'Precisely. Which means they are forced to express themselves in ways that supersede their sensory limitations, and to my tastes they do so most frequently through their arts.'

'I sometimes fear I have made you altogether too human,' the Queen replied, drawing closer to the edge of the platform – and therefore closer to Remembrance.

'Perhaps, my Queen,' Remembrance replied, growing glassy-eyed.

It was true that his Queen's attentions on previous occasions had made him sufficiently different from his own species that other Bandati now seemed strange to him. For all that Honeydew was a member of a rival Hive, Remembrance felt a curious kinship. They had both, after all, been made over by their respective Queens in order to communicate more easily with other species.

Remembrance waited patiently as his Queen inclined her head to run her long tongue across his wings and back. He felt an icy coldness sinking rapidly into his flesh, triggering physiological changes at the most fundamental level. It was a process that – given only a little time – would alter his scent and even his Hive rank. A Bandati Queen was the only one equipped to do such a thing.

'And your chosen spoken name is?' she asked, her voice growing thick with desire.

'"Days of Wine and Roses",' he told her.

'What a strange name,' she murmured, as long-chain molecules modelled after highly mutable infectious viruses continued to work their transformative magic on him. 'It paints a picture without relying on scent, and yet it still somehow feels as typically human as your previous name. Where did you find it?'

'I stumbled across it while engaging in cultural research before taking up my post as assistant economic adviser to your previous ambassador to Earth. The words are pleasing to my ear.'

'As they are to mine,' she concurred. 'And now to me, my love,' she added, reaching towards him with her tree-trunk limbs, lifting him entirely off the platform and into her giant embrace. 'You will serve me well.'

'That I will,' Remembrance-soon-to-be-Roses replied as the haze of lust finally overwhelmed him. 'That I will.' Five The next morning Dakota and Corso lay curled together on the floor, her back pressed against his belly, head resting on the inside of his arm, the door and the vertiginous drop beyond it barely half a metre away. She remembered the low grunts he'd made as they'd coupled in the half-light of dawn, the whispered conversations earlier as he explained how he'd been kept in a cell identical to her own.

She wondered if their gaolers had been watching them the whole time, if their lovemaking had made any kind of sense to them.

He shifted behind her, and she wondered if she smelled as bad to him as he did to her, because it wasn't like there were any washing facilities handy. He stumbled to his feet and she guessed he was heading for the ambrosia pipe.

'Don't drink it,' she warned him.

He shook his head. 'It's safe now.'

'Bullshit. It numbs your mind and makes it easier for them to deal with you. We have a better chance of figuring our way out of here if we can both think straight.'

He bent down to the pipe and touched its flexible tip before looking back over at her. 'Starving to death isn't going to help us either. Were you serious last night when you said you wanted to try and climb out of here?'

She pushed herself up onto one elbow and regarded him. 'Yeah.'

He shook his head. 'Well, don't. Where would you go, anyway?'

'Jesus, don't you want to get out of here?'

'I already tried.'

She frowned at him.

'Climbing out, I mean. I already tried. All I managed was to nearly get myself killed.'

'Lucas-' she began in alarm.

'I don't want to talk about it, okay? And, as far as the ambrosia goes, trust me when I tell you it's not an issue any more. Seriously.'

'It'll put you to sleep.'

'It won't.' He bent down to suck on the pipe and Dakota stared as he swallowed several mouthfuls. She half expected him to slump there like a junkie after a new fix, but he just stared back, as bright-eyed as ever.

He nodded down towards the pipe. 'I know you don't trust me, but…'

'You tried to steal the derelict from me. I didn't forget that, at least.'

'Look, trust me this one time. If I'm lying, fine, hold it against me for ever more. But look at you! Your ribs are showing. You need to drink, Dak. Or you're going to die.'

She rocked back on her haunches, feeling warm sunlight play against the curve of her spine, and buried her head in her arms folded over her shoulders. 'I don't want to drink that stuff and then wake up back in that fucking chamber being tortured,' she replied, her voice muffled. 'It feels like that's what happens every time I go near that pipe.'

'But not this time, Dakota,' Corso insisted. 'This time is different. Look at me. Do I look like I'm going to pass out?'

'Shit.' Dakota unfolded herself and propped her head on one arm, staring at a man who was equal parts friend, lover and enemy. There had been times when he'd saved her life – and times when he'd been ready to kill her.

'Shit,' she said again, sounding even more miserable. She fell onto her hands and knees and crawled the short distance over to the food pipe. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

She drank the ambrosia, staring up at Corso with a murderous expression.

It tasted different. Sweeter somehow, and grittier. She didn't experience the wash of euphoria she'd felt before. She pulled away from the pipe and coughed hoarsely.

'Easy,' said Corso, kneeling beside her and gently prying the pipe from her fingers. 'Not too much or you'll just bring it all back up again. How long have you been starving yourself like this?'

'Not sure. Several days, maybe.'

'What, you're trying to kill yourself?'

'I feel like I'm already dead, being stuck in here.' She glanced up at Corso.

He looked troubled. 'It was pretty bad for me too,' he said, glancing away from her.

'Corso, how did you know-?'

'Drink a little more now,' he replied, cutting her off. Some time later that same day she glanced over to see him standing by the door-opening, framed by stars. She watched him for a while, and realized she was starting to feel better than she had in days. Even the migraines were beginning to tail off, and her mind remained clear despite the ambrosia.

A voice she hadn't expected to ever hear again spoke inside her mind.

‹Dakota, I am still analysing the Bandati security protocols, but my current estimates for gaining limited control over city-wide systems are positive to a higher percentile than previously.›

How come?

‹The security protocols are constructed over legacy systems, some several thousand years old. I have found a means to penetrate the tower defence stacks by disguising aggressive query strings as legacy protocols, thereby-›

It's okay, Piri, I get it. Things are going okay for once.

‹Thank you. I should point out that I will shortly be passing around to the dark side of the gas giant, and therefore-›

See you when you come back round. Over and out.

It had been a moment of revelation when the Piri Reis had successfully piggybacked its signal on the derelict's own, more esoteric, system of communication. It had taken serious willpower earlier in the day not to punch the air in triumph, as it would have been hard to come up with an appropriate excuse to give Corso for such exultant behaviour.

The facility containing both the Piri and the derelict spacecraft orbited a moon whose Bandati name translated as 'Blackflower'. This in turn orbited Dusk, the nearest of two inner-system gas giants known to the Bandati as the Fair Sisters. The farther gas giant was called Dawn. At the moment, the orbits of both Dusk and Ironbloom had brought them relatively close to each other, although Ironbloom's greater orbital velocity would soon widen the gap.