Nova War

He stood up cautiously. Still nothing moved.

Maybe the Emissaries had moved on from this section of the ring.

Honeydew struggled upright behind him. Hiding between the roots of a tree clearly wasn't a comfortable situation for a creature with such large wings dwarfing the rest of his body. Corso moved a little further downhill to where the gradient suddenly steepened, taking each step with infinite care. Still nothing moved, but he could see where the dense mat of reddish-green growth underfoot had been flattened by passing Emissaries.

He heard something behind him, and turned to see Honeydew suddenly shoot upwards on an erratic course, his injured wing fluttering spastically. The Bandati had barely got more than a few metres off the ground before something plucked him out of mid-air.

An Emissary lumbered into view. How the hell, Corso wondered, did it manage to move so quietly?

He stood, frozen, too shocked to move, as the Emissary came crashing up towards him, Honeydew wrapped up in its trunk-tentacles. He watched as the Emissary raised Honeydew high in the air, then smashed him down against the trunk of the tree they'd been hiding under.

Instinct finally kicked in and Corso turned to flee, only to find himself staring up and into the wide, angry eyes of yet another Emissary. The scout-ship carrying Dakota and Days of Wine and Roses came in hard and fast through the middle of a major battle taking place around the station's hub. They were targeted a half-dozen times on their final approach, but each time Dakota managed to persuade the enemy's targeting systems that the scout-ship was a friendly target. The station meanwhile rushed towards them with alarming speed.

'Reports from Immortal Light detachments say the Emissaries have taken control of most of the docking facilities,' Roses warned her.

Dakota nodded absent-mindedly, her thoughts literally a world away. 'I know.'

She'd been studying the Emissaries' movements through the station's own security network. They were fearsome-looking things, and she recalled the look of horror on Corso's face when she'd even mentioned them during their last conversation.

She was a

As well as up close to the station, there were several protracted battles now raging between Shoal and Emissary forces throughout Ocean's Deep. A fleet bearing the distinctive markings of the Darkening Skies Hive had emerged from the Shoal coreship and was now engaging vessels belonging to Immortal Light. But at the same time – and here it became particularly confusing – the Emissaries had started firing on the fleets of both Bandati Hives, as well as on the Shoal.

Consequently, the beleaguered Immortal Light fleet found itself under attack from all sides, and it was clear they were being wiped out.

Roses turned to her. 'This close, we're in severe danger of-'

'Being targeted again,' Dakota muttered. 'I know, I know. I'm dealing with it, all right?'

'Perhaps-'

'No,' she said, cutting him off, wishing he would stay quiet. 'I can…'

She couldn't find words to explain the turbulence inside her head. She shook it irritably and focused on dealing with the seemingly endless array of enemy systems now attempting to shoot them out of the skies. Meanwhile, she learned that the Emissaries were storming through the colony's several rings, killing everyone and everything they came across, in a chaotic hunt for the derelict.

The Godkiller's core stacks were still proving frustratingly opaque, even to the derelict's mind, but judging by the less secure data they were able to leach out of it, the Emissaries had a distinctly esoteric reason for wanting the derelict. She had already learned, too, that their correct designation was Emissaries of God.

'I'm going to have to use the hub's trace-lock signal,' Dakota warned Roses, 'or we're not going to be able to get inside. That's going to make us vulnerable for a couple of seconds.' Now their main deceleration was done with, she handed partial control of the scout-ship over to the hub's computers. 'So you'd better hang on.'

A fresh slew of missiles flashed towards them, fired from Emissary assault ships that had latched on to the hub's exterior and punched their way through the hull. She reached out through her implants and managed to shut down the targeting systems in most of them. The majority went sailing off course, but a few shot past the scout-ship and hit the hub itself, tearing chunks out of the hull and sending clouds of crystallized atmosphere spilling out into the vacuum beyond. A few detonated close enough to the scout-ship to send life-support and hull-integrity alarms into a spiralling panic.

They were now vectoring in towards the station at critical speeds. Too slow and they'd be an easy target, too fast and they might overshoot, or even kill themselves crashing straight into the hull.

Beams of superheated plasma lashed out towards them as they dropped towards one of the few remaining bays not yet controlled by the Emissaries. One of those high-energy beams slammed into the hull of the scout-ship, whereupon one-third of the navigational systems failed permanently, while over eighty per cent of the external sensors and transceiver relays were burned away by the incandescent heat.

They were flying blind now, and all Dakota could do was watch helplessly through the station's own monitoring systems as they hurtled through the open bay doors. A moment later something hard slammed into her, and her thoughts were swallowed up in blackness. On reflection, Corso came to consider it a small mercy he had been knocked unconscious immediately following Honeydew's death.

When he finally came to, it was to the sound of panicked breathing. He soon discovered he was in the company of not only Sal but two Consortium troopers: an abrasive individual called Henry Schlosser and a woman by the name of Je

They disembarked into a launch bay containing a hangar-like building over to one side. To Corso's untrained eye, this looked like it might once have functioned as a machine-shop. Otherwise, the dust-laden hulks of abandoned vehicles and other less identifiable machinery sat abandoned in one corner, while a series of rusted metal tanks were mounted in brackets against a rear wall.

Beyond the hangar, a variety of small craft were suspended from ceiling clamps, all looking in serious disrepair. Estimating the length of time they'd just spent in the aircraft, he assumed they'd been carried back up one of the spoke-shafts and into the station hub itself.

After the Emissaries pushed them inside the hangar, Corso and the others had instinctively sought out the dark, relatively inaccessible spaces between the wall-mounted tanks, aware that a machine about six metres in length, mounted on six thickset double-jointed legs, was standing guard at the hangar's open entrance. The Emissaries meanwhile departed, although it seemed obvious they would return.

Which meant that if they were going to devise a way to escape, their time was strictly limited.

The guard had a set of manipulating arms at its front end and, although there was nothing that might reasonably be called a head, there was a pair of sensors in about the right position to qualify as eyes. Its body close to the ground, it occurred to Corso that it resembled some huge and brutish dog, and after that he found it difficult to think of it as anything else.

But that wasn't the worst part of their present predicament, for the very real possibility of escape lay tantalizingly, cruelly close.