Marauder (5 page)

Something about the confrontation with Cassanas had charged the atmosphere, so that Gabrielle felt her orgasm building more quickly than usual. She could see it was the same for Karl: barely a
minute or two had passed before she felt the muscles of his body go tense. He let out a restrained grunt before collapsing on top of her, finally releasing her wrists and leaning his head down to
kiss her.

Her orgasm, when it came, washed through her like a warm tide. She tipped her head back, her breath emerging in sharp gasps. She had carefully taught herself not to cry out; though Cassanas
might be easily blackmailed, the same could not be said for others who might overhear them, should they be passing anywhere near the door to her chambers.

Karl finally slid over to one side. ‘I can’t stay long,’ he declared.

‘You never can,’ she replied with a groan. ‘I just want all this to be over.’

‘Hey.’ He squeezed her shoulder with one hand. ‘It’s going to be all right.’ He was still breathing heavily from his exertions.

She laughed shakily. ‘You say that, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘We never talk about what comes after. After we’ve gone – after we’ve escaped. Where do we go? Where can we possibly live?’

‘A long way from here,’ he replied. ‘I’ve made arrangements to get us off Redstone and out of this system as soon as possible.’

‘But where, exactly, are we going to go?’ she insisted. ‘Aren’t they bound to come looking for me?’

‘And risk exposing the Demarchy of Uchida to the kind of scrutiny people like Thijs would rather die than allow?’ He chuckled. ‘I’ve been preparing for this day for a
long time, Gaby. We’ll soon have new identities and new lives.’ He squeezed her shoulder again, then raised his fingers to tousle her hair gently. ‘Picture us some place warm
where it never gets as cold as it does everywhere on this damn world, and living under some other sun. There are a thousand places I could get work as a security consultant, and you’ll be
able to decide for yourself what you want to do with the rest of your life. Just another day or two, and all this will be behind you, I promise.’ He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her
ear and flashed her a reassuring smile. ‘Why do you ask? Having second thoughts?’

She frowned. ‘No, of course not.’

‘There’s no turning back after this, Gaby.’

‘Haven’t I told you often enough how much I hate every last one of them?’ she hissed through clenched teeth. She remembered times before she had met Karl, when it had taken all
her willpower not to scream and to suppress the raw red anger she kept so tightly bundled deep inside herself. ‘I despise them all, more than you can—’

He reached down and pressed a finger against her lips. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I still needed to ask.’

She pushed his hand away and laughed. ‘I’m not sure you could ever really understand, Karl. Not without being a woman.’

Karl had not been her first. That had been Thijs, who had come into her quarters one night years before, when she had been little more than a child, chasing Mater Cassanas out of
Gabrielle’s bedchamber before raping her. It had given her an insight into her true value in the eyes not only of Thijs but also of Lampard, Abramovic and even Mater Cassanas herself.

‘Gabrielle—’

She silenced him with a kiss. ‘But it’s true what you say. It’ll all be over soon, and then the both of us will be gone from here forever.’

‘Then there’s something you need to do,’ he said, sliding his legs over the side of the bed and standing up. She pushed herself up on one elbow as he started to dress.

‘What is it?’

He pulled on his trousers, then removed something from his jacket pocket, holding it up where she could see it. ‘Do you know what this is?’

Gabrielle saw a thumb-sized vial filled with a dark red liquid the colour of blood. ‘What is it?’

‘This,’ said Karl, ‘is our ticket to freedom. Nanocytes, carrying a neurotoxin cargo. They’re entirely harmless unless activated by a remote signal. When that happens,
they release the neurotoxin into the bloodstream. Death then follows quite quickly.’

‘It looks so small,’ she whispered, through suddenly dry lips. She felt a creeping dread at the sight of the vial. It was small, yes, but full of deadly promise.

Karl nodded, replacing the vial in his jacket. ‘There’s been a slight change of plans, since Thijs has decided he doesn’t want me present at the banquet. I’m to wait
outside with the rest of the guards.’

‘Why? I thought—’

‘He doesn’t need to hide his dislike for me any longer,’ he replied. ‘In fact, he’s probably planning to have me thrown out of the Demarchy as soon as you’re
dead.’

He buttoned up his shirt and pulled on the jacket, then tossed a slim device onto the sheets, landing close to her hand. Gabrielle stared at the object as if it were a poisonous snake.

‘My original plan,’ he continued, ‘was to introduce the contents of the vial to the ceremonial wine, prior to the banquet. That much, at least, hasn’t changed. Then I
would use that device beside you to trigger the poison, once Thijs and the rest had taken a first sip. All those present but ourselves, of course.’ He shrugged. ‘But it appears that
last opportunity is now to be denied me.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘I can’t activate the poison if I’m not actually in the banquet hall along with the rest of them.’ He picked the device up again, this time folding the fingers of her
hand around it. ‘Its range is much too short, and anyway the whole of the banquet hall is shielded. Which means, Gabrielle, that you’ll have to be the one to do it.’

She felt a surge of dizziness wash through her. ‘Me?’

‘If not you,’ asked Karl, ‘who else?’

‘But I thought—’

‘That I would take care of everything?’ Karl chuckled. ‘This actually works out to our advantage. Once they’re all dead, I can come rushing in and perform a daring rescue
of the Speaker-Elect. The crew’ll be cheering me on, even as I sweep you off the Grand Barge – never to be seen again.’

‘What if I make a mistake?’ she asked, her insides suddenly feeling hollow. ‘What if it doesn’t work? What if . . . ?’

He snorted with exasperation, sitting down once more on the edge of the bed and reaching over to grab hold of her hand. ‘Belle’s tits, Gabrielle,’ he said, his expression
fierce, ‘don’t you
want
to get out of here before they flush your mind away? This is your chance to be free, damn it!’

She stared into his eyes, her lungs frozen in panic. Everything he said was true, and yet . . .

‘How can you be sure I have it in me to go through with all this?’ she asked.

He smiled at her. ‘Because I can
see
you have it in you. I
know
you can do this – and you will. It’s for both of us, remember. My life was ashes before I met
you, Gaby, and I can’t imagine a future without you being part of it.’

‘Both of us,’ she echoed, her voice suddenly sounding hoarse. He was right, so very right: without him she would be dead within a few days. ‘You can rely on me.’

She remembered the first time she ever set eyes on Karl Petrova, almost six years before. For a long time he had been nothing more than another adult amongst the many who
surrounded her. Even in the years that followed, she had been only peripherally aware of his reputation, of those stories regarding his spectacular victories against isolated pockets of militant
Freeholders.

Even then, however, she had known Karl was different from everyone else: an outsider born on some other world within the Accord. She had also seen the way Thijs and Abramovic’s faces
hardened whenever his name was mentioned, as if each fresh victory he brought to the Demarchy somehow carried him further and further away from their favour.

Ordinarily, his refusal to have a faith chip implanted would have excluded him from any position of power within the Demarchy. But his tactical skill – and his astonishing ability to
predict what the Freehold’s next move would be – allowed him to rise through the Demarchy’s ranks with astonishing speed regardless.

Finally, after many years of service to the Demarchy, he had been appointed her bodyguard.

For an outsider to be given such an exalted position was extraordinary, but Karl had explained to her the reasoning. There had been, he told her, an attempt by unknown forces to kidnap the
previous Speaker-Elect immediately prior to her Ascension, twenty-one years before. Drastic measures had been introduced to prevent any such attempt ever happening again, and Karl’s military
and strategic skill counted for far more than whether or not he happened to have a chip lodged under his scalp. As her bodyguard, he had gradually won her trust, albeit slowly. She had come to look
forward to seeing that dry smile, those world-weary eyes.

After they had finally become lovers, just a year ago, he had told her that he originated from a place called the Three Star Alliance, which had acquiesced to the Accord’s political
demands rather than face a brutal war it could not possibly win. Deeply embittered, he had fled across the stars to Redstone, having learned there was a need for experienced mercenaries within the
Sacerdotal Demarchy of Uchida.

When his rapid promotion attracted Thijs’s enmity, he had sought to learn as much about the chief of security as possible. And, in the course of his investigations, he discovered what the
Demarchy had in store for their Speaker-Elect. Moreover, he discovered that the Magi ship at Dios – known as the Ship of the Covenant – had crash-landed only after being very nearly
destroyed by the woman of whom Gabrielle was a clone.

The mind of that woman, whose name had been Dakota Merrick, had somehow come to be encoded within the memory banks of the Magi ship. Following its crash-landing, the ship itself had by some
means recreated Merrick in body as well as mind, apparently in the hope that she would be willing to negotiate with the Demarchy in order to ensure the ship’s survival until that time,
centuries hence, when it could complete its repairs and depart from Redstone.

Gabrielle had listened to all this while his hand caressed her hair as they lay together in her bedchamber, and her skin grew increasingly chill as awful detail followed upon awful detail.

At first, the Demarchy had been intent on dismantling the alien craft with the aim of penetrating its secrets. Extraordinarily powerful though it was, it had suffered incredible damage, for its
drive-spines and much of its outer shell had been burned away during re-entry. But then this woman – this Dakota Merrick – had suddenly emerged, disoriented but physically intact, from
the Magi ship. The Demarchy’s investigators had interrogated her for days, running tests that confirmed her physiology to be entirely human.

And yet there was evidence that she was not the
original
Dakota Merrick. She was clearly a clone of some kind, one whose last memory, prior to emerging from the ship, was of dying
halfway across the galaxy, some centuries before.

This clone proved to be entirely unwilling to fulfil the task for which the Magi ship had apparently brought it back to life; nor was it willing to cooperate with the Demarchy’s
interrogators. They had resorted to torture in the hopes of gleaning from Merrick any information relating to the Magi ship that might be turned to the Demarchy’s military or political
advantage.

Their attempt proved wildly successful, for Merrick’s clone proved to be in some way able to tap into the wealth of knowledge contained within the Magi ship’s memory banks, and it
imparted some of this knowledge under duress. But then the clone died while fleeing its guards, and before they had a chance to extract any more.

That might have been that, but the scientific and technological data the Demarchy of Uchida had thereby gained was valuable enough to barter in return for financial and military aid from the
Accord. With such support, the neighbouring River Concord States were beaten into submission, while the Freehold – once the dominant military force on Redstone – was eventually reduced
to a few violent extremists living in mountain caves.

But even that wasn’t enough for the Demarchy’s rulers, Karl had told her, for they saw a way in which they could secure the Demarchy’s future for as long as the Magi ship
remained there by the shores of the Ka.

They took tissue samples from the clone’s corpse, and from them fashioned a new clone of their own – one that they themselves could control. That first Speaker-Elect had grown to
adulthood with its own personality and memories – and none of Merrick’s – and had undergone surgery to install the machine-head implants that would allow it eventually to
communicate directly with the Magi ship.

Once such a clone reached the age of twenty-one, the cerebral circuitry had matured sufficiently that the clone could be transported to Dios, and to the Ship of the Covenant. Each Speaker was
forced then to enter the alien starship, after which she would emerge once more carrying within her mind a cornucopia of data offered up by the ship in return for it not being torn apart by the
Demarchy’s engineers and scientists.

The only problem, Karl continued, was that each time a Speaker returned from her encounter with the ship, her own personality and memories had been wiped and replaced with those of the long-dead
Dakota Merrick. And, each and every time, she proved just as wildly recalcitrant and unwilling to cooperate as before. The Demarchy’s interrogators found it necessary, on every such occasion,
to torture the clone until she gave them the information they wanted.

At first, Karl explained, the Demarchy considered trying to keep each of the clones alive, or even to produce multiple clones, but the ship refused to divulge data to more than one such clone at
a time, perhaps realizing the speed with which it might otherwise be drained of knowledge; it also set a limit on how much data each clone could siphon from its memory banks. In this way the ship
ensured its indefinite survival, by giving the Demarchy of Uchida sufficient leverage to rapidly dominate the whole of Redstone. And since it would take a little over two decades for a
clone’s implants to reach maturity, that set a definite limit on the frequency with which the ship could be interrogated.