Marauder (33 page)

Megan shook her head adamantly. ‘That still doesn’t make me her. She died centuries ago. I have no . . .’

No responsibility for the things she did or the decisions she made
, she had almost said.

‘Who
is
he, really?’ asked Gabrielle, changing the subject. ‘Gregor Tarrant, I mean. Before we escaped, I knew him as Karl Petrova. What does he even
want
from me?’

‘He wants an opportunity to merge you with the Ship of the Covenant himself, then give you to the Wanderer so it can use you the same way Tarrant wants to use Bash – as a means to an
end.’ She went on to tell Gabrielle about her first encounter with the alien entity, and the circumstances whereby Bash had been reduced to a near-vegetative state.

‘That’s so terrible,’ said Gabrielle, her eyes downcast, once Megan finished the whole story.

‘Gabrielle, I have to ask . . . is Tarrant the father of your child?’

Gabrielle lowered her gaze to the stony black ground at her feet, then nodded. ‘I feel such a fool.’ Her hand folded over her belly. ‘All the time, he was telling me such
ridiculous lies, and I believed him because I wanted to.’

‘Are you sure you want to keep it?’

Gabrielle darted a surprised glance towards her. ‘It didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s all I have left . . . as Bash is all
you
have
left.’

‘Come again?’

‘That’s the reason you came to find Bash, isn’t it? Because you care about him.’

‘One of the reasons,’ Megan admitted. ‘That, and the fact that Tarrant will dispose of him as soon as he gets what he wants from the Wanderer.’

‘Was he . . . was Bash your lover?’

‘No. No, he wasn’t,’ said Megan. ‘But I’ve never felt closer to anyone else in my life. He . . . saved me, Gabrielle. He’s family now – the only one
that ever really meant a damn to me, and the only one who knew the truth about who I really am.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right: he’s all I’ve got
left.’

‘And when this is all over?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘Do you think you can cure him, fix him?’

‘Until you told me about him speaking to you in some way, I didn’t think that was possible. But if I could just get him to talk to me the same way he did with you . . .’ She
shook her head, unable to keep the pain out of her voice. ‘I’m going to take him with me myself, to the Wanderer, and make my own deal with it.’

Gabrielle looked at her with alarm. ‘Why?’

‘When I . . . when
Dakota
died, she was hunting something called a Maker Swarm. It’s like a cloud of machines, in their millions, all capable of travelling at light speed,
and all utterly inimical towards other civilizations. That’s what’s heading our way, and I have to try and find a way to stop it.’

Gabrielle stared at her, then shook her head, looking away.

‘I know it’s a lot to take in,’ said Megan.

The girl shook her head. ‘You have no idea.’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t the Magi ships just go and do something about the Swarm themselves?’

‘They were designed not to be able to function – to carry out actions – without having a controlling intelligence, a pilot. It was a way of preventing them from evolving into
just as much of a potential threat as the Swarms themselves. It means they cannot act autonomously. So they alerted me – someone who’s effectively part-Magi and who understands the
threat – knowing I’d then have to act. We’re forever connected to the Magi ships, you and me. We were made by them, in a sense.’

‘You make it sound as if we’re not really human,’ the other woman remarked.

‘I’m not sure that we
are
, to be honest. I think the ships had some way of knowing where the Swarm was, and which way it was heading, and let me know.’

‘Then why is it coming here?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘I told you how Dakota died when she was visiting a Maker Swarm halfway across the galaxy. Before it killed her, the Swarm learned things from her about us – about
humanity.’

‘What does it want with us?’

‘The Swarms are programmed to prevent the rise of any advanced interstellar civilizations. If they’d ever discovered that the Shoal Hegemony had bucked the trend for as long as it
did, they’d have tried to destroy them, too. But the Hegemony is gone, and now it’s the Accord which is growing into a true interstellar civilization. Unfortunately that makes us a
target, and that’s why I need to fly out to the Wanderer and negotiate with it. I believe it knows something that could help us stop the Swarm before it arrives.’

‘How can you be sure the Wanderer will help you, after what it did before?’

‘I can’t. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to turn me down once it knows what I have to offer.’

‘And what’s that?’ asked Gabrielle.

Megan hesitated, and realized she had been on the verge of telling her the truth of what she intended. But before she could say anything more, Gabrielle looked past Megan, her eyes growing
suddenly wide. She scrambled to her feet.

‘Look,’ she pointed. ‘Over there, coming this way.’

Megan stood up, realizing she could hear a faint rumble somewhere far off in the distance. She looked in the same direction as Gabrielle, and saw multiple pairs of headlights coming their way.
She could even hear the sound of heavy treads crunching across ice and rock.

She glanced at Gabrielle and thought about telling her to run, but knew it was already too late.

Whoever had found them – whether it was Tarrant, or someone else – there was nowhere left for them to hide.

A high-built truck pulled to a halt just a short distance away, looking far newer than anything Megan had seen in the Montos de Frenezo. Gabrielle stepped up beside her, taking a tight grip of
her hand.

Light played across them, almost blinding them.

‘Hey there!’ a voice shouted in an accent that didn’t sound at all as if it came from Redstone. ‘We saw that dropship going down. Were you on it?’

‘Yes, we were,’ Megan called back, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the brilliant light. ‘Who are you people?’

‘Thank God,’ said the owner of the voice, coming closer. Megan saw it was a woman, short and round and swaddled in brightly coloured survival gear. ‘We were pretty sure there
weren’t any survivors, but then we saw your tracks heading this way. How many of you are there?’

‘Just three,’ replied Megan as the woman stepped up close to her.

‘Hey, Lloyd!’ the woman shouted, turning towards the trucks behind her. ‘Kill those goddamn lights. You’re blinding them!’

The lights dimmed. ‘Martha Stiles,’ announced the woman, holding out a gloved hand towards Megan. ‘We’re based fourteen or so klicks from here, and you guys look like you
could really use a hot meal.’

‘More than you could even begin to imagine,’ was Megan’s heartfelt reply.

Even with the trucks, it still took a couple of hours to get back to the settlement on the far side of the hills.

Low, grey-coloured domes loomed out of the encroaching night as they pulled to a halt. Several of Stiles’s fellow workers had clearly waited up for their return, and they proved to be
friendly but eager to find out just what had happened to the dropship.

Stiles shooed them away, then guided the three newcomers into a building which proved to be a communal refectory. By now, Megan had worked out that Stiles must be in charge of this research
base, and her suspicion was confirmed when the woman told her, over hot coffee and freshly baked
char siu
, that she was project director for a long-term study of the canopy trees. They
were trying, she explained, to find some way to adapt the same techniques the trees used to create their self-contained microclimates, as part of ongoing research into terraforming low-viability
worlds.

Over the past several days, however, work had taken a distant second place to watching the news about the disaster that had struck the Demarchy. Most of her staff, Stiles explained, were in fact
absent – called away to aid in the various relief operations springing up and down the coast to deal with the few survivors. And, given that a clash between the Accord and the Freehold seemed
inevitable, Stiles had been spending much of her own free time holding remote conferences with her funding body about whether they should all stay put or pack up and go home before things turned
really nasty.

When Gabrielle pulled down her hood, revealing her freshly cropped hair and the traces of circuitry visible beneath the skin, Megan felt suddenly certain that Stiles knew exactly who she was.
But, rather than saying anything, she merely glanced knowingly at Megan.

‘And what about your friend?’ asked Stiles, turning to study Bash. Megan had guided him to a seat and helped him eat one of the heated buns. ‘I can see you’re all
machine-heads, but is there a reason why he doesn’t speak?’

By now, some of Stiles’s staff had joined them at the table. ‘That,’ said one of them, ‘is a persistent vegetative state, if I ever saw one.’

‘He’s brain-damaged,’ Megan admitted, and then improvised: ‘I’m not sure who he is, or how he got that way.’ She flashed a taut smile. ‘It’s a
long story and I’m sure, after all that driving, you really don’t want to—’

‘Nonsense,’ said Stiles, her gaze hawklike. ‘Why don’t you start from the beginning?’

Megan sighed inwardly and gave herself up to the inevitable. ‘I work as a commercial pilot for the AM refineries in the outer system,’ she began, then nodded at Gabrielle, whom she
had introduced as her niece Beth. ‘Beth lives – well,
lived
– in Port Gabriel. I myself was in orbit when the floods hit.’

‘You were in Port Gabriel at the time?’ said a young woman sitting next to Stiles, now staring at Gabrielle. ‘Shit. And you
survived
that?’

‘She managed to make it to higher ground,’ Megan said quickly.

Gabrielle nodded uncertainly, glancing from Megan to Stiles. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was pretty bad.’

‘She managed to get word to me that she was okay,’ said Megan. ‘I was on an orbital station at the time, so I managed to borrow a dropship and fly down to pull her
off.’

‘And your friend?’ asked Stiles, nodding at Bash. ‘Where did he come from?’

To Megan’s surprise, Gabrielle spoke up. ‘We found him just wandering on his own in the middle of all the devastation, out in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have any idea how
he got there. He hasn’t said one word yet to either of us.’

Megan eyed Stiles uncertainly, now quite convinced the woman didn’t believe one word of their increasingly elaborate story.

‘So where were you flying to, when you crashed?’ asked a plump-looking man. ‘You’re a heck of a long way from the Demarchy out here.’

‘We were on our way back into orbit when something went wrong with our fuel containment,’ said Megan. ‘We tried to send out an alert for help, but the comms traffic was
overloaded.’

‘That’s true,’ muttered the girl next to Stiles. ‘The Tabernacle’s been severely hit all over. A lot of communities are completely cut off.’

‘We had no choice but to come back down,’ Megan finished. ‘We were in serious trouble.’

‘And I guess you didn’t have much choice about
where
you put down,’ said Stiles, her face impassive. ‘Am I right?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ said Megan, mentally damning the woman for toying with her. ‘And I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply, hugely grateful we are that you
came out there and found us. We owe you our lives.’

‘Well, you’re damn lucky we found you when we did,’ said Stiles. ‘A storm system’s been building up for a couple of days north of the Frenezo range, and it looks
like it’s heading this way.’

‘I think I can handle a bit of bad weather,’ said Megan stubbornly.

Stiles shook her head. ‘You’re not from here originally, are you?’

‘No, I’m not,’ Megan admitted.

’This is more than just some wind and snow we’re talking about,’ said Stiles. ‘When blizzards hit at this time of year, believe me, nothing moves – and not much
flies either. Wind speed can top two hundred and thirty kilometres an hour out here in the middle of nowhere. And on top of that, starting tomorrow, half of Redstone’s going to be a no-fly
zone for anything except Accord gunships, troop carriers and ground-to-orbit ambulances. What that means is that you can figure on being our guests here for at least the next week – if not
quite a bit longer.’

Megan nodded. ‘Again, thank you. But there’s one other thing we need to talk about. Beth is pregnant.’

Stiles looked shocked. ‘That’s the
first
thing you should have told us,’ she said. She turned towards Gabrielle. ‘How long, sweetheart?’

‘Four months,’ said Gabrielle.

‘Short or long-birther?’ asked Stiles.

‘Short,’ Gabrielle replied.

Stiles nodded. ‘You’re well past the midway point, then. You picked a hell of a time to get pregnant, young lady.’

At least Stiles had the tact not to ask about the father. Megan had already stretched the limits of her creativity in inventing a story for the three of them.

Stiles spread her hands flat on the table and look around at her co-workers. ‘Okay, then, down to business. As I said, half our people are away, working in the refugee camps, so
you’ll have your pick of quarters to use so long as you’re here.’

‘Again, I just want to—’ Megan started to say.

‘Hold it.’ Stiles raised a hand. ‘You don’t need to keep thanking us; it’s not as if we’d just leave you out there.’ She nodded towards Megan’s
still-bandaged shoulder. ‘We should check over all three of you, not just Beth. And as for Mr Mute, I don’t know what we can do for him. He’s a machine-head, which means
he’s on a registry somewhere, so one way or another we’ll eventually figure out who he is. But, until then, we don’t have the equipment for scanning neural hardware or anything
like that.’

‘Beth is the priority,’ agreed Megan, looking pointedly at Gabrielle. ‘But we’re all going to need treatment for radiation damage, at the very least.’

‘Well, we’re not doctors, but we do have a medbox. Beth, if you could go with Lucy –’ Stiles turned to the young woman seated next to her – ‘and she’ll
show you where our medbay is.’