Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  Artificial organs were grown in situ – lungs, heart, kidneys and more, tweaked to at least superficially resemble those of a human being. The rebuilt nervous system was gradually hidden under a tide of growing flesh.

  And somewhere inside all of this, the Shoal-member known as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents died a very real death indeed.

  He awoke, insane and naked, light slanting through tall windows that touched a bare concrete floor. He gagged on dry air, his mind telling him he was drowning even while his newly constructed lungs drew air down into them in great heaving gasps. He twisted and screamed, unable to coordinate unfamiliar limbs, the chafing of dry dust against his skin almost more than he could take.

  He lay panting as sunlight crawled across the floor towards him, and tried desperately to comprehend the new sensations and feelings coming to him through unfamiliar sense organs.

  That he had died was a conclusion he would come to only in retrospect. There was so little left of Swimmer in Turbulent Currents in the travesty Trader had now made of him; and yet his memories of who and what he had been remained intact.

  Later – much, much later – he recalled the paradox of the ship that was repaired, piece by tiny piece, so many times that nothing of the original remained. It was the kind of endless circular argument best left to the young as to whether it was in fact still the same ship once every part of it had been replaced.

  And therein lay the greatest cruelty of all, that this dazzling expertise had been deployed to make sure that he would always remember what he had been – and the reason for his punishment.

  Somehow, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents staggered upright on two strange-feeling feet, only to collapse a moment later, writhing and screeching out his madness at the bare metal walls that echoed his own cries back at him.

  He was alone, utterly alone, bar the cameras he knew must be watching him, recording every appalling moment, documenting the tragic outcome for anyone suicidal enough to betray Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.

  The creature that had once been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents managed to crawl towards a half-open door, stumbling through it and into the burning light of a midday sun. It didn’t take much guesswork to realize he was now a long, long way away from the Te’So system.

  Far overhead, contrails cut a bluish-red sky in half, while a large orange sun burned its way down slowly towards a distant horizon. A nearby road cut across a desert expanse in the direction of low hills beyond, while in the other direction a distant glimmer suggested the shores of an ocean or lake.

  He crouched in the dirt, and saw that he had emerged from what appeared to be a warehouse – one of human design.

  He looked upwards and saw a vast planet overhead, entirely visible even in the daytime and far larger than the sun. He could actually see it moving, as if barely skirting the world on which he stood, and he wondered if he was about to be witness to some cataclysmic collision.

  And, in that moment, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents knew where he was: Corkscrew.

  Corkscrew was a Consortium world close to the outer limits of the sphere of influence permitted to humanity by the Shoal. The planet apparently bearing down on him was therefore Corkscrew’s co-orbital companion, Fullstop.

  Stable co-orbital worlds were extremely rare, and the only other example Swimmer had ever heard of was a pair of moons in humanity’s home system. Fullstop and Corkscrew effectively shared the exact same orbit around their parent star; and Fullstop, a smaller world with a faster orbit, caught up with Corkscrew every 287 days.

  As it now rushed towards the larger world, the combination of mutual gravitational attraction and momentum sent Fullstop swinging past the larger world, appearing from the point of view of any observer on Corkscrew’s surface to first approach dangerously close, before quickly receding as Fullstop then moved into a wider orbit before continuing on its way.

  The human culture on Corkscrew called this phenomenon ‘playing chicken’. They had a regular festival at the time of every close approach, making jokey fake sacrifices and generally acting the fool in the way only humans really could, like frightened monkeys hoping their screeching and dancing could mask the very real fear induced by the awesome sight of an entire planet bearing down on you at enormous speed.

  Swimmer could even make out certain man-made details on Fullstop’s surface, both worlds being habitable, and he could see clearly the glistening silvery blue of rivers, lakes and oceans, as the planet proceeded across the sky.

  He knelt in the sand and watched its passing until night fell and Fullstop finally began to recede into the distance. Then he crawled back inside the warehouse to sleep, collapsing in a heap on the bare dusty floor to spend his first night as a human – or at least as an approximation of one.

  His features twisted into a combination that he did not yet know was called a ‘smile’.

  Corkscrew! Of all the damnable luck.

  Somewhere on this very world, in a disused bunker left over from one of the intermittent feuds between the two worlds, was a faster-than-light yacht very much like the one he’d used to travel to the Te’So system. There were several such craft carefully hidden on worlds leased to client species, placed there with the help of those who had first helped him elicit his audience with the Emissaries.

  And any one of those hidden ships could take him anywhere in Shoal-controlled space he wanted to go, and further.

  But first, he had to reach that bunker – and somehow stay alive in the meantime.

  The smile stayed on his face even as he slept.

  The next day he found food and water that had obviously been left for him. Then he crawled and flopped around the warehouse as he slowly relearned the most basic skills of physical coordination. Somehow, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – or rather, the creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – relearned the art of living.

  Meanwhile, a growing desire for vengeance gave purpose to every faltering step and laboured breath.

  He soon discovered there were microscopic lenses everywhere, feeding continuous video into a central stack he found in a dusty, unlit basement. It was linked into a tach-net transceiver, the signal run through so many encrypted proxies that his chances of ever working out where the video feed was ultimately destined were nil. He destroyed the stack with a crowbar, screaming his fury all the while at the tiny glinting eyes that watched him from every corner and from every angle.

  Then, one day, he stumbled across video records of his re-speciation, hidden elsewhere in the warehouse and certainly intended to be found by him.

  He watched, trembling, as his previous form was reduced to a tangle of nerves and then rebuilt into something else entirely. He was at a loss to find any empathy with the creature on the screens before him, as its flesh was torn apart and raped. It was happening to somebody – no, something else. He was—

  He had to find himself a name. He was not, any longer, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents.

  That one was dead.

  He needed a human name – not that he was human, or Shoal either, for that matter. He was something different: a sentient being freed of the constrictions of the flesh into which it had been born. He was, he thought, a harbinger of some distant time when a species was merely something you were born into. For then there would only be intelligence moving between different forms at will.

  If Trader had sought to punish him by the half-forgotten art of Re-Speciation, then he – as yet nameless – might choose to develop it yet further, even to attain the level of an art form. If he could retrieve the FTL yacht secreted elsewhere on Corkscrew, he might yet be able to access the same historical records Trader’s surgeons had relied on to rebuild Swimmer – and then learn them for himself.

  His mind burgeoned with possibilities.

  But the creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents could get only so far without establishing an identity.

  He found a fat-wheeled multi-terrain vehicle stored in a basement garage, with en
ough power in its batteries to safely carry him all the way to Celeste, the largest settlement on Corkscrew. This vehicle also boasted a full tach-net link that supplied him with the name of the human who owned the warehouse and the surrounding land: a Celestial businessman by the name of Hugh Moss.

  Trader had almost certainly bribed this man Moss into leasing him the warehouse, no questions asked.

  Hugh Moss. It was as good a name as any. He would find the human, kill him, and take his identity.

  The creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents rolled the syllables around on his new tongue. He was slowly learning to speak, grunting and shouting sounds and learning to shape them with his mouth, throughout each day, as he prepared for his departure.

  And then, on his last day at the warehouse, he climbed into the vehicle’s cabin and studied himself in a mirror, the wide, round shape of his face.

  That could be changed. So much could be changed, through the simple expedient of surgery. He was like an unfinished canvas, a work of art that had not yet found its final form.

  But beyond that lay a far higher purpose.

  When he – Hugh Moss That Had Been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – finally found the means to wipe the Shoal out of existence, he wanted Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals to know exactly who had been responsible.

  And on that day, whether soon or at some distant point in the future, he would carve Trader’s flesh deep, and make him anew as he himself had been made anew.

  Trader would become Hugh Moss’s greatest work of art, a symphony in blood and bone.

  The tug detonated silently behind Moss as his field-bubble carried him further inside the entrance to a complex of caves running deep beneath the hills.

  The flicker of his field-bubble caught at the shadows of vast stalagmites as they raced by on either side. It carried him downwards, through a crack in the floor of the cave that was several metres in diameter. He plummeted, dropping another half a kilometre beneath the surface, before emerging at last into a shallow chamber. Automatic sensors picked up his bubble’s gravitational signature and responded by flooding the chamber with light.

  A Shoal FTL yacht filled much of the chamber, its interior heavily re-engineered to accommodate his human form.

  It was a lucky thing for the inhabitants of Night’s End that he was not truly dead, for upon his demise the yacht was programmed to launch itself straight into the heart of the nearest star and destroy it and every living thing its light gave life to. It was the ace up Moss’s sleeve, his final fuck-you gesture to any civilization that had the temerity to let him die within its borders.

  This yacht was a weapon that could start wars – or end them.

  Fourteen

  A few days after she had destroyed the derelict, Dakota became aware that the pulse-ship had finally stopped decelerating.

  Her wrists chained together, Days of Wine and Roses had dragged her to a long, narrow store-room filled with pipes that hummed and throbbed constantly. And there she had been abandoned in dim blue light with nothing to do but stare at the walls.

  The pipes surrounding her alternated between freezing cold and scalding hot, so, at an educated guess, Dakota figured they were part of a heat-exchange system. She could only cat-nap here; the room was so narrow that whenever she shifted in her sleep, she ran the risk of either scalding or freezing herself, depending on which pipe she landed up against. Not that sleep appeared that likely or even possible.

  But, in the end, sleep she did.

  Without the derelict to process information in and out of her skull, she was as deaf and dumb as any unaugmented human. The programmed structures the Librarians had loaded into her implants back in Nova Arctis had become unresponsive, as useless as a radio receiver on a world devoid of transmitters.

  An anonymous Bandati warrior came in on the second day and left her a bottle of water and a small bag filled with some kind of dry grain that proved edible, if far from filling. It took some effort to hold the bottle two-handed and drink from it without spilling any. As for the grain, she had to lift the small fabric bag containing it up to her face in her two bound hands and lick its contents out as best she could.

  Because of her captivity, Dakota never got to witness the pulse-ship’s rendezvous with the coreship, but she had to endure the final stage of deceleration without the benefit of a gel-chair. This time, at least, the deceleration was relatively gentle. Nor had she been able to witness their descent towards an entry port on the coreship’s surface, or the surprise attack by a fleet of Immortal Light ships that had been waiting there for them.

  But, as she became weightless, she knew they’d reached the end of their journey. And when a series of detonations shook the hull, it was clear they were under attack.

  One of the detonations occurred near enough to where she was locked up to leave her ears full of a high-singing resonance. She coughed, tasting blood in her mouth after banging her head on one of the pipes.

  Other sounds were muffled at first, but they grew sharper over the next several seconds. She suddenly realized that the store-room door was buckled and damaged, letting in a single narrow sliver of light where the upper edge of the door no longer met the frame. In the zero gravity, pieces of grain bounced around the room, along with the water bottle, which she had peed in after drinking its contents. She batted it away in disgust.

  A distant whistle slowly rose to a roaring crescendo as her lungs sucked in the rapidly diminishing air. Her filmsuit activated in response, spreading itself out beneath her clothes. She tested the door and it shifted slightly; she slammed the heels of her fists against it a couple of times, but it wouldn’t budge any further.

  The room was small enough for her to brace her back against the wall opposite the door and use her right foot to kick out hard at it. But that proved harder than expected in the zero gee, and it took her several attempts to find exactly the right position in which to hammer most effectively at the door with the heels of both feet in turn.

  The door shifted again, just a little. The air beyond it seemed filled with a rushing sound like a tornado. She kept working away at it, slamming her foot into the door repeatedly and swearing with sheer frustration.

  This is not how it fucking well ends, she told herself.

  The door suddenly swung open and a Bandati, also coated in filmsuit black, reached in and grabbed her by one arm, pulling her outside.

  The store-room adjoined what looked like an observation suite where screens arranged around most of the walls of a hexagonal area displayed a series of exterior views. Dakota glanced quickly around them, seeing the rapidly expanding limb of the coreship rushing towards them, and tiny points of brilliance that darted through the surrounding vacuum like fireflies skating on pitch-black ice.

  As she watched, something enormous and black moved across the face of the coreship, filling first one screen and then another and yet another in its passing, its gently curving hull bristling with phase-cannons and mine-launchers.

  The Bandati who’d dragged her out of the locker still maintained a tight grip on her as he pushed them both towards an exit, though himself clearly fighting against the venting atmosphere. She could see where they were heading when a shaped field snapped on over the room’s exit, presumably to localize the loss of air.

  She could see further Bandati on the other side of the same field, apparently waiting for them. She looked behind her to see a thin rent in one bulkhead, and realized something was trying to drill in through the hull. She glimpsed whirring blades and lasers cutting through the metal, peeling the ship open like a tin can.

  A moment later the shaped-field barrier shut down. She grabbed hold of a ring set into the wall next to the exit and realized there had in fact been two force fields in operation, the one that had just snapped off and another one set half a metre further inside the short connecting tube between the viewing chamber and the next room along.

  Her rescuer dragged her inside the exit, whereupon the first sh
aped field snapped back on, and the second shut down. These two fields together acted as an airlock.

  She soon recognized Days of Wine and Roses from the pattern of scars on his wings. He clicked at the two Bandati who had been waiting there beside him, and in response they started roughly pushing Dakota along a wide, curving corridor beyond. She protested loudly at this treatment, but either their interpreters weren’t switched on or they simply weren’t listening to her.

  At last they arrived in a room not unlike the observation suite. Further displays showed the pulse-ship undergoing a rapid descent into the coreship’s interior, the dense walls of the Shoal starship’s outer crust sliding rapidly by. Then these were gone, and the pulse-ship entered the coreship’s outermost inhabited layer, falling away from a simulated sky towards the docking cradle where they would finally come to rest.

  The deck beneath them juddered, and a red light began flashing next to a hull panel. Seconds later, a series of explosive bolts sent that part of the hull tumbling outwards. Beyond was the curving artificial sky of the coreship, and with it came the welcome scent of rain.

  She caught a glimpse of another ship, clearly of Bandati origin, sitting on a neighbouring cradle a kilometre or so distant that appeared to be the focus of a major fire-fight. The air was filled with the sounds of explosions and the flash of beam weapons.

  Several small but powerful arms grabbed hold of different parts of Dakota’s anatomy.

  ‘No, you’re not going to . . .’ she yelled, the words trailing off into a scream as she was carried out through the open port and into the empty air beyond. At first the two Bandati supporting her on either side dropped like stones, but they quickly levelled off, gliding towards the neighbouring ship but gradually coasting lower.