Nova War (13 page)

There was a sound like rustling paper, and a moment later a winged shape darted through the gap in the roof and landed with a thump on top of a pile of dust-covered crates nearby. Corso winced as he sat up, a stabbing pain in his shoulder forcing him to move with exaggerated care. He’d almost certainly dislocated it.

‘Are you lost?’ said a voice coming from the direction of the Bandati. He peered at it, and its wings batted at the air reflexively, sending swirls of dust rising towards the ruined ceiling. A tiny point of light in the darkness located an interpreter bead identical to those used by his interrogators.

Corso stared back, his face now blackened by decades-old dust, unsure if he’d actually heard what the creature had said or if he’d only imagined it. ‘What . . . what did you say?’

‘Are you lost?’ the Bandati repeated. ‘You climbed out of the door of your house just as I was on my way to negotiate with you, and then you came down the wall in a most unusual manner. What was the purpose of that?’

Corso coughed, trying to clear his lungs, which were full of dust. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the dim light inside the building. ‘Away.’ He coughed again. ‘I was trying to get away from there.’

The creature buzzed its wings in what Corso later came to understand was a gesture of considerable perplexity. ‘Please, I must ask you to elaborate on the purpose of such an action.’

Corso gaped at the winged alien, and it was only just beginning to sink in that this particular Bandati was far better at communicating than any other of its species so far encountered.

‘I was trying to
escape,
you stupid, miserable, alien fucker!’

‘Escape?’

‘Yes!’ Corso screamed, before collapsing in a paroxysm of coughing.
‘Escape,
damn you.’

Silence filled the air between them for long moments. Then the creature asked: ‘Escape to where?’

As it turned out, someone had been listening to Corso’s bellowed offers of cooperation after all.

The crudely transliterated scent-name of the creature Corso had that morning encountered on the tower-platform was ‘Scent of Honeydew, Distant Rumble of Summer Storms’. Honeydew was a combination of teacher, tourist guide and linguist, charged with learning as much about Corso as possible. He had in fact been on his way to talk with the Freeholder, and arrived just in time to witness the abortive escape attempt.

The sporadic torture, apparently, was at an end.

Over the following days Corso had learned something about Night’s End in return. His cell was not, in fact, a cell at all. Despite its lack of furnishings, it was considered comfortable accommodation by Bandati standards, and a convenient location for positioning a new platform by any Bandati who chose to build there. The door-opening was nothing more sinister than a convenient entrance for a flight-enabled species.

That didn’t make Corso feel any better about finding himself back there subsequently, but at least he had someone to talk to now.

Corso was lucky Honeydew had turned up when he did. If he’d suffered severe concussion, it might have had serious consequences (as Honeydew later explained), given the Bandati lack of understanding of human physiology. They’d in fact had to spend time researching human-related databases in order to learn how to treat his dislocated shoulder – the same databases, Corso later came to suspect, they’d have needed in figuring out how to drug and torture him most effectively.

He was promised his clothes back, and open quarters on the ground, as soon as feasible. The ambrosia was now free of soporifics. Honeydew even delivered an apology of sorts: Corso’s torture had apparently been a
mistake,
a failure on the part of the Bandati equivalent of a civil service. Honeydew had also tried to explain the Hive’s organizational structure, but it sounded more like an archaic exercise in genealogy and birthright, and Corso eventually gave up trying to understand. It seemed the individuals responsible for retrieving Corso and Dakota from the Magi derelict had simply panicked when faced with a situation they weren’t equipped to deal with.

Corso thus learned that Honeydew was an expert in human affairs, a member of a consulate who’d travelled widely throughout the Consortium. The creature’s ability to communicate clearly and concisely with Corso filled the captured Freeholder with such gratitude that, at times, he’d come close to weeping.

As his shoulder healed and his bruises faded, he himself talked about his life in the Freehold, about his studies, and about the series of events that had taken him to Nova Arctis in the first place. They had discussed Senator Arbenz, Corso’s initial encounters with the first Magi derelict, and the means by which he’d gained entrance to it. He then described in detail the sabotage wreaked by a Shoal AI secreted inside Dakota’s implants.

It didn’t take long, however, for his initial burst of hopeful optimism to be replaced by a growing paranoia.

Every day after they had first met, Honeydew arrived either on the metal lip outside Corso’s cell or – very occasionally – via a door that slid seamlessly back in one wall, closing again to leave no evidence any such entrance existed. Corso was once or twice awarded a momentary glimpse of a dimly lit passageway beyond, with walls like burnished copper that appeared to be decorated with abstract patterns much like the graffiti-like squiggles adorning the cell itself. But at least they had now given him bedding as well as reading material, although the former would have seemed excessively spartan if Corso hadn’t been sleeping on a hard metal floor for so long. By contrast, the thin woven mattress felt almost decadent in its luxury.

His first hint of trouble came when he asked about the aerial battle he’d witnessed.

‘There was no such incident,’ Honeydew informed him blankly.

‘Unless you’ve been putting some really mind-bending shit in that stuff you feed me, I think there was,’ Corso protested. He was angry that his clothes had still failed to materialize. ‘I saw some kind of, of . . . military action, with your people shooting at each other. It was a fair distance away, but I got a pretty good idea something very serious was happening.’

‘There was no military action,’ Honeydew repeated pedantically.

‘So what, then, I imagined it? Or maybe you’re just lying, is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, what?’ Corso demanded, balling his fists and yet enjoying an increasingly familiar sense of frustration. He couldn’t work out whether the damn alien was being deliberately obtuse or not. ‘Yes, I imagined it, or yes, you’re feeding me a line of bullshit?’

Honeydew gazed back with those unreadable black eyes, the glowing bead of the interpreter bobbing gently in the air between them. ‘There was no military action,’ the alien repeated.

Corso leaned back and laughed derisively, the harsh sound echoing off the bare walls. ‘I saw it. One airship started firing missiles at another. What was going on? Was that something to do with me and Dakota?’

Another long pause from Honeydew. Then, suddenly, the creature reached out and touched the interpreter bead where it floated between them. It changed colour, and Honeydew let loose a stream of clicks. Corso guessed the creature was now consulting with his superiors.

A reply soon came in the form of another torrent of indecipherable clicks. Honeydew listened intently as this went on for some while.

Once or twice, while Corso watched with decreasing patience, Honeydew nodded his head in a disturbingly human fashion, before finally turning his attention back to him.

‘There was no military action,’ Honeydew repeated.

Despite such setbacks, and the increasing hollowness of Honeydew’s original promises, Corso’s continued confinement had at least become more bearable. Before very long, Honeydew assured him, Corso would be free to take part in negotiations that would include participation by the Freehold’s new rulers, and together their two species could then unlock the secrets the Shoal had kept from them all for so very long.

But before any of that, Honeydew explained one morning, he had to do them just one favour in return.

‘You must speak with Dakota Merrick,’ Honeydew explained. ‘She is currently in a cell like your own, but she has necessary information, and it is our understanding that she has no intention of being cooperative.’

‘Look, she does have some kind of link with the derelict, but she doesn’t have the programming knowledge. Her implants do all the work for her.’

‘Yet our own observations strongly suggest she is still in communication with the derelict – observations we might not have been able to make without your help and advice.’

‘Yes, but I myself don’t entirely understand how it works. Look, I told you I have the tools I need to get you inside the derelict, but they’re uploaded into the
Piri Reis
’s data stacks. I can’t do anything more to help you without those.’

‘The
Piri Reis
has been . . . uncooperative, therefore we believe Merrick is actively controlling it. You previously suggested you yourself might be able to persuade her to grant us access to her ship, as well as to the derelict.’

‘No . . . I mean yes, maybe.’

Corso blinked, wary and also unsure of just what Honeydew was driving at. ‘She’s misguided, that’s all. I’m sure I could talk her round if I had the chance.’

And by the next morning he had found himself inside Dakota’s cell.

Nine

Dakota dreamed she was falling.

The thick, humid air beyond her cell cradled her, and she felt no fear, even as the wall of the tower rushed by. She looked up, catching sight of the faraway summits of other towers appearing to crowd together as she tumbled. Yet she knew, deep in her sleeping mind, that she would never reach the ground. Below her there was only a dense haze, and no evidence of the river and the landscape that had become so familiar during her weeks of incarceration.

Her fall was endless, tranquil, untroubled.

She woke and found she couldn’t move. Drowsiness gave way to a bottomless dread. She managed to wrench her head upwards a bit, and discovered she was once again secured to a gurney.

This time, however, she was still in her cell, and there was no sign of Bandati interrogators. The wind sighed softly past the door-opening. She could just see it if she bent her head back and to one side.

She looked the other way, towards the rear of her cell, and suddenly found herself face to face with someone who was supposed to be dead.

Hugh Moss.

She screamed, wrenching at her restraints. Surely she was still asleep, and trapped in a nightmare. She had to be.

Moss was wearing a sumptuous fur-lined coat, interwoven with threads that glittered in the dim light. It looked impossibly, luxuriously soft to Dakota after her long imprisonment. He reached up and touched a cord holding the garment closed. It opened, revealing his naked body beneath, and he let it fall from his shoulders to the ground.

His body was impossibly, horribly thin and scarred, his flesh like the surface of some cratered moon, criss-crossed with scar tissue and ridges of pale flesh. He looked like a medical autopsy gone horribly wrong and subsequently reanimated. A small, shrivelled penis hung between two scarred and spindly thighs, and his smile revealed sharpened yellow teeth. He wore a skullcap of soft dark cloth that didn’t hide the fact his head had been recently shaved. She noticed the edges of what looked like surgical scars poking out from beneath that, too.

He stepped closer, reaching out to draw the spidery, calloused fingers of one hand over the thickening stubble of her scalp, then drawing it almost tenderly down across her cheek.

‘These are your scars, not mine,’ Moss said, stepping even closer. ‘I like to think of each one as a reminder of a past encounter, a lesson learned. I value my scars, Dakota Merrick. I value all the memories they represent.’

She twisted away from him. She’d electrocuted him on Bourdain’s Rock, and cut his throat ear-to-ear in Ascension; yet here he was again, like some unkillable
thing
out of her nightmares, his eyes glinting like diamonds frozen in those deep sockets.

There was still a long pale scar beneath his chin, a memento of their encounter in Severn’s mog bar, when he’d set out to destroy her on Bourdain’s orders.

Dakota tried to kick out at him, but the restraints held her firm.

She craned her neck as he suddenly stepped away, stooping to retrieve a large, grey-green canister from where it had been sitting on the floor, out of sight. From the way he handled it, she guessed it wasn’t a light burden, even in the local gravity.

‘I’ll take you out that window with me, you son of a bitch!’ she screamed, her throat already ragged as fear gave way to rage. ‘I killed you twice before, and I’ll kill you again!’

‘Unlikely, given your present circumstances.’ He smiled, thin lips twisting up at one corner. ‘The Queen of Immortal Light wants me to ask you some questions. I have other plans of my own, however.’

He placed the canister on one edge of the gurney, only millimetres from Dakota’s head. A complicated-looking pressure valve protruded from its upper end. The gurney itself was wide enough that Moss had no trouble pulling himself up onto it a moment later, twisting around until he was straddling her supine form, one knee planted on either side of her waist.

Dakota jerked her body from side to side, screaming abuse at him. She felt a moistness at her wrists and ankles and realized the restraints were cutting deeply into her flesh and drawing blood as she struggled.

Moss leaned over Dakota, and she twisted her head back until she could see daylight beyond the door-opening – anything but look at Moss’s horribly scarred flesh.

‘You should know,’ he hissed, pale thin lips almost touching one ear, ‘that I find you and all your kind . . . revolting. You’re so – pale and wormlike. Rest assured I have no sexual interest in you.’

Dakota twisted her head around again, snapping at him with her teeth, but he kept well out of reach. He grinned down at her, then laid one hand on the canister.

‘This,’ he said, patting the top of it, ‘contains live maul-worm grubs. A fascinating species, entirely native to Ironbloom.’ He turned a small wheel on one side of the valve. There was a faint hiss and, a moment later, the scent of ammonia. The canister rattled violently under Moss’s hand for a few moments, and Dakota heard a scraping sound coming from inside it.

As if something within it was trying to get out.

‘Maul-worms,’ Moss explained, ‘are necrogenes. They’re born by parthogenesis and enter this world hungry. Their birth kills their parent, and the young survive first by feeding on the rotting flesh of the parent, and finally on each other as they war for territorial dominance. Those that survive find their way into deep cave-systems, where they grow to quite enormous sizes over passing centuries. At this point, however,’ he paused to pat the top of the canister, ‘they are, of course, much smaller.’

He crouched over her again, his mouth next to her ear. Dakota twisted her head to one side.

‘You see, when these things find their way out of the canister, the first thing they’ll look for is something to eat. And I fear the only thing round here that looks edible is you.’

‘Is this because of what happened in Ascension? You were trying to kill me, Hugh. I was just trying to defend my—’

‘On the contrary, I should
thank
you.’

Dakota twisted around to stare at him, dumbfounded.

‘You taught me the danger of hubris,’ he continued. ‘I had ignored the lessons of our previous encounter on Bourdain’s Rock and allowed you to defeat me. It was a lesson I learned well.’

‘It won’t work,’ Dakota croaked. ‘Whatever those things in there are, they’re an alien physiology. They’d die if they attacked me. You know that.’

‘You’d be long dead yourself, by the time your flesh poisoned them,’ Hugh replied. ‘They’re voracious, but stupid. They’d gorge themselves on you until they died.’ He pulled himself up, hopping back down to the floor and reaching for his coat and pulling it back on. He left it hanging open at the front.

He then stepped over to the door-opening and looked outside before turning back to her. She craned her neck to follow his movements.

‘Did you know the Bandati are fundamentally an artificial species?’ he said, his tone suddenly casual. ‘They adopted quite a different form some millennia ago, and they call that time of change the ‘Grand Reformation’. Most of their records from before that period were destroyed, but I can tell you they were wildly destructive, almost suicidal in the scale of the wars they conducted up until that period. Then something happened: one group became dominant, and they began a centuries-long process that radically transformed their species from the cellular level up.’

He came back towards her and rested one hand on the edge of her gurney. ‘They didn’t have wings before that time. And yet, for all the wild experimentation that led to their present form, they have powerful taboos against making any further changes to their morphology. Which is why they’ve enjoyed remarkable stability for several thousand years – until recently, that is. Now their Hives fight wars amongst themselves, and ancient, destructive patterns are beginning to re-emerge.’

He smiled down at her. ‘There’s always a pattern to the way intelligent species develop in the galaxy. They spread wildly, almost like a contagion, and very soon they fracture into new species, using technology to differentiate themselves one from another far, far faster than the process of evolution could ever provide. Humanity is very close to that point, perhaps only a few centuries or millennia away. You see, the clue lies in your Ghost implants.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’re not quite human any more, Miss Merrick. Did you know that? The clue was right there in front of me: your
implants.
So primitive, of course, but a clear antecedent to those changes which will take over your species one day, and somehow enough for the Magi ship to mistake you for one of its own. Scans show your implants have been undergoing radical changes ever since you came to this system. And so the question I now have to ask myself is – are you, in fact, still human?’

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

‘Your original implants are gone, and there are new, organic structures in your brain that appear to have taken their place.’

‘Bullshit.’

Moss leaned in closer again. ‘You’re a machine-head – despised and mistrusted throughout human space, like all your kind. Your life has been a web of self-deceit and lies. Bad things happen to the people who love you. An entire colonial expedition, all dead. Your one-time lover Marados dead, and Severn too. Oh, I know everything about you, Dakota. You were a fountain of self-loathing and self-deceit during your interrogations, and it’s such a shame you’ll never remember most of it.’

She lunged her head at him, her teeth scraping his cheek. He pulled away quickly, laughing, but his skull cap slipped off and fell to the floor. Dakota spat at him, screaming more abuse as he bent to retrieve it.

But not before she saw more clearly the network of scars crisscrossing the top of his head.

‘Dakota the martyr,’ Moss hissed as he stared down at her. ‘That’s how you see yourself, isn’t it? Perhaps you thought it should have been you up on that little plinth while you were busy murdering children on Redstone. You pray for death and pretend it’s a noble sacrifice, all to save a humanity that did its best to wipe you and your kind out of existence.’ Moss put one hand over his heart, his tone mocking. ‘Such selflessness! I could weep, really’ His grin broadened. ‘And then
what,
Dakota? Then they’ll really be sorry?’

‘Fuck you!’ she screamed, the words ripping themselves out of her throat. She bucked and twisted, the restraints cutting even deeper, although the pain was welcome in a way. ‘What’s the point of all this? What do you want from me?’

Moss stepped forward with an almost balletic grace and punched her once on the side of her chin. Her head snapped round with the impact and she gasped with shock.

‘All in good time, Dakota.’ He took her bruised chin in one hand, his voice soft and low. ‘You blew the heads off innocent men and women and left their mothers to suffocate in Redstone’s air. The lucky ones just froze to death. Tell me the truth, just between you and me. Tell me you enjoyed murdering them all. Tell me how
good
it felt – the same way you told your interrogators.’

His rancid breath was warm and moist, his lips just millimetres from her ear as he leaned in close once more. ‘What would all those people back on Bellhaven think of you, if they knew how much alike we really were? Would they forgive you? Would they welcome you back? Or would they execute you for your crimes and toss your corpse into an unmarked grave?’

Dakota’s nostrils were now full of the stench of his breath and unwashed skin. His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. ‘I inserted a pre-recorded loop into the surveillance systems covering this cell. Do not think for one moment your actions have not been constantly scrutinized since you arrived here. But, for the moment, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know they’ll have no idea what’s in store for you until it’s much, much too late.’

And then she realized what was so familiar about those scars he was hiding under his skullcap. He looked like someone who’d just had the surgery for installing machine-head implants.

‘Fuck you,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know what the hell you want from me or what this is about, but—’

‘I’m about to give you a chance at a decent head-start,’ he hissed, cutting her off. ‘You’re going to have the opportunity to get out of here. You’re resourceful and you might even stay alive if you’re lucky, but I rather suspect you won’t.’

‘For fuck’s sake, what are you
doing
all this for?’

‘I want you to lead the Bandati on a wild-goose chase, Dakota. I want you to keep their attention off me while I finish some business with the Queen of this stinking planet.’

He moved away from her, towards the shadows in the rear of the cell. ‘And if they do catch you, you can tell the Queen that I do not respond to threats. Run if you can, my dear, but don’t interfere with me or with your precious derelict. I have better plans for it than you can ever imagine.’

‘For God’s sake, I don’t understand!’

He didn’t answer. She watched as part of the wall slid aside, and he stepped through into the corridor beyond. The door slid back into place a moment later and she was alone once more.
What now?
She was still bound to the gurney. She lay there for several more minutes, hyperventilating and looking wildly around her. Suddenly, without warning, her restraints came loose. She sat up slowly, blinking away tears and rubbing at her chafed and bleeding wrists.

She lifted herself off of the gurney and it suddenly lowered, folding up into a thin slab resting on the floor of the cell.

The canister was still there, on one edge of the slab. It rattled violently. As she watched, it began to open. There was the sound of escaping gas and, again, a strong smell of ammonia.

The lid of the canister lifted up on four glistening steel rods, revealing a hollow interior. Something mewled from inside, the sound disturbingly like that of a kitten. Two of the rods rose higher than the other pair until the lid toppled off onto the floor with a crash.

Dakota darted into the far corner of the cell, horrified yet unable to move. There was nowhere else to go.