Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  She had been here before, many times. How could she have forgotten? She—

  The food-pipe, she realized. The ambrosia.

  Then, at last, she caught sight of Lucas Corso.

  He was bound, naked and helpless, to another gurney several metres away, almost unrecognizable without his hair and eyebrows. She could see that his gurney rested on bare metal wheels. Between the two of them were perhaps half a dozen Bandati, looking more like hallucinogenically inspired rag dolls up-close than actual living creatures. Their mouth-parts clicked busily, their wide, iridescent wings twitching and flapping as they spoke, filling the air with a sound like flags whipping in a strong wind.

  They were surrounded by low walls, entirely open to the air, except that a series of translucent panels topping these walls were angled outwards. As Dakota watched, these panels began to fold inwards, like the leaves of a lotus flower closing for the night.

  More and more memories flooded back.

  The Bandati had been holding them prisoner for weeks (she had a sudden flash of something burning its way through the Piri Reis’s hull as they waited for rescue). They’d been brought here before to be questioned – and, more often than not, tortured.

  And yet the ambrosia swept those memories away every time. ‘Lucas!’

  Corso blinked and peered towards her, his eyes glassy. She guessed he was taking longer to shake off the effect of the ambrosia.

  He worked his jaw for a moment as if he’d briefly forgotten how to form words. ‘I thought maybe you were dead,’ he called over. ‘I—’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m all right, Lucas.’ She realized she was crying, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Don’t eat the ambrosia!’ she screamed.

  He shook his head with an expression of befuddlement. ‘The what?’

  ‘Do you hear me? The pipe in the wall! Don’t go near it!’

  ‘The . . .’ His gaze drifted away, as if he was fighting the urge to fall asleep. One of the Bandati approached her gurney, its complex mouth-parts snapping together to produce a series of rapid, complicated-sounding clicks she couldn’t even hope to comprehend. After a moment her interrogator raised a small, snub-nosed object in one wiry, black arm and pressed it firmly against her forehead.

  The effect only lasted for an instant, but it felt like the worst pain in the world, as if hot lava had been poured onto every nerve ending in her body. She screamed, her body bucking and twisting under its restraints, trying to twist away from the source of that terrible agony.

  The Bandati that held the device reached out with one wiry black hand, and appeared to touch the air at a midpoint between them. Dakota noticed a tiny object like a coloured bead hanging there, suspended in the air. It moved slightly from side to side, and she realized with a start that the bead was keeping pace with the movements of her interrogator’s head as if attached by an invisibly fine wire.

  At the Bandati’s gesture, the bead began to glow softly. Dakota suddenly recalled that the bead was a translation device, but apparently not a very effective one.

  The Bandati made another gesture and the bead changed colour, now glowing a bright, fiery orange. A moment later the torturer’s mouth-parts began to rattle and click once more. Simultaneously, words – recognizably human words – emerged from a point midway between Dakota and her interrogator, generated by the bead. The accent was harsh, machine-like, making it hard to distinguish one word from another.

  ‘—silence. To speak not speak when questioned. Questioning/enquiring/interrogative point of origin? Response.’

  The creature’s mouth parts stopped clicking and the simultaneous translation ceased. The words had been garbled nonsense.

  ‘Questioned/Responding?’ The Bandati asked again, its own rapid clicks providing a percussive backdrop to the bead’s machine voice. ‘Answer? Again.’

  ‘I . . .’ Dakota licked her lips, and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Dakota’s interrogator regarded her silently. A fresh torrent of clicks poured out from the bead, and she guessed they were her own words translated into the Bandati’s language.

  To Dakota’s surprise, as the clicks poured forth, a rich variety of scents briefly filled the air between them, making Dakota think of dying flowers and oiled copper. She now vaguely recalled that the Bandati employed scent glands in some parts of their communication.

  The interrogator reached out to the levitating bead and it changed in hue once more. The creature clicked more rapidly and, she imagined, more angrily.

  ‘Understanding now?’

  Dakota nodded. ‘Maybe. Yes.’

  ‘Dakota Merrick. Your theft. From us, of thing stolen-was-ours. Skin of darkness.’

  It was getting hard to think, now her initial rush of adrenalin was beginning to fade. The drugs they’d fed her with were once again tugging her thoughts towards oblivion.

  Then she realized it was talking about the filmsuit.

  All she had to do was close her eyes, and the filmsuit would—

  Fresh pain burned every nerve-ending in her body.

  ‘Do not do that, Dakota Merrick.’

  She twisted within her restraints once more, catching sight of the matt black of her activated filmsuit slithering across her bare skin, retreating back into her navel and sliding back between her thighs from where it had briefly emerged like night-stained mercury. She tasted its kiss as it slithered past her lips and back down her throat.

  Back in her cell, when her filmsuit had failed to activate on her mental command, she’d wondered if the skeletal implants responsible for generating it had somehow been removed from her body without her knowledge.

  It’s still there, she realized, even through the pain. But why hadn’t it worked that previous time? For a moment salvation had seemed so very close at hand, but her Bandati interrogator had somehow reversed the filmsuit’s progress.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she mumbled, a deep core of bitter anger rising past the terror and pain. ‘Fuck you and your questions. I came here on board a ship. Where is it? Where is it?’ she yelled.

  ‘We wish to know everything about the starship. It is not human. It is not Bandati. It is not Shoal, yet it travels between the stars.’

  She spat straight into the creature’s face. Probably the creature had no idea of the significance of the gesture, but for a very brief moment the action made her feel better.

  When it lowered the pain-inductor to her forehead once more, she guessed it probably had a pretty good idea what her gesture had meant after all.

  The next time she opened her eyes, she was back in her cell.

  Fat raindrops pitter-pattered on the protruding lip beyond the door-opening as a fresh migraine assaulted her like something trying to tear its way out through her skull. She clutched at her depilated scalp, her fear made all the worse for not knowing what was happening to her until, following long hours of agony, the pain began to subside. After a while, merciful sleep stole her away again.

  She woke to notice a pipe sticking out of the inner wall. She rubbed the viscous liquid between her fingers and touched it to her lips. An overwhelming hunger made her . . .

  She gripped the pipe in her trembling hands and felt a deep, instinctive terror.

  Ambrosia.

  Where had that word come from?

  Dakota pushed herself back over to the far side of the cell and crouched on her haunches next to the door-opening, staring hungrily at the pipe, knowing it was her one and only source of sustenance.

  If there was any one thing she could remember from her past life, it was the value of trusting her instincts.

  Time passed with excruciating slowness and select memories began to return to her; and with them came snatches of what had happened to her at the bottom of a deep, sunlit shaft.

  Her hunger and thirst became worse. Yet she couldn’t rid herself of the terror that if she drank from the pipe, she would once again find herself back in that sunlit shaft. So she spent all her time hunkered down on the h
ard metal floor next to the door-opening, staring outside as the sun moved across the sky.

  Her thoughts became clearer.

  After some indeterminate amount of time had passed, she turned her back on the city and carefully lowered herself over one side of the lip that extended beyond the only entrance. She pushed her bare toes into the deep grooves of the tower’s wall, breathing hard, gripping handholds tightly.

  Her breasts chafed against the edge of the metal lip, but she managed to cling on for a minute or two before pulling herself back in to safety, gasping and trembling from the effort. She’d become weak for lack of exercise, and the lack of food or water wasn’t helping any either.

  More headaches assailed her, each worse than the last. She whined like a kicked dog, curling herself up against the frame of the door as the evening drew on until a fitful sleep mercifully stole her away. She dreamed she was lost in some vast, depopulated metropolis, whose echoing streets felt so recently abandoned she could still hear the lingering voices of those who had once dwelled there.

  She opened her eyes to warm rain drizzling down between the multiple towers. She crawled back out onto the lip, heedless of the sheer drop beyond, and caught the rainwater in her cupped hands, drinking it until her thirst was slaked. When she had swallowed enough, she caught more and used it to wash the grease from her skin, rubbing at her flesh with wet hands until it grew red from the friction.

  Her dream of a city had not, in fact, been a dream, she now realized.

  She recognized it as a tenuous contact with the derelict starship; the city streets she’d explored had been taken from its memory stacks. They were nothing more than the long-dead dreams of fallen empires, and yet she felt a powerful nostalgia for them, as if the experience of interacting with the starship’s virtual worlds were more real than the here and now. More days passed, and even as her strength failed, so Dakota’s ability to communicate with the derelict starship grew. Her mind was carried far from the terrible racking agonies of her body whenever she slept.

  The derelict meanwhile tapped into databases located throughout the tower within which she was trapped, and began to feed her details concerning her whereabouts. She discovered she was in a Bandati-controlled system called Night’s End. The particular world she found herself on was Ironbloom, and the towers that surrounded her formed the city of Darkwater.

  She felt the derelict – so immensely more powerful than she’d previously realized – slowly extend its influence throughout the planet’s interconnected communications systems, like a virus subverting a living body to its own dark purpose. She discovered that the derelict was being held in an orbital facility, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in another part of the Night’s End system. She saw great swirls of cloud through the derelict’s senses, the surface of a gas giant seen from close up: clearly the facility orbited one of its moons. She witnessed Bandati engineers attempting to penetrate the derelict’s outer hull, with limited success.

  Even in sleep, she started in surprise when she discovered the Piri Reis was there as well, held within the same facility.

  When she woke the next day, Dakota realized with some considerable shock that she was no longer alone in her cell.

  A figure crouched in the corner, near the ambrosia-pipe. She rolled up onto her knees, heart hammering. She couldn’t make out the intruder’s face at first.

  Then the figure stood up and came into the light, moving with an uncertain gait. He stood as if trying to hide his nakedness from her. She studied the square jaw, too-wide nose, and permanently furrowed eyebrows that looked as if their owner had been born worrying.

  ‘Lucas?’

  Four

  Several days after his narrow escape from Immortal Light’s treacherous security forces – not to mention nearly being eaten by a very angry giant worm – Remembrance of Things Past found himself in the outermost part of the Night’s End system, on board a Shoal coreship that had recently arrived there on a scheduled stopover.

  As coreships went, it was far from the largest, measuring a mere one hundred and sixty-five kilometres around its equator. It was large enough, however, to produce powerful gravitic ripples that gave away its location to monitoring systems spread throughout the system. The coreship’s total population – a mixture of Bandati, humans and a few other species, some of them sequestered according to the Shoal’s complex rules regarding inter-species contact – barely numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

  Remembrance had been lifted, barely conscious, from an Immortal Light war-dirigible by an extraction team put together under the express directions of the Queen of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk. He had subsequently been bundled into a human-owned but unmanned cargo ship that attained orbit less than one-tenth of a solar rev later.

  Casualties during the extraction had fortunately been light: one member of the extraction team had been killed, while another had been seriously wounded by incendiaries, losing a wing and thus scheduled to spend considerable time in medical care until it could be regrown.

  Remembrance himself had been put into a drug-induced coma before being placed inside a cramped transport pod packed with pale crimson ona leaves officially destined for the atmosphere-gardens and helium-refineries of the outer system. Flexible polyurethane-coated cables held him safe during the high-gee liftoff.

  Once safely inside the coreship, he was removed from the pod by the Queen of Darkening Skies’ personal team of physicians. They carefully unbound his wings, then cycled chemical neurosuppressors out of his bloodstream while he remained comatose. By this point the injuries he’d sustained in the last hours of his mission were almost entirely healed, with the help of forced-acceleration cell-probes injected into his vascular system.

  When Remembrance finally woke, he found himself in shipboard quarters with pale dappled walls, which exuded a constantly cycling series of scents that filled him with a nostalgic longing for home. He soon discovered that he was aboard the royal yacht of the Hive of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk, itself carried deep beneath the coreship’s crust.

  The yacht – his Queen’s flagship – was a three-hundred-metre-long rapid-orbit cruiser equipped with field-based defensive systems that appeared to all but the most aggressive intrusion systems to be only lightly armed, with a pair of external force-cannons mounted fore and aft. The yacht sat in its own cradle beneath the pillar-supported outer crust of the coreship, in a field-walled chamber more than a dozen kilometres wide and whose atmosphere and gravity matched that of the Bandati home-world. Beyond lay more chambers tailored to the specific needs and requirements of others of the Shoal’s client-species.

  For a few moments, he had thought he might be far away from the Night’s End system.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re still there, my dear Remembrance,’ he was informed by Wind Sighing Through Leaves, the Senior Court Physician and one of the Queen’s most trusted advisers. ‘We will probably remain here for several revs, local measure.’

  Wind Sighing was dressed formally, the tips of his wings decorated with a hair-thin filigree currently fashionable in many Bandati royal courts. Semi-translucent streamers were attached to this filigree, their length an indication of the wearer’s real or perceived standing within a court. The physician stared down at him from his ceiling perch, the longest streamers trailing right down to the floor and wafting gently each time his wings flexed.

  ‘I see. Thank you, Physician,’ Remembrance replied as medical technicians fussed around him, removing the last of his support straps and medical monitoring devices. ‘How much longer do I have to stay here?’

  ‘Not much longer,’ Wind Sighing replied, dropping down to the floor. There was a sniffiness to his chittering. ‘You’re entirely healthy; all systems optimal, as they say. However, the Queen has requested that you attend a . . . a private audience immediately on recovering consciousness.’ The physician produced a tiny bottle, containing the scent Remembrance had requested. ‘Here you are.’

  Remembrance acc
epted it, discerning a reason for the Physician’s sudden chilliness. Normally the Queen’s most trusted advisers – who of course included Wind Sighing – would be present during any debriefing, in order to offer comment and suggestions. But something in the Physician’s manner suggested whatever the Queen now had to say to Remembrance required absolute secrecy – without the presence even of her most trusted courtiers.

  Remembrance now stood up for the first time in days, while wall-mounted monitors painted images of his internal organs in the form of a multi coloured kaleidoscope that blurred as he moved. A technician entered and unbandaged his wings. He flexed them carefully, feeling a rush of sensation as he spread them, twisting his head round to see the scars where fire and bullets had ripped through fragile, coloured flesh. The iridescent lines patterning his wings were discoloured where the flesh had recently healed.

  ‘A word of caution before your audience, Remembrance,’ the Physician asked. ‘It has been . . . some time since you spoke with her.’

  ‘I’m sure things haven’t changed so much in the Court since then.’

  ‘No – but you have. I wished to ask a question concerning your current name-scent. I believe you came by it during your ambassadorial duties in the Consortium?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s certainly exotic, but . . . I don’t quite understand it. How exactly do you represent it in words?’

  The description a scent might gain when transcribed into written form could be a matter of some artistic licence; scent-based communication was one of the few racial characteristics that had endured through the turbulent centuries of the Bandati’s Grand Reformation, several millennia before.

  ‘My spoken name is “Remembrance of Things Past”. Do you find it inappropriate?’

  ‘Not at all,’ the Physician replied. ‘As I say, it’s . . . well, distinctive.’