Nova War

But am I their prisoner'? she wondered. There lay the question.

It didn't take much thought to realize that any Bandati so inclined could easily fly into her cell (the notion that she was being held captive was quickly growing in her mind). She, on the other hand, being human and wingless, lacked any obvious means of escape. There was no evidence of any other doors or exits of any kind in this cell.

She was therefore trapped as surely as if the opening in the wall before her was blocked with electrified steel bars.

She crawled back out onto the protruding ledge and lay flat on her back in order to look upwards. It was instantly obvious she was confined in a tower like the others that dotted the landscape. The wall rose sheer above her, into dizzying heights.

She experienced a moment of overwhelming deja vu, as if every action she performed, every thought she now had, was one she had already experienced a thousand times before.

She was, she guessed, maybe halfway up the building, and she observed a multitude of irregular projections and rickety-looking platforms emerging from the tower's surface that gradually tapered outwards both above and below her vantage point. The platforms looked ramshackle enough to have been built from random pieces of junk, extending everywhere out from the side of the tower like some kind of vertical shantytown.

She twisted herself carefully around and stared back towards the ground, noticing that another platform projected out from the wall almost directly below her. A variety of irregularly shaped structures, as shambolic in construction as the platform itself, had been erected on its upper surface. It was perhaps thirty metres further down and several metres to one side of where she now lay on her belly. The platform, however, looked big enough to support several freestanding buildings on its upper surface.

Some of the platforms jutting from other, distant towers looked like they might be even bigger, although most were less ambitious in scale.

I could still jump, she realized with a start, that one simple fact emerging through the general sluggishness of her thoughts. There was no reason why she couldn't survive the drop, since she still had the Bandati filmsuit wired into her skeleton. Its ability to absorb ridiculous quantities of kinetic energy had kept her alive in the chaos following the destruction of, of…

But that memory slipped her mental grasp like a wet eel.

The harder she tried to remember, the more her frustration grew. Dakota pulled herself up onto her knees and hugged herself, fighting the lethargy that threatened to overwhelm her.

She closed her eyes, willing the black, protective liquid of the filmsuit to spill from her pores and swallow her completely…

She opened her eyes again and saw only her bruised and battered flesh.

It's not working.

Panic bloomed amid the fug surrounding her mental processes.

While she'd lain staring outwards, lost in this internal struggle, a Bandati had come to a spiralling landing on the large platform situated immediately below her cell.

The alien appeared entirely oblivious to her watchful presence, skidding to a halt near a two-storey building mounted towards the rear of the ledge. That building looked like it had been built from random pieces of driftwood and scrap metal, and as she watched, the Bandati lumbered through an entrance hidden from Dakota's view.

She tried to give a yell, hoping to draw it back outside, but all that emerged from her throat was a hoarse rattling sound.

She tried again, and this time the words came. She felt like she hadn't spoken aloud in a month. 'Hey! Hey, up here!' she hollered. 'Hey! Help, heeelp!'

There was no response, and the Bandati did not re-emerge.

She kept yelling for a couple of minutes, finally giving up when her throat started to hurt.

She waited there as dusk slid into night, waiting to see if the Bandati would come back out. It never did.

Dakota finally gave up peering below and sat up, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as the gradual drop in temperature made her naked skin prickle. As unfamiliar constellations spread across the bowl of the sky, there appeared to be no moon.

Despite her earlier fatigue, sleep proved elusive, so she slumped against the side of the wall-opening and turned her attention to the striated exterior surface of the tower right beside her. Reaching out and stroking it, she found the surface of the tower appeared to be encircled with thick grooves in something that might form a spiral pattern, the texture not unlike that of unfired clay. These grooves were aligned several centimetres apart – and sometimes cut as much as five centimetres deep, thus providing a decent handhold.

She leaned out, staring back down at the platform below, which seemed so close and yet so far away. Even if she had the strength to climb down without getting herself killed, she really wasn't sure she had the courage.

She reached out one hand again to the tower's external surface. It felt solid enough beneath her grip. Dakota woke long before dawn.

She had curled up near the door-opening, staring out at the lit-up towers and the blimps that sometimes moved purposefully between them. Her emotions wavered between nervous tension and loneliness, while her thoughts ranged from vague fantasies of escape to outright despair.

She rubbed at the stubbly dark fuzz on her scalp, while sorting through the random memories that had somehow found their way back to her.

She'd encountered Bandati before, but usually only from a distance. Her gut feeling told her it had been at least a couple of weeks since she'd come to this place, maybe as much as a month, judging by how much her hair had managed to grow back in. How or even why remained frustratingly just out of reach. She couldn't even be sure she had been conscious for much of that time.

A deepening, overwhelming hunger had been slowly gnawing at her gut ever since she'd recovered consciousness, and she had to fight the notion that she'd been deliberately left here to starve.

Whenever a Bandati, gliding from tower platform to tower platform, looked like it might pass within hearing range she had shouted to it until her throat was raw, yet all such efforts came to nothing. And as the night drew closer to dawn, true despair broached the last of her fragile mental defences, dragging her into a depression far deeper than the shadows filling her cell. She awoke once again, sore, thirsty and assailed by a growing hunger. Her attempts at sleep had been bedevilled by migraine headaches that felt like an army of tiny devils shod in white-hot boots were dancing around the inside of her skull. She squinted into the bright sunlight that slammed through the door-opening. Hunger was one thing, but she knew she'd die if she didn't drink some water before long. She turned to examine the rear end of her cell, where the light now fell on it, and noticed something that had escaped her in the darkness of the night: a short pipe that extended from the far wall.

She hesitated momentarily, experiencing another flash of deja vu, then scrambled over to find a short, flexible, segmented nozzle located about half a metre above the floor. And because it was the same colour as the rest of the cell, it had been that much harder to see. She squeezed the tip of the nozzle and a clear, jelly-like substance began to leak out.

She rubbed this oily substance between her fingers, and raised it to her nostrils to find it had no discernible odour.

The sense of deja vu refused to go away, except now it was accompanied by a sense of imminent danger. She touched the clear substance to her tongue regardless.

It tasted like the most wonderful thing in the world.

Her hunger reasserted itself with overwhelming force. She pressed the palms of both hands against the wall on either side of the nozzle, used her tongue to manoeuvre it into her mouth and began to suck hard.