by Gary Gibson
Stop being ridiculous, she told herself. There was almost certainly a perfectly good explanation for all of it. She had just helped him commit mass murder, after all. Both their lives were at stake now, and not just hers. She could hardly expect him to behave the same way, under such circumstances, as when they were alone in her bedchamber.
And yet that voice full of doubt kept shrieking at her from somewhere deep inside her own head. What about the tidal wave? Or the way he looked at you when he called you an ‘angel of death’. And why are there Freeholders here? And . . .
She shut the voice out and tried to activate her Tabernacle link, in the hope of distracting herself. To her shock, she discovered that she could not access it. She had no way of finding out any more information about the impact Abramovic had described, or the resultant tidal wave.
She reached up and touched the back of her neck, where Karl had injected her with what he had called an ‘inhibitor’. Supposedly it made tracking her via her implants impossible, and she wondered if it might also be the reason why she was unable to access the Tabernacle.
There was little to do, then, but pass the time staring out of a porthole, though she was barely able to see anything beyond the surging waters outside, and the dim outline of hills growing ever nearer. She eventually caught sight of an antiquated-looking jetty extending from the shore. The rhythm of the turbines soon changed subtly and, after another minute or two, the boat bumped gently up against the wharf.
One of the Freeholders reappeared from the passageway, handing Gabrielle another, better-quality jacket and a new breather mask. ‘Put these on,’ he instructed.
She slipped on the new gear, while the Freeholder pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, quickly checking that the seal was effective. Once she was ready, with her mask on, he yelled back along the passageway that he was about to open the hatch.
The rest, including Karl, then reappeared and pulled on their own breather masks, while their compatriot cracked the external hatch. Karl himself went out first, then gestured for her to follow him. She only did so with increasing reluctance. There was little she could do under the circumstances but comply, at least until Karl gave her some kind of proper explanation of what was going on.
Waves slapped hollowly against the underside of the dock as Gabrielle climbed out onto the jetty. She spotted a decrepit-looking emergency shelter nearby on the shore.
The voice of doubt manifested itself again, this time louder than before. He’s been working with the Freehold. They must, she realized, have been the ones holding Mater Cassanas’s son prisoner all this time.
Hard as it was to believe, the only conclusion was that Karl was acting as a double-agent. He must have been funnelling information back to the Freehold the whole time he had been in the employ of the Demarchy. Despite his supposed successes in locating their hideaways, she had heard Abramovic and others complain bitterly that no matter how much firepower they threw at the Freehold, they always managed to pop up somewhere else, and stronger than ever.
And no wonder, since Karl himself had most frequently led these supposedly punitive expeditions against the Freehold, when he wasn’t busy safeguarding her.
The men around her all glanced up, and she followed their gaze, at the same moment hearing a dull roar from above. A dropship was descending towards them from out of the night sky, with drive-fields flickering around its hull. For a moment she thought they had been caught, and that the approaching craft was an Accord patrol come to return her to the Demarchy.
Karl and his Freeholder companions, however, watched the craft’s descent with equanimity. Once the dropship had settled down onto the hard frozen soil, half a dozen metres away, Karl took charge of Gabrielle once more, tugging her towards the craft as light spilled out from its interior.
Gabrielle felt a sudden, powerful instinct urge her not to get on board the craft. She tried to shake herself loose from Karl, but his grip only became tighter.
‘Move,’ he snapped, dragging her forward. It was the first word he had said to her since picking her up and throwing her into the river’s freezing waters.
One of the Freeholders followed them. Karl paused at the dropship’s ramp and turned to him. ‘It’s all up to you from this point on, De Meer,’ he said. ‘The impact wave should hit before very long.’
De Meer nodded, and slapped Karl on the shoulder. ‘You’ve been a good friend to us, Tarrant. Maybe we finally have a chance at getting back everything we lost.’
Tarrant? Gabrielle stared between the two men in confusion. Why had De Meer addressed Karl by that name?
Karl nodded towards the boat bobbing gently in the starlight. ‘Can you get away before the wave arrives here?’
‘We have our own air transport waiting nearby,’ De Meer replied. ‘We’ll be able to watch Dios drown from above.’
Karl laughed at that, and the two men embraced as if they were old comrades. Gabrielle thought suddenly of the tens of thousands of pilgrims who had converged on Dios for Ascension Day. Then De Meer turned without another word, and went to rejoin his companions who were waiting by the dock.
‘Inside,’ said Karl, his expression hardening again as he turned back to her.
Gabrielle stared at him. ‘That name, he called you . . .’
He grabbed her by the shoulder, nearly throwing her into the dropship. The hatch closed behind them, and Gabrielle swallowed hard as the airlock rapidly cycled through. The inner door opened and he pushed her into a bay where a man was waiting, wearing a jumpsuit similar to her own.
‘Get her inside a medbox,’ instructed Karl, pulling off his breather mask and pushing her towards the other occupant, ‘before hypothermia sets in.’
The man saluted him. ‘You’ll need attention too, sir,’ he said, stepping up beside Gabrielle. ‘And the sooner the better, once we’re out of here.’
‘I want to know why that man called you Ta—’
Karl whirled towards her, grasping her by the jaw. ‘Now, you listen to me,’ he hissed, leaning in close, ‘things are going to be very, very different from now on. What I say, you do. Is that clear?’
She hated herself for nodding wordlessly, but she had never been so frightened, not even back on board the Grand Barge while waiting for the right moment to kill a roomful of people.
Karl gestured with his chin towards the waiting crewman. ‘Briggs here is going to put you in a medical unit for a while. Until we get to where we’re going, Gabrielle, you’re going to keep your mouth shut and do whatever the hell you’re told.’
THIRTEEN
Gabrielle
Briggs led her to a tiny medbay, where he left her to strip off her coveralls before she climbed into the warm embrace of a medbox.
She remembered using such machines in her youth, when she had first received her machine-head implants. Cilia-like feelers attached themselves to her skin as she lay back inside it, punching barbiturates through her skin even before the lid had fully closed over her. In the moments before consciousness slipped away, she felt the craft shudder as it lifted up.
The next thing Gabrielle was aware of was the sound of the medbox unsealing itself with a soft hiss. She had a sense that some hours had passed. She now sat up slowly, blinking in the harsh glare of the overhead lights.
She experienced a falling sensation, but everything around her looked still and silent. We must be in orbit.
She had never been off-world before and yet, despite being unfamiliar with the sensation of weightlessness, she discovered it was not unpleasant. She recalled learning, long ago, that the DNA of the earliest human colonists had been tweaked in order to optimize their chances of surviving the rigours of space travel. That meant she would never feel space-sick.
Climbing out of the medbox, she found the same oversized coveralls she had been wearing when she first boarded the dropship. Once she had tugged them back on, she realized that her boots were gone, replaced by a pair of slippers with soft, rubberized soles better suited for onb
oard life.
She wondered who was piloting this craft, and if they were a machine-head like her. There was something intoxicating about the idea of controlling an entire vessel through one’s mind, but when she reached out and tried to interface with the control systems, she quickly found they were inaccessible to her.
Damn Karl and his inhibitor.
Moving with the extreme caution of the inexperienced, Gabrielle pulled on the slippers, then gently pushed herself towards the medbay exit. Being in motion felt like flying. She then carefully made her way along a claustrophobically narrow corridor that followed the curve of the craft’s hull, until she came to an open hatch wedged between banks of instruments and bracketed conduits, and heard voices on the other side.
She climbed through the hatch and found herself inside what she guessed must be the cockpit or bridge. She noticed more instrument banks angled over and around a number of acceleration couches, and a Tabernacle projection floating just below what she took to be the ceiling.
Karl was seated in one of the couches, which had been adjusted so that he could look straight up at the projection. There was no sign anywhere of Briggs. She saw Karl make subtle gestures with his fingers, to which the projection responded by first rotating one way and then the other, before suddenly fading to be replaced by some new set of data.
Gabrielle looked more closely at the images, and saw great floods of water flowing around the roots of a canopy tree. She saw whole buildings and enormous vehicles bouncing and spinning in the tempest.
Karl glanced briefly towards her, then continued flicking through more images.
‘What is that?’ asked Gabrielle, now afraid to get too close to him.
‘I tapped into an Accord news feed,’ Karl replied, twitching his hand towards the projection as he spoke. ‘Take a look at this.’
The images changed, the projection expanding until it filled nearly the whole of the cramped cockpit.
This time, instead of a canopy tree, she saw floodwaters surging around towers and the shattered ruins of buildings. It was clearly a drowned city, but Gabrielle didn’t recognize it as Dios until the camera view panned around to show the Ship of the Covenant. The buildings, walls and bridges that had once surrounded it had all now been swept away.
She put her hand to her mouth, the breath stilled in her throat.
The camera view then shifted to take in more of the surrounding landscape. The docks were entirely submerged. Gone were the grand towers, capped by silver and gold minarets, that had stood at the Gates of Dios to greet pilgrims as they arrived. Further inland was yet more devastation, a flattened wasteland of debris where once had been homes and places of work, of worship and of entertainment. In their place were surging black waters filled with the bodies, she realized with a deep and absolute certainty, of countless pilgrims.
She felt her gorge rise and swallowed hard. Dios had almost literally ceased to exist.
She stared at Karl. ‘How . . . ?’
‘An impact,’ replied Karl, ‘just like Abramovic said. The news feeds are speculating over an unidentified asteroid.’
Gabrielle shook her head. ‘That’s not possible – not in this day and age. The Accord would have seen it coming. We’d have seen it coming. We have orbital defences.’
‘Unless,’ said Karl, ‘you have friends in the outer system who can make sure no one sees it coming. Or at least not until it’s much, much too late.’
The view had shifted to the waters still spreading inland, hundreds of kilometres from the shores of the Ka, and sweeping away towns and villages. The waves looked as if they might easily rise to a hundred metres in height.
‘I don’t believe you. That’s impossible. Someone would have known.’
He laughed, and looked back over at her. ‘I can’t make up my mind if you’re wilfully blind or just stupid, so let me explain it so you can understand: the Freehold has had agents working on this for years. Don’t get me wrong: it took a hell of a lot of planning to circumvent the security networks and get the right people into the right positions, but it’s not impossible. Or are you really going to deny the evidence of your own eyes?’
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.’
FOURTEEN
Megan
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.