Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  The scout-ship had slammed into the bay’s interior at enormous speed, and the shipboard computers had failed again, this time permanently. For a moment, it had seemed as if her senses had blanked, as if she’d been suspended in some timeless moment between mere seconds, presumably some side-effect of the filmsuit. But in that tiny sliver of an instant, she had hung in a void.

  Or at least it had felt that way. When her senses returned, the cabin was wrecked and all she could hear was a howling sound coming from somewhere outside it.

  There was no sign of Roses. Probably his filmsuit had also activated at the very last second, and he’d managed to find his way out.

  Dakota found she couldn’t move, and after a moment of panic she realized that part of the framework to which the gel-chair was attached had been twisted out of shape, pushing her chest-first up against a console and pinning her there. It took a while to wriggle out from between these two obstructions, then get onto all fours and crawl through to the rear, where she could see light shining through an open emergency hatch.

  Dakota could hear the distant buzz of the station’s computers through her implants. They were evaluating the damage to the bay, since apparently it was losing atmosphere.

  She crawled out on top of the hull to look around, squinting in the harsh artificial light. A strong wind tugged at her, and she realized the air was going to be exhausted pretty soon if she didn’t find a way out of the bay. At worst she could rely on her filmsuit to keep her alive, but that wouldn’t get her any closer to the derelict.

  At least the gravity here was lower than it would be in the rings themselves. She worked her way gradually down towards the deck, which in itself was a dangerous place to be since she was in danger of being dragged at any minute through whatever hole the atmosphere was venting from. Dakota held on very tight and moved carefully, and once she had reached her objective she flattened herself against the deck and began moving away from the scout-ship.

  Once she had crawled away a little, she looked behind her to see what had happened. Ceiling-mounted grapples meant to latch on to the scout-ship had been smashed to pieces during their high-velocity entry; the ship had then presumably rebounded against the bay doors before they could close properly. These had only managed to close most of the way before becoming stuck on a piece of twisted wreckage, and air was rapidly draining out through the narrow gap between them.

  If it hadn’t been for their filmsuits activating automatically, she realized, they’d have been reduced to jelly by the impact.

  She finally spotted Days of Wine and Roses gripping onto a handhold next to an airlock mechanism at the far end of the bay, and trying desperately to get it to open. By the look of things, the breach had triggered an automatic lockdown, but that still left both of them trapped on the wrong side of the door.

  Dakota reached out mentally through her implants and tweaked the lockdown mechanisms. The airlock suddenly banged open, making Roses jump back in surprise, almost letting go of his handhold – which, given the rate that air was being sucked out of the bay, could have proved fatal. He waited for her as she struggled over to his side of the deck.

  They both ducked into the airlock and waited for it to cycle through. Dakota slumped down, panting, and tentatively pressed fingertips against her aching head to feel for injuries. Scrapes and bumps, it seemed, nothing more.

  What she’d seen of this station through the derelict’s senses amazed her. That it hadn’t yet suffered a catastrophic failure of its life-support infrastructure was a source of wonder, and it was clearly barely capable of keeping the onboard population alive. At least two of the rings – including the one they now found themselves in – showed signs of having been abandoned for several centuries. The colony was like a corpse that hadn’t yet realized it was dead. It wouldn’t take much effort to send it drifting into the path of the nearby black hole.

  A few seconds later they were through to the other side, and facing the entrance to what was apparently a transport system running the entire length of the hub. Dakota was close to the derelict, and could feel it through the walls of the station – waiting for her.

  They entered an oval-shaped car floating serenely between sets of rails spaced regularly around the interior of a tunnel.

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said Roses, ‘that it’s in your power to destroy this station, the way you destroyed the one in Night’s End. But you didn’t.’

  He reached out to a scratched and dented control panel, but the car started moving before he could even touch it.

  He turned and stared at her, and she gave him a small smile. The car rapidly accelerated.

  ‘It doesn’t actually work that way,’ she explained. ‘Before I can completely control the derelict here, I need to make physical contact with it.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You clearly controlled the starship that first brought you to Night’s End.’

  ‘Yes, but I physically got inside it back in Nova Arctis. After that, we were fully linked. Look, if just anyone could control a Magi ship remotely, you could override a navigator’s control all too easily. This way, the derelict only recognizes a single individual – the one who happens to bond with it. The fact I’d already formed a bond with another derelict means the one here will recognize me, and help me, but only to a limited extent.’

  Days of Wine and Roses regarded her silently for some moments, displaying a species-wide trait she was beginning to find profoundly irritating.

  ‘And once you have control of it, will you then destroy this station?’

  Dakota glanced sharply at her Bandati companion, who had perched himself on a dandelion-like seat, narrow ball-tipped wires projecting from a thick, flexible arm rising straight out of the floor. These seats were widely spaced, enough to allow each passenger to spread his wings comfortably.

  Dakota, unable to use such seats, slumped on the floor instead. Feeling weariness sap her strength, she looked up at the Bandati, and wondered what to do with him.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean by that question,’ she replied at last.

  ‘We obtained records of your interrogations, which suggest you consider yourself the only one who can be entrusted with control of a Magi ship. And yet you murdered thousands when you destroyed the previous derelict.’

  The tone of Dakota’s reply was taut and angry. ‘I had reason to believe that not destroying the derelict would lead to trillions of deaths – and a war like nothing else before or since.’

  ‘So you believed you were making a morally correct judgement.’

  Of course, she almost replied, but suddenly had a mental flash of Senator Gregor Arbenz producing the exact same argument. Worse, she could imagine Trader saying the same thing, too.

  Dakota felt her fists tighten with anger and frustration and, when she replied, it was all she could do to hold it in. ‘I know a lot more now,’ she declared, her voice pitched low enough as to be almost inaudible. ‘I’ve learned things since that make all the difference. And I’ll never do anything like that again, I swear.’

  She glowered at the alien. None of this would have happened if your two Hives were at all capable of getting along, she thought, and it took her some effort not to give voice to this opinion.

  But there were other things she had to worry about first.

  Like Hugh Moss, for instance.

  She’d sensed him as soon as they’d arrived in the docking bay. Langley too. That meant they were both inside the station – both perilously close to the derelict.

  ‘What do you plan to do now?’ asked Roses.

  ‘There are two other machine-heads already here, one of them from the Consortium. The other is a little harder to explain, but he’s on his way to the derelict right now. We’re going to have to deal with them sooner or later.’

  She tried not to think about what might happen if she came face to face with Langley in a competitive situation. After all, her memories of her one-time tutor were fond ones. She tried searching for him throu
gh the station’s security network lenses and caught a brief glimpse of him weaving his way through the tight, enclosed spaces between a series of vast pumping mechanisms. He was accompanied by several extremely tired and haggard-looking men and women, most of them in military gear, who she guessed were fleeing the Emissaries. That there was a Consortium presence here at Ocean’s Deep was a wonder in itself.

  She could tell Langley’s implants hadn’t changed the way hers had, and she breathed a sigh of relief on realizing he wasn’t, after all, likely to present a challenge. Besides, he was currently moving away from the derelict, obviously too caught up in the immediate business of staying alive.

  ‘And their identities?’

  When Dakota told him, the alien remained silent for what felt like a very long time.

  ‘Hugh Moss,’ Roses eventually remarked. ‘This is not something I anticipated.’

  Dakota frowned. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yes, after a fashion. We met several times while I was carrying out ambassadorial duties within the Consortium. I encountered him recently on Ironbloom. He’s not someone I would want controlling an artefact of such enormous power.’

  The car suddenly decelerated, although it was still deep inside the tunnel.

  Taken by surprise, Roses slipped out of his seat, while Dakota remained where she was, watching him silently. The car suddenly reversed with a jerk, moving several metres backwards before once again coming to a halt.

  ‘Did you do that?’ asked Roses.

  Dakota stood up and pointed to a string of overhead lights running the length of the car’s ceiling. The lights at the far end blinked out, as if in response to her gesture. She then ran her finger through the air, pointing from one end of the carriage to the other, whereupon the lights rapidly blinked out, one after the other, following the movement of her hand. When she waved her hand back the other way, the lights responded by coming back on, in reverse order.

  She smiled at the Bandati agent. ‘Let’s be clear on something, Roses. I’m not interested in who you do or don’t want getting to the derelict, even if it happens to be me. I’m here because Trader threatened to destroy my world if I didn’t get it and take it back to him.’

  ‘I know that,’ Roses replied carefully.

  Dakota’s smile was almost savage. ‘There’s not much I can’t leach from the data-stacks of every Darkening Skies ship in this system, and I know you were ordered to kill me once I’d recovered the derelict. Your people don’t want the Shoal to get their hands on it any more than I do.’

  Dakota waited while Days of Wine and Roses stood silently, facing her with wide, unreadable black eyes.

  ‘My Queen increasingly believes the Shoal have no intention of following through on their promises,’ he finally said. ‘We know you’d feel constrained to take the ship back to them. My orders were to prevent that.’

  The car slowly began to accelerate once more. ‘Let’s be clear on this much, Days of Wine and Roses. You wouldn’t be alive right now if I thought you were any kind of serious threat to me.’

  ‘You’re going on alone?’

  ‘Not quite.’ She shook her head. ‘I want you in my sight as much as possible. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to need your help.’

  She saw that one slim, dark hand now lay close to a knife sheathed on the alien’s harness. She could feel the black tide of her filmsuit primed to spread over her in an instant.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘Help me get to the derelict, and there’s a chance I can save the day for all of us – both human and Bandati. Believe me when I say there’s so much more going on here than you could possibly believe.’

  ‘And if I don’t comply?’

  She shook her head, and smiled. ‘Try anything, and you’re not going to like the consequences – not you or any of the rest of your Hive’s fleet, believe me.’

  She watched as the alien sat again, flexing his huge wings as he did so. ‘If I help you, willingly or otherwise, I could be exiled by my Queen and forced to seek out an unaligned Hive. It would mean a life of considerable danger and hardship for me.’

  ‘We’ve all had to pay a high price just to be here,’ Dakota reminded him. ‘Some more than others.’

  The train started to slow as it approached its terminus. ‘All right,’ Roses said finally. ‘What do you need me to do?’

  Moss moved on through the ruins of an abandoned ring, the Magi derelict a steady presence in his mind. It was close by, its guts full of ancient secrets and terrible fires waiting to be unleashed. His mind spasmed with delight every time the new implants in his head made fleeting contact with it.

  He had made a wildly dangerous superluminal jump to a point midway between the orbital station and the black hole that eternally chased it around the gas giant. He had hoped the tremendous violence of the collapsed star would disguise his drive’s signature, but Emissary auto-response units had targeted him regardless.

  A quarter of his onboard systems had been burned out during the subsequent fire-fight, but he had still managed to blow a hole in the outer hull of another ring and slam the yacht straight through it. Protective shaped fields and inertial systems had compensated somewhat for the force of the crash-landing, but it had still been an experience he’d prefer not to repeat.

  Within seconds of exiting his yacht he’d encountered a group of Emissaries. They were vile creatures, even by Moss’s standards; technological cuckoos who stole from every species they encountered in their bizarre religious quest. Moss’s field generator had begun to fail under the constant, brutal assault of their weapons, so he’d been forced to make a run for it. He’d barely had time to strip off his shirt and boots in order to scale a wall, taking advantage of nanoscale tubules he’d grafted into his flesh that allowed him to cling to flat surfaces like an oversized gecko.

  His yacht meanwhile lifted back up through the hole it had torn in the ring’s exterior, and thereby successfully evaded capture by the Emissaries. Moss then made his way to a nearby spoke-shaft and allowed its transport systems to carry him directly to the hub. He sighted hundreds of Bandati on the way – all station-dwellers, dead or alive, clustering around their crumbling Hive Towers.

  Once he reached the ring where he knew the derelict was kept, his implants told him Dakota Merrick was herself getting maddeningly close. She must be converging on the derelict at more or less the same speed he was, so he checked his weapons – knives and small, short-range firearms – attached to a modified harness based on the design favoured by the Bandati.

  He was surprised to discover that his implants could even grant him an occasional, fleeting taste of Dakota’s emotions: a mixture of fear and determination laced with self-doubt. He had discovered to his surprise that there was a third machine-head present on the station, a man called Langley, but the few snatches of thought and emotion Moss detected from him were as bland and tasteless as tepid water.

  Making sense of all the data his implants were feeding to him demanded considerable willpower and concentration, and as such proved more often than not to be immensely and even dangerously distracting. His thoughts were constantly clouded by a whirlwind of information, random sense-impressions and artificially generated thoughts.

  Moss knew he needed time to learn how to filter and make sense of this data being dumped wholesale into his brain, but time was what he lacked. He had to defeat Dakota and assume control of the derelict, even while the Emissaries rampaged blindly through the station around them.

  He knew, of course, that Dakota was just as aware of him. He caught her trace once more: a flash of worry and the glimpse of a dusty corridor. So close.

  But he would savour her death; he would taste her soul, even as the life faded from her eyes.

  Dakota and Days of Wine and Roses soon left the hub behind, and began the long descent down a spoke-shaft. Dakota felt herself growing heavier as their elevator platform plunged down.

  After what felt like an endless journey, they finally emerged from t
he base of the shaft to find themselves in a place that had clearly been disused and abandoned for an extremely long time. Close by lay a warren of laboratories and power-generating systems, showing that this particular ring was dedicated solely to the storage, study and defence of the Magi derelict.

  They then parted ways, as they’d agreed during the long descent, Days of Wine and Roses spreading his wings wide and boosting into the air before quickly vanishing out of sight behind a series of buildings shaped like ziggurats.

  Dakota stared after him for a while, listening to the eerie silence amid the dance of data flowing to her via the derelict. Then she turned and headed purposefully away, quickly threading through a maze of narrow passages between imposingly tall structures that looked like part of a chemical plant.

  There were no Hive Towers here, no places of residence, and very little in the way of flora except for some algae and sparse wild grasses that had seeded themselves through the ring’s spokes over the long, quiet centuries. This particular ring was separated into distinct segments by three enormous bulkheads. Just before the nearest of these loomed a complex somewhat like a squat pyramid intersecting with a globe.

  This, she realized, was her destination: the storage facility within which the derelict was housed.

  For some time now, she’d been tracking Hugh Moss, and knew he was moving through a similar warren of passageways and open areas within this very ring-segment. However, his precise location was proving much more difficult to ascertain. For someone so obviously new to implant technology, he’d still worked out how to shut down part of the local surveillance systems, effectively preventing her from pinpointing his exact whereabouts. That uncertainty made her particularly vigilant, because he could be a couple of kilometres away from her, or he could equally be right behind her . . .

  The thought made her pause and turn, her skin prickling. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so damn quiet.

  Dakota moved on quickly through the grime-streaked and crumbling ruins. The Emissaries had begun destroying the station’s controlling computer networks as soon as they realized someone was using them to monitor their movements and impede their progress. Given enough time, they’d render both her and the derelict deaf and dumb. And meanwhile there was little to stop them from physically tearing the station apart until they had uncovered what they wanted.