by Gary Gibson
Corso turned and saw she was watching him. She caught his eye and immediately he looked away, a look of regret and guilt crossing his face as he did so.
In that moment, she realized he was keeping something from her.
They had clung together the previous night, still desperately glad to see each other, but as the following day progressed, Corso’s continued refusal even to discuss what had happened to him before he appeared in her cell both worried her and made her suspicious.
Her gut feeling that he was keeping something back increased every time she caught his furtive glances. By the time evening began to draw in the atmosphere had become badly strained, and Corso had taken up residence at the rear of the cell, silent and brooding.
She remained close by the door-opening, facing outwards, her attention on events that were literally a world away. She had her own secrets to keep, after all.
The Piri Reis had apparently been taken inside a Bandati ship, a huge dreadnought that had only recently docked with the facility.
Why this had happened was a question she couldn’t answer; but it was clear the Piri was under attack.
Her ship had been placed in a maintenance cradle in what appeared to be an engineering bay, while a team of Bandati huddled next to the hole that had been blown in its side back in Nova Arctis. The Piri was designed for electronic subterfuge and sabotage rather than physical defence, and yet her ship’s own surveillance systems made it clear several more Bandati lay dead nearby. They looked like they’d been blown apart.
That made her wonder if the Bandati were fighting amongst themselves for possession of the Piri – and presumably for possession of the Magi protocols still held within the Piri’s stacks.
She fought down a surge of panic at the thought. She wasn’t sure if the Bandati could actually use the protocols Corso had developed to take the derelict away from her – but neither was she certain they couldn’t.
In her distracted state, she hadn’t at first realized that more heavily-armed Bandati were now approaching from a platform at the far end of the bay, moving cautiously and setting up defensive posts as they did so – small, portable barriers behind which they could hide. But that made no sense, since the Piri had no weapons to use against them.
Yet, as she watched, soap bubbles began to appear everywhere throughout the bay, each one lasting barely a second before it shrank almost immediately to a brilliant white point, before exploding with the force of a grenade. More and more of them appeared, ripping apart both the Bandati warriors creeping towards the Piri and the ones still crouching by the rip in its hull.
But they weren’t really soap bubbles. They were shaped fields – each one popping into existence around nothing but air before shrinking, compressing the atmosphere inside to a white-hot plasma that exploded outwards with devastating force when the field dissipated barely a second later.
Shrink and blow. She’d first heard of this tactic during her pilot training.
The Shoal had used it to wipe out half a Sun-Angel fleet that made the mistake of trying to smuggle nukes on board a coreship at the height of the Erskine Offensive. The Consortium didn’t have access to field-generators half as sophisticated as those used by relatively senior races like the Bandati. What made things more confusing now was that the Piri didn’t have any field generators at all . . .
But the Bandati dreadnought did, she realized. The Piri – or whatever else might be controlling it – was using the Bandati ship’s own field-generators to blow its crew to smithereens.
Piri., I want you to tell me exactly what the fuck has been going on. I want to know—
Dakota blinked, stunned. It was like Bourdain’s Rock all over again. Who says?
What? Do you mean the Bandati? Are they telling you what to do?
But that didn’t make any sense, with almost a dozen dead Bandati scattered around the Piri – did it?
To hell with that, she almost said aloud. She wanted to know what was happening to her ship; she wanted to know—
But all the same, she was running out of time.
‘Dakota?’
She turned to see Corso standing and watching her with some apprehension.
‘Dakota? Who are you talking to?’
She turned away again and focused her attention instead on a train of blimps weaving their way between two neighbouring towers, following each other in tight, computer-controlled lines that reminded her of the motion of a snake undulating across desert dunes. She felt a powerful sense of satisfaction as the lead blimp in the procession suddenly changed course. Dozens of identical blimp-trains passed through the city day and night, always sticking to the same pre-programmed routes, without varying once.
Until now.
The lead blimp began to tack directly towards their own tower, getting closer over the next few minutes until it was no more than a few hundred metres away. She could make out strange markings on the side of its unmanned gondola, complex sigils whose meaning was lost on her, but bore some resemblance to those decorating her cell.
It was more than enough. She grinned like a maniac as the blimp suddenly shifted back onto its original course, the rest of the train automatically shifting to follow it in its sudden, unintended course change.
Thank you, she sent to the skies, but it was already too late. Both the derelict and the Piri Reis had passed into Blackflower’s dark side, and thus temporarily out of range.
‘Dakota!’
The way Corso said her name this time, it sounded like a warning.
She stood and turned to face him once more, her heels only millimetres from the chasm of air filling the void between the Hive Towers. In her mind’s eye, she imagined she looked like a diver about to make a leap from the high board.
‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ she challenged him without preamble. ‘I don’t know what it is, but there’s something. And we can’t afford secrets, not here.’
He squinted at her in shock, his expression suddenly blank. She almost smiled. It was like confronting a kid with his hand still inside the cookie jar.
‘Maybe you could tell me what you were doing there just now, Dakota. I was watching and . . . I saw what happened to that airship.’ He licked his lips nervously. ‘Did you make that happen?’
‘At first I thought they put us together so they could spy on us while we talked. But there haven’t been any interrogations since you appeared, and you’re telling me the ambrosia is safe to drink and, the funny thing is, it is. And I can’t help but wonder how you could have known that?’
Corso rubbed his palms across his face as if trying to erase the expression of alarm that had appeared there. ‘Dak, do you know how close you’re standing to the edge? Come back in. Please be reasonable.’
‘Reasonable?’ She could hear the bitterness in her tone. She glanced down at her feet, realizing that, without consciously thinking about it, she had shuffled slightly backwards. She was standing just outside the cell now, looking in, balanced on the lip of the tiny platform, one hand on the frame of the door-opening.
‘You like to think you’re a reasonable man, but when it comes down to it all you do is follow the path of least resistance, right, Lucas?’
‘Make your point, Dakota,’ he snapped, finally sounding angry.
She crouched down, reaching behind her to feel the edge of the lip. A cool wind blew over her bare skin. ‘Tell me exactly what you gave the Bandati before they stuck you in here with me. Or was that all your idea?’
He stared at her in silence, looking guilty as all hell. For Dakota, it was as good as an a
dmission of complicity with her tormentors.
Despite her still-weakened state, Dakota started to lower herself over the rim of the lip, reaching out to her right to take a grip on one of the rough grooves of the tower wall, her flaccid muscles protesting as she did so. Her feet briefly kicked at air before finding a toehold, and she wondered if she would die if she let go – or if the Bandati had a contingency plan if either of them looked ready to commit suicide.
Corso stepped forward, half-crouching, his arms extended as if he were about to rush forward and make a grab for her. ‘Stop this, Dakota! Just come back in here, for fuck’s sake, please.’
Her heart was beating so hard it felt like it was about to drum its way out of her chest. Terror mixed with a strange giddy joy, the two emotions somehow intermingled. ‘The whole time you’ve been in here with me, you’ve hardly been able to look me straight in the eye, not for one second. Whatever it is you’ve been holding back, now’s the time to tell me.’
‘You’ll die, you crazy fucking bitch!’ he yelled, his anger finally asserting itself. ‘Look at you, you’re half-starved, you can’t think straight. For God’s sake, let me help you back in, okay?’
‘A couple of weeks ago you were ready to kill me and steal a starship you wouldn’t even have been able to fly without me. I don’t trust you, Lucas, so just tell me what you’re up to.’ She began tensing her arms as if she were about to let go.
And realized, with a certain distant horror, that she might actually be prepared to do so.
She heard a distant roaring, not unlike a waterfall, and blackness scrawled its way across the corners of her vision. She felt lightheaded, the metal surface of the ledge taking on a curiously soft, rubbery quality . . .
. . . hands were pulling her back inside, Lucas Corso’s breathing harsh amid words and curses spilling out of his mouth in a jumble as he braced himself against the door frame, one foot wedged against it while he half-kneeled to reach her. She held onto him tight, suddenly all too conscious of the void beneath her kicking feet, and was pulled back into the suddenly welcome confines of their cell.
She sprawled face-down on the floor and watched as he scrambled backwards, gasping from the sudden exertion of saving her life – again.
‘Try not to make a habit of that,’ he wheezed. ‘I have bad enough nightmares nowadays as it is.’
‘Tell me,’ she whispered, cheek still pressed against the steel floor. She closed her eyes, and waited.
A moment later, she heard him sigh. ‘They already know you’re in communication with the derelict,’ he muttered, almost too quietly for her to hear.
She blinked. ‘And?’
‘They’ve been trying to get inside it. I offered them my help.’
‘Of all the stupid, idiotic—’
‘Shut the hell up!’ he shouted, rising up and looming over her. ‘They already know you’re the one making it so hard for them to get inside the derelict, or even the Piri Reis.’
She laughed weakly. ‘Whatever the Piri’s doing, it’s got nothing to do with me,’ she retorted. ‘Sounds like you’re quite friendly with those things that were torturing us, Lucas. Funny you never mentioned that to me until now.’
He shook his head, speaking more quietly now. ‘They wanted to kill you once they knew about the protocols I’d developed. But then I told them you were still the key, and how they couldn’t get the derelict to cooperate without your help.’ He tapped his chest. ‘I’m the only reason you’re still alive, Dakota. And the only way either of us is going to stay alive from this point on is if they think we’re both useful to them.’
She stared at him with a deep sense of loathing. ‘So, what next? You told them you could talk me into helping them, is that it?’
‘What was I meant to do, stand by while they murdered you? Look, we both talked. When the torture didn’t work, they relied on the drugs to get information out of us. They showed me recordings where I’m talking about my work, about how I could get them inside the derelict. I don’t remember saying any of it, but I talked, all the same. We both did, Dakota.’
‘The first derelict you found back in Nova Arctis tried to kill you when you tried to use the protocols on it. Did you tell them about that?’
‘Only because that damn Shoal-member in your head interfered!’ Corso snapped back. ‘That. . . thing sabotaged all my work, entire months of it. Look,’ he said, his voice taking on a more pleading quality, ‘the Bandati still have good relations with the Consortium. If we can help them get control of this derelict, then we can both go home, and then I stand a chance of helping swing a better deal for the Freehold – and maybe for the whole human race, once we understand how to replicate the drive technology.’
She chuckled and shook her head. ‘You’ve had plenty of time to say all this to me before, and instead you’ve just been skulking around saying nothing. What were you doing, just looking for the right moment?’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘I think maybe you should have just let me fall.’
His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. ‘You’ve been granted a privilege no other human being alive has ever enjoyed. You’ve seen inside a civilization as old as the stars, Dakota, and it’s wrong to keep all of that to yourself. It’s an act of, of. . . tremendous hubris to think that you and you alone deserve to. Humanity should be the judge of what you know. Meanwhile I don’t know how far we can trust the Bandati, but I’m willing to try – even if you aren’t.’
For a moment she was ashamed of her anger at him. Neither of them had asked to be swept up by the events that had recently taken place.
So she closed her eyes and ran away once more, opening her mind to the greater presence that suddenly emerged from beyond the bright limb of a moon almost one hundred and forty million kilometres away, far from the current torment of her physical body.
The derelict was still waiting for her, as it always would wait for its navigator.
Six
The Fair Sisters moved serenely along the path of their respective orbits, the pair of them more or less evenly matched in diameter, atmospheric composition and albedo, but separated from each other by some hundreds of millions of kilometres of empty space. Dakota, still trapped in a high tower on Ironbloom, had not yet realized that by linking these two worlds with a common name, the Bandati were also commemorating a battle between Darkening Skies and Immortal Light that had taken place in that very system some millennia before.
As was the case in the majority of colonized systems with an emphasis on industry, robot scoops routinely dived into the upper atmosphere of the two gas giants in order to dredge helium three for use in fusion-based power systems. Once they had their fill, these simple-minded machines would boost back out of a deep gravity well, before heading for one of the hundreds of similarly automated refineries that orbited the many moons of the Fair Sisters.
One of these orbital refineries, however, was not what it seemed.
It floated high above Blackflower’s pocked landscape, which still bore the scars of a strategic encounter between the massed forces of the two Hives so long before. The transmissions that frequently passed between the refinery and Ironbloom utilized the same encryption employed by the highest echelons of Immortal Light’s royal court. Further, the refinery was far larger than the rest of its ilk, and boasted a variety of defensive weaponry out of proportion to its apparent intrinsic value, along with a newer section that had been put under gravitational spin.
It was also occupied.
Hugh Moss sent one of his newer bead-zombies to greet the Queen of Immortal Light’s proxy, once the incoming cruiser had settled into the docking facilities. While he waited, he stood by a railing surrounding a deep, oval pit that had become known, to those who lived – and more frequently perished – within the Perfumed Garden, as the Killing Floor.
The air was damp and humid, the rust-streaked walls of the converted refinery now half-hidden behind dense greenery, while insects and small bio-engineered winged creature
s constantly darted here and there. Water dripped from the uneven surface of the ceiling and the light was dim and grey-green, the combined effect giving the illusion to those few visitors to the Perfumed Garden that they were underwater.
Moss wore a long, thick coat deliberately left open over his emaciated, naked body so as to better feel the cool dampness of the air against his mottled and heavily scarred flesh. Relatively fresh welts wriggled across his narrow chest and torso, mementoes of an unpleasant encounter quite recently.
Two men circled each other warily at the bottom of the pit as Moss gazed down upon them. Each moved in a low crouch, keeping their distance as they circled, and waiting to see who might make the first move when the right time came.
Of the two, Da’ud Anwar had risen from the gutter, working as a hired thug for an extortion racket in Nairobi before being given the choice of immediate execution or joining a prison mining operation on a prospective colony world. From there he had lied and cheated his way onto a coreship before developing a taste for extortion and assassination. He had eventually learned of the Perfumed Garden, the place from which the most highly valued assassins within the Consortium originated, and found his way there, as some few very determined ones always did.
Victor Nimitz was already an assassin of some repute, but one who had been sent to kill Hugh Moss specifically. He was not the first to be sent on this quest and – Moss knew for sure – would not be the last. A variety of physical and psychological torture had been used to first destroy Nimitz’s mind, and then carefully rebuild him into the efficient and vastly improved killing machine that now prowled the floor of the pit.
If he survived this contest, the remade Victor Nimitz would be repaying those who had sent him on his mission by killing them all.
Both men had benefited from Moss’s extensive knowledge of extreme body modification. Da’ud Anwar had chosen to model himself on a Terran wolf; his internal musculo-skeletal structure had been altered so that his bones could unlock one from another, allowing him to morph his body into remarkable new configurations. He was, for instance, able to stretch and alter his limbs in such a way that he could run on all fours with surprising speed. His teeth had been removed and replaced with sharpened diamond flakes; a modification that allowed him to rip out another man’s throat with startling efficiency. Da’ud had even extended the morphology to his tongue, so it was now long, black and eel-like, and the poison it secreted could kill any other human he encountered within seconds.