Gary Gibson: Nova War

It tasted of sunlight, and warm summer nights, and everything that had been good in her life – at least while life had been good.

She let the nozzle slip from her mouth some indeterminate time later, now numbed by the overwhelming sensual pleasure of the liquid ambrosia. She wondered what would happen once it had worked its way through her digestive system. Presumably she'd just pee it.

Thinking about this, she looked around her cell. Things, she realized, could get unpleasant very quickly indeed. Or maybe they just expected her to take a leak out the door?

There was something important about that pipe she had to remember – except she'd never seen it before.

Or had she?

Suddenly she wasn't so sure one way or another.

Whatever magical potion of nutrients and narcotics she'd just ingested, Dakota began to feel sleepy – a comforting, gold-tinged fatigue that made her want to curl up on the floor and sleep for a thousand thousand nights… Two At the culmination of his long investigation, the Bandati agent known as 'Remembrance of Things Past' found himself on Iron-bloom, the primary planetary settlement in the Night's End system, waiting outside an establishment that – to any ignorant eye – appeared to be little more than a cave mouth from which issued a particularly odoriferous stench.

The establishment, a human-owned restaurant of considerable notoriety, was located high on the slopes of Mount Umami, and overlooked the city of Darkwater. The remote location was necessary, of course, for the sake of public propriety and decency.

Close by were tethered a few passenger blimps – cylindrical bundles of balloons laced together, with wide vane-sails projecting from around their circumferences and multi-tiered gondolas suspended beneath. The air at this altitude was simply too thin for most Bandati to be able to fly very far. A younger, fitter Bandati might manage to hop and glide here and there for a short while, but in most cases the only way to and from the restaurant was on board one of the blimps.

Remembrance, on the other hand, had arrived aboard an Immortal Light war-dirigible, along with a squadron made up from the Queen of Immortal Light's personal security contingent.

Having finally picked up the trail of the fugitive called Alexander Bourdain, members of that same security contingent were busy interrogating a couple of horrified Bandati who had emerged from the cave only to find themselves in the middle of a raid.

Immediately beyond and on either side of the cave entrance stretched a wide, flat ledge of smooth and carefully polished rock. Two heavy-duty artillery platforms bristling with beam weapons were mounted at either end of it, both of them pointing outwards, providing the kind of security the restaurant's clientele apparently expected; yet the Bandati mercenaries who had been manning those same platforms had been suspiciously quick to surrender without a fight, once they realized the raid was being carried out on the orders of their Queen.

A low steel railing marked the rim of the ledge, and beyond it lay a vertiginous drop – and a spectacular view of Darkwater. Immortal Light had been granted the contract to settle Iron-bloom, over and above the wishes of his own Hive many millennia earlier. If history had turned out just a little bit different, this might have been his home.

Remembrance lifted his body up on narrow, dark limbs and peered over the railing, finding pleasure in the chill breeze that lifted his wings. He looked down into an intricate weave of glistening Hive Towers whose peaks stabbed upwards through a thick, soupy atmosphere so remarkably like that of the Bandati home world that it made him long to visit there once more. Even on those worlds possessing air breathable by his species, the atmosphere was either too thin to support flight for his kind, or the gravity level was too high. Night's End, however, was very much the exception to the rule.

He turned to see that a spindle-leg had perched on the railing nearby. It resembled nothing so much as a miniature Terran elephant on stilts – Remembrance had once seen an actual elephant on one of his several diplomatic missions to Earth, although that particular one had certainly lacked stilts. The spindle-leg's eyes were mounted, also in a distinctly un-elephantine fashion, on the end of its trunk, although proboscis might have been a more accurate term for that startling appendage.

Two large clown eyes gazed stupidly at Remembrance until he buzzed his wings in annoyance, and the ungainly looking creature leapt onto an outcrop just below the railing, in the way a real elephant – with or without stilts – never would.

Remembrance glanced up as another Bandati dropped down from the war-dirigible's gondola, then skittered to a hard landing nearby.

Remembrance immediately recognized 'Scent of Honeydew, Distant Rumble of Summer Storms', and greeted him with a formal snap of his own wings.

'I see you're familiarizing yourself with the mountain wildlife,' Honeydew clicked, picking himself up and approaching. 'Strange-looking critters, even to me. And I was born here.'

'I've seen stranger,' Remembrance replied. 'You got the message, then?'

Like Remembrance of Things Past, Honeydew wore a weapons harness fastened around his upper body, crossing over twice diagonally from each shoulder to opposite waist. The harness featured several sealed pockets and loops holding a shotgun and a smaller pistol, the former secured sideways across the back below the wing-muscles and the latter to one side at the front.

Honeydew was Chief of Security for Darkwater, and had been partnered with Remembrance for the duration of a long cross-Hive investigation into Alexander Bourdain's smuggling activities.

Honeydew nodded towards the cave entrance. 'Who gave you authorization for this raid?'

'I didn't request any,' Remembrance replied immediately. 'It takes too long.'

Honeydew's wings twitched in annoyance. 'And just how sure are you that Bourdain is in there?'

'Very sure indeed.'

'You should know there's a storm of shit going on down there because of your actions.' Honeydew waved towards the city far below. 'First you track Bourdain on your own time without telling me, then call in a raid you don't have the authorization for. All this without providing any evidence that Bourdain is even still on Iron-bloom at all. Do you have any idea how much trouble you're going to be in if you've got this wrong? We're talking a major diplomatic incident – with yourself firmly in the spotlight.'

'I appreciate the warning,' Remembrance replied drily, watching as Honeydew's wings twitched yet more angrily.

'All right, it's your call, then,' Honeydew finally relented. 'The security services for two Hives trying to track down one single human together couldn't find him, but you track him down all on your own. So tell me, how did you do it?'

I infiltrated your own Hive's internal security databases, Remembrance almost confessed, and found everything I needed in the last place I expected. There were levels of corruption within Immortal Light's administration that even he couldn't have anticipated.

'Look, we can talk about this later,' Remembrance parried. 'I have the direct authority of my own Queen, and that's enough. You know from my reputation that I'd never call in a raid without extraordinarily good reasons.'

Honeydew looked less than convinced. 'You still don't have the jurisdiction to go pulling stunts like this. I'd rather-'

'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-'