Nova War (20 page)

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 enough 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 shaped 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.

Below them, spread out between the two supporting cradles, was a battlefield.

The other ship Dakota had noticed was a lot bigger than the nuclear pulse-ship, and was decorated with thick bands of alternating green and yellow, a theme repeated on a series of Hive Towers just visible far off in the distance. It floated on a cushion of shaped fields above a thick concrete cradle, the whole structure maybe two hundred metres across at its widest point.

They descended into an open cargo bay, while the sounds of war echoed all around.

The door closed above them and they landed hard, plummeting several metres before crashing into a mound of padded bags put in place for that purpose. The only sounds Dakota could hear were her own panic-stricken breathing and the pounding of her heart.

They were in a dimly lit, low-ceilinged chamber whose curved walls snaked away on either side into darkness.

From within a brine-filled sphere formed from shaped energy fields, the chamber’s only other occupant watched Dakota as she struggled to her feet. Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals’ manipulator tentacles twisted themselves together beneath the fleshy curve of his lower body in an expression of sick delight.

It’s really him,
Dakota realized; not just the computerized entity that had succeeded in destroying an entire star system, but the blood-and-flesh Trader himself.

‘Mellifluous greetings,’ the creature boomed. ‘To be reacquainting ourselves after such adventures is tantamount to self-pleasuring unto the point of exhaustion, is it not, my dear Dakota?’

Fifteen

Coming face to face with the Queen of the Hive of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk was like being confronted with the product of a lunatic’s fevered nightmare.

The Hive Queen towered over Dakota, a vast, sluglike being with an obscenely tiny head perched atop her enormous shoulders like the afterthought of a deranged gene-job surgeon. Every time the Queen so much as twitched, the deck underfoot would shake, sending ripples through the creature’s pale, semi-translucent flesh. Dakota found she couldn’t escape the morbid fear the Queen might topple forward and suffocate her under those acres of pale, wormy flesh.

Immediately following her unexpected encounter with Trader, Dakota had been unbound from her chains and given water, along with a bowl of paste that tasted like it had probably come from a Consortium-built escape pod’s emergency rations. She had devoured it without hesitation, then had been led straight through to the chamber containing the Queen, and pushed down onto her knees.

Her two guards had then moved to either side of her, weapons drawn. They weren’t taking any chances.

Trader appeared once more, entering the Royal Chamber and taking up a position slightly to one side of Dakota and midway between her and the Queen. Days of Wine and Roses had been the last to arrive, positioning himself at the far end of the chamber, presumably so he could keep an eye on both Dakota and Trader simultaneously.

Dakota watched as a fragile-looking tower, constructed on a wheeled base, was pushed up close to the Queen. An attendant then pulled himself up onto the platform at the tower’s summit and placed an interpreter bead in the air immediately before the Queen’s wide slit of a mouth. The attendant then hopped back down onto the deck, wings flaring momentarily, before scurrying away in some haste.

I’d be scared, too, standing next to that thing,
Dakota reflected.

And then the Queen began to speak in words Dakota could understand, the programmed tones so outlandishly fragrant and sensual that Dakota could scarcely associate them with the monster before her.

‘So this is the one who not only colluded in an attempt to steal from us the filmsuit technology we worked so hard to acquire, but a starship as well?’ said the Queen. ‘I must admit, Miss Merrick, to some indecision over whether to applaud or condemn you.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Dakota grated. ‘I didn’t “steal” anything, particularly not your filmsuit. Let’s just be clear on that.’

‘There is substantial evidence,’ the Queen replied, ‘to the contrary. You would be facing serious charges of espionage, if the matter of the derelict starship wasn’t considerably more urgent.’

‘I said it wasn’t like that. Okay?’

‘Then perhaps,’ the Queen replied, ‘you would care to enlighten us before we move on to other matters.’

And Dakota began to tell her story.

It had all started with a betrayal, only a few months before the destruction of Bourdain’s Rock.

Quill’s instructions for Dakota, which awaited her in the form of a lightly encrypted and therefore highly insecure transmission upon her arrival at one of Fullstop’s lesser-known orbital ports, had been a triumph of nebulous wording and deliberate obfuscation, even when compared with her previous assignments. She was to meet a man called Lin Liao in a bar called The Wayward Dragon, in a district whose outer hull was still dotted with nacelles that had once housed nuclear missiles – a testament to less peaceful times.

The port itself had been constructed during one of the periods of political tension between Fullstop and its sister world Corkscrew.

It was well known that every 287 days, the two worlds came spectacularly close to crashing into each other; then Fullstop slid around the larger planet and went on its way. Although this was traditionally a cause for celebration, every now and then trade embargoes, political rivalries, clashes over available resources and ideological differences between these two worlds would result in one or the other starting a shooting war at the point of closest approach. The celebrations held at such times were inclined to have a decidedly fatalistic edge.

Only Fullstop, however, enjoyed the attention brought to it by the dreamwind spores that drew those in search of ecstatic revelation to its capital city.

‘You understand, “Fullstop” and “Corkscrew” are not their true names, not their
original
names,’ Lin Liao had explained to her, peering over the long-stemmed pipe he fiddled with constantly.

Lin Liao wore traditional Chinese garb, fine cloth with gold and silver threads woven into intricate patterns. His eyes had been bio-engineered so that Dakota found herself peering into twin green slits like the eyes of a particularly hungry lizard-demon. Clearly extremely ill-at-ease, he studied her through the cloud of smoke that emerged from the pipe. His nervousness did nothing for her own state of mind.

‘That’s interesting,’ Dakota replied in a voice that conveyed her complete lack of interest, but Liao either didn’t notice or care about her reaction.

‘Corkscrew is known as
Nuwi
in the Chinese language,’ he explained, sounding like he was desperate to distract himself from whatever was really occupying his mind. ‘And Fullstop is
Fuxi.
The names are those of a brother and sister from ancient myth, and most often they are pictured as intertwined, crossing the heavens together.’ Liao smiled. ‘You can see the significance.’

I can see that you’re worried about something,
she had thought. ‘The shipment?’ she asked, desperate to get it all over with.

Liao halted in mid-flow and looked over at her. ‘Yi has been delayed,’ he replied, a touch gruffly.

‘Bit public here, don’t you think?’ she said, nodding her head to either side to indicate the crowded and busy bar around them.

He shrugged. ‘Most of these people are Tong,’ he said, as if that explained everything.

Dakota glanced around again. ‘Most of them aren’t of Asian descent,’ she observed.

‘Yeah, well. The Tongs are equal-opportunity secret societies these days,’ Liao replied with a small note of irritation. ‘So nobody’s going to hassle us, all right?’ His lizard-eyes glanced nervously towards the rear of the bar behind her, and she resisted the urge to turn and look.

Lin’s gaze dropped back to the table between them and Dakota kept her mouth shut, determined not to be sidetracked into small talk. She studied her own drink, the liquid sloshing up slightly on one side due to the port ring’s coriolis effect.

Half a minute passed in an uncomfortable silence, then Lin looked up suddenly, his head cocked slightly to one side and his gaze focused on some indeterminate point between them. She guessed he was receiving a message, almost certainly from Yi. He nodded to the air and stood abruptly.

Dakota gazed up at him. ‘Lin, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I’ll be straight with you. Someone’s been trying to screw around with my ship since I disembarked, and we both know that can’t be good for the health of either us. The faster I’m gone from here the better, so I really don’t have the time for stupid—’

‘Okay,’ he said, as if completely oblivious to everything she’d just said. ‘There’s a room in the back where we can all talk. Come on.’

I don’t want to—
Dakota started to say, but Lin was already barging his way through to the rear of the bar.

She stood and followed him, despite an increasingly stony weight in the centre of her gut. She had to move fast to keep up as Lin jogged through a busy kitchen area, and then pushed open a door leading into a refrigeration room. Dakota followed him inside to find a large, ragged piece of carpet had been tacked over part of the bulkhead that formed the room’s rear wall. Lin twitched the carpet aside and Dakota saw a crude door had been burned through the bulkhead, the edges looking rough and half-melted.

She followed Lin through this bolthole and found herself in a cramped space furnished with reed mats, low tables and large embroidered cushions in rich shades of gold and red. Wreaths of smoke rose up from ornate incense-burners, tickling the insides of her nostrils.

Several wall hangings covered in Chinese characters disguised the bare metal walls all around her, yet it was clear that this room had not been designed with domestic occupation in mind, for a large, bare girder crossed the width of the low ceiling, and a series of pressure pipes ran up one wall, gurgling sporadically.

Yi lay sprawled across one of the cushions, watching with a brooding, nervous expression as they entered. Where Lin was tall and willowy with a narrow face, Yi – his sister – was smaller and more compact, with the lithe strength and grace of a dancer, which had in fact been her chosen career prior to the most recent outbreak of hostilities between the Two Planets. Since then she had gained a reputation as a merciless warrior with a strong nationalistic streak and a string of recorded kills to her name. Her rise within the criminal societies of Fullstop had been even more spectacular following the resumption of an uneasy peace.

In fact, she and her brother were two of Dakota’s least favourite people in the known universe.

Lin now paced nervously around the room, near his sister. ‘We want to make a proposal,’ he said, glancing towards Dakota.

‘A
deal
,’ Yi corrected. She gave her brother a sharp glance before regarding Dakota with hazel eyes that were as pretty as their owner was callous. ‘A deal concerning what it is you’re here to pick up.’

Dakota briefly considered her options. Immediately turning around and walking back the way she came was the favoured one; but that meant returning to Quill empty-handed, which was something she couldn’t afford to do.

‘Yi, play “Dragon Lady of the Spaceways” all you like, but I’m here on business. It doesn’t involve impromptu “deals”. You offload my shipment, and replace it with the agreed quantity of dreamwind spores. I stay away in the meantime, and, as far as anyone else is concerned, I’m here on legitimate business. When you’re done, I fly away again. I never heard of you, and you never heard of me. And yet,’ she glanced deliberately around the room, ‘I have to put up with all this clandestine bullshit and get myself seen in public with your brother. Why is that?’

‘There has been a change in circumstances,’ Yi replied.

‘Really?’ Dakota stared at the other woman in a stunned silence for a few moments. ‘All right, then, there’s a protocol for exactly this kind of situation. I’m going to go back out through that bar. I’m going to go shopping and pretend I was never here talking to you, while you, as far as I know, get busy loading up the spores. If you can’t do that, some very nasty people are probably going to come here and ask you why.’ Dakota stabbed one thumb towards the room’s half-melted entrance. ‘So I’ll be leaving right now, okay?’

Yi’s expression was faintly amused. ‘Remind me what it is we got our hands on?’ she asked Lin.

‘Some kind of fancy alien personal shield tech,’ Lin replied. Thick, orange-green smoke squirted from his nostrils as he took another hit from his pipe, and Dakota smelled the distinctive aroma of burning dreamwind spores. ‘Acquired from Atn traders, who acquired it themselves from God knows where. They might have been carrying it at sub-light speeds for centuries, for all we know. You know what the Atn are like; they don’t care how long it takes as long as they get wherever the hell it is they’re going.’

Dakota shook her head. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Restricted technology,’ Yi replied. ‘Stuff the Shoal doesn’t want us to have. We . . . acquired it, and now we need your help.’

Dakota stepped backwards towards the exit. ‘Right, fuck you, in that case. We’re finished doing business. I—’

She turned, and yelled in surprise when her shoulder touched a shaped-field barrier that had suddenly appeared across the half-melted exit. It sparkled where she had collided with it, and her shoulder smarted.

Lin cackled, and instantly started to cough. Dakota turned back towards the brother and sister in time to see Yi reach behind her cushion to retrieve and activate a dock-worker’s torchgun that had been hidden out of sight.

Torchguns were handheld plasma-arc cutters designed for small repair jobs and quick fixes, and a device Dakota was far from unfamiliar with. Yi pointed it at Dakota, holding it steady with the other hand under her wrist. The tip of the nozzle was already incandescent with heat. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a weapon, and had a range of barely more than half a metre; close up, however, it could do serious damage, and Dakota was currently close enough . . .

‘Didn’t you ever hear that line about not shooting the messenger?’ Dakota asked, carefully keeping her hands by her sides where the other woman could see them.

Lin wiped at his eyes with one hand, still sniggering. ‘Sorry, it was the look on her face. She . . .’ he snickered again, then belched smoke and began to cough loudly.

Yi spared her brother a brief and deeply hateful glance. ‘We meant it about a deal,’ she repeated, returning her gaze to Dakota, her anger evident. ‘We just aren’t interested in giving you a choice in this matter.’

‘But a “deal” sort of implies I get something out of it, Yi.’

‘Well, yeah. We’re going to need your ship – and in return, you get to stay alive.’

‘What do you mean “need my ship”?
I
need my ship.’

Lin sniffed and wiped a hand over his face. ‘We had a problem, you see. We—’

Yi’s face grew red with anger. In one smooth motion, she turned towards her brother, still standing to one side of her, and now pointed the torchgun at him.

A moment later there was a searing flash of light that left Dakota momentarily blinded. She stood frozen with shock, her ears full of Lin’s screams. She covered her eyes, waiting for vision to return. When she could see again, Lin was lying on his side and panting like a sick dog, both hands gripping his thigh. The smell of burning flesh now drowned out the more delicate scent of incense. Dakota saw part of one trouser leg had burned away, revealing charred meat and the sickening sight of exposed bone. With his slit green eyes, the injured Lin looked far more like an injured animal than anything human. Dakota looked away.