Nova War (36 page)

Moss must have noticed something in Dakota’s eyes as she stared up beyond his shoulder. He twisted around suddenly, staring straight up at Roses, still in the process of his rapid descent.

Just before Roses’ filmsuit could flicker into life, Moss’s hand blurred into motion and white-hot agony seared through one of the Bandati’s wings. Roses slammed helplessly into Moss, crying out in pain as his wing began bleeding from a deep wound.

Dakota had twisted to one side once she saw Roses shooting like a bullet towards them. Moss’s face was now etched with agony, but he still managed to drag himself out from under the burden of Roses, who was also clearly struggling to recover from the force of his impact.

Roses’ wings trembled as he grasped weakly at the assorted debris onto which he had collapsed. His shotgun had skidded to one side, and lay just a hand’s reach from Dakota.

Moss staggered upright and wrenched his knife from the wounded Bandati’s wing. His eyes looked unfocused, and for a second Dakota thought the mercenary might collapse. But then he appeared to recover, and pulled his arm back as if to slash again at the Bandati’s vulnerable wings.

Dakota reached out for the shotgun and grabbed it without thinking. The weapon had a distinctive flaring barrel, at the sight of which her implants automatically dumped a wealth of relevant information into her short-term memory; the shotgun could fire shot over an extensive area, and was perfectly adapted for a winged species with a history of aerial combat. Her finger felt as if it were being guided instinctively towards the trigger.

She gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the throbbing ache of the wound in her shoulder, and took careful aim.

The spray of shot caught Moss halfway across his back; he screeched in anger and pain, and tumbled a short distance away in the zero gravity. Dakota herself was sent crashing into a piece of sharp-edged rubble as the shotgun kicked hard against her shoulder. She screamed as renewed pain lanced through her, and she lay helpless on her side, panting and moaning. When she opened them again, she saw that Roses had pushed himself to his feet, and now stood there clicking quietly to himself.

She looked around, and realized there was no longer any sign of Moss.

Gone.

‘I nearly couldn’t find you,’ admitted Roses. ‘The ring, it . . .’

‘Came apart,’ Dakota finished for him. She tried to stand and nearly collapsed. She had to get the damned knife out. ‘Moss is responsible. How badly injured are you, Roses?’

‘I don’t think I can fly without some treatment.’

‘Okay’ She nodded. ‘First, you’re going to have to help me get this knife out.’

‘But what about Moss?’ Roses replied. ‘You shot him at close quarters, but he still managed to get away.’

She stared off into the dust-laden haze still choking the air.
He’s the closest thing to nigh-on fucking unkillable I’ve ever encountered,
she wanted to say.

‘I need to get this knife out,’ she repeated. Her skin felt cold and damp. ‘Can you help me with it? I can’t seem to do it on my own.’

Roses chittered quietly to himself, as if coming to a decision, then he knelt carefully beside her and tentatively touched the haft of the weapon. She bit back a scream, then clutched at the alien’s narrow waist for support as Roses wrapped both of his black fists around the haft and yanked the blade out.

Dakota screamed till her lungs ached, all too aware how easily she could die out here.

But it was more important than ever she reach the derelict before Moss did, assuming he hadn’t simply collapsed somewhere nearby. The data imported through her implants was still inconclusive; injured or dying, Moss’s own implants were still doing a good job of keeping him hidden.

‘Can you move?’ Roses asked her.

‘I think so.’ She struggled back onto her knees. Wincing, she clamped one hand to her shoulder, afraid of bleeding to death, though beginning to suspect that the wound had not been as deep as she had at first assumed.

The Bandati agent beside her didn’t look much better. He kept his wings furled close in to his body but, as usual, it was impossible to judge his state of mind. He had retrieved his shotgun once more, and now carefully reinserted it into his harness.

‘You saved my life, Miss Merrick,’ the alien observed. ‘This was not to be expected.’

Dakota affected a weak smile. ‘Sometimes we all just have to watch out for each other, Roses,’ she said. ‘We should get moving now. I’ve seen Moss come back from much, much worse.’

She looked around carefully. The derelict’s containment facility was closer than she’d realized. Now the dust had started to disperse, she could make it out clearly through the thinning haze.

Roses came right up beside her, and she leaned on him for support as they started to pick their way through the ruins.

Suddenly she remembered Corso, still trapped on the Bandati station. She’d promised to help him if she could.

Corso curled up in a tight ball as an Emissary towered over him where he’d fallen. Its attention was on Sal, however, who had now been dragged out into the open. Schlosser’s body had been yanked from the tubular construction and thrown casually to one side, his lifeless eyes staring straight at Corso as if in accusation.

The Emissary was trying to push Sal inside the tubular pyramid, while Sal was making a heroic but clearly futile attempt at resisting. The snake-machines twisted greedily, as if desperate for the taste of new flesh.

The pain seemed to hit him in waves, with brief moments that were almost bearable before being rapidly superseded by peaks of agony where Corso cursed and moaned and even prayed, always aware of how easily one of the Emissaries could crush his skull under one of those giant, splayed feet.

A fresh tremor ran through the deck and bulkheads, causing one of the wall-mounted tanks to crash down and go thudding up against the motionless form of the injured Emissary. The station trembled yet again, the air filling with a dull roar and the metallic screech of bulkheads under enormous strain.

Corso stumbled upright, gasping hard from the effort, and began to head towards the
Piri Reis,
mindless now of both the Emissaries and the robot they had set in place to guard him. The air turned thick with the smell of something burning, and acrid smoke began wafting into the hangar.

Corso coughed, but kept moving, though he wanted to lie down and sleep so very, very badly.

He could hardly see the bay extending all around him, as yet more smoke flooded in through conduits and passageways. He stared into the murk, terrified of going in the wrong direction – or wandering straight into one of the Emissaries. As if in response to this thought, an angry trumpeting came from somewhere behind.

He tripped, fell to his knees, and picked himself up again.

He just had to keep moving.

But he felt so
cold.

Another angry bellow sounded, but much closer this time. It was getting hard to breathe, and he couldn’t see further than a couple of metres in any direction, but he felt sure the
Piri
must be close by.

Corso heard a regular, mechanical clanking sound as something came running straight towards him. He tried to pick up his pace, then stumbled to a halt, suddenly aware of the bulky mass of an Emissary looming, half-visible, through the churning dust straight ahead.

As it spotted him, it began bellowing loudly.

Corso turned to run, only to find himself staring up at the formidable bulk of the guard-machine. He froze in terror, the thud of the Emissary rushing up behind him as ominous as the descent of an executioner’s axe.

But the machine stepped on past Corso, and launched itself at the Emissary. The alien roared and howled in outraged response.

Corso stared open-mouthed.

Dakota?

He stumbled away from the Emissary as fast as he could. It was down on the ground now, desperately trying to defend itself.

She’d heard him.

He searched frantically through the thick haze, convinced the entire station was coming apart around him. For a horrible moment he feared he was completely lost, but then he stumbled upright against the
Piri
’s hull and began to feel his way around it.

The lock opened at his approach, as if the ship were expecting him. Maybe it had, after a fashion. He managed to pull himself up and inside the spacecraft with the last of his strength, then waited, panting and gasping, in the confined space as the lock slammed shut behind him. Enveloped in a warm darkness filled with familiar aromas, he half-crawled, half-rolled into the forward cabin.

He had to first find some way to get the
Piri
away from the space station, and then he had to get himself straight into a medbox.
Easier said than done,
he thought, as he lay there shivering. He didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but a deadening numbness was spreading through his arms and legs. That the
Piri
would probably start leaking atmosphere from its hull-breach as soon as it exited the station was another good argument for getting inside the medbox.

A darkness even deeper than that filling the
Piri
began to crowd in on his vision. He tried calling out, to get the
Piri
’s attention, but all that emerged was a croak.

A wave of overwhelming fatigue washed over him. All he needed to do was close his eyes, just for a moment, just until he could get the energy together to, to . . .

Something crashed loudly against the side of the
Piri,
but Corso didn’t hear it. Outside, two of the Emissaries were dead, and the third was engaged in a desperate struggle for survival with its own security robot.

And then, finally, there was silence.

The Piri rocked gently as the section of deck on which it rested began to drop, lowering it into an airlock chamber below the bay.

Inside the
Piri Reis,
the effigy – which had lain inert and lifeless in Dakota’s tiny sleeping space – stood up suddenly and moved towards the cabin door. Just as before, the umbilicals linking it to its wall-slot stretched to their limit and brought it to a stop.

The effigy turned, grabbed the connecting cables in one strong fist, and jerked them free of the sockets that studded its spine. It stumbled on through to the forward cabin, stepping astride Corso’s inert form and gently lifting him up in its arms. It carried him through to the medbox unit, waited as the unit’s lid hissed open, then lowered him into the waiting tangle of probes and catheters that reached up like hungry mouths. They drew Corso down, sliding into his mouth, nose and anus, shredding and dissolving the remnants of his clothing before getting to work on stemming the internal bleeding that would otherwise have killed him in just a few more minutes.

The medbox’s lid hissed back into place as the effigy watched. It waited there for several moments more, then its head slowly tipped forward, its jaw drooping, the eyes becoming blank and lifeless once again.

Meanwhile, the outer airlock doors opened, and the station’s own centrifugal force threw the spacecraft far away from the hub. After a few moments the ship’s engines engaged and it began to accelerate, moving with increasing speed as it put distance between itself and the wounded space station.

Twenty-eight

There was something ghostly in the way the containment facility responded to their approach. Dakota could feel how weak she was getting, and had to rely more and more on the steadying support of Days of Wine and Roses.

The Emissaries were clearly losing the battle. They’d sent only a relatively small force, and clearly hadn’t expected to encounter a Shoal coreship or more than one offensive fleet. The Emissary Godkiller itself was now coming under direct attack, most of its assault drones already dead or deactivated.

‘Look,’ said Roses urgently. Dakota returned her gaze to the containment facility, the vast wall of the bulkhead rising just behind it. It was decorated in familiar gold-and-azure stripes and embellished with decorative glyphs. They gave it the air of a temple, she decided.

Now, as they drew closer, it was beginning to split open, down one side.

Most of the floating debris had finally settled. After leaving the ruined buildings behind, they had picked their way up a flight of wide, shallow steps that led into the facility’s interior. Inside, she could see the derelict was suspended from the ceiling by thousands of flexible cables, while raised platforms accessible by ramps surrounded the craft’s teardrop-shaped hull.

A wind was picking up, growing louder by the second. The ring-segment was dying, finally coming apart under the colossal stress of being blown away from the main space station.

There was still no sign of Hugh Moss. Yet instead of triumph, there was only a hollow feeling deep within Dakota’s gut, and even a sense of terrible loss. Though unable to imagine any reasonable alternatives to the path she had chosen, there was still a nagging suspicion that if she’d only had more time to think about things, there might have been a different way for her to get to where she now was – involving fewer deaths, less pain, and considerably less horror.

Moss had been able to stagger only a short distance away from Dakota and Roses before he had collapsed and blanked out. Medical monitors dotted throughout his body and brain briefly shut down his consciousness, but kept sufficient control of his motor centres to allow his body to drag itself into relative shelter between two huge chunks of shattered masonry.

And there he slept, while the machinery infusing his flesh, organs and bloodstream anaesthetized him and did its best to repair the very worst of the damage.

When Moss finally regained consciousness, it was to hear a howling gale that made it immediately clear, even to his drug-addled senses, that the ring-segment’s structural integrity had finally failed. The atmosphere was already venting fast through a thousand hissing gaps and cracks that widened by the second.

How very close he’d come. He could feel Dakota’s joy radiating out from within her skull. He caught a glimpse through her eyes, of the facility opening up to her like the arms of a long-lost lover, and it was almost as if she were taunting Moss with her triumph.

He moaned with inhuman longing and despair.

But before long, a powerful calm settled over him. His yacht was still where he’d left it, orbiting low above the clouds of Leviathan’s Fall, successfully evading the attention of the various fleets occupying the system. He sent out a silent command, and the yacht’s propulsion systems began to power up. If he could not confront Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals in triumph, he would choose death instead.

But he did not intend to die alone.

It was like coming home.

Defensive systems that had lain dormant for centuries scanned both Dakota and Days of Wine and Roses as they passed by, then closed down. They walked on, into the grand interior space of the containment facility.

The interior of the building began to fill with a soft light. The derelict rising before them was so very different from those Dakota had encountered back in Nova Arctis. Those had been crippled, some of them almost beyond repair, even though one of them had transported her and Corso across light-years in a fraction of a moment.

The ship before her now was undamaged. Long, curving spines flared out from the rear of the craft until they almost brushed against the walls that surrounded it.

‘And there are more of these?’ Roses asked as they both stared up at it.

‘More than anyone ever suspected,’ she replied in a low voice. The building had the atmosphere of a long-abandoned cathedral. ‘This is just the first of many’

‘And you are the only one who knows where they are all hidden. I am not sure that I envy you, Miss Merrick.’

She was still leaning against the Bandati, feeling weak and shaky. The wound in her shoulder felt like a hot line of fire and itched abominably. ‘Roses, once I’ve got you out of here, I need you to carry a message for me. Can you do that?’

The alien stared back at her, waiting for more.

‘The rest of the Magi ships are on their way here to Ocean’s Deep.
All
of them. Some are coming from a long way off, so they won’t get here for some time. But the first of them will get here in just a couple of hours.’

‘But why bring them here?’

‘Because I want to build a superluminal fleet that the Shoal don’t have any control over. And I’m going to base it right here.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think there’s going to be too many objections once everyone understands exactly what I could do with them.’

Days of Wine and Roses helped her climb the wide ramp that led up to the derelict’s hull. They moved slowly, Roses holding her tight as Dakota made her pain-racked way upwards. All around they could see pieces of long-abandoned equipment scattered across the maintenance platforms that surrounded the ancient starship.

‘I need to ask you a question,’ Roses finally replied once they had come to a halt right beside the hull.

‘Go on,’ said Dakota, sinking gratefully to her knees. It was getting colder as the air became thinner. The area outside the facility was filled with the sound of metal shrieking under extreme stress, and of howling wind spilling out into the vacuum. The ring-segment around them was on the verge of disintegrating completely.

‘The Shoal are powerful, but they share that power amongst themselves. There has never been, to my knowledge, any time when that kind of power was concentrated in the hands of one single individual. I had the opportunity to study human history during my time within the Consortium, and when it comes to the accumulation of great personal power, the outcome both for the individual concerned and those affected by that power is rarely favourable. History, Miss Merrick, is never kind to such people.’

Dakota gritted her teeth, feeling the anxiety and uncertainty that had been dogging her every step threaten to overwhelm her. ‘I know that,’ she croaked. ‘But I’m just trying my best to work out what to do as I go along. And until someone comes up with an idea I think is a better one, this is the way it’s going to be.’

She tried to ignore the little voice inside her that insisted the Shoal would have made the precise same argument.

Dakota reached out and laid her bare hand on the derelict’s surface. A thrill of intense pleasure swept through her at the touch, almost orgasmic in its strength. It felt smooth and slick, as if the craft had been created only days before, and there was a slight give to it as if it were something organic: as if she were touching flesh, rather than the hull of a ship designed to move between worlds.

No, she thought, stroking her hands further along the pale surface and sensing a response from deep within; it was much more like touching the face of a long-lost lover.

She felt a faint tremor under her fingertips and drew back, peering upwards and from side to side. A dimple several metres across began to form on the skin, centred on where her hand had touched it. She stepped back, watching as this dimple rapidly deepened, turning into a concave bowl within seconds, then deepening further to take on the shape of a passageway leading directly into the craft’s interior.

‘We need to get inside,’ she said to Days of Wine and Roses, and finally let go of the alien’s compact body. She pulled herself inside the ship, cursing under her breath at the pain in her shoulder. A soft, non-localized glow filled the air, illuminating branching corridors that were still forming as she watched.

She glanced back at Roses, who waited on the platform beyond. It wasn’t hard to imagine his apprehension. ‘Believe me when I say it’s safe,’ she assured him.

‘It feels unpleasantly like stepping into the mouth of a very large animal,’ he replied. ‘Not an experience to be enjoyed, believe me.’

Dakota tried to control her impatience; she wanted to tear off her clothes and immerse herself in the derelict’s pale flesh. ‘I can still take you back to your own fleet, if you’d like.’

And what would I tell my Queen upon my return?’ Days of Wine and Roses asked her. ‘That I let you take away that which she values most? And what news would she then take to the Shoal?’

‘Listen to me, Roses. The Shoal were only ever here because they could use the presence of the Emissaries as an excuse to make a pre-emptive strike against them, using weapons that can do to other star systems what Trader did to Nova Arctis. You were pawns in a much bigger game – we
all
were – but that’s over now.’

Roses didn’t reply, so she continued. ‘Your Queen was right that she couldn’t trust the Shoal, even if she left it all a bit too late. The point is, it seems the Emissaries already had their own nova weapons, when the Shoal had assumed they didn’t.’

Roses’ wings twitched spasmodically. ‘But that means—’

‘It means a nova war just like the one in the Greater Magellanic Cloud has started, but
here,
in our own galaxy. The Emissaries are already retaliating, destroying Shoal-controlled systems across the border between their empires. But the fighting’s going to come our way before long, and unless we find a way to deal with it we’re all going to be wiped out of existence. Bringing every last available Magi ship still in existence here to Ocean’s Deep is one part of a possible solution I have in mind.’

Roses still hung back. ‘How could
you
possibly know such things?’

‘Blame these implants’ – she reached up and tapped the side of her skull – ‘in here. They do all the work, in conjunction with all this,’ she went on, casting a significant glance around them. ‘Even now, there’s encrypted tach-net traffic flashing back and forth between the coreship here and the ones in other systems. The derelict is tapping into it, and feeding the main details to me.’

‘I . . . see.’ Roses finally stepped fully inside the Magi ship, and the hull sealed itself behind him. Doors had now appeared, leading off from the newly formed passageway.

‘As I told you, there are serious consequences to my aiding you,’ Roses informed her. ‘Though there are non-aligned Hives who might accept me.’

Dakota nodded. ‘In the meantime, this ship is inertialess, like the coreships, so you should be comfortable enough. There’s . . .’ She peered further down the softly glowing corridor at the outlines of doors that had appeared just in the last minute or so. The derelict had predicted her train of thought, as always. ‘There’s a room modelled after a Bandati habitat through there,’ she informed him more decisively. A door slid open, as if at her unspoken command.

Roses moved down the corridor and peered inside. ‘Dakota, I’ve seen some very strange things in my life, and some of them frightened me very much. But I don’t think any of them frightened me quite as much as you do.’

Once Roses had entered his quarters, darkness fell around Dakota. The ship’s flesh pressed around her, swallowing her whole and drawing her into itself. There was that same brief moment of animal terror she remembered from the first time she’d physically merged with a Magi ship. But that fear soon passed, and she awoke to the expanded perceptual range of the Magi ship. She sensed, felt, heard what it did.

She was its navigator.

Welcome home,
said a voice.

A welter of images and ideas flooded over her, chief amongst them an external view of the ring-segment. It was finally coming apart as it accelerated towards the black hole. They had only minutes left, at most.

The Librarian fed her an image of the derelict blowing the ring-segment apart in order to allow them to escape.

No,
she replied.
First we have to deal with Moss, and then we deal with Trader.

‘Swimmer in Turbulent Currents.’

Moss opened his eyes, then closed them again. He was obviously hallucinating. ‘My name is Hugh Moss,’ he said quietly.

Beneath him the ground rumbled. A few more seconds and the ring would . . .

‘Look at me, Swimmer.’

He opened his eyes to find Dakota looking down at him. She appeared to be in far better shape now than during their recent encounter.

‘Too late,’ he told her.

‘You have to call your yacht back.’

‘Another few minutes and this ring-segment is going to shatter into a thousand pieces. When that happens, I will die. When that happens, my yacht will slip into superluminal space, and reappear in the heart of this system’s star. And then . . .
boom.
’

He squinted up at Dakota. Some hidden sense told him he was seeing a form of projection.

‘I’m speaking to you through your implants, Hugh. I’m on board the Magi ship now. So tell me what happens after? You destroy this system, and everyone and everything in it, and then what? Revenge is one thing, but what exactly is it you think you’ll have achieved? The coreship would be long gone from Ocean’s Deep before its sun blew. The same goes for pretty much anyone and everyone who can get away from here, and that includes Trader.’

Moss sat up gingerly from where he’d been lying curled up and waiting for death. ‘You wouldn’t even be asking me these questions,’ he replied, ‘if you were able to stop me. Have you been trying to compromise my yacht’s systems?’

Her face remained impassive, and a smile tricked its way into one corner of his mouth. ‘That turned out to be harder than you thought it would, didn’t it?’

A lot harder. Remember, Trader did this to you, Hugh – no one else.’