Marauder (15 page)

She felt a sharp stabbing pain in her palms, and realized she had been digging her fingernails into them. ‘Why?’ she asked, her voice sounding harsh to her own ears.

The man she had known as Karl Petrova, but who in reality was some stranger named Tarrant, looked at her as if she had asked the dumbest question in the world. ‘Because it was
necessary,’ he said.

‘You didn’t do this for me,’ she protested. She stared again at the projection, and saw bodies caught in an eddy. ‘Nothing could be worse than thinking that . . .
this
could have had any connection with me.’

His expression grew hard. ‘Your hands are just as dirty as mine, Gabrielle. After all, you were happy to kill Thijs and the rest in cold blood.’

‘Yes, but they . . .’ The words choked off in her throat.

‘
Deserved
it?’ he laughed. ‘Of course they did.’

‘But all those people in Dios, all those pilgrims . . .’

‘. . . are the same people,’ said Tarrant, ‘who helped eject the Freehold from Redstone. The Freehold settled this world long before the Demarchists or anyone else turned up.
Now, it seems, the tables are turned once again.’

‘So what do you need me for, if all you wanted to do was destroy the Demarchy?’

Karl laughed again. ‘Destroying the Demarchy was just a way of distracting the Accord long enough for me to get you away from there and make it look as if you’re dead.’

She suddenly felt a depth and intensity of loathing towards this man – this
stranger
– that she had previously reserved only for Thijs. ‘You really think I could still
love you after . . . after . . .’

‘Don’t be a child,’ he snapped, pulling himself out of his couch, his expression coldly devoid of emotion. ‘You’re an asset, nothing more.’

Gabrielle stared at him, mute, then wrapped her arms around herself as if suddenly cold.
An asset, nothing more?

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Take me back. I want to go home.’

Tarrant snorted with derision. ‘Port Gabriel doesn’t exist any more.’

She forced back the tears she could feel welling up. She was determined not to lose control in front of him.

‘What happened to Dios was necessary,’ Tarrant continued. ‘Even killing Thijs and his friends wouldn’t have been enough to enable us to escape for certain. We needed a
bigger distraction, one that would convince people we must have died along with everyone else.’

She launched herself towards him, beyond reason now, a noise that was barely human escaping her throat. Everything he had ever said to her, every word whispered to her in the depths of the
night, had been little more than elaborate lies.

Tarrant avoided her onslaught with ease, grabbing hold of both her arms and twisting them behind her back until she screamed from the pain. ‘Now you have a choice,’ he said.
‘Unless you decide to be cooperative, I can put you back in a medbox and leave you there until I need you. We’re going to meet with some old friends of mine, and then we’re going
on a trip, Gaby. A long one.’

‘I hope they catch you,’ she hissed, still struggling to free herself from his grasp. ‘I hope the Accord finds you and cuts you into little pieces for what you’ve
done.’

Tarrant laughed. ‘The Accord? And what the hell do you think would happen to you if their soldiers got hold of us? The best you could hope for is that they’d hand you over to the
Demarchy, but it’s much more likely they’d just try to find some way to merge you with the Ship of the Covenant themselves.’

She twisted in his grasp, the movement sending them both into a slow spin in the zero gravity. ‘They wouldn’t do that,’ she said, aware of the uncertainty in her own voice.

‘The Accord badly needs the data that the Demarchy was about to extract from you. It has come to rely on it, so don’t make the mistake of thinking it would treat you any better than
Thijs would have done. It’d use you for what you actually are: a made thing, a clone.’

‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered.

Tarrant released one of her arms and used his other hand to yank her around until she faced him.

‘What did you just say?’ he demanded, sounding furious.

‘Are you deaf?’ she spat at him. ‘I said I’m
pregnant
.’

A range of emotions flickered across his face. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me before now?’

‘I guess I couldn’t find the right moment,’ she sneered.

His face darkened with rage, and for a moment Gabrielle thought he might strike her.

‘You stupid little whore,’ he muttered under his breath instead, before letting go of her. She pushed herself away from him, and moved towards the hatch.

‘You
stupid
little whore,’ he shouted after her again. ‘How long has it been?’

‘Almost four months,’ she told him, and saw his eyes drop towards her waist. ‘It’s just starting to show.’

She saw him doing the calculations in his head. She’d give birth in another two months, shorter gestation periods being another benefit of long-ago DNA tweaking by her colonist
ancestors.

‘I suppose this changes all your plans, doesn’t it?’ she said, enjoying what felt like a fleeting moment of triumph.

His eyes were bright and hard as he stared at her. ‘No, not really, Gabrielle,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t change a damn thing.’

2751 (twelve years before)

When they were no more than a half-dozen jumps from the target system and the Wanderer, Megan called an emergency meeting.

She waited for them on the command deck. Sifra was the first to arrive, red-eyed and yawning, closely followed by Bash, who studied her curiously but said nothing. Tarrant was the last to
appear, a bulb of hot coffee in one hand. Megan had made an excuse not to spend the previous night with him.

‘Whatever this is about,’ Sifra grouched, ‘it had better be really damned important.’

Megan stalked around the base of the astrogation chair, rubbing her hands together as the others took seats by various consoles, swivelling the chairs to face towards her.

‘It has to do with the Wanderer,’ she said, finally stopping her pacing, her body turned rigid with suppressed anger. ‘But mostly it has to do with certain details, Gregor,
that you omitted to mention before we left Kjæregrønnested.’

Tarrant gazed back at her coolly. ‘What details?’

‘Details that were deliberately redacted from the research material you passed on to me and Bash.’

Bash fired at her.

Tarrant, unaware of this private communication, nodded expressionlessly. ‘Go on.’

‘I didn’t say anything at first, because I thought maybe there was a reason why some of that material had been redacted. I thought perhaps the missing details weren’t that
important. But then I took a look at the source texts – the original Meridian data, from which Schelling’s researchers first extracted the details regarding the Wanderer – and
fortunately all the source material was provided as well.’

Her muscles felt sore and achy after a long and mostly sleepless night relieved only by intermittent and angry dreams. She glanced briefly at Tarrant, who gazed back with an innocent expression
that brought her anger flooding back. ‘I decided to have a go at translating those source texts myself,’ she continued, ‘after downloading the expert knowledge necessary to manage
it. I had to do a lot of backwards engineering to try and figure out how your researchers built their translation algorithms but, once I had, I realized the missing details were still there, in
those source texts.’

She now stepped a little closer to Tarrant, not even trying to hide her contempt. ‘That was a mistake on your part, Gregor, thinking I wouldn’t dig deep enough actually to translate
the Meridian records myself. I could hardly believe what I discovered, but the real breakthrough came when I cracked the encryption on those low-energy transmissions you’ve been secretly
sending back to the Three Star Alliance.’

Tarrant’s eyes widened, his cheeks flushing with anger.

‘You had no right to intercept our communications,’ said Tarrant. He hadn’t moved from where he sat, but he held himself totally rigid.

Megan smiled humourlessly. ‘We do have a right to know how much danger we’re putting ourselves in, Gregor. Even though each of your messages consisted of no more than a few kilobytes
of data, the energy cost of sending them through the tach-net array all the way back to Kjæregrønnested was enough to catch my attention. You covered your tracks, but not quite well
enough. I dug around until I found older messages buried in a systems cache, full of all kinds of surprising little details you’ve been keeping from us. Imagine my surprise when I discovered
we weren’t the first ship from out of Kjæregrønnested to encounter the Wanderer.’

Tarrant’s expression was unreadable, but Sifra glared at her with undiluted hatred. Bash, meanwhile, simply looked appalled.

Tarrant started to say something, but Bash put up a hand, cutting him off.

‘What ship?’ asked Bash.

‘A deep-space research vessel from Al-Jahar,’ said Megan, ‘called the
Kelvin
. It was ordered to divert from its course more than a year and a half before we set out.
Alliance researchers had located the Wanderer with their probes, and since the
Kelvin
was already on a deep-space exploratory mission, and the only ship available at short notice, it got
sent to investigate. But after it arrived, the Wanderer nearly tore it apart before its crew managed to jump it back out of range.’

Bash stood up, his expression thunderstruck, and stared at Tarrant. ‘Is this true?’ he demanded.

‘And, according to those records I translated,’ said Megan, ‘the same thing happened to the Shoal. They approached the Wanderer and it attacked their ships – except
they
called it the Marauder, and with good reason. It was powerful enough all on its own that they were forced to retreat, and it refused to negotiate with them except on its own terms
– ones that were apparently unacceptable to the Shoal.’

‘But what about the Meridians?’ asked Bash. ‘And the Atn? They encountered the Wanderer long before the Shoal did, and it didn’t attack
them
.’ Doubt
flickered across his face. ‘Did it?’

Megan shook her head. ‘No, it didn’t attack them, and I still don’t know why. But there’s no way we can proceed without knowing
exactly
what we’re going to
be dealing with – not if there’s any chance the Wanderer might try and attack us as it did the
Kelvin
.’

‘You’re getting this all wrong,’ said Tarrant. ‘Of course there are some inherent risks in an expedition like this, the same as there are in any such, and we’ve
already assessed those risks. But you’re talking as if we’re going out there without any game plan whatsoever. Besides,’ he continued, ‘last time I looked,
I
was
the one in charge around here.’

‘Maybe,’ said Megan through clenched teeth, ‘we should put that to a vote.’

‘All right.’ He raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘The fact is that we were going to have to tell you the truth about the Wanderer soon enough.’

Bash moved closer to him. ‘What the hell was the point of keeping us in the dark in the first place?’

‘As Megan says, the records show that different species had different experiences when they approached the Wanderer. Sometimes it reacted aggressively, sometimes it didn’t.’
The way he was talking, he sounded almost reasonable. ‘We’re not clear on the reasons for this discrepancy,’ Tarrant continued, ‘but we’ve made reasonable
preparations, given what happened to the
Kelvin
. That much you must understand.’

Bash drew in a sharp breath, his eyes full of betrayal. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

‘Maybe it’s because Bash and I wouldn’t have wanted to come out on this trip if we’d known – is that it?’ asked Megan. ‘We’re just
one
ship
up against something that sent even the Shoal running, so what the
hell
do you imagine is going to happen to us?’

‘We have,’ Tarrant ground the words out one by one, ‘certain
advantages
that the
Kelvin
didn’t possess.’

Megan nodded as if he had answered a question. ‘The anti-matter weapons in the cargo, is that what you mean? The ones that came on board with that final shipment just before we left
Kjæregrønnested?’

Sifra finally stood up, uncoiling rapidly from where he sat. He made no move towards her, but something in his expression sent a shiver through her.

‘All right,’ said Tarrant, also standing, ‘maybe we
should
have been more straight with you, and I’m truly sorry we weren’t. But we were in one hell of a
hurry to get away before we lost our chance to take command of the
Beauregard
. Our mission objective still hasn’t changed, and there’s just as much at stake as there ever was.
We weren’t sure how you’d react if you knew the whole truth so, yes, we held some details back.’ He let out a sigh and fixed his gaze on Megan. ‘We should have told you
sooner than this,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t.’

‘And maybe, if that’s all there was to it, I might have been okay with that,’ said Megan. ‘But I haven’t even got to the worst part yet.’

‘Megan,’ said Tarrant, a hint of warning in his voice.

She turned to Bash. ‘Remember the Accord’s justification for the embargo, and why it threatened war against the TSA? It claimed we were retooling our nova drives into offensive
weapons.’

‘Except that was all bullshit,’ said Bash, ‘because they never found any.’

‘I seriously wish that was true.’ She stared hard at Tarrant and Sifra. ‘But it’s not. The Schellings built nova mines – as many as a dozen, all of them stockpiled
at different locations throughout the TSA. Enough of them to start a whole new Nova War and wipe out half of the Accord, if they wanted to.’

‘No.’ Bash turned to stare at Tarrant and Sifra, his fingers flexing by his sides. ‘That’s impossible.’