Nova War

Except, of course, it couldn't, because the bubble of energy surrounding Corso sent burning spasms through the worm's flesh. The creature bucked and twisted violently before retreating, sliding a short distance back down the pit, while its intended meal remained dangling face-down towards it.

Corso felt a warm trickle of urine slide down over his chest as he hung there, hyperventilating. There were, he now realized, worse things than even Emissary KaTiKiAn-Sha.

'Corso?' Honeydew's synthesized voice emerged again from out of the darkness.

'Yes?' he croaked.

'Watch carefully.'

The field-bubble dissipated instantly, and the maul-worm came rushing upwards a second time. Corso croaked in horror, incipient madness fracturing his thoughts.

Just before those vile lips closed around him, the field generators snapped on a second time. Pale striated throat-muscles vainly attempted to crush the uncrushable.

Again, the monster retreated. Honeydew's voice once more came out of the darkness.

'The next time, we might not switch on the field-bubble, Lucas. We might just let the maul-worm eat you. Tell me, do you think you're still useful enough for us to let you live?'

Something snapped inside Corso, and he bellowed to the walls around him. 'Don't you understand that it doesn't matter whether you or the Emissaries, or anyone else, has working protocols or not, Dakota is here in this system, and she could be in touch with the derelict already. Those protocols won't make a damn bit of difference if she decides to take the derelict away from you!'

'Is he telling the truth?'

Corso tensed, his muscles rigid, his eyes staring down into the darkness. It wasn't Honeydew who had just spoken. The voice he'd heard was unmistakably human.

Not only that, it was one he recognized.

'I believe so, yes,' he heard Honeydew reply.

'And she can do that? Just… grab the derelict and fly away with it?' the human voice continued.

The accent was Redstone old colonial: soft, rounded tones that spoke of a life of privilege.

'So our previous interrogations suggest, assuming we can't find a way of preventing it.'

'But it's so obviously unbelievable. How can you possibly give credence to something so-'

'She's already destroyed one derelict. If there's any chance we can find the means to keep her from doing the same to the one located here, we must find the means.'

'Yes, but like this? This is… barbaric.'

Sal?

Sal.

Sal who'd driven down to Fire Lake with him when he'd been determined to kill Bull Northcutt. Sal who had been one of his oldest friends, and whom he'd last seen while looking out of the cockpit window of a helicopter lifting up from a frozen Redstone shore a million years ago.

'Sal!' Corso screamed, just as he was being winched lower into the pit. He glanced upwards, dizzy from the blood pooling in his head, and saw only a dim circle marking the rim of the pit.

His throat was too sore to scream, but he could hear the monster approaching once more. He could smell its awful fetid breath, a stench even worse than that of the pit's slimy walls.

The worm surged up towards him and, at the very last moment, the shaped fields switched on. Corso closed his eyes tight and prayed for oblivion, not wanting to see the monster's throat as it tried to crush the fields surrounding him.

The worm slithered back down the pit, and the field snapped off. Again.

As if awaiting its cue, the worm immediately rushed up and engulfed him. Once more the shaped fields snapped on at the very last moment.

Corso tried to scream for mercy, but his throat was so raw that the words were unintelligible.

The worm retreated for the last time.

'-God's sake, that's enough!' he heard Sal yell. 'If you kill him, he's no use to anyone.'

'He deliberately deceived us. Do you have any idea how many Bandati have died because of him?'

They were starting to winch him back out of the pit. The shaped fields flickered into life, and stayed on this time.

'Permission for torture came directly from the Consortium,' he heard Honeydew say. 'And from your own superiors. I believe you already stated that you understood the necessity for this approach, given the circumstances-'

'Yes, but… I mean, not like this! This, this is…'

'I believe the word you are looking for is necessary.'

Hands reached for him and dragged Corso back out of the pit. One after the other, the nova-equipped drones – which Trader had placed near strategic systems throughout the Long War's primary zone of conflict – now received their activation signals. They began slipping in and out of normal space like stones being skipped across the still, flat waters of a lake, while making their way towards their respective target stars.

The first to reach its goal translated deep into the stellar core of a small yellow sun that had burned steadily for three and a half billion years, triggering a deadly phase-change that caused a cataclysmic implosion within just a few hours. Energy and light sufficient to power the star for another ten or twelve billion years erupted in a single incandescent outwards burst, the destruction spreading like flames through dry woodland after a long, hot summer.

Entire systems scattered across a belt of stars a thousand light-years wide soon burned with nova light, like a bright cancer staining the face of the Milky Way. Trader listened and watched from within his private yacht, linked in to the heart of the Hegemony's secure tach-transmission networks, as the first reports came in of devastation occurring the length and breadth of the Long War. Eleven systems were wiped out, most of them sparsely populated by the Emissaries' own client species, but of strategic value to them nonetheless. The enemy beachhead within Hegemony territory had finally been wiped out – fifteen thousand years of slow losses to the Shoal recouped in the course of a single day.

The Long War was as good as over.

Trader passed the rest of his time rehearsing his testimony. After he returned to the home world, and presented the Hegemony's ruling council with the details of his fait accompli, he would finally make those cowards understand just how necessary, how inevitable using nova weaponry had been, regardless of snivelling doubts expressed in certain quarters. This first strike would come to be seen as a historically necessary blow against the encroachment of a destructive enemy who…

A fresh deluge of data began to pour in through his yacht's tach-net transceivers, accumulated from a thousand different sources.

But what they were telling him couldn't possibly be true.

Trader locked his mind into the tach-net flow, swimming through this flood of data, trying to discern the key facts buried in the inrushing chaos.

But it was true. More detonations had been detected – more nova fire on the nearer fringes of the Long War. Hegemony-controlled systems were rapidly dying, one after the other.

Trader stared at the report summaries and conflict analyses, and felt a cold horror creeping through him. The only way to make sense of what he was now seeing was if the Emissaries already possessed their own nova weapons. That was impossible, inconceivable…

And yet the cold hard evidence remained, for all to see.

He had to fight down a sudden surge of panic, and focus again. He ran analyses on the data coming to him, but the conclusions remained the same. Long-range detection systems were all picking up the same signature, double-neutrino bursts that signified the deployment of nova weapons within Shoal-controlled systems. And then those same systems had fallen out of contact shortly thereafter.

First, Trader decided, he had to put some distance between himself and the forces commanded by General Desire. His yacht was still locked into its cradle at the coreship's heart, so he sent out an automated request for permission to exit the coreship, and waited.