Nova War s-2

by Gary Gibson

  Dakota closed her eyes, drawing on her training. Focus.

  Only seconds remained before they met the first of the nukes.

  Her mind flashed back to Bellhaven and her first day of training, when the implants had been fresh in her skull. Everything that makes us human – the ability to think and to reason – is a recent development in evolutionary terms, Tutor Langley had said. Underlying all of it is a sea of instinct a billion years old carefully adapted for life at the bottom of a gravity well. That is not to be underestimated. It can react instantaneously, breaking down and analysing any situation or potential threat far faster than our conscious minds can even Something accelerated hard towards the pulse-ship from dead ahead. The pulse-ship's manoeuvring jets fired in response to Dakota's non-verbal commands, subjecting every living thing on board to dangerously high levels of acceleration. Alarms began to wail throughout the ship, and the helpless Bandati commander found himself at the centre of a deluge of automated threat-assessment reports and status requests from a dozen different locations.

  Some of the proximity mines detonated in the wake of the pulse-ship's unanticipated new trajectory, but none within several kilometres of the hull. Dakota kept the ship veering, mines slipping out of range before they could get close enough to detonate with any effectiveness, betrayed by their own momentum as they boosted into empty vacuum where the ship had been only moments before.

  The worst of the danger was past, the receding nukes burning up the last of their fuel in a futile attempt to gain on them as they boosted towards the outer system. Dakota let out a long, shuddering sigh and opened her eyes to just narrow slits, feeling the painful tension in her body.

  Now there was only the question of exactly where the pulse-ship was headed.

  Something sent a burst of static through her machine-head senses and Dakota finally lost control of the ship's systems. She caught one last glimpse of the grizzled-looking commander as he swiftly rerouted the primary navigation systems.

  Perhaps she could 'Please don't do that,' said a voice very close to her.

  Dakota opened her eyes wide to see that one of the Bandati had pulled himself free of his gel-chair restraints and now stood next to her with something very much like a pistol held close to her forehead. She couldn't help but notice the hand holding the weapon was shaking.

  'Days of Wine and Roses,' she said, remembering the alien's name.

  'Yes. Now, relinquish control of the ship.'

  The Bandati remained standing with relative ease, which surprised Dakota since they were still undergoing substantial acceleration. Then she noticed the fine web of silver struts and servos encasing the alien's body and his narrow, spindly legs: a motorized exoskeleton.

  'Already done,' she told him carefully. They were out of immediate danger anyway. 'You can put the gun down.'

  Roses didn't respond directly. Instead he clicked rapidly into his gently glowing interpreter, which had changed from its usual hue.

  Dakota didn't need to tap into the flow of data around them to know he was making sure she was telling the truth. The barrel of his weapon remained where it was, cool and hard against her head.

  Dakota cleared her throat. 'You know, if I hadn't done what I just did, we'd all be dead. Those mines would have taken this ship out.'

  'Thank you. Please don't do it again, though, or I'll be forced to kill you.'

  She studied the wide black eyes staring down at her. 'You're not going to just casually kill me, not after you went to this much trouble to find me. You have your orders, right?'

  Roses adjusted his grip on the gun, switching hands. 'Accidents are possible. Perhaps you were injured during the sudden acceleration. You came free of your gel-chair in an attempt to escape, and were smashed to a pulp.' The alien paused for a moment, quietly clicking to himself. 'That can be arranged.'

  'Okay' She nodded slowly, and realized she believed him. 'Put that thing away, please. I won't do it again.'

  The Bandati's wings twitched in their shoulder-restraints, and he finally let the barrel drop until it pointed down at the deck.

  'There are,' he said, 'some things we have to talk about.' To Dakota's amazement, they had found clothes for her.

  The ship, as often with vessels driven by nuclear-pulse propulsion, had unusually large and comfortable quarters for its crew, very different from the cramped and tiny living spaces Dakota had had to put up with on board craft like her own Piri Reis.

  They were in a bubble-shaped room centred on the confluence of several passages, making it easy to guess this room had been designed primarily for use in zero gee. They'd finally stopped accelerating a few hours before, and were – so Dakota gathered – merely coasting until they were ready to reverse the ship and begin braking prior to reaching a destination that Roses, so far, had chosen not to reveal. Almost every available surface, apart from several hammocks she guessed were the Bandati equivalent of chairs, was hidden under strips of greenish-red foliage. The room thus resembled a garden.

  She glanced at a strip of soil populated by blue-leafed things resembling a cross between a porcupine and a cabbage; unfamiliar smells came to her as their leaves slowly reached towards her, suggesting what she was looking at was as much animal as plant.

  But of far greater interest than any of that was the collection of underwear, trousers and T-shirts bundled together inside one of the stringy hammocks.

  'Where did you find these?' she exclaimed, pulling each item out and studying it with barely concealed delight, before leaving it hanging in the gravity-less air and then digging out the next.

  'There's a small human presence in the Night's End system,' Roses explained. 'So finding clothes for you was less difficult than I expected.'

  Dakota picked up a bra and tried it on. It felt tight under her breasts. She dropped it and found another. In fact there were several of everything there, as if Roses hadn't been quite sure what to get, or in what size.

  She glanced over at him with wry amusement: Definitely the male of the species. She tried on the second bra and found it fitted well enough. She pulled some more stuff on, revelling in the feel of cloth against her bruised skin, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of the one thing she'd had to learn to ignore during the past several weeks: the fact that she stank to high heaven.

  Her skin was greasy and dark, and her unbrushed teeth felt matted and sticky. But, then, basic human sanitation hadn't been easy to come by, and she had a feeling a species that utilized scent as one of its modes of interpersonal communication might not be so big on washing any odour off. At least she'd been able to get rid of the worst of it by standing on the ledge outside her cell whenever it chanced to rain.

  'I need water,' she said. 'Something I can clean myself with?'

  Roses clicked for a moment. 'You wish to hide your scent?'

  She stared at the alien in complete non-comprehension. 'No, clean myself. I don't like to feel this dirty, and I haven't washed in weeks. My teeth feel like-'

  'You are not thirsty,' said the alien. 'I understand.' He clicked and chittered into his interpreter. 'You will have an appointment with one of our surgeons.'

  'No, really, all I need is a cloth and a – oh, forget it.' She began rolling a T-shirt over her head, regardless, while the alien watched with apparent impassiveness from nearby. 'Roses, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.'

  'You may ask,' Days of Wine and Roses replied, 'but whether I can answer is another matter.'

  'Okay, exactly where are you taking me?'

  'We're rendezvousing with a coreship scheduled to materialize in the outer system in four days' time, local measure.'

  Dakota nodded, understanding that nuclear pulse-ships were extremely fast, although outlawed in most human systems for obvious reasons. It took her a moment to realize this was as much as Roses was going to tell her without further prompting. 'And once we're there?'

  'And then you will be granted the privilege of an audience with the Queen of Dar
kening Skies.'

  Dakota sighed. 'And then will I be free to go?'

  A pause. 'It's not quite so simple as that.'

  'Really,' Dakota replied with another sigh. 'I had a feeling you'd say something like that.'

  'If you make any further attempts to grab control of this ship, I will be forced to-'

  'Kill me, yes. I understood you the first time.'

  'You should realize,' Roses added, 'that there's not much more I'm able to tell you. I have my orders from my Hive-Queen, and they are to bring you to her at any cost. That's all.'

  Dakota nodded, wondering if she would have the opportunity, once more, to try and lose herself in a coreship, and remembering how badly that had turned out the last time. 'Then you ought to be aware of something, Roses.'

  The Bandati's wide, lustrous wings – now free of their bindings – twitched in what she chose to perceive as a noncommittal gesture.

  'I can do a lot more,' she explained, 'than just take control of this ship. I could grab something like those mines back there and pull them right up against the hull, easily enough energy to overload your shield generators and turn us all to radioactive slush. I could ram us into the side of the coreship when we reach it. When I told you I didn't need to be rescued by you or anyone else, I meant it. I had a plan, a way out.'

  'There was nowhere for you to go. And, even assuming you had found some way to escape into Darkwater and remain at large, you would never have been able to find transport off-planet. You have no understanding of Bandati culture, no ability to communicate with the majority of Bandati, even assuming you could have found any willing to help you.'

  She smiled, despite herself. 'There are other humans on Ironbloom. I even had control of half the city's transportation systems by the time you found me. Just how sure are you?'

  Dakota knew she was playing a perilous game. Show herself too powerful, and it might just give Roses or his Queen a reason to think she was too dangerous to keep alive.

  Roses chose not to rise to the bait. 'You should know,' he informed her, 'there's a very good chance Immortal Light will be waiting for us once we reach the coreship. The chances are good that there'll be yet more fighting.'

  'And all because of me?' Dakota replied, half to herself.

  'The Queen of Immortal Light Hive will not give up,' Roses continued, 'so long as we remain in this system.'

  'What's to stop them following you inside the coreship as well?'

  'Nothing, as I'm sure you very well know. We fully expect to continue the battle there, as long-'

  'As long as it doesn't involve nukes and doesn't threaten the integrity of the coreship, I know,' Dakota finished for him. 'You burned down an entire city and fried what was left of it with radiation, all apparently so you could steal me from another Hive. How many Bandati died because of what you did, Roses? For that matter, how many humans? All this,' Dakota cried, waving her hands to either side as if to indicate not only the ship around them, but the system beyond the hull. 'Was it really worth it?'

  'For the prize you carry?' Wide black eyes stared at her in contemplation. 'For an interstellar drive? Perhaps, yes.'

  'Immortal Light still have Lucas Corso.' She decided not to mention anything about Hugh Moss.

  'We have been assured that you are far more valuable than Corso, whatever the Queen of Immortal Light may believe.'

  'You have no idea what you're doing. You're… you're playing with fire!'

  'According to our intelligence, you and the starship arrived here from the Nova Arctis system,' Roses said by way of reply. 'It's a system widely known to have recently turned nova, something that should be entirely impossible. Simple logic demands that these two events must be related.'

  'Maybe it's just a coincidence,' Dakota replied.

  Roses didn't answer.

  'Fine,' she snapped. 'So you know that much. A completely stable star at the midpoint of its life ups and goes boom and, the next thing you know, here I am with a starship that's even older than the Shoal, carrying who-knows-what inside it. Did I do that? Is that what you're wondering? Do I have some kind of super-secret technology that can blow up stars? Maybe you're thinking about the power something like that could give to your Hive.' She raised one hand in the air. 'Maybe all I need to do is snap my fingers, and Night's End goes boom, with you and me in it, and both your precious Queens! How about that?'

  Roses still didn't say anything. She waited, imagining wheels turning in the alien's head while it tried to work out if she was bluffing or not.

  She kept her hand in the air. Then Days of Wine and Roses abruptly turned away from her, spreading his magnificent wings wide and soaring upwards and out of sight through an access tube, leaving her on her own. Dakota slumped to the floor and cradled her head in her hands, grateful for the sudden silence. And, besides, there was nowhere else for her to go. A few members of the crew passed through, using their wings to make short hops from passage to passage, but none of them paid her attention.

  Her stomach rumbled, but it was getting easier to ignore the signals from her body: hunger, pain, fear. They were all symptoms of her too-frail human body. If only she let herself slip inside the mind of the derelict, she could ignore them – it was that easy. There were entire worlds to see, all hidden within the derelict's stacks.

  At least the terrible headaches were finally gone.

  But in their place something much more frightening was beginning to assert itself; for now, whenever she closed her eyes, she had a curious sensation of somehow expanding in size, as if her perceptions were growing exponentially, and far beyond the confines of her normal body.

  At first she had dismissed this as some form of hallucination, perhaps some by-product of her interaction with the alien processes contained within the Magi derelict. But it was becoming clear that it involved much more than that. She could… sense things, out on the edge of the Night's End system: remote probes and sensors lost in the starry darkness, their attention focused outwards. And when she followed their gaze into that darkness, it was as if something was waiting for her there, like some lone beast far outside the bright light of a campfire, something waiting for the flames to die.

  But when she opened her eyes again, it was gone.

  She had some idea what the derelict intended for her. It wanted her to help it resume its ancient mission of hunting down and destroying the Maker caches. That was the reason for these disturbing changes in her skull.

  It wasn't a role she had asked for, and it was one she was far from sure she wanted.

  And yet there was an addictive quality to the power and knowledge concealed within the derelict, which reminded her of how it had felt to have her original implants installed. To give up what the derelict held within it would feel like losing much more than a limb. It would feel like losing a substantial part of her mind.

  The derelict was still waiting for her orders. Meanwhile the crew of the Blackflower facility apparently still hadn't noticed that she'd shut down half the power systems around it.

  She had been about to destroy it – destroy the derelict. There was good reason to do so, because it represented enormous power for whoever – whatever – controlled it. Getting rid of it was surely the best solution all round.

  Yet the personal sacrifice involved was so enormous she could barely contemplate such an action. It would leave her trapped in her own body for ever, without recourse to the derelict's timeless virtual realms.

  And not only that, she would be destroying what might very well be the last remaining memories and records of a long-dead galactic empire. But not to do so would be to risk the outbreak of precisely the kind of war that had destroyed the Magi in the first place.

  And yet, and yet…

  And then she realized she was ready, at last, to do what had to be done. The Blackflower facility was much more than a holding pen for spacecraft and robot atmosphere dredgers. Away from the docks, the facility – more of an orbital city – boasted a population of more th
an four thousand Bandati, all employed in the extraction of helium three from the upper reaches of the gas giant called Dusk. Refineries, transport hubs and industrial complexes were woven around the docks and bays.

  Suddenly, without warning, a pulse of incandescent destructive energy radiated outwards from the derelict's skin. The vast steel ribs surrounding it tore apart in an instant in a stupendous flash of heat and energy. A large chunk of the facility's superstructure was destroyed in the process, leaving a gaping hole with the derelict at its dead centre.

  The derelict began to move, rapidly picking up speed and accelerating away from the ruins of the facility. The blast continued to ripple through the rest of the city's superstructure, shattering transport systems and sending large-scale pressurized habitats crashing into each other, their atmospheres spilling out into the vacuum.

  From the viewpoint of the very few survivors of this cataclysm, the derelict dwindled rapidly from sight, boosting out of Blackflower's gravity well, and towards Dusk's swirling clouds of hydrogen and helium. Dakota floated, loose-limbed, close to one curving wall of the garden-room. The vast bulk of Blackflower filled her mind's eye, the slow whirl of the moon gravity as the derelict accelerated away feeling like the insistent tugging of a child at its mother's sleeve.

  I just killed all those Bandati, Dakota thought. Everywhere I go, there's a trail of death, and I can't make any excuses for myself this time. I'm the one responsible – not the Freehold, the Uchidans or the Bandati. Nobody but me.

  She tried to tell herself it was better to lose a few thousand lives in order to get rid of the worst threat to life the galaxy had ever known, but her own words sounded just as ridiculous, just as hollow as she'd expected them to. The knowledge was an acid sensation in the pit of her stomach, and she had to struggle not to throw up.

  The old religions of Bellhaven came back to her, with their prophecies and prophets, stories and fables. Maybe, after she was long dead, she'd become one of those stories, a kind of warning to future generations – or more likely something to scare children with. Do what you're told, or Dakota Merrick will come and kill us all.