Nova War

Whatever was going on, it was clearly much more than just common sabotage.

And then it came to him: a way to keep himself alive.

The Piri's data stacks were so badly scrambled it shouldn't be hard for him to sabotage his own work there. He could keep some of what he'd developed and present it to the Bandati, but dump the rest and say it got scrambled during the flight from Nova Arctis. The ship had barely survived a nova, after all – so how could they expect otherwise?

Given enough time, and access to the derelict, he could reconstruct the complete protocols. And stay alive in the meantime.

There came a creaking noise from somewhere deeper within the ship. Corso froze, but heard nothing else except silence. He forced himself to relax. The ship had been badly hammered, after all, so it would be a lot more surprising if nothing shifted around from time to time, especially while the vessel was wobbling about between shaped fields.

Then he heard the same sound again, uncomfortably like someone moving around in the rear of the spacecraft. Corso peered into the darkness and realized he was going to have to go and find out what it was, for the sake of calming his nerves as much as anything else.

He finished downloading select fragments of the Magi protocols and flushed the rest. Then he stepped through to the rear of the main compartment, leaned down and peered through one of the narrow crawl-tubes that led through to the rear of the ship. He could see the entrance to Dakota's private sleeping quarters, and another narrow passageway that led through to the rear cargo area and the engine bays.

A shadow moved.

This is ridiculous. I'm jumping at nothing.

But there was only one way to be sure.

He pulled himself along the narrow crawl-tube, and peered through towards where the engine bays were located, but saw nothing bar some light seeping in through the hull breach.

A few moments later he found himself crammed up against a kitchen unit just next to the entrance to Dakota's sleeping quarters. He heard the noise, again, as of something shifting. The emergency systems were still the only source of light, so what little he could see was bathed in a deep red that only enhanced the dark shadows.

This is idiotic, he thought. There's no one here. He squeezed into the sleeping quarters and looked around. The one narrow cot had broken loose of its foldaway latches, scattering bedclothes and yet more clothing across the cabin. He sat down on it, staring up at the ceiling.

Just his imagination, clearly. He started to get up again Someone in the corner of the cabin?

Corso froze in a half-crouch over the cot, glancing towards a tall and narrow recess set into one wall, its interior filled with oiled machinery that glistened under the emergency lighting.

He wouldn't have noticed anything at all if a silhouette hadn't suddenly emerged from the recess.

The figure moved closer to him; man-shaped but not human, and he found himself gazing at the smooth, bland features and not-quite-convincing skin and musculature of a machine-effigy.

His jaw flopped open as he realized what he was looking at. It's a goddamn sex toy.

The effigy moved towards the exit from Dakota's sleeping quarters, metallic tubes extending from its spine back into the recess where it no doubt spent the majority of its existence. These tubes clearly prevented it from getting too far away from the recess that housed it.

Except, of course, that it had moved to stand directly between him and the only way out of the cabin.

'Dakota?' asked the effigy, peering towards him.

It was recognizably the Piri 's voice. And, even though he felt sure this was only his imagination, Corso couldn't help but detect a querulous, almost childlike quality to its tone.

'No, Piri, it's me,' Corso replied, shifting to increase the gap between himself and the effigy. Why am I frightened of it? he reasoned. I didn't expect to find it here, but it's hardly anything to be terrified of. He glanced down at the effigy's member hanging between its smooth flanks. What was particularly worrying was that it appeared no longer as flaccid as just a few moments before.

'Dakota,' the effigy repeated, and Corso considered making a dash past it for the exit, but he had no idea how swift or strong this machine was. It looked formidable.

'Piri! It's me, Lucas Corso. I just requested for permission to come aboard, remember?'

'Yes. I remember. You are Lucas Corso.'

'I have full systems access, Piri. Remember? Dakota gave it to me.'

'Yes. No… please wait.'

The machine paused as if indecisive, and Corso frowned. Who the hell ever heard of a forgetful AI? It wasn't like they were truly intelligent anyway – the Piri's core personality was a Turing engine, plain and simple, regardless of how sophisticated its responses could be.

'Dakota has told me to tell you…' The effigy paused in mid-sentence and ducked its head down to one side, pursing its lips and staring off into the darkness exactly like a human being trying to remember something hovering on the tip of his tongue.

Suddenly, the effigy's mouth grew slack and it drooped, and Corso saw his opportunity. He quickly slipped back through into the cockpit area and glanced towards the external monitors. A few shadowy figures had begun creeping closer and closer to the Piri – more armed Bandati.

Corso rushed towards the airlock, realizing what was almost certainly going to occur. He felt the ship lurch violently around him just as he started to climb back down and into the bay. He lost his grip and hit the deck, hard.

The Piri was shifting violently from side to side on its bed of shaped fields, humming ever more loudly.

He groaned and clutched at the shoulder he'd landed on, and started to pull himself upright. The Bandati warriors had seen him and were moving towards him tangentially, staying close to the far wall of the bay and moving around to one side of the Piri Reis.

'Stop! Go back!' he yelled, appalled. Were they stupidly trying to rescue him?

The Piri rocked again, so violently that the underside of its hull banged hard against one side of its supporting cradle.

The Bandati then started firing at the Piri Reis just as tiny bursts of light began to fill the air around them. The warriors disappeared in a deafening burst of smoke and flame.

Instinct drove Corso to push himself back up onto his unsteady legs and he ran, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the ship as he could.

The platform was already starting to rise back up to the upper bay by the time he reached it. Honeydew was waiting there for him. For a terrible, drawn-out moment Corso thought the Bandati agent intended to leave him behind, but then Honeydew knelt at the platform's edge and reached out with tiny black hands.

Corso leapt forward, grabbing at the platform's edge, his legs dangling as it rose higher. A moment later and he was kneeling on the platform next to the alien, breathing hard.

As he sucked down air, he looked back towards where the Piri had again come to rest on its cradle. Huddled dark shapes burned fitfully around it.

Corso tasted bile in the back of his throat and quickly looked away.

'They died so that you could escape,' Honeydew explained from beside him. 'You have the protocols?'

'The stacks were too severely damaged to recover a completely intact copy' He glanced up at the alien and shook his head. 'You have to remember the ship got hit by a missile. It's going to take time, but I should eventually be able to reconstruct the complete set of protocols. It's the best I can do for now.'

'Then we no longer need the Piri Reis?'

Corso glanced back at Dakota's ship and hesitated. Honeydew was right; if he made it sound like he had everything he'd need, the Bandati would assume Dakota's ship had outlived its usefulness.