Nova War

by Gary Gibson

The Bandati then started firing at the Piri Reis just as tiny bursts of light began to fill the air around them. The warriors disappeared in a deafening burst of smoke and flame.

  Instinct drove Corso to push himself back up onto his unsteady legs and he ran, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the ship as he could.

  The platform was already starting to rise back up to the upper bay by the time he reached it. Honeydew was waiting there for him. For a terrible, drawn-out moment Corso thought the Bandati agent intended to leave him behind, but then Honeydew knelt at the platform’s edge and reached out with tiny black hands.

  Corso leapt forward, grabbing at the platform’s edge, his legs dangling as it rose higher. A moment later and he was kneeling on the platform next to the alien, breathing hard.

  As he sucked down air, he looked back towards where the Piri had again come to rest on its cradle. Huddled dark shapes burned fitfully around it.

  Corso tasted bile in the back of his throat and quickly looked away.

  ‘They died so that you could escape,’ Honeydew explained from beside him. ‘You have the protocols?’

  ‘The stacks were too severely damaged to recover a completely intact copy’ He glanced up at the alien and shook his head. ‘You have to remember the ship got hit by a missile. It’s going to take time, but I should eventually be able to reconstruct the complete set of protocols. It’s the best I can do for now.’

  ‘Then we no longer need the Piri Reis?’

  Corso glanced back at Dakota’s ship and hesitated. Honeydew was right; if he made it sound like he had everything he’d need, the Bandati would assume Dakota’s ship had outlived its usefulness.

  But he didn’t want to see it destroyed. After all, it had saved his life before. Maybe it could do so again.

  ‘Look,’ he said, improvising, ‘the data may be scrambled, but you have to allow me the time to try and retrieve more data from the Piri. If I can do that, you could have a working copy of the protocols a lot sooner.’

  Honeydew was staring towards the still-smouldering corpses. ‘Very well then, Mr Corso. We will keep the Piri Reis for now. But if you don’t recover the complete protocols soon enough, I’ll make sure you die just as they did.’

  I didn’t ask you to send a goddamn rescue party, Corso almost complained, then thought better of it.

  Seventeen

  The assault on the Queen of Darkening Skies’ personal yacht resumed a little while after Dakota had been given over to Trader’s custody, and just as an artificial night began to fall across the core-ship’s Bandati-occupied sector. From inside the yacht, Dakota heard a sound like unending thunder accompanied by a series of violent, tooth-rattling vibrations that shook the deck and bulkheads.

  The yacht’s energy reserves were rapidly approaching their design limitations. Immortal Light pulse-cannons were directed towards the squat steel and concrete structure of the vessel’s supporting cradle, whose integral shields had also begun to fail. They soon began to shut down for ever as the thickset structure began to fracture and melt, the external lattice of maintenance platforms shattering and tumbling to the ground under the brutal onslaught.

  Then something entirely unexpected occurred.

  Most of the artillery fire was coming from semi-autonomous robot units controlled from an Immortal Light command post set up a few kilometres from the cradle. The air around these temporary structures began to sparkle as tiny shaped-field-bubbles first materialized and then shrank, in the blink of an eye, to a millionth of their original diameter. As those same bubbles winked out, the compressed atmosphere inside them exploded with devastating force.

  The command bunkers were destroyed instantly, and then thousands more minuscule field-bubbles rapidly swept through the massed forces Immortal Light had gathered for the siege. The wave of destruction came to a halt less than fifty metres from the Queen of Darkening Skies’ yacht.

  For a couple of kilometres around the cradle, nothing moved, nothing lived, and everything burned. The pulse-ship that had carried Dakota to the coreship had now been reduced to a pile of softly glowing wreckage.

  The yacht itself shuddered and lifted up from its cradle on a cushion of shaped fields, which carried it over the carnage as if it weighed little more than a feather. It was borne rapidly towards one of the kilometre-wide pillars that supported the coreship’s outer crust.

  High in the nearest side of the pillar, an enormous door irised open that was big enough to swallow the craft whole. The yacht was transported inside and then down a wide funnel while, far above, the door slowly crunched back into place.

  Dakota had since been dragged away from her audience with the Hive-Queen and thrown into an empty, hexagonally shaped chamber with a high ceiling. The door had been closed behind her, leaving her in total darkness.

  Some minutes passed, and a faint blue sparkle appeared high up in the chamber. She looked up to see Trader’s field-bubble enter the chamber through a passageway set close under the ceiling. He drifted down towards her and she backed away instinctively, frightened at being left alone with the Shoal-member.

  Trader came to a halt, his field-bubble hovering a few millimetres above the deck. His enormous piscine eyes were fixed on her.

  Then, as Dakota watched, the walls and ceiling around them began to fade from view, revealing a bottomless stony shaft whose walls rushed by at enormous speed. She felt a lurch of vertigo as the deck beneath her feet also became translucent.

  Dakota squatted and placed her hands flat on the deck, just to take some comfort from its solidity. What she was seeing was an illusion, of course, but some part of her subconscious refused to accept that she was still on board the yacht.

  The only illumination came from Trader’s field-bubble and three vertical rows of lights spaced equidistant around the sides of the shaft, which rose far up above as well as below them.

  ‘Where . . . where are we?’ she managed to stammer. At first she could hardly bring herself to look down at the abyss beneath her feet, but when she finally did, she caught a glimpse of something swirling far below.

  ‘You are to witness something few outside the Hegemony have ever been privileged to see,’ Trader informed her. We are on our way to the coreship’s Shoal-occupied sector. Hence, we travel downwards, towards the centre.’

  The lights rushing by gradually began to slow, and they were nearing the bottom of the shaft. Dakota saw waters foam and break against its walls, and she gasped involuntarily as they suddenly dived deep beneath the choppy waves. The parallel lines of light soon gave way to a darkened abyss.

  ‘The core of this vessel is an artificial ocean,’ Trader explained. ‘Lightless and serene, as close to the optimum habitable environment of our home world as possible. Consider yourself most privileged to swim in such waters.’

  Before long they passed by something that, in Dakota’s eyes, had a passing resemblance to a jellyfish- if only jellyfish could grow to the size of a small city. She gazed upon several vast toroid structures centred on a semi-translucent column that undulated as she watched. Dozens of Shoal-members swimming together near the hub of one wheel gave her a sense of the thing’s sheer size; they looked like minnows caught in the wake of some enormous sea monster.

  Each torus was connected to the column by sets of spokes that were dotted with lights, nacelles and the unmistakable regularity of machined parts. More lights delineated the outer edge of each torus. Deep within the column itself, she could see shadowy shapes that suggested a skeletal structure entwined with gently pulsing organs. She had the sense she was indeed looking at some kind of city, but one that was also a living organism.

  They continued on until the only light came from Trader’s field-bubble.

  ‘Why are you showing me all this?’ Dakota demanded.

  ‘Why?’ Trader was silent for a moment. ‘In essence, my greatest desire is that you witness how very much there is to lose. You and I, dear Dakota, are driven to swim dangerous currents because it is
within our natures to do so. You by happenstance stumbled upon our most valued secrets, but in that very process discovered the reasons for such secrecy. And so for all that you believe you hate us – for visiting a multitude of despair upon poor ravaged Redstone, and for your life ever since that unfortunate debacle - you nonetheless understand why we have worked so hard to prevent the spread of the Magi’s secrets among our client species.’

  There was something appalling about the blackness of the ocean that surrounded them. Dakota felt as if she were descending into hell, and being lost in such an abyss awakened ancient, primeval fears. So she focused on Trader, and his protective bubble of energy, in order to distract herself from what lay beyond him.

  ‘You know,’ she managed to say eventually, ‘that’s not far from being a confession of sorts. Like you have a need to justify your actions to me.’

  ‘It was always within the realm of possibility that some species very like yours would stumble across a cache long before we could sweep it into concealing depths, far from the watchful eyes of others. Yet all we could ever do was forestall the inevitable, and upon my willing fins was placed much of the burden of that responsibility. My only defence is the peace we have imposed upon the galaxy - a peace that has lasted far longer than some of our client species have even existed. To have done otherwise would be to shirk the responsibility thereby placed upon us. And now,’ he added, ‘my instruments inform me that there are several new structures inside your skull. Magi structures, it seems.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘A stain upon your noble reputation, Miss Merrick, that you would wish to deceive me when the truth is so abundantly clear. I witnessed, as from a great distance, your flight from Ironbloom. Within moments your mind had penetrated the Bandati vessel that carried you away, even as you destroyed the Magi ship that had delivered you to Night’s End.’

  ‘Fine.’ She sighed and slumped to the floor, her back resting against one wall. ‘So what’s your point?’

  Trader’s tentacles writhed beneath the wide curve of his under-body. ‘An exponential leap in your ability to control computational systems remotely, is it not? You had control of the pulse-ship within seconds, Dakota. Just seconds.’

  Dakota shook her head wearily. ‘I don’t know how I did it. I just—’

  ‘Did it without even really thinking?’

  Dakota averted her gaze, her expression defiant as the Shoal-member drifted closer.

  ‘Upon us the Magi attempted most foul seduction, dearest Dakota. When first they arrived from faraway skies, they offered to us the pleasure of hunting the Maker caches by their side, through nebulous reef and abyssal depth. And, yet, any one of their ships was equal to our entire civilization at that time.

  ‘No, what they most wanted, in its entirety, was to regain the lofty heights of their civilization, to build new temples and palaces and wonders – even to rebuild their empires in place of our own. Oh, Dakota, it would have been grand beyond imagining. But it would have been their empire, yes, not ours. Only ever in their shadows would we then live, and only upon their sufferance.’

  ‘So you destroyed them?’

  ‘In order to protect ourselves! It was necessary to be cunning, to engage in conspiracies that lasted half a millennium while they repaired and maintained part of their fleet. Meanwhile, other ships of their fleet - we never knew just how many - scattered themselves throughout this fair spiral arm of ours, caught up in their grand quest.’

  After a pause, he continued. ‘And, for all their lofty ambitions, we found the means to subvert their systems and kill them from great distances. A few of their ships escaped from our world and were hunted down one by one, and continue, Dakota, to be hunted long after their navigators have become dust. Look there.’

  Dakota looked up and saw a star simulation materialize out of the darkness around them: the Milky Way as seen from high above the galactic plane. Trader next caused their point of view to zoom in first towards the familiar glittering band of the Orion Arm, and then on the familiar borders of Consortium and Bandati space. Markers appeared signifying Earth, Redstone, Nova Arctis, Bellhaven, Ocean’s Deep and finally Night’s End.

  A line next appeared, cutting tangentially first through the Bandati territories and then through those of the Consortium, curving slightly as it did so. The line originated from deep within the galaxy, before zooming out into the relatively starless regions of the outer rim.

  ‘Witness the path along which the last Magi chose to flee from our system. And also direct your attention upon both Nova Arctis and Ocean’s Deep,’ Trader continued, ‘which, you will observe, lie close to that very same path, as does the world briefly occupied by the Uchidans.’

  Dakota nodded, studying the map with undisguised fascination. It was clear that the fleet had also passed through the territories of other species with which she was less familiar - particularly the Rafters and Skelites.

  ‘We suspect,’ Trader continued, ‘the vessel secreted within the Ocean’s Deep system might very well prove to be the last of its kind. Others may yet lie hidden, but their existence lies outside the realms of verification.’

  Dakota moved closer to the walls of the chamber, drawing her fingers across the multitude of stars represented. Other, nameless, territories lay beyond the Rafters and Skelites, as tantalizing as they were unknown. Home, no doubt, to further species with whom humanity had been forbidden contact.

  ‘So there might be more of them?’ she asked, turning back to Trader.

  ‘May be, yes. Yet their navigators are dead, dead, dead, and their ships lost and adrift far and wide across an entire spiral arm. It is to be most readily assumed that the vast majority will almost certainly have been destroyed by time’s slow and steady hand.’

  Dakota wondered about that, for she had begun to feel a presence both familiar and new floating at the edge of her awareness: the Ocean’s Deep derelict reaching out to her.

  She had to fight to keep her voice steady as she spoke. ‘We’re at Ocean’s Deep already, aren’t we?’

  ‘Indeed, our travels are done,’ Trader replied, ‘and our coreship set sail to that star’s far light during these last few minutes. Within a passing moment, you and I, we will pass through this great ship’s centre, to join a fleet that will snare and destroy the unwary Emissaries.’

  The huge eyes stared down at Dakota questioningly. ‘You understand your role in all of this? You can prevent the derelict here from falling to the Emissaries. You will then deliver it to me, so that the Shoal may seek to stem the fount of forbidden knowledge from which the Emissaries seek to drink.’

  Dakota shook her head, incredulous. ‘And you really think I’m going to bring the derelict to you? I already know what you did to the Magi.’ She laughed. ‘Sometimes you almost sound convincing, but most of the time I just wonder how you think I could believe your bullshit.’

  Trader moved closer again, until his field-bubble hovered millimetres from Dakota’s face. ‘By careful implementation of technologies manifestly dangerous in fins of lesser forms, the Shoal most demonstrably are the only force capable of maintaining peace and preventing war. Once you brought the derelict to Night’s End, were you not tortured, imprisoned, and made witness to the outbreak of war between two great Hives? And so it would always be, should control lie outside our grasp. Upon reaching the derelict, dear Dakota, you will endeavour to bring it to the coreship, and thence will it travel at last to the Shoal home world, where its knowledge may be studied in safety.’

  Dakota’s reply was calm. ‘I already destroyed one derelict. And I’ll destroy this one, too, before I let you or anyone else get control of it.’

  ‘Would you indeed?’ asked Trader, moving up to the edge of the field-bubble that was closest to her. His fins and manipulators wafted gently as he floated closer. ‘Or have you finally succumbed to the seductive voices whispering to you from within this newfound derelict? To whom or what, I wonder, do your loyalt
ies now actually lie?’

  Dakota felt her face grow hot. ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘Most certainly, given time. The structures in your brain, Dakota, mark you now as a Magi navigator, however much you might deceive yourself that you are still human. That you would try to flee upon reaching this latest Magi ship is a given, hence the necessity of making certain that you then do with it only what the Shoal and I wish.’

  Dakota took a breath and ducked her head down defensively, her voice trembling surprisingly little. ‘I already told you to go to hell, Trader. There’s nothing you can do to make me follow your orders.’

  ‘Excuse me that I should be so bold, but may I assume you are at least passingly familiar with the history of the First Civil War on your own world of Bellhaven?’

  Dakota stared back at the Shoal-member. ‘What?’

  ‘If you will please recall, State and Church struggled more than once for control of your world. The Elders fought hard to gain victory and yet, if not for a healthy trade in technologies with other worlds throughout the vastness of the Consortium, Bellhaven might easily have slipped into obscurity and political chaos. Praise be, then,’ Trader concluded, ‘that so few of their stockpiled nuclear weapons were ever used.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ Dakota snarled between gritted teeth.

  ‘Near-orbital space around Bellhaven is littered with the ruins of military platforms, some of them centuries old. Many are heavily irradiated, so that to approach them is not permitted. This, supposedly, is because they are tainted with the active remnants of biological or nanotechnological weaponry. The truth is perhaps more complicated.’

  Trader navigated his bubble back across the narrow viewing chamber, casting his gaze again across the face of the galaxy. ‘It is of no surprise to man or fish that many of those platforms have been secretly maintained to this day. To acquire the requisite launch codes proved scandalously easy, and your world does not lack in competing factions to take the blame for a sudden all-out strike upon the Free States. Which, I do believe,’ Trader added with relish, ‘include your own city-state of Erkinning.’