by Gary Gibson
'An entire star system destroyed: a middle-aged, main-sequence star that had absolutely no right to go about exploding all on its own. That's the kind of incident any one of our client species might well express considerable curiosity about, wouldn't you say?'
'I have no reason to think it was anything other than necessary,' Trader grated.
'Then you might be interested to know that the Immortal Light Hive recently came into possession of a Magi starship. A craft, my friend, with two humans on board.'
Trader remained silent at this revelation, and the General elaborated. 'Our Bandati spy turned out to have a variety of data encoded into strands of his genetic material. These have now been extracted – observe.'
The image of Nova Arctis was replaced with that of another star system, this one almost obscured by a riot of sigils representing hundreds of communities and industrial complexes scattered throughout it. It was Night's End, home to Immortal Light.
The viewpoint zoomed in abruptly, first bringing into focus a small, heavily cratered moon orbiting a cloud-streaked gas-giant, and then a large industrial complex orbiting some hundreds of kilometres above the moon's equator. Hundreds of pressurized capsules were strung together, joined by gossamer transport tubes, the whole flimsy-looking structure encapsulating a number of fat-bodied helium dredgers. The viewpoint zoomed in a third time, to show another craft docked nearby that was quite unlike any of the other vessels.
Trader felt a sudden and unpleasant thrill as he recognized it: a ship of the ancient Magi fleet – and looking the worse for wear.
Long, curving arms reached out from the craft's rear, as if grasping at something invisible. These were the drive spines, conduits that could rip time and space open and throw the ship across light-years in an instant. Much of the craft's milky-white outer hull had been burned away – particularly where it covered over the drive spines – exposing the skeletal framework beneath.
'And the two humans?'
'Here.' The General gestured again. The Magi ship faded, replaced by two figures – one instantly recognizable, the other only slightly less so.
The first was Dakota Merrick, of course, small, with a narrow frame, short dark hair curling around her ears. The other human was Lucas Corso, citizen of a violent and marginalized human society known as the Freehold. It seemed that his government had charged him, against his will, to unlock the derelict Magi ship's secrets.
Both were immobilized, strapped onto gurneys in a chamber. Several Bandati clung to the sides of pillars standing here and there throughout the chamber, while others were leaning over the two humans.
'And are they still alive?' Trader asked his superior, in as nonchalant a manner as possible.
'Yes,' Desire replied. 'Immortal Light have been trying to extract information from them ever since they appeared rather unexpectedly on the edge of their Hive's system, in the Magi ship.'
'Then the Bandati may already know too much,' Trader observed mournfully. 'They may already know that the superluminal drive is a weapon, and I'm guessing the miserable winged bastards mean to trade that knowledge to the Emissaries.'
For all their aggressive forays into Hegemony territory, the Emissaries – during all their millennia of interstellar travel – had apparently failed to discover the star drive's destructive potential.
'That,' Desire agreed, 'would appear to be the most reasonable conjecture. In which case, we could soon be facing a nova war of unprecedented proportions – one that could destroy our entire civilization. Based on the evidence we've extracted from our Bandati spy here, the Emissaries want direct proof of what Immortal Light claim to possess. They intend to send a covert expedition deep into our territory with the simple purpose of verification. Given the circumstances, one might easily find justification for a pre-emptive strike against the Emissary forces massed on our borders.'
Trader's head swam for a moment. 'We should not be discussing this in such close quarters to your crew,' he snapped.
The rulers of the Shoal Hegemony had long held back from using nova weapons against the Emissaries, for fear it would give them the clues they needed to start developing their own, thereby escalating the conflict to mutually destructive levels. Yet at the same time there remained the very real concern that the Emissaries might discover the truth any day now; and if such a day ever came, the Shoal would be facing its greatest challenge.
Pre-emptive escalation was a phrase only rarely heard, usually whispered in darkened corners or in secluded high-level meetings. It was the notion of carrying out a pre-emptive nova strike against the Emissaries, in order to destroy their beachhead in the Orion Arm in one single devastating blow. And when those responsible were called to account… they would need to prove the absolute necessity of their actions, and let history judge them if necessary.
The General twisted his manipulators in assent. 'You needn't worry, Trader. Our secrets remain quite secret here. I'm sure you will agree, given the circumstances, that we appear to be in precisely the kind of crisis that calls for clear minds to take unpleasant but necessary action, regardless of how drastic it might appear to the outside observer.'
'And of course, it would be necessary for the ultimate weight of responsibility to be carried on the fins of one single Shoal-member,' Trader added, the sarcasm clear and sharp in his words.
'We both serve many masters, Trader. They must remain nameless by necessity. Otherwise, there might be speculation about a vast and ancient conspiracy to suppress certain truths from the greater population of the Shoal, which might ultimately destabilize the Hegemony. And that would never do, would it?'
No, damn you, it wouldn't. 'No doubt you've volunteered me for the job.'
'I'd say you've been preparing for this job all your life,' Desire replied. 'You've advocated a pre-emptive strike yourself often enough. Can you think of anyone else who could be trusted with such a task?'
Trader briefly enjoyed a fantasy of the General being tortured by his own interrogators. 'Our goal is to preserve our race, preserve the Hegemony, and preserve the peace.' Trader paused before continuing. 'Regardless of the costs.'
Desire twisted his manipulators in a gesture of grim agreement. 'Regardless of the costs,' he echoed. 'Our secret is finally out, Trader. Therefore our strategy must be swift, retaliatory and brutal. We propose destroying the Emissaries' primary systems along their beachhead in this spiral arm. We would thus set the skies ablaze, but only for a short while.'
And yet, Desire, think of the scale of such destruction. It would be enormous.'
'Indubitably But not sufficient to bring the Shoal to an end -or so the Dreamers say'
A high price for many of our client species to pay, is it not?'
'Of course,' Desire replied. 'But, as I know you'll agree, better them than the Shoal.' Night's End One Dakota Merrick awoke, alone and naked, in a cloud-high tower on an alien world, and wondered for a moment if she was dead.
She gained consciousness slowly, at first only dimly aware of her surroundings, eyes and lips sticky with mucus, breasts and hips pressed against an unyielding and deeply uncomfortable floor. Sunlight stabbed into her eyes as she tried to open them and she winced, turning away from the brightness.
The air smelled wrong, tasted wrong on her tongue. A breeze touched the fuzz on her scalp, and on it was carried a riot of unfamiliar scents. She sneezed and coughed, trying to clear her throat. She reached up with one unsteady hand and touched her head, realizing in that moment that her hair had been recently depilated.
She sat up, blinking and looking around at unfamiliar surroundings. Walls, floor and ceiling were surfaced in a grey metal etched with alien calligraphy, fine tight curls of vermilion or jade running in parallel or entwining tightly in intricate, indecipherable patterns.
The only light came via a door, through which she could see clouds drifting across a blue-green sky that was slowly fading into dusk. Sunlight that wasn't quite the right colour touched the bare skin of one of her legs, sending
a sudden warmth into her brain.
The air smelled so strange, a new-world smell, the scent of some exotic faraway place she had never been to before.
The last thing she remembered…
All that came to mind were moments of intense, overwhelming pain interspersed with far longer periods of deep, dreamless sleep that might have lasted a single night or a thousand years.
Before all that, she'd been on her ship the Piri Reis. And they'd…
She shook her head. It felt like her skull was filled with thick, viscous mud that obscured every thought, inducing a turgid heaviness that made her want to just close her eyes and stop… stop trying to remember.
She inspected her body, finding that her hips and upper torso were bruised, the skin yellow and discoloured as she glanced down along her breasts, stomach and legs. She peered between her thighs and saw that the triangle of pubic hair she remembered there had also been reduced to a fine fuzz.
She touched her eyebrows. They felt… thinner. As if they'd only just started growing. She shivered, despite the warmth of the air coming through the door, a few wayward fragments of memory creeping slowly back.
Her name was Dakota Merrick. She was a machine-head – possessor of a rare and illegal technology inside her skull that allowed her to communicate both with machines and with similarly equipped human beings on a level approaching the instinctive. She had been born on a world called Bellhaven. She had…
She had obviously been given something – something that blurred her thoughts, made it hard to think.
She rose up on unsteady legs, and nearly collapsed again.
She touched her head with unsteady fingers and moaned, recalling a flash of her and Corso's frantic escape from, from…
Lucas Corso.
Who was Lucas Corso?
The name was maddeningly familiar.
She carefully walked over to the door, seeing it was nothing more than a vertical opening cut into one wall. She squinted against the fading light, seeing the tops of buildings backlit by the setting sun, though hazy with distance.
There was only air beyond this opening. A lip of metal floor at her feet extended perhaps half a metre beyond the room she'd woken in. It looked like a gangplank made for suicidal midgets.
Dakota wasn't particularly scared of heights, but some instinct made her balk at the idea of getting too close to the vertiginous drop that lay beyond the gap in the wall. She lowered herself onto all fours, the metal floor hard against her knees, and crawled part of the way out of the opening, determined to see just how far away the ground was. At best, maybe there was some way she could climb down, or even…
The ground was at least half a kilometre below her. A long, long way down. Despite her ingrained pilot's training, the combination of her current physical nakedness and the unexpectedness of discovering such a sheer drop brought a rush of vertigo. She retreated back into her chamber – cell? – but not before she had got a good look at an entire series of enormous towers criss-crossing a wide river plain framed by mountains blue with distance.
The towers – each of them rising up considerably higher than her own vantage point – all followed the same basic design. Each had a wide, fluted base that narrowed slightly as it rose, before culminating in a similarly fluted peak. Each edifice was decorated with wide horizontal stripes, pale pink alternating with cream. Many of them also featured intricate glyphs which might be decorations or something far more mundane, but bore a clear resemblance to the etched patterns within her own present quarters.
The river that wound between the towers nearest to her was fed by at least a dozen tributaries, whose courses were etched across a dense urban landscape in sparkling silver lines.
Winged specks kept darting between the towers: she realized they were Bandati, a species whose permitted sphere of influence under the Shoal trade charters directly neighboured humanity's own.
She remembered learning about them… where?
Bellhaven. The world she'd grown up on.
So why were all her memories so hazy?
She spied an extended glitter on the horizon, almost certainly indicating the shores of some distant ocean, the destination for the network of waterways that snaked past far below. Suddenly she remembered brief glimpses of alien faces – wide black eyes gazing at her, impassive and distant – and nightmares, such terrible nightmares.
The wide black eyes, she realized, of Bandati.
But am I their prisoner'? she wondered. There lay the question.
It didn't take much thought to realize that any Bandati so inclined could easily fly into her cell (the notion that she was being held captive was quickly growing in her mind). She, on the other hand, being human and wingless, lacked any obvious means of escape. There was no evidence of any other doors or exits of any kind in this cell.
She was therefore trapped as surely as if the opening in the wall before her was blocked with electrified steel bars.
She crawled back out onto the protruding ledge and lay flat on her back in order to look upwards. It was instantly obvious she was confined in a tower like the others that dotted the landscape. The wall rose sheer above her, into dizzying heights.
She experienced a moment of overwhelming deja vu, as if every action she performed, every thought she now had, was one she had already experienced a thousand times before.
She was, she guessed, maybe halfway up the building, and she observed a multitude of irregular projections and rickety-looking platforms emerging from the tower's surface that gradually tapered outwards both above and below her vantage point. The platforms looked ramshackle enough to have been built from random pieces of junk, extending everywhere out from the side of the tower like some kind of vertical shantytown.
She twisted herself carefully around and stared back towards the ground, noticing that another platform projected out from the wall almost directly below her. A variety of irregularly shaped structures, as shambolic in construction as the platform itself, had been erected on its upper surface. It was perhaps thirty metres further down and several metres to one side of where she now lay on her belly. The platform, however, looked big enough to support several freestanding buildings on its upper surface.
Some of the platforms jutting from other, distant towers looked like they might be even bigger, although most were less ambitious in scale.
I could still jump, she realized with a start, that one simple fact emerging through the general sluggishness of her thoughts. There was no reason why she couldn't survive the drop, since she still had the Bandati filmsuit wired into her skeleton. Its ability to absorb ridiculous quantities of kinetic energy had kept her alive in the chaos following the destruction of, of…
But that memory slipped her mental grasp like a wet eel.
The harder she tried to remember, the more her frustration grew. Dakota pulled herself up onto her knees and hugged herself, fighting the lethargy that threatened to overwhelm her.
She closed her eyes, willing the black, protective liquid of the filmsuit to spill from her pores and swallow her completely…
She opened her eyes again and saw only her bruised and battered flesh.
It's not working.
Panic bloomed amid the fug surrounding her mental processes.
While she'd lain staring outwards, lost in this internal struggle, a Bandati had come to a spiralling landing on the large platform situated immediately below her cell.
The alien appeared entirely oblivious to her watchful presence, skidding to a halt near a two-storey building mounted towards the rear of the ledge. That building looked like it had been built from random pieces of driftwood and scrap metal, and as she watched, the Bandati lumbered through an entrance hidden from Dakota's view.
She tried to give a yell, hoping to draw it back outside, but all that emerged from her throat was a hoarse rattling sound.
She tried again, and this time the words came. She felt like she hadn't spoken aloud in a month. 'Hey! Hey, up here!' she h
ollered. 'Hey! Help, heeelp!'
There was no response, and the Bandati did not re-emerge.
She kept yelling for a couple of minutes, finally giving up when her throat started to hurt.
She waited there as dusk slid into night, waiting to see if the Bandati would come back out. It never did.
Dakota finally gave up peering below and sat up, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as the gradual drop in temperature made her naked skin prickle. As unfamiliar constellations spread across the bowl of the sky, there appeared to be no moon.
Despite her earlier fatigue, sleep proved elusive, so she slumped against the side of the wall-opening and turned her attention to the striated exterior surface of the tower right beside her. Reaching out and stroking it, she found the surface of the tower appeared to be encircled with thick grooves in something that might form a spiral pattern, the texture not unlike that of unfired clay. These grooves were aligned several centimetres apart – and sometimes cut as much as five centimetres deep, thus providing a decent handhold.
She leaned out, staring back down at the platform below, which seemed so close and yet so far away. Even if she had the strength to climb down without getting herself killed, she really wasn't sure she had the courage.
She reached out one hand again to the tower's external surface. It felt solid enough beneath her grip. Dakota woke long before dawn.
She had curled up near the door-opening, staring out at the lit-up towers and the blimps that sometimes moved purposefully between them. Her emotions wavered between nervous tension and loneliness, while her thoughts ranged from vague fantasies of escape to outright despair.
She rubbed at the stubbly dark fuzz on her scalp, while sorting through the random memories that had somehow found their way back to her.
She'd encountered Bandati before, but usually only from a distance. Her gut feeling told her it had been at least a couple of weeks since she'd come to this place, maybe as much as a month, judging by how much her hair had managed to grow back in. How or even why remained frustratingly just out of reach. She couldn't even be sure she had been conscious for much of that time.