Nova War

'You're going on alone?'

'Not quite.' She shook her head. 'I want you in my sight as much as possible. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to need your help.'

She saw that one slim, dark hand now lay close to a knife sheathed on the alien's harness. She could feel the black tide of her filmsuit primed to spread over her in an instant.

'I mean it,' she said. 'Help me get to the derelict, and there's a chance I can save the day for all of us – both human and Bandati. Believe me when I say there's so much more going on here than you could possibly believe.'

'And if I don't comply?'

She shook her head, and smiled. 'Try anything, and you're not going to like the consequences – not you or any of the rest of your Hive's fleet, believe me.'

She watched as the alien sat again, flexing his huge wings as he did so. 'If I help you, willingly or otherwise, I could be exiled by my Queen and forced to seek out an unaligned Hive. It would mean a life of considerable danger and hardship for me.'

'We've all had to pay a high price just to be here,' Dakota reminded him. 'Some more than others.'

The train started to slow as it approached its terminus. 'All right,' Roses said finally. 'What do you need me to do?' Moss moved on through the ruins of an abandoned ring, the Magi derelict a steady presence in his mind. It was close by, its guts full of ancient secrets and terrible fires waiting to be unleashed. His mind spasmed with delight every time the new implants in his head made fleeting contact with it.

He had made a wildly dangerous superluminal jump to a point midway between the orbital station and the black hole that eternally chased it around the gas giant. He had hoped the tremendous violence of the collapsed star would disguise his drive's signature, but Emissary auto-response units had targeted him regardless.

A quarter of his onboard systems had been burned out during the subsequent fire-fight, but he had still managed to blow a hole in the outer hull of another ring and slam the yacht straight through it. Protective shaped fields and inertial systems had compensated somewhat for the force of the crash-landing, but it had still been an experience he'd prefer not to repeat.

Within seconds of exiting his yacht he'd encountered a group of Emissaries. They were vile creatures, even by Moss's standards; technological cuckoos who stole from every species they encountered in their bizarre religious quest. Moss's field generator had begun to fail under the constant, brutal assault of their weapons, so he'd been forced to make a run for it. He'd barely had time to strip off his shirt and boots in order to scale a wall, taking advantage of nanoscale tubules he'd grafted into his flesh that allowed him to cling to flat surfaces like an oversized gecko.

His yacht meanwhile lifted back up through the hole it had torn in the ring's exterior, and thereby successfully evaded capture by the Emissaries. Moss then made his way to a nearby spoke-shaft and allowed its transport systems to carry him directly to the hub. He sighted hundreds of Bandati on the way – all station-dwellers, dead or alive, clustering around their crumbling Hive Towers.

Once he reached the ring where he knew the derelict was kept, his implants told him Dakota Merrick was herself getting maddeningly close. She must be converging on the derelict at more or less the same speed he was, so he checked his weapons – knives and small, short-range firearms – attached to a modified harness based on the design favoured by the Bandati.

He was surprised to discover that his implants could even grant him an occasional, fleeting taste of Dakota's emotions: a mixture of fear and determination laced with self-doubt. He had discovered to his surprise that there was a third machine-head present on the station, a man called Langley, but the few snatches of thought and emotion Moss detected from him were as bland and tasteless as tepid water.

Making sense of all the data his implants were feeding to him demanded considerable willpower and concentration, and as such proved more often than not to be immensely and even dangerously distracting. His thoughts were constantly clouded by a whirlwind of information, random sense-impressions and artificially generated thoughts.

Moss knew he needed time to learn how to filter and make sense of this data being dumped wholesale into his brain, but time was what he lacked. He had to defeat Dakota and assume control of the derelict, even while the Emissaries rampaged blindly through the station around them.

He knew, of course, that Dakota was just as aware of him. He caught her trace once more: a flash of worry and the glimpse of a dusty corridor. So close.

But he would savour her death; he would taste her soul, even as the life faded from her eyes. Dakota and Days of Wine and Roses soon left the hub behind, and began the long descent down a spoke-shaft. Dakota felt herself growing heavier as their elevator platform plunged down.

After what felt like an endless journey, they finally emerged from the base of the shaft to find themselves in a place that had clearly been disused and abandoned for an extremely long time. Close by lay a warren of laboratories and power-generating systems, showing that this particular ring was dedicated solely to the storage, study and defence of the Magi derelict.

They then parted ways, as they'd agreed during the long descent, Days of Wine and Roses spreading his wings wide and boosting into the air before quickly vanishing out of sight behind a series of buildings shaped like ziggurats.

Dakota stared after him for a while, listening to the eerie silence amid the dance of data flowing to her via the derelict. Then she turned and headed purposefully away, quickly threading through a maze of narrow passages between imposingly tall structures that looked like part of a chemical plant.

There were no Hive Towers here, no places of residence, and very little in the way of flora except for some algae and sparse wild grasses that had seeded themselves through the ring's spokes over the long, quiet centuries. This particular ring was separated into distinct segments by three enormous bulkheads. Just before the nearest of these loomed a complex somewhat like a squat pyramid intersecting with a globe.

This, she realized, was her destination: the storage facility within which the derelict was housed.

For some time now, she'd been tracking Hugh Moss, and knew he was moving through a similar warren of passageways and open areas within this very ring-segment. However, his precise location was proving much more difficult to ascertain. For someone so obviously new to implant technology, he'd still worked out how to shut down part of the local surveillance systems, effectively preventing her from pinpointing his exact whereabouts. That uncertainty made her particularly vigilant, because he could be a couple of kilometres away from her, or he could equally be right behind her…

The thought made her pause and turn, her skin prickling. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so damn quiet.

Dakota moved on quickly through the grime-streaked and crumbling ruins. The Emissaries had begun destroying the station's controlling computer networks as soon as they realized someone was using them to monitor their movements and impede their progress. Given enough time, they'd render both her and the derelict deaf and dumb. And meanwhile there was little to stop them from physically tearing the station apart until they had uncovered what they wanted.

If only she could get to see Moss. His presence stained the dataflow, and she'd sensed the twisted hatred filling his deranged mind during one of their brief moments of mutual co

A moment later, Dakota had cause to reflect on just how close she had come to underestimating him.