by Gary Gibson
Megan?
She pulled up a visual encompassing the command deck and saw that Tarrant had just entered. Anil just alerted me that the Wanderer’s beacon signal cut off just now, without any warning. Can you confirm that?
She made a quick check and saw he was right. The beacon signal had indeed cut off within just the last minute or two.
Then there’s one other thing I wanted to ask you, he said.
Whether either you or Bash have experienced anything unusual since we arrived in-system.
When the Kelvin was here, its two pilots proved to be – Tarrant appeared to be searching for the right words – sensitive, in some way, to transmissions coming from the Wanderer.
Well, then, we need to talk about it, he said, stepping back towards the exit. I want you to come down to the ship’s lounge in half an hour, and join me and Anil. Tell Bash to come as well. We need to talk about what we do next.
I like to think we’ve achieved some kind of mutual understanding, he replied, pausing by the exit. I like to think force is no longer necessary. And the reason I want you both there is that we have an idea about how to avoid the Kelvin’s fate.
She smiled to herself. His earlier scepticism seemed to have faded entirely.
Megan? said Tarrant. Don’t delay.
It’s not a request, said Tarrant, his voice edged with anger. Let’s at least be civil. Half an hour, Megan, no later.
Knowing they had a plan in place made it easier for her to be civil.
SEVENTEEN
Megan
2763 (the present)
Three days after she and Bash had been forcibly taken aboard the system transport Liberia, now decelerating on its final approach to Redstone, Megan prepared to make her escape.
Throughout the journey, Luiz and Sifra had returned only rarely to the dropship in which she and Bash were held prisoner, and then only to let them eat and visit the head. It was fine by Megan, since it gave her endless opportunities to work out how to subvert and tap into the core programming of the two bead-zombies more thoroughly.
The control systems for both zombies had proved to be a rat’s nest of encrypted routines and command protocols, any one of which might alert Sifra or Luiz to the fact that they were being interfered with if she wasn’t extremely careful. But, two days into the journey, she had finally managed to get one of them to unstrap itself and climb out of its acceleration couch. She remained, as ever, cuffed at the wrists and strapped into her own separate couch.
The sight of the creature under her direct control had made her weep with joy, but she knew the right time to make her escape was once they got into orbit above Redstone.
That meant, unfortunately, she was going to have to stay where she was for just a little while longer. So it was with considerable feelings of regret that she had the same zombie climb back into its acceleration couch and strap itself down.
Just another couple of hours, Megan, she told herself. Then we’re the hell out of here.
Luiz picked the worst possible time to enter the dropship’s cockpit.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ he said, staring at Megan. She was out of her couch, and already working at getting Bash free.
Luiz floated just inside the cockpit hatch. One of the zombies floated nearby, one hand threaded through a ceiling grip. The other was still strapped into its couch.
She froze as Luiz reached inside his jacket and withdrew his torch gun. ‘I don’t know how the hell you managed it,’ he said slowly, ‘but you’re going to get back in that couch right now. Do you understand me?’
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ she said, edging away from him.
Luiz’s eyes roved around the cockpit, until they settled on the couch where the bead-zombie had been seated until a few minutes before. He glanced at the other zombie beside him, as if seeing it for the very first time.
‘I want you to tell me,’ he said, ‘what the fuck you’ve been up to.’
They were his last words.
Megan switched the freed zombie to lethal mode and gave it a target. She watched as it unsheathed its sword and, in a single liquid motion, drew the razor-edged blade across Luiz’s windpipe.
The Freeholder’s limbs fluttered and jerked as he died. Globules of his blood floated in the zero gravity, misting the air red. It was impossible to avoid as it spread throughout the tiny cabin. After a moment the dropship’s monitoring systems finally realized something was wrong and activated a pump that sucked out the tainted air, rapidly replenishing it from the emergency tanks.
That got rid of most of the blood floating in the air, but it was also the worst possible thing that could have happened just then. It meant an alert had gone out to Sifra. And that meant he would soon be on his way back to the dropship – and vessels such as the Liberia offered a distinct lack of hiding places.
Not to mention that she still hadn’t figured out how she was actually going to get off the Liberia and down to Redstone without being stopped . . .
Focus, damn you.
She kneeled by Bash and touched one hand to his now bloodstained cheek. ‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going to be hard enough getting away from here without having to lead you by the hand the whole way.’
You don’t have to worry about me, she imagined him saying. You just need to take care of yourself.
‘But I still need to take care of you,’ she said, and felt tears running down her cheeks. ‘Everything got so fucked up, ever since I managed to find you again, but I’m going to come back for you, okay? And, when I do, I swear I’ll never let you out of my sight, not ever again.’
His eyes stared at nothing, his face expressionless.
She stood then, looking down at him. Somehow I just keep abandoning you, don’t I?
She edged over to Luiz’s corpse, which had come to rest against an instrument bank, and carefully pulled the torch gun from his hand. It was sticky with his blood, but then everything in the cockpit was sticky with his blood. She wiped it on her jacket, then pocketed it on her way out. She forced herself to stop off at the head to see how bad she looked, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She was caked in blood, like something out of a nightmare. She got the water running and frenziedly splashed it on her face and hair, scrubbing with her hands until she had washed off the worst of it. Then she stepped back out into the passageway and yanked open random doors and lockers until she found a pair of spare overalls that just about fitted.
She went back to the head and changed quickly before checking herself again. She still looked like a disaster but, with luck, she didn’t look as if she’d just killed someone.
Working her way
to the external hatch, she discovered to her vast relief that it was secured with only a default access code. It was a moment’s work to get it open.
She then pulled herself along the docking extension that connected the dropship to the Liberia’s interior, and soon emerged into a brightly lit passageway stretching for some distance fore and aft. Here and there up and down its length, she could see any number of entrances leading to other docking tunnels. There were even signs and advertisements telling her where on the ferry she could find a place to eat or sleep.
Making her way over to an observation window, she found herself looking down at the surface of Redstone for the first time in a very long while. The sight generated a variety of conflicting emotions within her, few of them good.
Things would have been so much simpler if she had been able just to steal Sifra’s dropship outright and take it down to the surface. But a cursory examination, once she had freed herself, showed the craft’s guidance computers to be remotely slaved. Sifra would therefore have had no trouble assuming command of it remotely.
That meant she had to find some other way of getting herself down to the surface.
She walked quickly, putting some distance between herself and the dropship, terrified that she might literally run into Sifra on his way to see what the alarm was about. He was without doubt already hurrying back to investigate.
She spotted a figure coming towards her and slowed down, her whole body tensing. As the figure came closer, she saw it was only a member of the Liberia’s crew. The man came to a halt, staring aghast at her as she drew closer to him. Clearly her attempt at cleaning up had been less successful than she had thought.
‘Hi,’ she said, as brightly as she could manage. ‘I’m kind of lost and I need to get downside as soon as possible. I’ve got business in Aguirre and . . . well, I’m really in a hurry.’
‘A hurry?’ he said. ‘Are you . . . are you with the relief teams?’
‘Relief teams?’ she echoed.
‘The surgical teams,’ he said, his expression growing ever warier. ‘I assume you’re from that emergency medical unit they set up in Bay Five?’
She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
‘Exactly.’ She nodded with as much enthusiasm as she could humanly muster. She spread her hands, looking down at herself before flashing an apologetic grin at him that said, Well, will you look at the state of me. ‘I’m with the relief teams, but I need to get back down there and . . .’
He nodded, visibly relaxing and gestured back the way he had come. ‘There’s a shuttle just docking that’s brought in more people. If you make it there in the next couple of minutes, you can hitch a ride back down.’
‘Thank you!’ she said as cheerily as possible, and headed in the direction he had indicated, trying hard to think of where the hell she could go next, once she hit ground-side. It wasn’t as if there was anyone down there who could help her, or who could . . .
Sarbakshian.
How could she have forgotten?
She felt a grin spreading across her face as she continued along the passageway.
EIGHTEEN
Megan
By the time Megan landed on Redstone less than an hour later, she had already managed to contact Sarbakshian and arrange a place to stay; somewhere, he assured her, where nobody would be able to find her.
On getting down to the surface, she found the spaceport in utter chaos. Redstone, she was beginning to understand, had recently suffered some kind of major disaster. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t hard for her to slip away from the gaggle of relief workers whose shuttle she had joined, drawing in her wake a trail of puzzled or downright suspicious glances. But it was only when she managed to access the Tabernacle for the first time that she understood the enormity of what had happened here.
The bolt-hole Sarbakshian had located for her turned out to be an apartment near the centre of Aguirre, a city neighbouring the spaceport. She showered for a solid hour, meanwhile scraping up every detail she could about the disaster from local news feeds, before falling into a dead sleep and only waking again late the next morning.
She concocted some breakfast from the dried ingredients she found in a kitchen cupboard, then walked, stiff-legged and groggy, to a window seat. It offered a view across the pastel-coloured rooftops of the Rook, as this particular district of Aguirre was known.
This city’s proximity to the spaceport meant it had become a melting-pot of different cultures and species over the centuries. A Bandati hive-tower stood on the Rook’s western perimeter, while further inland a small colony of Skelites occupied a subterranean warren that emitted a never-ending haze of industrial fumes from surface vents. This was a logical base of operations for a sans de sezi dealer like Sarbakshian, and Megan had her own reasons for wanting to keep a distance from the Demarchy.
Staring out of the window, it was hard to believe anything had happened at all. Aguirre was a long way from the Demarchy, and so had avoided the direct effects of the flood. A series of hundred-metre waves had smashed into the Demarchy’s coastal regions, reaching far inland and destroying countless settlements, large and small. The death toll was reported to have reached the tens of millions, exacerbated by the fact that so many thousands of pilgrims had been making their way to Dios to celebrate Ascension Day.
Speculation on the cause of the disaster was increasingly focused around a rogue mining shipment from the outer system, which had apparently gone astray before plunging through the atmosphere at several thousand kilometres an hour. It had not, however, been anywhere near large enough to cause such terrible damage, so there were suggestions that it could have secretly contained an anti-matter core.
Certainly no one seemed to believe it was all an accident. Someone had brought this about, just as Avilon – and Sifra – had arrived in 82 Eridani, with uncanny timing.
Ever since encountering Luiz, Megan had wondered just what connection Sifra and Otto Schelling might have forged with the Freehold. Because if anyone stood to benefit from a catastrophe like this, it would be the latter.
Megan hit Aguirre’s streets swaddled in warm padded clothing, her face hidden behind a stylish breather mask. She jumped on a tram that creaked its way through dusty streets, its barely functional AI squawking out the names of each district they traversed through a damaged grille. Everywhere she looked, she saw people piling goods into the rear of vans and trucks. There were long queues on the main roads out of the city, and a constant stream of ground-to-air vehicles lifting up above the rooftops.
Megan sat back anxiously and glanced around the tram, realizing that, apart from herself, it was deserted. She watched some of the vehicle’s peeling flicker-posters, which displayed stylized animations of menacing figures adorned with Freehold tattoos placing bombs in public places or slaughtering busloads of children with equal enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard now to guess what Aguirre’s citizens were running from.
She disembarked on the furthest edge of the Rook and made her way inside a single-storey building, also owned by Sarbakshian. Passing through a pressure field that separated the native atmosphere from that inside, she peeled off her mask and found herself in the nondescript foyer of what purported to be a trade and economics consultancy. It was completely deserted, and there was a fine layer of dust evident on the single desk it contained.
As instructed, she made her way down a dark and dank staircase at the rear of the foyer, until she reached a security door at the bottom. Light flickered in her eyes for a moment, and then the door swung open with a gentle click.
Megan passed through a second pressure field: the air was now warm and moist and slightly perfumed. She looked around, seeing that the entire lower level was open plan in layout. Pillars supporting the building above were artfully concealed behind clusters of ivy, while grass crunched beneath her boots. One or two tiny yellow birds fluttered from the branches of potted trees. She could almost have been in one of the cloistered gardens of Morgan’s W
orld. The illusion was marred, however, by a number of crates stacked here and there, with their contents spilling out.
She felt sweat beading on her forehead and pulled off her heavy coat before making her way towards a set of divans arranged around a low table at the centre of this open space. Arrayed on the table were tiny silver bowls filled with what passed for delicacies on Redstone.
Sarbakshian himself, looking tired and grizzled, sat on an upholstered chair to one side of the table, the invisibly narrow band of a data interface pressing against his long and unkempt hair. He waggled a finger towards one of the divans, without even looking at her; his attention was clearly focused elsewhere.
She took a seat and waited until the man finally pulled off his interface, dropping it onto the table between them with a sigh. He leaned back, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes for several seconds, then dropped them back in his lap before giving her a smile.
‘Long day?’ she asked.
‘Like you wouldn’t believe,’ he replied, in a monotone. ‘Everyone’s getting out.’
‘I noticed. Why?’
He eyed her with an expression of disbelief. ‘You’re kidding me. The Freehold is on the way here. They want Redstone back.’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything about that. I mean, there were some rumours floating around the Tabernacle, but . . .’
Sarbakshian laughed unpleasantly. ‘Rumours? More than rumours, my dear. People know exactly what’s going down. Now that the Demarchy’s been effectively wiped out, it’s only a matter of time before a bunch of crazy tattooed Freehold bastards turn up here in Aguirre, armed to the teeth and claiming ownership. And once they’ve finished with the Sacerdotal Demarchy of Uchida, their neighbours, the River Concord States, will be next.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ she asked, her tone clearly sceptical.
‘Does it matter?’ Sarbakshian shrugged sadly. ‘I go where the business is, and Aguirre is fast turning into a ghost town.’ He tapped the fingers of one hand against an armrest, studying her carefully. ‘You know, I was more than a little surprised about the way you turned up here without any warning. I’d already heard a rumour you were retiring.’