Gary Gibson - Nova War

Nova War

Shoal Sequence 02

Gary Gibson

Orion-Perseus Arm/Milky Way

32,000light-years from Galactic Core/2,375 light-years from nearest edge ofConsortium space

0.15 GCRevs since Start of Hostilities (approx. 15,235 years [Terran])

ConsortiumStandard Year: 2542

Inside a Shoal reconnaissance corvette, lost and hunted through a densetangle of stars and hydrogen clouds a thousand light-years wide, a Bandati spywas being tortured by having his wings pulled off one by one.

In order to accommodate the prisoner, who was anair-breather, the bare steel vault of the corvettes interrogation chamber hadbeen drained of its liquid atmosphere. Misted brine formed heavy, wobblingdroplets in the oxygen/nitrogen mix that had replaced it, floating in the zerogee like tiny watery lenses.

The Bandati had been pinned to an upright panelplaced in the centre of the chamber, where the floor dipped to form a shallow,stepped well. The Shoal-member known as Trader in Faecal Matter of Animalsnoted the enormous iron spike that had been driven through the creatures lowerchest in such a way that he was held immobile without, to his surprise, immediatelythreatening his continued survival. Nonetheless, it was not difficult todiscern from the Bandatis ceaseless struggling that he was in someconsiderable distress.

A sound like a hammer hitting metal set thebulkheads shaking briefly, announcing the successful circumvention of thecorvettes shield defences by an enemy attack drone. Trader listened to thedamage reports as they flooded in through a private data-feed, but nothingessential had been hit. Yet.

Cables had been fastened to the chamber walldirectly above the scouts head, and hooks attached to the opposite ends ofthese cables had been inserted into the outermost edges of his five remainingwings. The tension in these cables pulled the wings wide, as if the Bandatiwere frozen in the act of gliding through the dense atmosphere of the world onwhich his kind had originated. Trader was reminded of a display he had onceseen of small winged invertebrates, row after row of dried husks pinned to awall, carefully mounted, labelled and categorized.

Clearly, the interrogators had been in a creativemood when they were ordered to extract as much information as possible fromthis spy.

Colour-coded projections floated in the airaround the creature, simultaneously revealing his inner structure. The Bandatispecies were bipedal, about the same size and approximate shape as a younghuman adult and there the similarity ended. The scouts four primary limbs,apart from the wings, were long and narrow, the arms tapering to long, finefingers, while his narrow, deceptively frail-looking frame was coated in finedark hairs. The skull was like an oval laid on its side, the mouth small andpuckered, while the skin, on closer inspection, had the appearance and textureof tightly coiled black rope. But the first thingsone noticed above all else were the iridescent, semi-translucent wings thatentirely dwarfed the rest of the creatures frame.

If Trader had ever seen a terrestrial bat, hemight have recognized a certain passing resemblance. Even now, the scouts tinymouth twisted in a shrill of agony as a shimmering blade of energy sliced intothe ligatures and bony struts connecting one of his five remaining wings to hisupper body.

The eyes, rather than being compound in themanner of the insects the Bandati had been partly modelled after, were roundblack orbs mounted in a fur-covered face that featured a variety of exoticsense organs designed tens of millennia before by the Bandatis legendarypredecessors. Their lungs were equipped to draw in extraordinary quantities ofoxygen to power them while in flight.

Trader watched the proceedings from a vantagepoint just outside the interrogation chambers entrance, where the shipsliquid atmosphere was maintained at pressures substantial enough to crush anunprotected human should any have ventured within a few thousand light-years and was prevented from re-flooding the chamber by a shaped energy fieldspanning the entrance. Trader himself matched about half the body mass of atypical human, and took the shape of a chondrichthyan fish. His dark, compactbody was tipped by multihued fins and a tail, which wafted slowly in the waterall about him.

The Shoal interrogators within the chamber itselfoccupied bubbles of water prevented from dissipating by tiny disc-shapedfield-generators that formed a protective sphere around each of them. Traderflicked one of his manipulator-tentacles, and in response dozens of identicaldiscs freed themselves from nooks set into the walls around the entrance,whirling chaotically before each equidistant from the next finally formingthe outline of another sphere with Trader at its centre.

He swam forward and through the barrier, thediscs keeping pace and retaining the water he needed to breathe. Water splashedand pattered down onto slime-slicked metal as he entered.

The Bandati spy was trembling, his remainingwings twitching feebly but still held in check by the hooks tearing throughtheir gossamer-fine flesh. Blood from the prisoners wounds stained the panelon which he had been so brutally mounted. One recently severed wing lay on thedeck to one side, and Trader could see that the knot of muscle and tissue whereit had been severed was blackened and burnt. A streak of green-blue liquiddirectly below the panel suggested that the spy had defecated involuntarily.

The Bandati chittered, and the Shoal-memberresponsible for running the interrogation studied the creatures response as itwas automatically translated into some approximation of Shoal-speak. Traderwatched as another interrogator operated a set of mechanical, vaguely arachnoidarms attached to a device mounted on the ceiling directly above the prisoner.The devices arms were variously tipped with blades, probes and the hissing jetof a blowtorch, this latter now directed towards another of the unfortunateBan-datis wings.

Seeing what was about to befall it once more, theBandati struggled ever more feebly to escape. Trader ignored the increasinglydesperate cries as he approached his old patron, Desire for Violent Rendering,who was supervising the entire interrogation.

Ah, there you are. Desire turned from where hehad been quietly watching the proceedings. Weve been enjoying ourselves here.What kept you?

A second booming sound rolled through the air,and the bulkheads rattled yet again, while the harsh white lights dotted aroundthe chamber flickered briefly. Trader noted a series of projections that hungin the air by Desires side, complex real-time simulations and battleprojections that illustrated the swarm of Emissary hunter-killers slowlygaining on the corvette. Helpful colour-coded lines of trajectory andtime-to-impact estimates provided a running commentary on their rapidlydwindling chances of survival, the longer they remained this deep inside enemyterritory.

Traders superluminal yacht had rendezvoused withthe corvette barely an hour before, at a set of coordinates barelylight-minutes distant from a small, rocky world constituting part of a systemsufficiently nondescript to warrant only a catalogue number for a name.Nonetheless, it appeared that Emissary drones had been seeded there millenniabefore, and had been busily attempting to penetrate the corvettes defensivesystems ever since its arrival.

Traders yacht had been targeted immediately, andhe had experienced some tense moments while his onboard battle-systems meshedwith those of the corvette, allowing his ship to be drawn into the relativesafety of the larger ships main bay.

The Emissary drones employed offensivetechnologies ranging from the most primitive directed-energy weapons all theway up to subquantal disruptors, intended to tear holes in the corvettesshaped fields and allow tiny, nuclear-tipped missiles to reach the relativelyfragile hull within. At the same time, a constant barrage of superchargedplasma rained down on the corvette, a strategy that was rapidly depleting thebatteries powering its shields.