by Gary Gibson
‘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.
FIVE
Megan
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.
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.
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 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 paused just long enough before replying for her to know he was choosing his words carefully.
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.
She fired a message off to Bash, to let him know she’d be waiting in the ship’s lounge. Then she exited the command deck without allowing herself a backward glance.
She had just got settled in, after grabbing a second squeeze-bulb of Irish coffee from the lounge bar, when Bash entered, accompanied by two other men. The first she didn’t recognize but the second was immediately familiar, even if she couldn’t quite place him straight away. He was broad-chested and not a little handsome, and he carried himself with a confidence just shy of arrogance. His companion, by contrast, was as thin as a rail, his hair a dense tangle of blond-brown hair above a goatee beard. Whenever he moved, it was in a slightly jerky, bird-like fashion.
‘Megan Jacinth?’ asked the moderately familiar one in a loud voice.
She raised her squeeze-bulb in an ironic salute. ‘That’s me.’
She watched as the three of them made their way towards the circle of couches where she was sprawled. From the ease with which the two strangers navigated in the zero gravity, she could tell that they had both spent a lot of time off-world.
‘Thanks for agreeing to wait for us here,’ said Mr Vaguely Familiar, pulling himself into a seat across from her and sliding an arm through a nearby loop to keep himself from floating away. His skinny companion pulled himself down next to him, while Bash took his seat right opposite Megan. ‘My name,’ said the more attractive one, ‘is Gregor Tarrant.’
Gregor Tarrant. Megan sat up straight, suddenly embarrassed at her casual slouching. ‘I thought I recognized you from somewhere. You’re famous.’
Tarrant smiled self-deprecatingly, with a dismissive gesture. ‘Not really.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you are. Bash – I mean, Pilot Bashir – told me all about what happened. What you did was incredible.’
Tarrant and his goateed companion both chuckled and grinned. ‘I was just doing my job,’ said Tarrant.
Tarrant had been a junior officer on the Beauregard’s sister ship, the Chesapeake, on an exploratory expedition to a white-dwarf system sixteen light years from Al-Jahar. There the Chesapeake had come under assault from automated attack systems left dormant since the Shoal–Emissary war of a few centuries earlier.
That attack had taken the expedition completely by surprise. As a result, the Chesapeake had suffered a devastating breach that vented its atmosphere and killed a full quarter of its complement, including its captain, most of its senior staff and one of its two machine-head pilots. Bash was the fortunate one who had survived.
Tarrant, despite his relative inexperience, had somehow rallied the survivors and, regardless of repeated attacks, he had managed to keep them alive inside a hastily pressurized cavern located on an airless moon, until rescue arrived nearly two months later. It was an extraordinary story, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Tarrant had been only twenty-four standard years old at the time.
‘I think you’re being coy,’ Megan replied. ‘But I’ll say no more about it if you’d rather I didn’t.’
‘Just as long as you don’t have any unrealistic expectations of me,’ he said, and then gestured to his companion. ‘This is Anil Sifra, and he’s here in an advisory capacity, as a representative of the First Families.’
Sifra. Of course. He was from the same bracket as the Schellings and the Beauvoirs who – along with the Sifra Clan – were the most powerful of the Alliance’s founding families.
Sifra nodded to her politely. ‘I know you must be wondering what the hell we’re doing here.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ Megan replied, then regretted sounding so flippant.
‘We’re here to make you a proposal,’ Tarrant explained. ‘One we’ve already made to Mr Bashir here. It was his idea to bring you in on this, by the way. I hardly need tell you that things haven’t been going well for the Three Star Alliance lately.’
‘If by not going well,’ said Megan, ‘you mean the Accord bent us over and ass-fucked us with the terms of their new treaty, then I’d be inclined to agree with you.’
‘Now it’s my turn to embarrass you,’ said Tarrant. ‘I heard all about what you did at Kappa 659. You’re halfway to being a legend yourself, after the way you bypassed that blockade.’
Kjæregrønnested’s First Families had made their fortune financing long-range expeditions after the Shoal–Emissary war inadvertently opened the galaxy up to humankind. One of those expeditions had discovered Kjæregrønnested as well as Alyeska and Al-Jahar, all three of them habitable worlds orbiting stars that were separated from each other by no more than a few light years.
Some amongst those same families had dreamed of creating a society based on their own values, one that reflected the pioneer spirit they believed necessary to the survival of the species out there in the wider galaxy. These three colonies soon signed a treaty, forming the Three Star Alliance, just a few short years after the Accord – an interstellar polity comprising not only humanity but a number of neighbouring species – had also come into existence.
The discovery of Meridian ruins beneath the kilometres-deep layer of ice covering much of Alyeska’s surface had been rapidly followed by the further discovery of a derelict Shoal coreship out in the depths of interstellar space, no more than three light years from Al-Jahar. That abandoned, world-sized starship proved to contain an even more fabulous prize, one whose value could not be measured: a cache of dozens of undamaged nova drives, enough to allow the Alliance to build its own independent fleet of starships. In one stroke, the Alliance had thus gained the potential to challenge the growing economic and political power of the Accord.
But as the Accord grew in strength, it introduced more and more stringent regulations regarding the use of nova drives – including those recovered from the said coreship.
Megan was far from unsympathetic to the Accord’s fear that these nova drives might be used as weapons if they fell into the wrong hands. Indeed, the conflict between the Emissaries and the Shoal had shown just how destructive the devices could be, for in just a few short years the two rival empires had laid waste to vast swathes of the Perseus Arm.
But where she and many others chose to differ was regarding the assumption that the nova drives would be automatically safer under the Accord’s control.
The Accord had then demanded that the Alliance hand over control of their entire superluminal fleet, with the claimed intention of leasing those same ships back to them – but carrying a permanent contingent of Accord military and technical personnel aboard each of them.
That had been a demand too far for the Fi
rst Families. When tensions reached a peak, Accord cruisers had set up a blockade of the derelict coreship, cutting off any escape route for the salvage team at work on removing the last remaining drives.
Megan herself had been the pilot for the expedition sent to try and rescue the blockaded salvage workers.
‘The way some of the other machine-heads talk about you,’ said Tarrant, ‘it seems that what you did there bordered on the supernatural.’
Megan grinned. ‘Now you really are embarrassing me.’
‘Apparently you jumped your ship across fifteen AUs, and directly inside the coreship itself.’ Tarrant shook his head. ‘Something like that shouldn’t even be possible.’
‘I swear it wasn’t such a big deal,’ she replied. ‘A large part of the coreship’s outer hull had already been torn away, so that left a pretty big gap to aim for.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Tarrant, ‘but crossing from a distance of even one AU would scare anyone else to death. Look, what would you say if I told you there was a way to change everything, and put the TSA back on top? In a way that the Accord wouldn’t be able to do anything about?’
Megan glanced at Bash, then turned back to Tarrant. ‘What is it you want from me, exactly?’
‘We’re here,’ said Tarrant, ‘because you’re one of the best machine-head pilots in the Alliance . . . and because we also need the Beauregard.’
‘You “need” the Beauregard?’ She could hardly mask her incredulity.
‘Please, Megan,’ said Bash, ‘hear him out.’
‘We’re here,’ said Sifra, ‘on the direct orders of Otto Schelling. What we’re now asking you for will be entirely voluntary.’
‘We need you to pilot the Beauregard, but leaving immediately,’ explained Tarrant. ‘As soon as you give us the word, Otto Schelling will authorize the payment of half a million shares in high-value First Family commercial patents, with guaranteed per annum returns, into a private account under your own name.’
She glanced at Bash. ‘This is bullshit, right?’ she asked him. ‘They’re having me on.’