Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  ‘You mean the Maker caches,’ Dakota replied, regarding Trader with a stony expression. ‘And you know about those now?’

  ‘We do,’ said Roses, ‘now that Trader has done us the favour of enlightening us. We realized the Shoal were looking for something, so as we settled each new system we explored the neighbouring region of space in case we could discover just what it was they were looking for.’

  ‘And what you found was another derelict Magi starship?’ Dakota said into the silence that followed.

  ‘Barely three and a half light-years from here, in a system known as Ocean’s Deep,’ the Queen picked up the thread once more. ‘Unfortunately, that ship has proved overwhelmingly resistant to our attempts to breach it over the intervening millennia.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Dakota, pulling herself to her feet. Nobody made a move to push her back down. ‘You had your hands on a derelict for thousands of years and you didn’t manage to get inside it?’

  Shit, she thought. No wonder Immortal Light had reacted that way when she and Corso appeared out of nowhere, with another, identical, starship.

  ‘We believe Immortal Light faced greater difficulties than you did,’ Roses informed her. ‘Even discounting the damage caused by the exploding nova, the ship you arrived here in was in much worse condition than the one at Ocean’s Deep.’

  ‘So I’m still alive only because you think I can get you inside this other derelict,’ Dakota muttered. ‘Great.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Roses replied. ‘However, it may interest you to know that Immortal Light still believe Lucas Corso can help them gain entry to it.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what he’s doing here,’ Dakota protested, pointing at Trader.

  ‘The Emissaries are aggressively expansionist,’ Roses ignored her comment. ‘They won’t have to accept Immortal Light’s word that the superluminal drive could be used to destroy star systems. Before very long, they’ll have the full text of your forced testimony, and the destruction of Nova Arctis will provide all the proof they need. We now know an Immortal Light contingent is currently on its way to rendezvous with an Emissary superluminal fleet that will then transport them to Ocean’s Deep and the derelict hidden there.

  ‘In return, Immortal Light would gain their own small superluminal fleet, though controlled by the Emissaries, an Emissary tactic to further destabilize the Shoal Hegemony’s control over this part of the Milky Way. And the first thing the Queen of Immortal Light would do with her new-found power would be to destroy the Hive of Darkening Skies utterly’

  Roses moved closer to his Queen before turning to face Dakota once more. ‘In the face of what we know, we have no choice but to offer our help to the Shoal and thus stop Immortal Light from handing the derelict - as well as your friend Corso - over to the Emissaries. In return for our help, the Shoal will grant us significant technological advantages over rival Hives, as well as allowing us to retain our colonies, despite our smuggling activities.’

  Slimy, fish-eyed bastard, thought Dakota, staring hard at Trader. What else have you dangled in front of them?

  ‘What exactly are the Emissaries?’ Dakota asked, trying to keep her voice even.

  ‘According to Trader, they took their superluminal technology directly from a Maker cache. It might just be luck that they haven’t worked out yet what else the superluminal drive is capable of. Even if they already suspect, all the evidence very strongly suggests they are no closer to understanding or being able to implement the process causing the nova effect. The data inside the Ocean’s Deep derelict, however, would save them the trouble of discovering it independently. And then, Miss Merrick, we would have a nova war on our hands.’

  ‘You act like I’m just going to go along with you on this, but you’re forgetting something,’ she replied quietly. ‘Didn’t it occur to you to wonder why I destroyed the derelict that brought me and Corso here? Trader wanted to destroy it so badly himself he blew up a star to do so. But he failed. The knowledge is dangerous enough that he’ll kill all of you too, and I can tell you right now that you can’t trust one word he says.’

  ‘We’re aware of the risks,’ said Roses. ‘We’ve disseminated what we know far and wide, to trusted sources and secure stacks across dozens of Bandati systems. I can’t speak for Immortal Light, but I suspect they’ll have done something similar.’

  Dakota shook her head. ‘You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with. Trader’s been doing this for a long time. He’s a fucking master of deception. Trust me, you’ll all be signing your own death warrants.’

  ‘For you to not act, dear Dakota, would allow blackest of secrets to fall into hands of dread Emissaries,’ said Trader. ‘And would allow them to spread across all our worlds like a great black tide’.

  ‘But perhaps you are right,’ he continued, moving his field-bubble closer to her. ‘Perhaps you are instead fit only for acts of cowardice and betrayal. And yet you have a rapport with the Magi fleet that for the moment may well be unique, and may well prove our one advantage in the coming conflict.’

  Dakota stared at Trader with undisguised loathing. ‘So you think I’ll just up and destroy the derelict in Ocean’s Deep because you want me to?’

  ‘If necessary. Or, better yet, steal it,’ Trader replied, ‘that being a skill in which you obviously excel. Once we arrive at the other system, you will also find Corso and bring him back from the Emissaries.’

  ‘Will she really be able to destroy the other derelict?’ asked the Queen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Trader replied. ‘But it would be in her best interests not to.’

  ‘Pray elucidate,’ said the Queen.

  Trader swivelled in his field-bubble until he faced the Queen, moving closer to her. ‘Current events are preceded by woeful discovery of ancient artefacts lost in stellar wilderness, when it was believed the very last of such had long been destroyed or lost. And now the revelation, alas, of yet another Magi starship, its existence known to your Hive these long millennia. Perhaps this is the very last of them, but I now have reason to believe more may lurk in unseen depths, yet unfound. The details of their location may even lie within this last derelict - and possibly the locations of the remaining Maker caches dispersed throughout our galaxy.’

  ‘I’ve got no intention of helping you in anything, Trader,’ Dakota spat defiantly. ‘The whole lot of you can go to hell.’

  ‘And without your help we surely will,’ Trader replied, ‘along with your entire species, should the Emissaries discover the means to build their own nova weapons any time soon. Or perhaps you really are the cowardly, deceitful murderer your people believe you to be. Perhaps I myself did nothing more than draw out your true nature, Dakota; and perhaps I helped you find your true vocation.’

  Dakota leapt up, taking her guards by surprise. She got halfway to Trader’s suddenly retreating field-bubble before something heavy slammed into the back of her skull. She hit the deck hard, curling up into a ball as the pain hit her.

  ‘My apologies, my Queen. I should have been more prepared—’

  ‘That’s enough, Roses,’ Dakota heard the Hive-Queen say. ‘Trader, you have custody, as agreed. I hope you can persuade her to cooperate.’

  Dakota lifted her head, and found herself staring down the barrels of two lethal-looking weapons from a distance of only a couple of centimetres. She didn’t even struggle when someone started to lift her up by the shoulders.

  Trader floated nearby. ‘Anticipation of failure, my Queen,’ she heard him say, ‘is unknown within my vocabulary’

  Sixteen

  For a long time, Corso lay on the floor of the train, next to the gurney, wondering just what options he had left.

  Honeydew had opened a connecting door and disappeared into another part of the vehicle, leaving Corso to ponder the question of what would happen to him once the Bandati agent returned. And, as he pondered, a deep and overwhelming sense of regret began to seep through him every time he thought about Dakota.<
br />
  The more he thought about it, the more he was forced to confront the very real possibility that he’d just been a staggering idiot.

  He finally took hold of one edge of the gurney and pulled himself back upright. He slumped over it and waited until Honeydew reappeared, accompanied by another Bandati brandishing a shotgun, and with a variety of weaponry secured in the loops of his harness. The guard kept the shotgun trained on Corso’s head as Honeydew addressed him.

  ‘I want to know what your decision is,’ Honeydew said flatly.

  ‘I don’t know how you, or any of the rest of your people, think I could trust one more damn word you ever say to me. But I’ll still get your protocols for you.’ Or let you believe that until I figure out my next move.

  ‘And help us develop new ones if necessary, yes?’

  Corso glowered at the alien for a moment, then looked away before nodding his head briefly in agreement.

  ‘We were not lying when we said we would invite your people into our negotiations, Mr Corso. Given the scale of what we are dealing with, my Queen knows the wisdom of seeking strength in numbers, and is entirely aware of how much you’ve succeeded where we have failed, and within a far shorter time span than was granted to us. I can’t tell you too much yet, but if you give us your willing cooperation, I think you’ll look on us rather more positively in good time.’

  Corso felt the urge to give a bitter laugh, but he pushed it back down, realizing at the same moment that the train was finally beginning to slow.

  To his surprise, things did indeed begin to change for the better. For a little while, anyway.

  The train pulled into another, identical-looking station and Corso was bundled out. Re-emerging into blinding sunlight a few minutes later, he found himself on the edge of a wide level plain that had been entirely surfaced over. It had the universally bleak and lifeless quality of spaceports everywhere. The towers of a city - presumably the same city they had just come from - could be seen in the hazy distance, with the sharp peaks of mountains visible just beyond it.

  Corso was promptly marched across the concrete towards a wheeled launch platform, a fast ground-to-orbit scooter mounted above it, sunlight gleaming from the craft’s black-as-night carapace. He was taken inside and thrust into a gel-chair, and left to watch as Honeydew and the guard climbed into their own restraints next to him.

  The craft lifted up within moments, and Corso was slammed down into his gel-chair with all the force of a three-ton invisible elephant suddenly parking its rear on his chest.

  Several minutes later the pressure abated, and he realized they were now in orbit.

  Before very long he was transferred to another orbiting vessel. He caught a glimpse of it from the outside in advance, through the window of the tiny ship-to-ship shuttle that ferried them across. It was a grim-looking thing with weapons nacelles dotted all along its enormous armoured flanks, and was on a scale with the Hyperion, the Freehold warship that had first brought Corso to Nova Arctis.

  Beyond it lay the bright starry band of the Milky Way, while far below he could see the bright lights of low-orbit docks. Yet farther down were the blue-green continents and wide, shallow oceans of Ironbloom itself.

  Corso could only guess where they were taking him, but the best bet was they were heading back to the derelict. As he stared down at the planet below, he wondered if Dakota was still trapped in her cell, and if she was looking up into the sky at that moment.

  Once Corso was safely on board the dreadnought, the ship underwent constant acceleration for what he estimated was the better part of a Redstone day. When weightlessness briefly returned, he guessed they must be at the midpoint of their journey.

  He’d been left to his own devices in a small compartment that featured a bundle of twisted ropes attached at either end to two widely-spaced wall brackets. It resembled an abstract rendition of a spider’s web, but a few minutes’ contemplation finally brought him to the conclusion it was the Bandati version of a hammock.

  He wasn’t even under lock and key, as he’d assumed he would be. His quarters lacked a door, but this also meant there was no way to hide from observation. Once he was sure he was alone, he stepped outside the room.

  He looked around the area beyond.

  After a while, for lack of anywhere else to go, he went back into his billet.

  What brought him his first surge of joy in a long time was to discover his clothes stuffed into a wall niche.

  They stank of sweat and those long sleepless days and nights in the Piri Reis and, before that, in the Hyperion. He surely smelled no better now, but putting his clothes back on made him feel more alive, more human than at any point since his capture.

  It was amazing how much confidence this simple act of getting dressed provided him with. It was hugely empowering.

  I’ll never let myself be locked up like that again, he decided. If his freedom had been valuable to him before he’d left Redstone, it was now more in the nature of an obsession.

  Accompanied again by two guards, Honeydew came for him some time later, as Corso lay dozing in a corner of his billet, having been unable to work out how to use the hammock provided.

  He sat up, feeling grubby and sticky again, and instantly recognized Honeydew by the colour and pattern of his wings. The Bandati agent had a distinctive green-blue shading to his upper pair, while the lower ones were shot through with a fine tracery of vermilion.

  ‘Mr Corso, accompany us, please.’

  By this point the ship was moving again, decelerating now for the second half of their journey at a gravity-equivalent speed close enough to what he was used to from Redstone, so that he could again walk around quite comfortably. Corso nodded without replying, and Honeydew took the lead.

  Soon Corso found himself back in a docking bay that looked identical to the one he’d disembarked into on their arrival.

  There were various small craft to be seen - mostly variations on the ground-to-orbit launch that had first lifted him into orbit - as well as several even smaller, bulbous ones lacking engine nacelles, which were probably life rafts. The scale of the chamber alone was enough to give a sense of just how big the Bandati dreadnought must be.

  He was led on towards a mobile platform set into the floor of the bay that started to sink as soon as all four of them had fully stepped onto it, dropping them down into another chamber almost as big as the one immediately above it.

  This one, however, was filled with a deep gloom, through which occasional flashes of light sparked and flickered eerily. A bulky, dark shape occupied the far end of the otherwise empty chamber and, as Corso peered at it through the gloom, he felt his jaw actually drop when he realized what he was now looking at.

  It was Dakota’s own ship, the Piri Reis - battered, dented and scarred, but nonetheless utterly familiar. The Piri floated just above a maintenance cradle built over a set of horizontal bay doors in the deck beneath it, and was held in place by shaped-field generators built into the cradle itself.

  Corso then realized this chamber was simply a very large airlock where ships and heavy cargo could be loaded, before being raised to the pressurized upper chamber. He could see clearly where part of the ship had been damaged by missiles back in Nova Arctis.

  ‘This is the craft used to bring the starship out of the Nova Arctis system,’ Honeydew enquired, ‘is it not?’

  Corso nodded absent-mindedly, but realized after a moment that he still hadn’t given an answer. ‘It is, yes.’

  Something was different, however.

  He’d now just about been able to make out odd shapes through the gloom, scattered more or less at random across the floor of the chamber, between where they stood on the platform and the cradle holding the Piri. The light flickered once more and Corso noticed scorch marks on the walls, ceiling and floor around Dakota’s ship. Those shapes now resolved into the singed remains of Bandati, their bodies contorted in their death-agonies.

  He realized, with a start, that they were st
anding on the edge of a battlefield.

  Most of the lighting units in the walls and ceiling had either been destroyed or were functioning only sporadically, hence the flickering gloom. Clearly a vicious fire-fight had taken place here. He could make out weapons scattered near the bodies of the dead Bandati, while various chunks of dented and blasted machinery looked like they’d started out as robotic exploratory devices. There was also a suspiciously Piri-sized dent in the bay doors situated directly beneath the cradle.

  ‘What the hell happened here?’ Corso asked, once he remembered how to breathe.

  ‘The Magi protocols you developed are stored inside this vessel’s stacks,’ Honey dew replied bluntly.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said before.’

  ‘This vessel was also in communication with the starship that brought you to Night’s End.’

  ‘I know she was making it difficult for you to get inside the Piri Reis.’ Understatement of the century, Corso thought to himself. ‘Based on what I’ve seen and heard, I guess she was using the derelict as some kind of relay between herself and the Piri.’

  Wide black eyes surveyed him intently while Corso desperately tried to glean some notion of what was going on in the Bandati’s mind. ‘You do not clearly understand. This craft also communicates with the starship,’ Honeydew repeated.

  ‘Look, I - oh.’ Exasperation gave way to enlightenment. ‘The Piri Reis is communicating with the derelict - directly? You mean, under its own volition, without Dakota being involved?’

  ‘The evidence strongly suggests it.’

  This was a revelation. ‘How do you know?’ Corso asked.

  ‘Remote sensors previously showed a link between increased systems activity on board the Piri Reis, and increased gravitic and neutrino activity within the region of the Magi derelict. The correlation is clear: the ships were - and still remain - in communication with each other.’