Nova War Read Online Free PDF

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