by Gary Gibson
When the gas giant came back into view a minute later, it was noticeably larger, and growing larger by the second.
Corso twisted in his restraints, leaning forward to try and see better where they were heading as much as to avoid Honeydew’s implacable, unflinching gaze.
At first he had assumed they were heading for the tiny star-like object orbiting the gas giant, which he then realized with a shock, might actually be a black hole. If it wasn’t for his more pressing predicament, he’d have been endlessly fascinated. He realized he was almost certainly the first human being ever to witness a black hole up close.
Corso looked back down and saw how every single one of the Bandati around him was staring at him in silence. He felt himself flush and quickly fixed his gaze on the viewscreen again.
Suddenly, out of the silence, Honeydew resumed his questioning. ‘Explain the Piri Reis’s unusual behaviour.’
Corso lowered his gaze and realized Honeydew now gripped a pain inductor in one hand. Sweat broke out on his brow and he worked his mouth, trying to come up with an answer the Bandati agent might find acceptable.
‘I don’t know,’ Corso replied eventually. ‘I . . .’
Honeydew reached out the inductor and Corso was hit by a sudden jolt of pain that made him spasm. He bit his tongue hard and tears came to his eyes. He blinked them away, listening to the sound of his heart hammering.
‘We scanned the Piri Reis while you were on board just now, and picked up sonic vibrations consistent with human speech. Who were you talking to?’
Corso looked away from his tormentor and said nothing, not so much out of bravery as the inability to devise a reply that might spare him further punishment. He waited for the inevitable.
Honeydew struck him with the inductor a second time, and the pain was even worse. This time, Corso cried out and began choking and retching once the pain started to fade.
He could now see an orbital station coming into view on the screen: a central spindle positioned at the centre of a dozen rings. It might have been just a few kilometres away, or much more, since it was hard to judge its size without the benefit of a horizon to stand on, but at a guess the hub alone was several kilometres in length. Orbital mechanics was far from being Corso’s strong point, but he knew enough to guess that it had been placed in an L4 orbit relative to both the black hole and the gas giant.
‘We require the correct protocols, Lucas. You have been lying to us.’
‘I swear I wasn’t.’
‘Then listen. We compared your protocol-fragments with research carried out on the Ocean’s Deep derelict, over many thousands of years, and we found a match. We’ve had the means to translate all along; but the significance of what we had was not understood, and was then lost – until now. Our AI stacks have already created an initial set of fully functioning protocols, and these have now been handed over to the Emissaries.’
Corso took a moment to absorb this news. ‘Then you don’t need me any more.’
‘Something is wrong, though,’ Honeydew’s bundled wings twitched sharply. ‘The Emissaries ceased all communications with us a few minutes ago. They have attempted to order our fleet back to their Godkiller without any explanation. We have also lost contact with the ships of our fleet that are still docked within the Godkiller. Why would that be?’
Corso shook his head. ‘What? You’re asking me?’
‘If we cannot understand precisely why the Emissaries are now behaving as they are, then we may all die here. Do you understand that, Mr Corso?’
‘Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Corso stammered. ‘If you’ve got working protocols now, then . . . I just don’t see the problem.’
‘They brought us all this way, Mr Corso, and yet they broke off communications with us the instant we gave them the means to communicate with, and possibly control, the derelict. Why would that be?’
Corso licked suddenly dry lips. ‘I swear, Honeydew, I have no idea.’
‘My Queen has ordered me to investigate the possibility of sabotage on your part. Given the evidence – the bizarre behaviour of Dakota Merrick’s craft, your own obvious attempts at evasion – sabotage of some form seems the most likely answer, does it not?’
Corso glanced at the pain inductor, still firmly gripped in Honeydew’s hand, and felt a tug of deep, primal terror.
‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘they just don’t need you any more now they have most of what they wanted.’
Honeydew was silent for a long time. ‘That is possibly the case, and yet I may be able to preserve my Hive’s honour.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Corso.
‘We will continue to our destination. This time, you will provide us with a copy of the protocols that is not sabotaged, and we will then attempt to reopen negotiations with the Emissaries.’
Crazy, thought Corso. They’re all completely crazy. ‘You want to know the truth, Honeydew?’ he yelled. ‘I destroyed most of the protocols – and that’s about as far as the sabotage went. If what you gave the Emissaries is wrong in some way, then it’s nothing to do with me, so blame your own scientists.’
He fell back, feeling exhausted and spent. The orbital space station now filled the viewscreen.
‘I should kill you,’ said Honeydew, the electronic tone of his voice as flat and dry as ever, but Corso couldn’t help but imagine he heard a note of resignation in the words. ‘I knew you were deceiving me and, by accepting that truth in one part of my mind while not allowing it to influence my decisions, I have failed my Hive and my Queen.’
He paused, as if in thought, then continued: ‘And yet circumstances dictate that I must assume that you are still lying to me, and therefore a version of the protocols that would prove acceptable to the Emissaries must exist. There isn’t enough time to pry your mind apart and leach what we need directly from your neurons, but your entirely personal interpretation of the protocols may be key. My actions from this point are therefore highly regrettable but unfortunately necessary. And if the Emissaries still do not accept what we give them, then we must endeavour to steal the derelict for ourselves.’
‘I was telling you the truth!’ Corso screamed.
‘Yes, you might well have been. Yet my duty to my Queen and also the apparent evidence of sabotage indicate that my actions now must be other than you might prefer. Otherwise there is the very real risk that the Emissaries may turn on us.’
Honeydew’s eyes remained wide and impassive as the shuttle began to decelerate for its final approach to the station.
‘Tell me, Mr Corso, are you familiar with a species known as “maul-worms”?’
Dakota felt her consciousness bloom outwards in a sudden rush. In a brief moment of astonishing clarity, before her mind snapped back to the here and now, she was aware of:
–
the ebb and flow of data within the Shoal coreship she had just departed
–
the Emissary Godkiller, with a fleet surging from its ports like wasps from a nest
–
three Consortium frigates accompanying a smaller fleet of Immortal Light assault ships
–
and, most shockingly, the grazing contact with another machine-head on board one of the frigates . . .
Someone she knew.
Her eyes snapped open, her heart fluttering arrhythmically deep within her chest, a sudden spike of adrenalin giving her a sensation like freezing cold water surging down her spine.
She became aware that Days of Wine and Roses was watching her closely.
‘I’m all right,’ she told him, though feeling anything but.
‘Your biomedical displays suggest otherwise,’ Roses replied, nodding towards one of the scout-ship’s external views.
A while after she’d been left to her own devices in the viewing chamber, Roses had come for her. She soon found herself crammed alongside the Bandati agent in a tiny unarmed vessel originally designed to carry only one passenger. She had been far from reassured to d
iscover that, just prior to their boarding this craft, significant chunks of the life-support systems had been stripped out in order to make enough room for the two of them.
The coreship that had brought them to Ocean’s Deep was already half an AU behind them, and growing ever more distant by the second.
On the other hand, they weren’t entirely defenceless. Tiny defensive drones flew alongside them, fanning out to cover an area almost a thousand kilometres across, but all centred on the scoutship. These drones were all armed with field-generator weapons, pulse-cannons, and even old-fashioned nuclear-tipped missiles. A tach-comms network linked them all into the scout-ship’s strategic systems, so if any one part of the network went down, the rest of the drones could adapt accordingly.
Since they’d departed the coreship, Roses had approved a drone-submitted plan to move through the densest part of an asteroid belt scattered across the space intervening between the coreship and Darkening Skies’ secret colony. The hope was that the Emissaries might write the scout-ship off as merely one of many thousands of unmanned intelligence-gathering devices now scattered throughout the Night’s End system – and even if this strategy failed, the presence of several thousand asteroids would hopefully make targeting them in any offensive action extremely difficult.
Well, pretending they were just another unmanned drone clearly hadn’t worked, for it became clear to Dakota that a large number of enemy drones were gradually converging on them the deeper they moved into the asteroid region. She glanced over at Roses, not an easy proposition given she was wedged deep into a gel-chair. She caught sight of her own reflection in expressionless eyes like obsidian mirrors.
‘Dakota, can you do what you did back at Ironbloom? Can you take direct control of this ship?’
‘Maybe . . . I don’t know. I needed the derelict to do that.’
‘I was under the impression that your implants did the work.’
‘Yes, but I wiped them back in Nova Arctis.’
‘Why?’
‘Too long, too complicated. After that, the derelict – the one that brought me to Night’s End – replaced the wiped software with its own version.’
‘And the derelict in this system? Can you use that?’
Dakota curled her fists in frustration and kept her voice level as she replied. ‘Listen, if I could control it, I would, and this time I’d tell you, but . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘But it’s like it won’t talk to me.’ She tried to affect a helpless shrug, but that was impossible in her tight restraints. ‘I can . . . I can feel it out there, and sometimes I can see through its eyes, different objects scattered all throughout this system – but that’s it. It won’t respond when I want it to actually do something for me.’
‘Then we are lost already.’
‘No, it knows I’m here. I just . . . I just have to figure out how to get it to listen to me.’
Dakota closed her eyes and felt the same sudden outwards rush she’d felt only seconds before. And, as her consciousness bloomed again, she once more had a sense of something ancient lost in the darkness – but somewhere much, much further away than the Ocean’s Deep system. It was like swimming down into the sea until the light was gone and a heavy black pressed all around you . . . and you suddenly realized you weren’t alone.
Following that first fleeting contact made on their arrival, the Ocean’s Deep derelict had fallen silent, manifesting now as little more than a brooding, dimly sensed presence. It made Dakota feel like some medieval pauper seeking shelter in a castle, only to find the drawbridge raised and the windows darkened.
‘Well, in any case, our defensive drones are more than capable of dealing with an attack,’ Roses was explaining when she opened her eyes again. She wondered which one of them he was trying to reassure.
‘From what – other Bandati drones? Those things hunting us are Emissary. Last I heard, they’re on a technological par with the Shoal. Have the Bandati ever taken on something like that?’
‘No,’ Roses admitted, ‘but then again maybe you shouldn’t judge a battle before it’s started. The local asteroid bodies should help confuse the enemy, and our own defensive drones are designed to give off exactly the same heat and radiation signatures as this scout-ship. Even if they know we’re here, by the time they figure out exactly where we are we’ll already be at the station.’
‘And if that doesn’t work?’
‘All we can do, Dakota, is watch and wait.’
Watch and wait?
Boredom overcame fear as the hours passed, and Leviathan’s Fall expanded from a pale bright dot to a growing circle. The scout-ship and its accompanying drones performed a complicated dance, accelerating, braking and suddenly changing position, though spread out over millions of cubic kilometres. The tedium was enlivened only by sudden, unpredictable accelerations and equally violent braking manoeuvres that slammed them into their respective gel-chairs.
Dakota even fell asleep for a short while, albeit fitfully. It had been days since she’d really slept properly. She finally snapped awake during a particularly brutal manoeuvre. A sharp, acid stench suddenly filled the cabin, and Dakota twisted around in terror, trying to see where the fire was coming from. No smoke, nothing; just that all-pervasive smell of electronics burning.
‘It’s only an alert,’ Roses told her, by way of reassurance.
‘What is? For God’s sake, I can smell something burning!’
‘That is the alert,’ Roses informed her with what she imagined was a degree of impatience. ‘It means we’re going to come under attack at any second.’
The craft shook around them and Dakota held her breath, petrified, her thoughts filled with an overwhelming desire to get out of this cramped scout-ship . . .
Except there was nowhere to go.
A dozen Emissary hunter-killers had meanwhile boosted from rock to rock, communicating with each other over their own, ever-shifting communications network before they stumbled on the scout-ship.
They had already catalogued tens of thousands of black-body objects ranging in size from boulders to mountains, before finally capturing one of the scout-ship’s defensive drones – identified by the sudden pulse of its rapid-acceleration systems. One of the hunter-killers tore the drone apart with machine-mandibles, drawing the components into the interior of its own, larger body, while simultaneously decrypting and analysing the data traffic still flowing to and from the drone’s transceiver in order to try and identify the scout-ship’s precise location.
The hunter-killers shared their data, and then turned their attention to one particular region of the sky. They didn’t have to wait long before their strategy bore fruit. Their sensors had picked up a flare of fusion energy consistent with a craft big enough to carry organic passengers.
They moved towards the scout-ship’s location, vectoring in on their prey like sleek black hounds chasing an elusive quarry through a Stygian forest.
The scout-ship accelerated hard for several seconds, then started to judder around them, just as every screen in the tiny cabin flared white and died. A fresh slew of alerts went off a bare second later.
Dakota glanced over at Roses with a questioning look.
‘That was unpleasantly close,’ he confirmed.
Her mouth felt bone-dry. ‘Can we try to get away from them?’
‘I don’t know. There’s at least a dozen of them, and there are more on the way. I’m not sure there’s any way we can slip them.’
An icy calm slid over Dakota. She had come too far, been through too much, just to lose now.
But who was to say anything in the universe gave a damn what she wanted?
‘We’re being targeted again,’ Roses informed her, in unchangingly bland machine tones. ‘I don’t see how we can get out of this. I’m sorry.’
Sorry? Dakota wanted to scream, to reach out with invisible fingers and tear the approaching missiles out of the eternal night and throw them straight back towards the Emissaries �
� back towards Trader, who was still out there somewhere, and still dangling the threat of genocide over her home world.
She wanted to—
She heard a sound like a gong, and suddenly remembered the scent of honeygrass from a school trip to one of Bellhaven’s largest hydroponic farms. Something was dazzling her, too, like a torch pointed directly into her eyes.
She reached out—
Shielding her eyes with fingers spread against the sunlight, she peered up at an intensely blue sky. Soft winds tugged at her hair and she lowered her gaze, seeing the honeygrass spreading out towards an endless horizon.
The scout-ship was gone. For a moment she wondered if she was on some world in the Ocean’s Deep system, but that was impossible . . .
The derelict?
She laughed, because the Ocean’s Deep derelict had finally spoken to her more directly than at any time since her arrival in its system.
It had lowered its drawbridge.
She turned, and saw the familiar spires of a Magi library-complex rising out of a distant horizon, reaching up and beyond the clouds.
She looked around, trying to find a clue as to where she would go next.
Of course, she was still on the scout-ship, only moments from death, but the simulated worlds inside the Magi ships could provide endless experiences like this within a single moment.
There was a trail leading through the grasses, as if worn down by years of treading feet. It began only a few metres away from her, stretching from them towards the library-city in the distance.
So she started to walk.
Twenty-two
The shuttle carrying Corso, along with Honeydew and several other Bandati warriors, had now moved towards one end of the station’s hub. Huge angled mirrors reflected sunlight in towards the rings surrounding the spindle, and Corso caught a glimpse of verdant jungle within one of them through a long, translucent window. The station was decorated in a manner markedly like that adorning the towers back on Night’s End. Wide horizontal stripes, alternating between pale shell-pink and cream, covered the hub itself, while intricate glyphs were emblazoned across the encircling rings.