Marauder (6 page)

And what about the clone? Gabrielle had asked, as she lay curled up on top of the bedsheets, her hands clasped around her knees and shivering. Put to death, Karl had informed her, once a clone
had outlived her usefulness. The physical remains were disposed of in secret, even as the next Speaker-Elect was being born to a secret birth-mother.

This process had been finessed over the intervening centuries, and embellished with ceremonies as a public demonstration of the Demarchy’s growing power. The city of Dios – meaning
literally, the city of God – had grown up around that grounded starship, becoming a place of devout pilgrimage for the Demarchy’s citizens. Few outside a secretive inner circle,
however, knew the underlying truth.

In this way, Karl explained in a voice full of regret and anger, he had learned the true reason he had been hired to protect her: for the sake of the riches she would unlock once she was of
age.

He had cupped her face in his hands then, assuring her he could never allow her to suffer the awful fate that had befallen her predecessors. She would not, as she had been taught to believe,
ascend bodily to Heaven after entering the Ship of the Covenant. Instead, she would become someone else entirely, and then die a miserable, painful death.

She had clung to him, hot tears burning a path down her cheeks, as he promised to take them both somewhere far away from Redstone, where no one could ever find them.

But to do so, he had warned, might require drastic measures – possibly very drastic indeed.

Karl gave out a sigh of relief as Gabrielle reconfirmed her willingness to aid him in his plan. She would help him murder the whole of the Demarchy’s inner circle, rather
than allow them to take her life, and then the two of them would finally make their escape.

‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he said, with a strange half-smile that left her feeling unsettled, without really knowing why.

‘But what happens afterwards?’ Gabrielle demanded. ‘You haven’t told me how we’re even going to get ourselves off-world. What if Thijs sends your own soldiers out
looking for us . . . ?’

He pressed a finger to her lips. ‘I’ve made arrangements, Gabrielle. Believe me, there’s no possible way anyone’s going to stop us.’ He grinned, and she again felt
that same curious unease as she returned his gaze, as if someone else were hiding behind his eyes. ‘I promise you this, though,’ he added, ‘they’ll never know what hit them.
Literally.’

Karl slipped out of her bedchamber not long after. She let herself fall back against the pillows and closed her eyes, thinking of Karl’s seed now deep within her
body.

She wondered why she had yet again failed to tell him about the new life growing inside her.
It’s one less thing for him to worry about, before we escape
, she assured herself. But
another part of her knew that she was just afraid to tell him she was pregnant – strangely fearful of how he might react.

Mater Cassanas stepped back into the room, her mouth pinched tight and her eyes refusing to meet her mistress’s. She moved around the bedchamber, picking things up and then putting them
down again, making a show of tidying up but without really achieving anything.

‘I don’t know what you’re planning,’ Cassanas said finally, her voice tight with emotion, ‘but I’ll tell you this: you’re making a mistake in trusting
Petrova. He’s an evil man, with evil intentions . . . you have
no idea
—’

‘Then you could have at least tried to protect me,’ replied Gabrielle, unable to keep the venom out of her voice. ‘But instead you left me alone with him.’

‘With Petrova?’ Cassanas stared at her. ‘But you—’

‘I meant with Thijs,’ hissed Gabrielle. ‘You could have told him no, that he had to leave . . . but instead you did nothing.’

Gabrielle watched the old woman’s face as comprehension finally dawned there. ‘How was I to know that he would—?’

‘How could you
not
know?’ Gabrielle cried. ‘I remember the look on your face then! You
knew
. . . you knew why he was there. And yet you still let him in. You
never once tried to protect me from him,
not once.
’

Cassanas swallowed a great gulp of air, in the manner of someone drowning, before she replied. ‘I took care of you as if you were my own daughter,’ she gasped, her voice growing
husky. ‘I fed you from my own breast when you were a baby. I—’

‘Get out.’

‘I taught you how to read and—’

‘I said
get out!
’

Gabrielle screamed these last words at the top of her lungs. She kept shrieking them until Cassanas backed away – running out through the door, with the same two words still pouring out of
Gabrielle’s throat like the shriek of a wounded animal.

2751 (twelve years before)

The first time Megan had ever heard of the Wanderer was on the command deck of the
Beauregard
– a Kjæregrønnested-registered exploration vessel in
orbit above that same world – where she sat ensconced within the folded-up steel petals of the ship’s astrogation chair.

she observed.

Although Valentin – the merchant officer in charge of supervising the final maintenance checks before the
Beauregard
was handed over to the Accord – was hidden from her
actual view, she could see and hear him perfectly well via her ship-linked senses.

Thus she saw Valentin reach out to a console, information rippling under his touch. One or two other members of the skeleton crew assigned to this final check-over were moving here and there
around the command deck, in order to supervise last-minute drive and systems diagnostics.

Looks like a standard supply shipment
, he replied, his voice sounding flat and echoless as it was fed directly into her auditory nerves.
Seems a little weird that they’d be
sending it up now, though.

I’ll check the authorization.
He paused, the data before him flickering into a new configuration.
Well, whatever it is, it’s highest priority. Orders direct from
Ladested: don’t look, don’t touch.

Megan tried to puzzle it out. Why would they be
loading
supplies? The
Beauregard
had only just arrived back in-system, and it wasn’t going anywhere for a good long while
– at least not until the special delegation of technical staff on its way from the Accord had finished taking it apart and putting it together again according to their own stringent
specifications.

Already did
, Valentin replied.
But I’m pretty damn sure nobody’s going to tell us anything. It’s got a security rating like you wouldn’t believe
.

Screw it
, she thought; it wasn’t her concern any more. she asked Valentin.

Maybe in another hour or so
, he replied.
There’s a bar in the port district of Ladested, place called the Mog & Bone. We’re thinking of holding a wake. Fancy joining
us?

Megan grinned.

Hey, wait a minute.
She saw Valentin step towards another console, frowning at what he saw.
There’s a message for you
.

Take a look
.

The message materialized before her.

It can’t be the Accord delegation already
, said Valentin.
We’re not scheduled to hand the ship over to them for at least another forty-eight hours.

You don’t have to do shit, Megan. Our contracts are null and void the moment we step on to the disembarkation shuttle. After that, this ship belongs to the Accord, not to the Three
Star Alliance. Come on down with the rest of us and we’ll hold a wake in its honour.

she replied.

She reread the orders a second time, her sense of disappointment growing. More than anything, right now, she wanted to be around the people she knew and trusted. She wanted to be there with them
when they all drank to the end of an era.

Sorry, Megan. That’s really shitty luck
.

Will do
, Valentin replied, and Megan got busy monitoring the docking process, as the cargo pod slid inside the hull.

A few hours later, Megan found herself all alone aboard the
Beauregard
, as she waited for the unnamed delegation to arrive from Ladested, which was
Kjæregrønnested’s capital. It was like wandering through a deserted mausoleum – or maybe a museum dedicated to failed hope.

Like most starships designed for long-range reconnaissance, the
Beauregard
was not somewhere most people would be happy to call home. Comfort was at a minimum except for those few
luxuries deemed necessary to maintain the mental and social health of its crew. Beyond the lounge, and the recreation and meditation pods, the ship was a tangle of narrow access tubes, utilitarian
corridors, claustrophobically tiny personal quarters and cramped working spaces.

Megan Jacinth was not most people. She had fond memories associated with the
Beauregard
, but the handing-over of all the Alliance’s nova-class starships to the Accord and the
stringent terms of the new treaty virtually guaranteed the end of her career in piloting starships. It felt to her like a betrayal.

Even so, she had to admit to herself that there was a certain novelty to being entirely alone on board the ship, even if that was only for a little while. She took the opportunity to wander its
deserted corridors and silent access tubes, staying remotely linked all the while to the control and navigation systems, fantasizing that she was marooned alone somewhere in the depths of
interstellar space.

Give it up
, she chided herself.
The life you built here is over.

Maybe there would be other opportunities for her, other routes to the stars, but for the moment she found it impossible to envision them.

She soon retreated to the bridge and the astrogation chair, the petals once more folding up around her. She felt herself immediately relax as her machine-senses merged again with those of the
surrounding ship.

When most people complained of the hardships of space travel, they tended to forget it was a natural environment for a machine-head. The physical body became a distant concern once locked in
full interface. All the stresses of living in cramped conditions amongst a few dozen other human beings, of sharing their recycled water and air, tended to vanish when your senses conspired to
convince you that you were floating naked in infinite space rather than sealed up within a set of steel petals.

It wasn’t long before a dropship rendezvoused with the
Beauregard
. Megan fired an ident-request over to it, and confirmed it was carrying the unidentified passengers she had been
ordered to wait for.

What she didn’t expect, however, was to find that Bash was also on board the dropship. She could sense his proximity through her machine-senses as the smaller craft made to dock.

he responded, when she fired an immediate query at him.

you’ve
got something to do with this. What exactly are you up
to?>

He paused just long enough before replying for her to know he was choosing his words carefully. he sent back after a few moments. me from Ladested who want to talk to you.>

me
? Who? Are they from the Accord?>

she replied, unable to hide her exasperation.

He broke the connection, and she stared beyond the coloured nodes of information arrayed in deep stacks all around her, projected against the interior of the petals. Bash was the
Beauregard
’s co-pilot as well as her closest friend, and two days earlier he had departed the
Beauregard
for what she’d believed was the last time. There had been no
hint of any furtive plans for him to come sneaking back on board.

Let’s have one last drink before I abandon ship
, he’d said to her as he stood in the door to her quarters, gripping a bottle of some brown liquid in one hand.
Before I
take the dropship down and try to figure out just what in hell I’m going to do with the rest of my life
.

She now severed her connection to the
Beauregard
’s AI, and sat there in the silent darkness for a few moments before ordering the petals to unfold.

As she gazed around the command deck, it finally hit her that she would never pilot the
Beauregard
again.

She tried not to feel bitter about it. Just days before, Otto Schelling and other senior members of the Three Star Alliance’s ruling First Families had signed a treaty handing over full
control of the nova-class fleets of all three worlds of the Alliance – Kjæregrønnested, Al-Jahar and Alyeska – to the Accord. And, as an accord of civilized species, they
had much more power to bring to bear than the weaker Alliance. This agreement had followed years of intense bargaining, a trade and communications embargo, and the arrival of a number of heavy
Accord cruisers filled with troops ready to occupy the Alliance’s major cities, should they fail to accept the proposed terms. The whole business had struck Megan as immense overkill.