Nova War (23 page)

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.

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 standing 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.’

Corso stared out across the scene of ruin. He had a pretty good idea just what the
Piri Reis
was capable of when it came to defending itself, but it had no onboard weapons capable of causing this level of devastation.

‘You agreed to cooperate,’ Honeydew reminded him. ‘Now board the
Piri Reis
and retrieve the protocols.’

‘But. . . what about this?’ Corso asked, waving a hand towards the field of carnage. ‘What
did
this?’

‘That is something we would also like to know.’

Corso turned to face the alien directly. ‘The
Piri Reis
doesn’t have any kind of offensive capabilities, and that’s a fact. You’ve been monitoring the ship, haven’t you? So this must be obvious to you?’

‘Yes, but our monitoring systems have been . . . unresponsive. All we can say for certain is that there have been sporadic surges of power to the field generators built into the supporting cradle.’

‘Okay’ Corso thought for a minute. ‘I’m assuming you
did
try turning the power supply to the cradle off?’

The alien stared at him silently.

For pity’s sake.
‘What, you can’t actually turn it off?’

It didn’t take much for him to sense Dakota’s hand somewhere in all of this.

‘You made it clear that Merrick granted you override privileges that allow you to board her ship.’ The alien cast his gaze across the silent, darkened bay. ‘Our own attempts to do so have not met with success.’

Corso gazed over the swathe of destruction before them and felt sweat prickle his brow. ‘Yes, but
she’s not
here. I tried boarding the ship without her direct permission once before, and it came very close to killing me. Maybe if you brought her here—’

‘That isn’t currently possible,’ came the bland synthesized reply. ‘You, however, are a noted expert in pre-Shoal electronic linguistics. You will board the
Piri Reis,
find the information we need, and thereby prove your worth to us.’

‘Everybody wants something from me,’ Corso sighed, half under his breath.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nothing,’ Corso snapped, feeling irritable. Would the
Piri Reis
still recognize him? Or would it find some way to kill him before he could even get near it?

‘In that case, time is of the essence, Mr Corso. Don’t wait too long before returning - or think about hiding inside the ship. If you do, we will not hesitate to destroy the
Piri Reis,
with you inside it if necessary’

Corso stared into the alien’s implacable black eyes.

Just get this over with.
He stepped off the platform and walked slowly forward, eyes firmly fixed on the
Piri Reis.
After a dozen or so steps he stopped and turned to look back at the platform, and saw the three Bandati still standing there like giant-eyed statues, unmoving and implacable beyond the occasional involuntary twitch of their wings.

He turned back to face the
Piri,
and started moving again, unable to keep himself from crouching slightly, as if to make a smaller target.

Reaching the first group of corpses, he saw that their wings had been almost entirely burned away.

The
Piri
sat only about fifteen or twenty metres ahead, drifting very slightly inside its field restraints. The constantly flickering light was too much like some cheap effect out of a haunted-house ‘viro for Corso’s comfort. He tried to remember what he’d seen of the
Piri
’s internal systems layout, in case there was some clue there as to how it had managed to kill those heavily armed warriors.