Nova War

The cavalry had arrived, and not a moment too soon.

The Immortal Light dirigible was close enough now for him to hear its commander shouting orders to his underlings. It started to tack towards the Darkening Skies dirigible, but not before it had fired a second set of incendiaries at Remembrance. He took off again as the missiles wove lazy arcs through the thick air, before slamming into the blimp.

Every beat of his wings now felt like it was tearing at their co

He shook his head and his sight cleared a little, then he swooped in a long arc towards the Immortal Light war-dirigible with the last of his strength, seeing the weapons mounted on the sides of its gondola track him even as he flew. He felt a flash of hot pain in one wing and knew he'd been hit once more, but didn't bother to check how badly.

Instead he reached into a harness pocket and pulled out a fresh round, fumbling it into his shotgun and taking wild aim at his would-be assassins.

The shot might have found its target, or it might as easily have gone wildly astray. He was dimly aware that the battle was being closely observed from the tiers and platforms of nearby towers, even as he flew towards what was probably certain death. Or it might have all been a hallucination born of fatigue and blood-loss.

He swooped upwards at the last moment, pulling himself on top of the Immortal Light war-dirigible. It was just a temporary plan, one that might buy him a moment or two. He was, after all, an easy target for any enemy sniper who cared to pick him off from any one of a hundred nearby platforms that bore witness to his struggles.

The shotgun slipped from his hands and he fell face-first onto one of the gas cells, the breath rasping in his throat.

A shadow floated across Remembrance's face. I've been caught, he thought. Or perhaps it was the Queen of Queens come to collect him for his final journey to the shadow-world.

Instead, heavy-winged shapes thumped onto the same hardened fabric and netting on which he lay exhausted, and he felt long, fur-covered hands reach down and lift him up. They bore him aloft, and the sound of their wings beating in the thick, honeyed air was strangely comforting.

In his last moments of consciousness, he recognized the scent of his fellow Darkening Skies Hive-members, who had come for him at last. Three The next time Dakota woke was to find herself bound to a rusted gurney, her ankles and wrists held in place by tight straps.

For the first time in weeks, her mind felt clear and she remembered everything in appalling, grisly detail: Nova Arctis, Corso, and the escape from the exploding supernova against impossible odds.

Everything.

She had lashed the Piri Reis to a derelict alien starship and carried out a superluminal jump, trusting to fate as to where they would emerge. In fact, they had dropped back into normal space near a Bandati colony world occupied for longer than human civilization had existed.

Dakota stared up into a vast shaft filled with light and air, a circle of sky visible far, far overhead. An airship constructed of bulbous gas bags, with a gondola suspended beneath, ponderously made its way upwards from the floor of the shaft towards that distant circle of sky.

Balconies were placed around the shaft's interior, seeming to blur together the further up she looked. There was plant-life everywhere, a riot of red and green in more or less equal measures, virtually a vertical forest growing out of the shaft's walls; and buzzing through it all, hundreds upon hundreds of Bandati making short hops from balcony to balcony.

But more importantly – much, much more importantly – she sensed the thoughts of the derelict starship they had recovered from Nova Arctis for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, like a whisper barely heard through the wall of an adjoining room. Her machine-head implants were still inextricably linked to this ancient craft, and it was clear to her how severely it had been damaged.

The gurney was angled so that her head was raised higher than her feet, and she twisted her head around to try and see her more immediate surroundings. She took in the details through a panic-stricken haze, her heart hammering and adrenalin flooding her brain.

A variety of robot arms tipped with sensors, along with one or two sharp-looking blades, sprouted from a machine attached to one side of the gurney. The skin of her naked belly tightened with terror at the thought of what might be intended for her.

She had been here before, many times. How could she have forgotten? She The food-pipe, she realized. The ambrosia.

Then, at last, she caught sight of Lucas Corso.

He was bound, naked and helpless, to another gurney several metres away, almost unrecognizable without his hair and eyebrows. She could see that his gurney rested on bare metal wheels. Between the two of them were perhaps half a dozen Bandati, looking more like hallucinogenically inspired rag dolls up-close than actual living creatures. Their mouth-parts clicked busily, their wide, iridescent wings twitching and flapping as they spoke, filling the air with a sound like flags whipping in a strong wind.

They were surrounded by low walls, entirely open to the air, except that a series of translucent panels topping these walls were angled outwards. As Dakota watched, these panels began to fold inwards, like the leaves of a lotus flower closing for the night.

More and more memories flooded back.

The Bandati had been holding them prisoner for weeks (she had a sudden flash of something burning its way through the Piri Reis's hull as they waited for rescue). They'd been brought here before to be questioned – and, more often than not, tortured.

And yet the ambrosia swept those memories away every time. 'Lucas!'

Corso blinked and peered towards her, his eyes glassy. She guessed he was taking longer to shake off the effect of the ambrosia.

He worked his jaw for a moment as if he'd briefly forgotten how to form words. 'I thought maybe you were dead,' he called over. 'I-'

'I'm all right. I'm all right, Lucas.' She realized she was crying, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. 'Don't eat the ambrosia!' she screamed.

He shook his head with an expression of befuddlement. 'The what?'

'Do you hear me? The pipe in the wall! Don't go near it!'

'The…' His gaze drifted away, as if he was fighting the urge to fall asleep. One of the Bandati approached her gurney, its complex mouth-parts snapping together to produce a series of rapid, complicated-sounding clicks she couldn't even hope to comprehend. After a moment her interrogator raised a small, snub-nosed object in one wiry, black arm and pressed it firmly against her forehead.

The effect only lasted for an instant, but it felt like the worst pain in the world, as if hot lava had been poured onto every nerve ending in her body. She screamed, her body bucking and twisting under its restraints, trying to twist away from the source of that terrible agony.

The Bandati that held the device reached out with one wiry black hand, and appeared to touch the air at a midpoint between them. Dakota noticed a tiny object like a coloured bead hanging there, suspended in the air. It moved slightly from side to side, and she realized with a start that the bead was keeping pace with the movements of her interrogator's head as if attached by an invisibly fine wire.

At the Bandati's gesture, the bead began to glow softly. Dakota suddenly recalled that the bead was a translation device, but apparently not a very effective one.