Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  But that memory slipped her mental grasp like a wet eel.

  The harder she tried to remember, the more her frustration grew. Dakota pulled herself up onto her knees and hugged herself, fighting the lethargy that threatened to overwhelm her.

  She closed her eyes, willing the black, protective liquid of the filmsuit to spill from her pores and swallow her completely . . .

  She opened her eyes again and saw only her bruised and battered flesh.

  It’s not working.

  Panic bloomed amid the fug surrounding her mental processes.

  While she’d lain staring outwards, lost in this internal struggle, a Bandati had come to a spiralling landing on the large platform situated immediately below her cell.

  The alien appeared entirely oblivious to her watchful presence, skidding to a halt near a two-storey building mounted towards the rear of the ledge. That building looked like it had been built from random pieces of driftwood and scrap metal, and as she watched, the Bandati lumbered through an entrance hidden from Dakota’s view.

  She tried to give a yell, hoping to draw it back outside, but all that emerged from her throat was a hoarse rattling sound.

  She tried again, and this time the words came. She felt like she hadn’t spoken aloud in a month. ‘Hey! Hey, up here!’ she hollered. ‘Hey! Help, heeelp!’

  There was no response, and the Bandati did not re-emerge.

  She kept yelling for a couple of minutes, finally giving up when her throat started to hurt.

  She waited there as dusk slid into night, waiting to see if the Bandati would come back out. It never did.

  Dakota finally gave up peering below and sat up, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as the gradual drop in temperature made her naked skin prickle. As unfamiliar constellations spread across the bowl of the sky, there appeared to be no moon.

  Despite her earlier fatigue, sleep proved elusive, so she slumped against the side of the wall-opening and turned her attention to the striated exterior surface of the tower right beside her. Reaching out and stroking it, she found the surface of the tower appeared to be encircled with thick grooves in something that might form a spiral pattern, the texture not unlike that of unfired clay. These grooves were aligned several centimetres apart – and sometimes cut as much as five centimetres deep, thus providing a decent handhold.

  She leaned out, staring back down at the platform below, which seemed so close and yet so far away. Even if she had the strength to climb down without getting herself killed, she really wasn’t sure she had the courage.

  She reached out one hand again to the tower’s external surface. It felt solid enough beneath her grip.

  Dakota woke long before dawn.

  She had curled up near the door-opening, staring out at the lit-up towers and the blimps that sometimes moved purposefully between them. Her emotions wavered between nervous tension and loneliness, while her thoughts ranged from vague fantasies of escape to outright despair.

  She rubbed at the stubbly dark fuzz on her scalp, while sorting through the random memories that had somehow found their way back to her.

  She’d encountered Bandati before, but usually only from a distance. Her gut feeling told her it had been at least a couple of weeks since she’d come to this place, maybe as much as a month, judging by how much her hair had managed to grow back in. How or even why remained frustratingly just out of reach. She couldn’t even be sure she had been conscious for much of that time.

  A deepening, overwhelming hunger had been slowly gnawing at her gut ever since she’d recovered consciousness, and she had to fight the notion that she’d been deliberately left here to starve.

  Whenever a Bandati, gliding from tower platform to tower platform, looked like it might pass within hearing range she had shouted to it until her throat was raw, yet all such efforts came to nothing. And as the night drew closer to dawn, true despair broached the last of her fragile mental defences, dragging her into a depression far deeper than the shadows filling her cell.

  She awoke once again, sore, thirsty and assailed by a growing hunger. Her attempts at sleep had been bedevilled by migraine headaches that felt like an army of tiny devils shod in white-hot boots were dancing around the inside of her skull. She squinted into the bright sunlight that slammed through the door-opening. Hunger was one thing, but she knew she’d die if she didn’t drink some water before long. She turned to examine the rear end of her cell, where the light now fell on it, and noticed something that had escaped her in the darkness of the night: a short pipe that extended from the far wall.

  She hesitated momentarily, experiencing another flash of déjà vu, then scrambled over to find a short, flexible, segmented nozzle located about half a metre above the floor. And because it was the same colour as the rest of the cell, it had been that much harder to see. She squeezed the tip of the nozzle and a clear, jelly-like substance began to leak out.

  She rubbed this oily substance between her fingers, and raised it to her nostrils to find it had no discernible odour.

  The sense of déjà vu refused to go away, except now it was accompanied by a sense of imminent danger. She touched the clear substance to her tongue regardless.

  It tasted like the most wonderful thing in the world.

  Her hunger reasserted itself with overwhelming force. She pressed the palms of both hands against the wall on either side of the nozzle, used her tongue to manoeuvre it into her mouth and began to suck hard.

  It tasted of golden fields of hay. It tasted of fine beer and roasted meat and thick, creamy desserts prepared by master chefs working from secret books of recipes passed down from generation to generation in a family of culinary geniuses. It tasted of the first time she’d eaten cold soya cream as a child after waking up from a bad dream.

  It tasted of sunlight, and warm summer nights, and everything that had been good in her life – at least while life had been good.

  She let the nozzle slip from her mouth some indeterminate time later, now numbed by the overwhelming sensual pleasure of the liquid ambrosia. She wondered what would happen once it had worked its way through her digestive system. Presumably she’d just pee it.

  Thinking about this, she looked around her cell. Things, she realized, could get unpleasant very quickly indeed. Or maybe they just expected her to take a leak out the door?

  There was something important about that pipe she had to remember – except she’d never seen it before.

  Or had she?

  Suddenly she wasn’t so sure one way or another.

  Whatever magical potion of nutrients and narcotics she’d just ingested, Dakota began to feel sleepy – a comforting, gold-tinged fatigue that made her want to curl up on the floor and sleep for a thousand thousand nights . . .

  Two

  At the culmination of his long investigation, the Bandati agent known as ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ found himself on Iron-bloom, the primary planetary settlement in the Night’s End system, waiting outside an establishment that – to any ignorant eye – appeared to be little more than a cave mouth from which issued a particularly odoriferous stench.

  The establishment, a human-owned restaurant of considerable notoriety, was located high on the slopes of Mount Umami, and overlooked the city of Darkwater. The remote location was necessary, of course, for the sake of public propriety and decency.

  Close by were tethered a few passenger blimps – cylindrical bundles of balloons laced together, with wide vane-sails projecting from around their circumferences and multi-tiered gondolas suspended beneath. The air at this altitude was simply too thin for most Bandati to be able to fly very far. A younger, fitter Bandati might manage to hop and glide here and there for a short while, but in most cases the only way to and from the restaurant was on board one of the blimps.

  Remembrance, on the other hand, had arrived aboard an Immortal Light war-dirigible, along with a squadron made up from the Queen of Immortal Light’s personal security contingent.

  Having
finally picked up the trail of the fugitive called Alexander Bourdain, members of that same security contingent were busy interrogating a couple of horrified Bandati who had emerged from the cave only to find themselves in the middle of a raid.

  Immediately beyond and on either side of the cave entrance stretched a wide, flat ledge of smooth and carefully polished rock. Two heavy-duty artillery platforms bristling with beam weapons were mounted at either end of it, both of them pointing outwards, providing the kind of security the restaurant’s clientele apparently expected; yet the Bandati mercenaries who had been manning those same platforms had been suspiciously quick to surrender without a fight, once they realized the raid was being carried out on the orders of their Queen.

  A low steel railing marked the rim of the ledge, and beyond it lay a vertiginous drop – and a spectacular view of Darkwater. Immortal Light had been granted the contract to settle Iron-bloom, over and above the wishes of his own Hive many millennia earlier. If history had turned out just a little bit different, this might have been his home.

  Remembrance lifted his body up on narrow, dark limbs and peered over the railing, finding pleasure in the chill breeze that lifted his wings. He looked down into an intricate weave of glistening Hive Towers whose peaks stabbed upwards through a thick, soupy atmosphere so remarkably like that of the Bandati home world that it made him long to visit there once more. Even on those worlds possessing air breathable by his species, the atmosphere was either too thin to support flight for his kind, or the gravity level was too high. Night’s End, however, was very much the exception to the rule.

  He turned to see that a spindle-leg had perched on the railing nearby. It resembled nothing so much as a miniature Terran elephant on stilts – Remembrance had once seen an actual elephant on one of his several diplomatic missions to Earth, although that particular one had certainly lacked stilts. The spindle-leg’s eyes were mounted, also in a distinctly un-elephantine fashion, on the end of its trunk, although proboscis might have been a more accurate term for that startling appendage.

  Two large clown eyes gazed stupidly at Remembrance until he buzzed his wings in annoyance, and the ungainly looking creature leapt onto an outcrop just below the railing, in the way a real elephant – with or without stilts – never would.

  Remembrance glanced up as another Bandati dropped down from the war-dirigible’s gondola, then skittered to a hard landing nearby.

  Remembrance immediately recognized ‘Scent of Honeydew, Distant Rumble of Summer Storms’, and greeted him with a formal snap of his own wings.

  ‘I see you’re familiarizing yourself with the mountain wildlife,’ Honeydew clicked, picking himself up and approaching. ‘Strange-looking critters, even to me. And I was born here.’

  ‘I’ve seen stranger,’ Remembrance replied. ‘You got the message, then?’

  Like Remembrance of Things Past, Honeydew wore a weapons harness fastened around his upper body, crossing over twice diagonally from each shoulder to opposite waist. The harness featured several sealed pockets and loops holding a shotgun and a smaller pistol, the former secured sideways across the back below the wing-muscles and the latter to one side at the front.

  Honeydew was Chief of Security for Darkwater, and had been partnered with Remembrance for the duration of a long cross-Hive investigation into Alexander Bourdain’s smuggling activities.

  Honeydew nodded towards the cave entrance. ‘Who gave you authorization for this raid?’

  ‘I didn’t request any,’ Remembrance replied immediately. ‘It takes too long.’

  Honeydew’s wings twitched in annoyance. ‘And just how sure are you that Bourdain is in there?’

  ‘Very sure indeed.’

  ‘You should know there’s a storm of shit going on down there because of your actions.’ Honeydew waved towards the city far below. ‘First you track Bourdain on your own time without telling me, then call in a raid you don’t have the authorization for. All this without providing any evidence that Bourdain is even still on Iron-bloom at all. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re going to be in if you’ve got this wrong? We’re talking a major diplomatic incident – with yourself firmly in the spotlight.’

  ‘I appreciate the warning,’ Remembrance replied drily, watching as Honeydew’s wings twitched yet more angrily.

  ‘All right, it’s your call, then,’ Honeydew finally relented. ‘The security services for two Hives trying to track down one single human together couldn’t find him, but you track him down all on your own. So tell me, how did you do it?’

  I infiltrated your own Hive’s internal security databases, Remembrance almost confessed, and found everything I needed in the last place I expected. There were levels of corruption within Immortal Light’s administration that even he couldn’t have anticipated.

  ‘Look, we can talk about this later,’ Remembrance parried. ‘I have the direct authority of my own Queen, and that’s enough. You know from my reputation that I’d never call in a raid without extraordinarily good reasons.’

  Honeydew looked less than convinced. ‘You still don’t have the jurisdiction to go pulling stunts like this. I’d rather—’

  ‘Listen, someone somewhere inside your Hive has been keeping Bourdain under cover and well out of sight. That’s exactly how he’s been staying ahead of us. And that means somebody on the inside of your own security service is working against you,’ Remembrance continued patiently. ‘If I’d done things the usual way – the approved way – we’d have lost him again, so I called in a raid using my own authority—’

  And didn’t bother to tell me until it was already under way?’

  ‘—since your chain of command is compromised, as I just explained. So here’s what we do: we go in now, grab Bourdain -and then maybe we’ll have the last link in the smuggling chain.’

  Honeydew buzzed his wings in indecision. ‘If he isn’t there, you’ll be at the mercy of our Hive, and even your precious Queen of Darkening Skies won’t be able to do a damn thing to help you.’

  ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ Remembrance snapped, ‘and save the threats until later, okay?’ He reached up and pulled his shotgun loose, then held it close against his chest. Honeydew fixed his gaze on the shotgun barrel for a moment, then drew his own. ‘You are aware, I hope, of the precise nature of the establishment we’re about to enter?’

  Remembrance of Things Past glanced towards the cave entrance. Apart from the polished stone floor of the ledge beyond, little had been done to alter its natural appearance: just a rough-edged, eight-metre-tall crack in the side of the mountain, wide enough at its base for several Bandati to enter side by side.

  Uncultivated wild scrub grew on the rising slopes above the cave entrance, immediately over which an enormous sign of glowing multicoloured tubes had been constructed: a crude animation of monstrous jaws alternately opening and closing on a crowd of helpless – but clearly human – diners.

  ‘It’s a public eating establishment,’ Remembrance replied, with a world-weariness that spoke of a lifetime of having seen all too much. ‘A restaurant, as the human vernacular has it.’

  Such public consumption of food was taboo within the Bandati culture, and only the most offensively perverted of their species gathered together in order to practise it. Remembrance had become aware that the restaurant’s human owners were discreetly servicing an exclusive Bandati clientele that greatly valued their privacy.

  ‘I’ve raided places like this before, Honeydew.’ He glanced up at the sign above the cave entrance. ‘Mind you, actually advertising it this way . . . that’s got to be a slap in the face for common decency, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s called The Maw,’ Honeydew explained.

  Remembrance stared back at him in incomprehension.

  ‘It’s become quite famous,’ Honeydew continued. ‘The owners are proponents of what they call “extreme dining”.’ Raising his shotgun for a moment, he added, ‘Believe me, it’s not the place to start a fire-fight.’r />
  All I know about it is that it’s a place of public eating, designed for other species.’

  ‘By my Queen’s sphincter, all this time on Ironbloom and you don’t. . .’ Honey dew’s wings flickered in exasperation. ‘Listen, the restaurant is a living organism, a maul-worm. Its body extends deep inside the caves that riddle the mountainside. It adheres very closely to the curves and contours of those caves. The inside of a maul-worm is basically a miniature ecosystem in its own right, and dozens of other species have taken up residence there. For the most part, the worms live a long time. They hardly ever move unless provoked, and they reproduce maybe once a century. The restaurant is located inside the worm and, if Bourdain is really here, that’s where you and I need to go too.’

  ‘Bourdain,’ Remembrance echoed, ‘inside a monster’s gullet?’

  ‘A monster which, if provoked, will rapidly close up and consume every living thing currently inside it,’ Honeydew concluded. ‘Which means anyone and everything entering it has to do so extremely slowly, quietly and carefully’

  Remembrance glanced towards the mounted gun turrets, once he realized Honeydew was not, in fact, joking. He suddenly understood the real reason for the defences.

  ‘The turrets . . . ?’

  ‘One grenade tossed just outside the entrance would be enough to trigger a deadly gustatory reaction,’ Honeydew affirmed. ‘You can sometimes see the creature’s internal gullet-tentacles snatching at the smaller organisms it plays host to. Not,’ Honeydew added hastily, ‘that this has ever presented a problem to larger-bodied organisms such as ourselves. The artillery is there to safeguard it from attack.’

  Suspicion, mixed with horror, bloomed in Remembrance’s mind. ‘So you’ve gone in there before?’

  ‘Don’t start making any accusations. Yes, my work means I’ve had to deal with the human owners here. They have to provide us with reassurance that they won’t admit any Bandati clientele.’

  ‘They’re lying, then.’

  ‘Of course they are. They’re aliens, and their ways are not ours. But I know this mountain well – younger Bandati still like to blimp up here just to jump from the highest points, and then try and free- fall all the way down to the city.’ Honey dew spoke with undisguised nostalgia. ‘All extremely dangerous, of course.’