, Left Rotting under the First Light of Dawn'. That he did in fact smell literally like death to his fellow Hive-members did little to distract from his status and reputation amongst them.
He was a crippled veteran lacking two wings, who had suffered badly at the hands of Immortal Light, and so Roses' suggestion to the commander that they might steal one of Immortal Light's own craft – a museum-piece nuclear pulse-drive ship whose exhaust doubled as a
n offensive weapon – had a great deal of emotional appeal for him. But at the same time, Old Victory – as he was sometimes known – was far from unaware that Immortal Light's planetary defence forces would be formidable when it came to mustering a response. Nonetheless, Roses' plan was not only quickly approved by the Queen of Darkening Skies, but had so far proven wildly successful.
A surprise attack was one thing; maintaining the edge thereby gained was another matter. Old Victory knew they needed to put distance between themselves and Ironbloom, and fast. The vessel was on its way to a rendezvous with a coreship scheduled to materialize in the outer system within the next few days, and the fighting would surely intensify once they reached it.
Victory spat out a rapid series of clicks, the slim dark fingers of his primary battle-crew flickering across a variety of bridge interfaces in response. Manoeuvring jets in the pulse-ship's hull started the vessel rotating around its length as it rose above the atmosphere and towards the nearest of Ironbloom's orbital platforms.
As often among the Bandati, the staff of the orbital platform in question were all closely related. All twenty-five were, in fact, siblings, hatched within several days of each other, and sharing the wing-patterning of a brood-male who was briefly favoured by the Queen of Immortal Light.
Old Victory was entirely unaware he was the product of the same brood-male, and therefore shared close lineage with every Bandati dwelling within the network of pressurized compartments that comprised the platform – and he would have cared little even if he had known. Brood-males were often sold and bartered between Queens of different Hives, so that Victory and the crew he was about to murder should be half-brothers would have been no great revelation to him.
Victory shifted in his gel-chair and watched the surrounding displays as the pulse-ship stopped rotating and banked to one side, tipping towards a horizon that looked increasingly curved from his perspective.
The pulse-ship blasted straight through the centre of the orbital platform, sending its components spinning apart. The nuclear fire of the ship's exhaust finished the job, spraying across the pressurized living spaces and command systems, turning them white-hot in an instant and vaporizing everything inside.
The pulse-ship sped on, with minimal damage reports. Attitudinal systems rapidly brought it back onto its original trajectory. A few moments after the manoeuvre had been completed, it was boosting hard away from Ironbloom, with no reported casualties amongst the crew. Roses loved his Queen in many ways, yet he couldn't help but question the wisdom of reviving this ancient conflict – a war whose legacy remained in the form of deep scars cut into worlds throughout the Night's End system.
Millennia ago, the Fair Sisters – the Queens of both Immortal Light and Darkening Skies – had financed a joint exploration of Night's End in order to assess its suitability for a new Bandati colony. Such an undertaking was bound to mean dealing with the Shoal and their despicable colonial contracts.
That relations between the Sisters had become strained at this time was a matter of historical record, but the reasons why had never emerged, and records from that time proved a source of considerable frustration to any interested historian. Until a few days before, Days of Wine and Roses had been as much in the dark about the roots of that bloody conflict as any other Bandati.
Since then, however, he had been permitted to learn the cause of that ancient war, and this knowledge brought a sense of foreboding.
Less than a few centuries after being granted a joint development contract for Night's End, the Sisters had discovered something as ancient as it was remarkable. They had fallen out over what to do with their discovery, and this disagreement had proven contentious enough to engender a conflict still remembered throughout the Bandati worlds even after several millennia – a conflict in which Darkening Skies had been the loser.
And then this ancient starship had materialized out of nowhere on the edge of the Night's End system, carrying two humans about whom there was something sufficiently important to rekindle that ancient conflict – something closely involved with that long-ago discovery.
Roses was forced to concede the possibility that one might know too much. Dakota rode in her gel-chair, eyes closed, only peripherally aware of the similarly racked Bandati soldiers around her, who nevertheless endured the sudden multiple-gee accelerations and wild shifts with only the occasional click. Her filmsuit had reactivated about twenty minutes after lift-off, and Days of Wine and Roses hadn't made any objection to it, or attempted to shut it off remotely.
She escaped from her pain and discomfort by communicating with the derelict, which had by now tapped into dozens of live visual feeds from tracking systems both on the ground and in orbit. She found herself confronted with a multitude of viewpoints on the pulse-ship, as it blasted away from the small, blue-red world.
She finally had the time to think more clearly about some of the things Moss had said to her.
It chilled Dakota to the marrow that he might actually be in a position to take the derelict away from her, and yet the freshness of the scars he bore made it clear he himself had received his implants only very recently. At a guess, he very likely hadn't yet had nearly enough time to break them in. Dakota herself had required months of careful tutelage in order to learn how to use her own. More than likely Moss was still overwhelmed by the sheer sensory overload.
Had he known her filmsuit would activate once she was far enough away from her cell? Perhaps, yes. It seemed far less likely, however, that he could possibly have anticipated a rival Hive grabbing her in the way they had.
Dakota thought hard, staring at the alien faces so close around her. He'd very nearly got what he wanted. If these rescuers- if that was what they were – hadn't turned up when they did, she'd still be running around Darkwater with no plan and no immediate way to get off-world. But she couldn't bring herself to be thankful; whatever they told her, it was inevitable they wanted her for the same reasons everyone else did – the Magi derelict still held in orbit above Blackflower.
She could feel the derelict as a distinct presence in the back of her thoughts, both a blessing and a terrible burden.
A solution to her troubles had been forming in her mind ever since she'd re-established contact with the derelict. Even contemplating it, however, had frightened her so badly that even after all she'd been through, she couldn't be at all sure she had the courage to carry it out.
And yet it was so simple, so perfect, a way of resolving everything all at once. And with that, she knew she was ready to act, and found herself wondering just why she'd taken so long to make this necessary decision.
She merged her senses fully with those of the derelict, seeing the complex framework that surrounded it, almost as if it had been snared from out of the stars by some vast, cybernetic spider and wrapped in a metal cocoon. She could see the pocked and ruined surface of Blackflower far below.
Although subverting the orbital facility's computer networks was a relatively simple matter for the derelict, what she had in mind was going to take time, because she couldn't afford to draw attention. The derelict began to power up its systems as the shaped-field generators holding it in place shut down, one by one.
She hesitated, appalled by the enormity of what she had in mind. She was doing the right thing, the necessary thing. Yet she needed more time to think, to consider the consequences of her actions…
Dakota pulled back, switching her attention back to the immediate vicinity of the pulse-ship. The derelict responded by feeding her views of the ship as seen through the electronic senses of the pursuing Immortal Light forces.
She found herself contemplating a disorienting number of perspectives. Laid over it all was a cotton-wool tangle of discrete communications channels in their millions, comprising the totality of instantaneous tach-net traffic throughout the entire Night's End system.
At the heart of this nightmare tangle was a knot of data so complex it shone like a second star from the derelict's perspectiv
e, a white-hot informational nexus centred on Ironbloom. Dakota found herself trying to make some sense out of a deluge of tactical, defensive and offensive data that spilled over her as Immortal Light struggled to muster a coherent response to the attack.
In informational terms, it was like standing in a crowded stadium just as a bomb went off; a million voices shouting in your ear at once while you struggled to find the exit.
Dakota pulled her focus back to the immediate vicinity of the pulse-ship, and the deluge dropped back to manageable levels.
Something new: a bright sparkle of points, some tens of thousands of kilometres ahead of them, directly in the pulse-ship's path.
She shifted her focus back to Ironbloom, the derelict anticipating her request and grabbing control of orbital reconnaissance systems, reaming them of any data relating to the expanding cloud. Within seconds she discovered the points of light were in fact proximity nukes, launched from a network of automated defensive platforms. The nukes were already spreading out to intercept the pulse-ship.
Closer at hand, she became aware the ship's Bandati pilot was already working on a response to this newest threat. But, from Dakota's perspective, his response was impossibly slow; worse, he was relying heavily on pre-programmed evasion patterns.
I don't know if they'll thank me or shoot me for what I'm about to do.
The derelict wormed its way deep inside the pulse-ship's core stacks, rapidly subverting them. Within seconds Dakota had full control of the ship. Its programmed defensive algorithms were laid bare before her, her machine-senses analysing them in a moment and finding them distinctly wanting.
The proximity mines wouldn't have any problem getting close enough to the pulse-ship to detonate, and there was no guarantee its shaped-field generators could hold up to the damage they could cause.
She had a mental flash of the Bandati commander and his crew on the ship's bridge; he lacked a couple of wings, while those that remained – carefully bundled against his back – appeared ragged and torn from old wounds. She watched as he desperately twisted around in his gel-chair restraints, trying to figure out why his vessel had suddenly stopped responding to his commands.
