Nova War

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 sca

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 ca

'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 discover 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, fa