Nova War

'Listen, someone somewhere inside your Hive has been keeping Bourdain under cover and well out of sight. That's exactly how he's been staying ahead of us. And that means somebody on the inside of your own security service is working against you,' Remembrance continued patiently. 'If I'd done things the usual way – the approved way – we'd have lost him again, so I called in a raid using my own authority-'

And didn't bother to tell me until it was already under way?'

'-since your chain of command is compromised, as I just explained. So here's what we do: we go in now, grab Bourdain -and then maybe we'll have the last link in the smuggling chain.'

Honeydew buzzed his wings in indecision. 'If he isn't there, you'll be at the mercy of our Hive, and even your precious Queen of Darkening Skies won't be able to do a damn thing to help you.'

'Let's just get this over with,' Remembrance snapped, 'and save the threats until later, okay?' He reached up and pulled his shotgun loose, then held it close against his chest. Honeydew fixed his gaze on the shotgun barrel for a moment, then drew his own. 'You are aware, I hope, of the precise nature of the establishment we're about to enter?'

Remembrance of Things Past glanced towards the cave entrance. Apart from the polished stone floor of the ledge beyond, little had been done to alter its natural appearance: just a rough-edged, eight-metre-tall crack in the side of the mountain, wide enough at its base for several Bandati to enter side by side.

Uncultivated wild scrub grew on the rising slopes above the cave entrance, immediately over which an enormous sign of glowing multicoloured tubes had been constructed: a crude animation of monstrous jaws alternately opening and closing on a crowd of helpless – but clearly human – diners.

'It's a public eating establishment,' Remembrance replied, with a world-weariness that spoke of a lifetime of having seen all too much. 'A restaurant, as the human vernacular has it.'

Such public consumption of food was taboo within the Bandati culture, and only the most offensively perverted of their species gathered together in order to practise it. Remembrance had become aware that the restaurant's human owners were discreetly servicing an exclusive Bandati clientele that greatly valued their privacy.

'I've raided places like this before, Honeydew.' He glanced up at the sign above the cave entrance. 'Mind you, actually advertising it this way… that's got to be a slap in the face for common decency, hasn't it?'

'It's called The Maw,' Honeydew explained.

Remembrance stared back at him in incomprehension.

'It's become quite famous,' Honeydew continued. 'The owners are proponents of what they call "extreme dining".' Raising his shotgun for a moment, he added, 'Believe me, it's not the place to start a fire-fight.'

All I know about it is that it's a place of public eating, designed for other species.'

'By my Queen's sphincter, all this time on Ironbloom and you don't…' Honey dew's wings flickered in exasperation. 'Listen, the restaurant is a living organism, a maul-worm. Its body extends deep inside the caves that riddle the mountainside. It adheres very closely to the curves and contours of those caves. The inside of a maul-worm is basically a miniature ecosystem in its own right, and dozens of other species have taken up residence there. For the most part, the worms live a long time. They hardly ever move unless provoked, and they reproduce maybe once a century. The restaurant is located inside the worm and, if Bourdain is really here, that's where you and I need to go too.'

'Bourdain,' Remembrance echoed, 'inside a monster's gullet?'

'A monster which, if provoked, will rapidly close up and consume every living thing currently inside it,' Honeydew concluded. 'Which means anyone and everything entering it has to do so extremely slowly, quietly and carefully'

Remembrance glanced towards the mounted gun turrets, once he realized Honeydew was not, in fact, joking. He suddenly understood the real reason for the defences.

'The turrets…?'

'One grenade tossed just outside the entrance would be enough to trigger a deadly gustatory reaction,' Honeydew affirmed. 'You can sometimes see the creature's internal gullet-tentacles snatching at the smaller organisms it plays host to. Not,' Honeydew added hastily, 'that this has ever presented a problem to larger-bodied organisms such as ourselves. The artillery is there to safeguard it from attack.'

Suspicion, mixed with horror, bloomed in Remembrance's mind. 'So you've gone in there before?'

'Don't start making any accusations. Yes, my work means I've had to deal with the human owners here. They have to provide us with reassurance that they won't admit any Bandati clientele.'

'They're lying, then.'

'Of course they are. They're aliens, and their ways are not ours. But I know this mountain well – younger Bandati still like to blimp up here just to jump from the highest points, and then try and free- fall all the way down to the city.' Honey dew spoke with undisguised nostalgia. 'All extremely dangerous, of course.'

They started moving in the direction of the cave entrance. Honeydew's own security squad had already secured the gun platforms, and twitched their wings in greeting as they drew nearer.

'Any other fascinating little tidbits I should know?' asked Remembrance.

'Just be aware that it's very, very easy to upset a maul-worm.'

Moist, warm air filtered out through the mouth of the cave before getting drawn back in. 'And what if Bourdain resists arrest?' Remembrance asked in an appalled tone. 'Just give up because this… worm might eat us? What kind of lunatic would ever enter such a place?'

'Someone with a distinctly jaded palate, I should say. You really might have avoided all this if you'd just let us know what you were up to.'

The cave's interior was unpleasantly warm and dank. 'There's no other way out of here, am I right?'

Honeydew merely nodded in affirmation.

'Then he'll risk death by resisting arrest. Frankly, I can think of a lot of ways I'd rather go.'

'Maybe he would rather die than be taken back to the Consortium.'

'Bourdain?' Remembrance clicked in amusement. 'That's unlikely. I've dealt with him in the past, and I know he's not nearly that brave.'

Remembrance had indeed spent some time undercover on Bourdain's Rock, posing as a black marketeer. He'd managed to gather damning evidence – but then the Rock itself had been destroyed, along with much of his evidence, and Bourdain himself had fled to Bandati-controlled space.

'Yet brave enough to set foot in here.'

'Bravery doesn't come into it. I've been in human establishments called mog parlours that aren't so different. They're the kind of places where the clientele never talk about what or who they've seen and heard. If we were ever going to track down Bourdain, it was always going to be in someplace like this.'

They had paused for a few moments before properly entering, but now, as if by some unspoken mutual decision, they walked determinedly further inside the cave. Remembrance let Honey dew take the lead, having been here before. The very thought gave him a pang of disgust, even though he knew the security agent must have had perfectly legitimate reasons for doing so.

As Remembrance brushed against something soft, there was a squeak and several small, pale, winged bodies batted past him in squawking confusion. He looked up and around in the deepening gloom and spied dozens of pairs of tiny, glowing eyes winking all around them. He then turned and looked behind him to see the cave entrance was now visible only as a pale oval of light, and seemed impossibly far away.

He fluttered his wings experimentally and the sound of them returned to him eerily from distant unseen walls. His eyes, however, were begi