Free Nova War by Gary Gibson Page B

beating in the thick, honeyed air was strangely comforting.
    In his last moments of consciousness, he recognized the scent of his fellow Darkening Skies Hive-members, who had come for him at last.

Three
    The next time Dakota woke was to find herself bound to a rusted gurney, her ankles and wrists held in place by tight straps.
    For the first time in weeks, her mind felt clear and she remembered everything in appalling, grisly detail: Nova Arctis, Corso, and the escape from the exploding supernova against impossible odds.
    Everything.
    She had lashed the Piri Reis to a derelict alien starship and carried out a superluminal jump, trusting to fate as to where they would emerge. In fact, they had dropped back into normal space near a Bandati colony world occupied for longer than human civilization had existed.
    Dakota stared up into a vast shaft filled with light and air, a circle of sky visible far, far overhead. An airship constructed of bulbous gas bags, with a gondola suspended beneath, ponderously made its way upwards from the floor of the shaft towards that distant circle of sky.
    Balconies were placed around the shaft’s interior, seeming to blur together the further up she looked. There was plant-life everywhere, a riot of red and green in more or less equal measures, virtually a vertical forest growing out of the shaft’s walls; and buzzing through it all, hundreds upon hundreds of Bandati making short hops from balcony to balcony.
    But more importantly – much, much more importantly – she sensed the thoughts of the derelict starship they had recovered from Nova Arctis for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, like a whisper barely heard through the wall of an adjoining room. Her machine-head implants were still inextricably linked to this ancient craft, and it was clear to her how severely it had been damaged.
    The gurney was angled so that her head was raised higher than her feet, and she twisted her head around to try and see her more immediate surroundings. She took in the details through a panic-stricken haze, her heart hammering and adrenalin flooding her brain.
    A variety of robot arms tipped with sensors, along with one or two sharp-looking blades, sprouted from a machine attached to one side of the gurney. The skin of her naked belly tightened with terror at the thought of what might be intended for her.
    She had been here before, many times. How could she have forgotten? She—
    The food-pipe, she realized. The ambrosia.
    Then, at last, she caught sight of Lucas Corso.
    He was bound, naked and helpless, to another gurney several metres away, almost unrecognizable without his hair and eyebrows. She could see that his gurney rested on bare metal wheels. Between the two of them were perhaps half a dozen Bandati, looking more like hallucinogenically inspired rag dolls up-close than actual living creatures. Their mouth-parts clicked busily, their wide, iridescent wings twitching and flapping as they spoke, filling the air with a sound like flags whipping in a strong wind.
    They were surrounded by low walls, entirely open to the air, except that a series of translucent panels topping these walls were angled outwards. As Dakota watched, these panels began to fold inwards, like the leaves of a lotus flower closing for the night.
    More and more memories flooded back.
    The Bandati had been holding them prisoner for weeks (she had a sudden flash of something burning its way through the Piri Reis’s hull as they waited for rescue). They’d been brought here before to be questioned – and, more often than not, tortured.
    And yet the ambrosia swept those memories away every time. ‘Lucas!’
    Corso blinked and peered towards her, his eyes glassy. She guessed he was taking longer to shake off the effect of the ambrosia.
    He worked his jaw for a moment as if he’d briefly forgotten how to form words. ‘I thought maybe you were dead,’ he called over. ‘I—’
    ‘I’m all right. I’m all right, Lucas.’