by Gary Gibson
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 grabbe
d 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.