by Gary Gibson
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 uncom
fortable 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.
Yi lay sprawled across one of the cushions, watching with a brooding, nervous expression as they entered. Where Lin was tall and willowy with a narrow face, Yi – his sister – was smaller and more compact, with the lithe strength and grace of a dancer, which had in fact been her chosen career prior to the most recent outbreak of hostilities between the Two Planets. Since then she had gained a reputation as a merciless warrior with a strong nationalistic streak and a string of recorded kills to her name. Her rise within the criminal societies of Fullstop had been even more spectacular following the resumption of an uneasy peace.
In fact, she and her brother were two of Dakota’s least favourite people in the known universe.
Lin now paced nervously around the room, near his sister. ‘We want to make a proposal,’ he said, glancing towards Dakota.
‘A deal,’ Yi corrected. She gave her brother a sharp glance before regarding Dakota with hazel eyes that were as pretty as their owner was callous. ‘A deal concerning what it is you’re here to pick up.’
Dakota briefly considered her options. Immediately turning around and walking back the way she came was the favoured one; but that meant returning to Quill empty-handed, which was something she couldn’t afford to do.
‘Yi, play “Dragon Lady of the Spaceways” all you like, but I’m here on business. It doesn’t involve impromptu “deals”. You offload my shipment, and replace it with the agreed quantity of dreamwind spores. I stay away in the meantime, and, as far as anyone else is concerned, I’m here on legitimate business. When you’re done, I fly away again. I never heard of you, and you never heard of me. And yet,’ she glanced deliberately around the room, ‘I have to put up with all this clandestine bullshit and get myself seen in public with your brother. Why is that?’
‘There has been a change in circumstances,’ Yi replied.
‘Really?’ Dakota stared at the other woman in a stunned silence for a few moments. ‘All right, then, there’s a protocol for exactly this kind of situation. I’m going to go back out through that bar. I’m going to go shopping and pretend I was never here talking to you, while you, as far as I know, get busy loading up the spores. If you can’t do that, some very nasty people are probably going to come here and ask you why.’ Dakota stabbed one thumb towards the room’s half-melted entrance. ‘So I’ll be leaving right now, okay?’
Yi’s expression was faintly amused. ‘Remind me what it is we got our hands on?’ she asked Lin.
‘Some kind of fancy alien personal shield tech,’ Lin replied. Thick, orange-green smoke squirted from his nostrils as he took another hit from his pipe, and Dakota smelled the distinctive aroma of burning dreamwind spores. ‘Acquired from Atn traders, who acquired it themselves from God knows where. They might have been carrying it at sub-light speeds for centuries, for all we know. You know what the Atn are like; they don’t care how long it takes as long as they get wherever the hell it is they’re going.’
Dakota shook her head. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Restricted technology,’ Yi replied. ‘Stuff the Shoal doesn’t want us to have. We . . . acquired it, and now we need your help.’
Dakota stepped backwards towards the exit. ‘Right, fuck you, in that case. We’re finished doing business. I—’
She turned, and yelled in surprise when her shoulder touched a shaped-field barrier that had suddenly appeared across the half-melted exit. It sparkled where she had collided with it, and her shoulder smarted.
Lin cackled, and instantly started to cough. Dakota turned back towards the brother and sister in time to see Yi reach behind her cushion to retrieve and activate a dock-worker’s torchgun that had been hidden out of sight.
Torchguns were handheld plasma-arc cutters designed for small repair jobs and quick fixes, and a device Dakota was far from unfamiliar with. Yi pointed it at Dakota, holding it steady with the other hand under her wrist. The tip of the nozzle was already incandescent with heat. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a weapon, and had a range of barely more than half a metre; close up, however, it could do serious damage, and Dakota was currently close enough . . .
‘Didn’t you ever hear that line about not shooting the messenger?’ Dakota asked, carefully keeping her hands by her sides where the other woman could see them.
Lin wiped at his eyes with one hand, still sniggering. ‘Sorry, it was the look on her face. She . . .’ he snickered again, then belched smoke and began to cough loudly.
Yi spared her brother a brief and deeply hateful glance. ‘We meant it about a deal,’ she repeated, returning her gaze to Dakota, her anger evident. ‘We just aren’t interested in giving you a choice in this matter.’
‘But a “deal” sort of implies I get something out of it, Yi.’
‘Well, yeah. We’re going to need your ship – and in return, you get to stay alive.’
‘What do you mean “need my ship”? I need my ship.’
Lin sniffed and wiped a hand over his face. ‘We had a problem, you see. We—’
Yi’s face grew red with anger. In one smooth motion, she turned towards her brother, still standing to one side of her, and now pointed the torchgun at him.
A moment later there was a searing flash of light that left Dakota momentarily blinded. She stood frozen with shock, her ears full of Lin’s screams. She covered her eyes, waiting for vision to return. When she could see again, Lin was lying on his side and panting like a sick dog, both hands gripping his thigh. The smell of burning flesh now drowned out the more delicate scent of incense. Dakota saw part of one trouser leg had burned away, revealing charred meat and the sickening sight of exposed bone. With his slit green eyes, the injured Lin looked far more like an injured animal than anything human. Dakota looked away.
Yi was standing now, her face a mask of apocalyptic rage. Dakota stayed where she was without moving.
‘Fuck! I told you to let me do the talking, didn’t I?’ Yi screeched. ‘But you had to start smoking those fucking spores, you miserable, useless piece of shit! This is all your fault!’
She turned back to Dakota, talking rapidly. ‘Shithead here had the bright idea of investing in a hi
jack operation that grabbed a shipment being smuggled to some Bandati Hive. The hijackers got a hell of a lot more than they bargained for, though, including prohibited tech which wound up here when they realized the Bandati wanted it back very, very badly.’ She paused momentarily for breath. ‘Except my dear brother here has such a hard time keeping his mouth shut that word got out – and now the Bandati are looking for both of us.’
‘So I happened to turn up just when you needed to get out of town?’ Dakota replied stonily.
‘Tough shit. You’re in as deep as we are now, so you’ve got even more reason to help me get out of here.’ She waved towards one of the wall hangings. ‘There’s another door behind there. Go open it.’
Dakota stepped towards the hanging and pulled it back to reveal a pressure door. Lin went on whimpering and cursing from where he lay on the floor, his skin pale and slick with sweat. Yi stepped forward and ripped the hanging away from the wall. Dakota then spun the wheel on the door, all too aware of the steady hiss of the torchgun’s nozzle only millimetres from her spine.
The door hissed open and Yi gestured for her to step through. Dakota found herself on a wide metal platform running along one side of an open docking bay. Overhead was a curving metal roof equipped with gantries on which escape pods had once been mounted during the port’s military days. Beyond that and below the platform was only hard vacuum.
The dusty yellow-green surface of Fullstop, several thousand kilometres distant, wheeled out of sight as the port rotated on its axis. The bay was separated from the vacuum by shaped fields and, even though she’d been in many such bays, Dakota’s stomach always did a small flip when she was confronted with such a sight.
Some of the gantries were occupied, she saw, by a variety of ground-to-orbit shuttles. Further along the platform they now stood on were several other doors identical to the one they’d just stepped through. She wondered at the chances that some or any of them might be unlocked, and whether Yi would be expecting her to make a break for it.