Marauder

by Gary Gibson

  ‘No,’ she said, struggling to pull her wrists free. ‘No.’

  ‘Now, listen,’ he said, standing up once more, ‘there’s too much at stake not to have to make some sacrifices. We need to talk to the Wanderer; we need to get it to share data with us, like it did with the Meridians, if we’re to have any hope of salvaging the Alliance. And since you’re the better pilot, that means Bash has to be our sacrificial goat.’

  He walked back over to the open aluminium case, and pulled out a tangle of black rubbery-looking cords all connected at one end. They looked to Megan like poisonous snakes joined at the tail.

  ‘Use me,’ she whispered, ‘not him. Let me talk to the Wanderer.’

  He shook his head. ‘If things don’t work out as well as we’re hoping they will, we might find ourselves in need of those exceptional piloting skills of yours.’

  ‘Please, Gregor,’ she begged, ‘don’t do this!’

  He ignored her, kneeling beside Bash and carefully arranging the snake-like cords across his skull, with the join positioned at the back. Sifra stood behind Bash, holding Bash’s head steady while Tarrant worked. Each cord ended in a broad, flattened pad that adhered to the skin of Bash’s head.

  ‘Now let’s wake him up,’ said Tarrant, stepping back.

  Sifra nodded, lowering the back of Bash’s head onto the couch. Then he walked over to Megan and dragged her into an upright seated position on her own couch, before stepping around behind her and placing both of his gloved hands on her shoulders.

  Megan tensed, her breathing constricted, as she watched Tarrant remove a pressure-hypo from the silver case and touch it to one side of Bash’s neck.

  The unconscious man jerked in response, then drew in a deep, shuddering breath, his eyes flickering open. He blinked and looked around him, his gaze turning baleful when it finally settled on Tarrant.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Bash demanded. ‘First you shoot me, then you—’

  ‘Bash, I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ interrupted Tarrant.

  ‘Fuck that,’ said Bash, twisting from side to side as he attempted to pull his hands free of the plastic ties. He started pushing himself up on to his feet, his mouth becoming a grimace of anger.

  Megan sent to him.

  She saw Bash glance towards her. Then Sifra activated his gloves, and Megan screamed. The pain wasn’t as bad as before, but it was still bad enough. She twisted wildly, but he had a tight hold on her. She tipped forward, vomiting between her knees onto the floor of the lounge.

  The pain kept coming.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she could hear Bash shouting. ‘Don’t you understand you’re going to fry her implants?’

  ‘I’m using a low setting,’ said Sifra, from behind her. ‘Too low to cause any permanent damage to her implants. But I can make up for that by maintaining the pain for hours, Bash, or even days. However long it takes to get you to cooperate.’

  ‘Please,’ said Bash, his voice cracking. ‘Let her go. Just stop this.’

  ‘As soon as you stop resisting us,’ said Tarrant, ‘he will.’

  ‘Shit. Fine.’ Bash sat back down, his face pale and sweating. ‘Stop the fuck now. Now.’

  Suddenly, the pain was gone. Megan collapsed back onto her side, her breath wheezing and her teeth chattering.

  ‘What the hell is this thing you’ve got on my head?’ said Bash.

  ‘Should we go ahead now?’ said Tarrant, glancing at Sifra.

  Sifra nodded. ‘All ready.’

  Tarrant made a gesture, and a virtual control panel shimmered into existence next to him. He reached out and began tapping at it.

  ‘Has this got something to do with the Wanderer?’ asked Bash. ‘Because if you’re . . .’

  Bash fell suddenly silent, as if he was trying hard to listen to something.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Tarrant. ‘Do you hear something?’

  Bash looked up at him uncertainly. ‘I don’t know, but maybe. Why don’t you tell me what you—?’

  ‘Open it up as far as you can,’ Sifra interrupted him. ‘Link him into the main tach-net array and let’s see what happens.’

  Megan hated herself, in that moment, for not shouting at Bash to get to his feet, to make a run for it, to do anything he could to stop this happening. But she knew what would happen if she did, and nothing frightened her more than the thought of those gloves touching her again.

  She watched, helpless and filled with self-loathing, as Bash’s expression slowly changed to one of amazement. He grinned, then laughed, shaking his head from side to side.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ said Tarrant.

  ‘I . . . don’t know how to describe it,’ said Bash. ‘It’s as if I can hear a million voices all talking at once, but I can’t make a single one of them out. I can’t make any kind of sense out of any of it. I . . .’

  Bash jumped so suddenly that Tarrant stumbled back from him. Bash’s eyes bulged in their sockets, his jaw clenching in a deathly grimace. Then he slumped against the couch and began to shake with a dreadful, high-pitched keening emerging from the depths of his throat. Megan watched in horror, her heart aching to see him in such terrible distress.

  ‘Watch he doesn’t swallow his tongue,’ said Sifra, his tone calm and unaffected.

  ‘He’s wide open,’ said Tarrant, glancing at the virtual panel. ‘His vitals are spiking all across the board.’

  ‘Then ramp him down, for God’s sake,’ snapped Sifra. ‘Let’s not blow every circuit in his brain before we’ve even had a chance to talk to the damn thing.’

  ‘You’re killing him,’ Megan rasped, her terror of Sifra and his gloves momentarily forgotten. ‘Goddamn you, Gregor . . . you’re killing him!’

  Tarrant made an adjustment and Bash’s fit came to a sudden and spontaneous end. His chest heaved like that of a drowning man gasping for air, his eyes unfocused and staring wildly.

  ‘He looks as if he’s trying to say something,’ said Sifra.

  Bash’s mouth opened wide, his tongue flicking around his teeth. His eyes rolled in their sockets in a way that sent a shiver up Megan’s spine; his head twisted from side to side, first slowly, then quickly, then slowly again.

  When his gaze finally settled on her, it felt to Megan as if she was looking into the eyes of a complete stranger. As if he was possessed.

  Bash began to thrash, twisting wildly as if again trying to break free of his plastic restraints.

  ‘Belle’s tits,’ said Tarrant, wrapping an arm around Bash’s shoulder in an attempt to keep him still. Sifra pulled off his gloves and hurried over, struggling alongside Tarrant to keep Bash firmly on the couch.

  Bash finally stopped thrashing about and fell back again, breathing loudly through his nose. His eyes revealed no hint of human intelligence. Tarrant and Sifra stood back cautiously, waiting to see if he’d jump up again.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ said Tarrant. ‘Now we see if we’ve established a bridge.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Megan.

  Tarrant looked over at her. ‘You’re about to talk to the Wanderer, via Bash.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re—’

  ‘I told you that one of the Kelvin’s pilots went into a coma and never recovered. But his co-pilot, before he died, found he could communicate with the Wanderer through the unconscious pilot’s implants, by linking mind-to-mind with him. We think that’s the reason he survived longer, because the Wanderer wasn’t tapping directly into his own implants.’

  ‘Whereas what Gregor shot you with inhibits your higher-level implant functions,’ added Sifra, pulling his gloves back on and coming to stand beside her once more. ‘The device on Bash’s head boosts his. All we need you to do is link to Bash, and see what you get. Got that?’

  Megan nodded tightly, unable to take her eyes away from Sifra’s hands.

  ‘Okay,’ said Tarrant, reaching out on
ce more to the virtual panel hovering beside him. ‘I’m now going to patch Bash through the comms array. Tell me if you hear or feel or sense anything at all.’

  As Tarrant adjusted something, Megan felt her skin begin to prickle. She had the sudden sense that there was someone else standing immediately behind her, where Sifra had been. Yet he was there right in front of her, watching with evident fascination.

  It took an enormous amount of willpower not to look behind her to see if something was there that shouldn’t be.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Tarrant.

  ‘Not yet.’

 

  No reply, but the link appeared to be functioning optimally.

  In the next moment, she had the inescapable sense of being noticed by something cold and alien, and utterly unlike anything she had ever come into contact with before.

 

  NOT YOU ARE NOT THEY WHO SAIL DEPTHS

  Megan gasped as a torrent of sensory information came racing towards her across the link with Bash. A welter of alien sensations assaulted her, and for a moment she was lost in the flood.

  She cut the link, with cold perspiration beading her skin. She noticed Tarrant and Sifra staring at her.

  ‘What happened just now?’ asked Tarrant.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ll try again.’

  ‘Is there anything at all you can describe?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Imagine looking up at the stars,’ she said, ‘and seeing the sky rip open and an enormous eye stare down at you.’

  The two men exchanged uncertain glances. ‘Try again,’ instructed Tarrant.

  she asked.

  WE SEEK THE LEAF THAT FLOATS ON THE RIVER OF LIGHT THAT FALLS THROUGH THE SKY

  The voice was Bash’s but the words were nonsensical, the rush of accompanying sensory data so vast and deep that she felt in danger of being swamped by it.

  The leaf that floats on the river of light, she thought. That falls through the sky.

  Somehow, she knew this river of light was the Milky Way. And the leaf was their own ship, the Beauregard.

  Something else came flooding across the link. She found herself assailed with yet more sensory information she could hardly begin to comprehend. She felt pain in her lungs, as if she were drowning in this flood of data.

  It was too much.

  The Beauregard disappeared from around her, as she found herself adrift in a timeless void full of chaos and noise, her every sense under assault.

  And all of this was coming through Bash’s implants, yet further filtered through the inhibitor Tarrant had put into her. What the hell must it be like for Bash, then? How could he possibly live through something like this and stay sane?

  She slowly began to understand, to thread some meaning through the sheer noise. There was a message there, coming from the Wanderer.

  Once she understood that, she began to laugh.

  She opened her eyes to find Tarrant leaning over her, with his hands on her shoulders. She lay on the floor next to the couch, her wrists still secured behind her back.

  ‘You had a fit,’ said Tarrant. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Water . . .’ Her voice was hoarse and brittle. ‘For God’s sake, please give me some.’

  To her surprise, Sifra obeyed instantly, darting towards the kitchenette in the far corner of the lounge and returning moments later with a bulb of water. He knelt by her as Tarrant helped her into a sitting position, and held the bulb towards her so she could take a sip. She sucked at it greedily, then fell back against the side of the couch, coughing violently.

  ‘Well?’ asked Sifra.

  ‘You’re in so fucking deep,’ she said, ‘you have no idea.’

  Sifra’s expression turned angry. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  She cleared her throat and remembered the message the Wanderer had conveyed to her. ‘You came all this way to get something from it,’ she said. ‘But we’re only here at all because of what it wants from you.’

  ‘So what does it want?’ demanded Tarrant.

  ‘Our nova drive,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t care about anything else.’

  Both men stared at her in blank surprise.

  ‘It knows all about the Magi ships, and about how they came to our galaxy.’ The Shoal Hegemony, before it wound up ruling much of the galaxy, had stolen the secret of faster-than-light travel from the Magi ships, before destroying most of them. ‘It knows the nova drives come from caches like the one at Tierra.’

  ‘And it told all this to you?’ asked Tarrant.

  ‘Not exactly – not in anything I’d call words. It was more like taking in an expert memory dump: suddenly I know things I didn’t just moments before.’

  Tarrant rubbed at his face and glanced at Sifra. ‘We’ve been so blind,’ he said.

  Sifra stared back at him in stupefaction. ‘How so?’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Tarrant. ‘That damn thing’s been sailing around the galaxy all this time at sub-light speeds, but not out of choice. Once it saw the Kelvin and then us jump into this system, it was obvious to it that we had a means of travelling faster than light.’

  ‘That’s got to be why it attacked the Shoal,’ said Megan, ‘but not the Meridians.’

  ‘Because they didn’t have FTL technology?’ suggested Sifra.

  Megan nodded. ’It wants a nova drive so it can get to wherever the hell it is it’s planning on going.’

  ‘But why attack at all?’ said Sifra. ‘Why not just negotiate for a nova drive in return for the information we’re looking for?’

  ‘Imagine how dangerous it would become if it could travel at superluminal speeds,’ said Tarrant. ‘That thing out there repelled the Shoal, for God’s sake. How much chance would the Three Star Alliance, or the Accord for that matter, have against it if it decided to turn on us?’

  ‘So why the hell doesn’t it just go and find itself a Maker cache, since that’s where all the faster-than-light drives come from in the first place?’ said Sifra.

  ‘It’s a big universe,’ replied Tarrant. ‘Especially if you’re stuck with traversing it at sub-light speeds. Besides, nobody knows how many more caches there are left, not after the Shoal Hegemony spent millennia destroying as many of them as it could.’ He shook his head. ‘My guess is that a cache is exactly what the Wanderer’s been looking for all this time, but we can’t afford to risk giving it what it wants until we have at least some idea what it’s ultimate intentions are.’

  ‘Then we need to get the hell away from here,’ said Megan, ‘before it decides to take our nova drive away from us whether we like it or not.’

  Sifra moved towards the exit.

  ‘Where the hell are you going?’ demanded Tarrant.

  ‘To prep the anti-matter missiles,’ said Sifra, stopping by the door. ‘We can launch them into their own separate orbit. That way it’ll understand exactly what’s going to happen if it tries to attack us.’

  ‘And, for all you know, it’s likely to assume that we’re attacking it the moment we do launch them,’ said Tarrant. ‘And maybe that’s all the excuse it’d need. We need to try and talk to it again, to see if there’s something else we can use to try and get it to deal with us.’

  ‘You can’t put Bash through all that again,’ protested Megan. ‘You saw what happened. It nearly killed him.’

  Tarrant stared at her, his expression hard. ‘No, Megan, we’ll keep trying until we get some kind of result.’

  TWENTY

  Megan

  Tarrant kept to his promise. Over the next week, Megan was forced to undergo more attempts at communicating with the Wanderer, using Bash as a go-between – or a ‘bridge’, as the two men chose to refer to it. And gradually, as the hours and then days passed, she learned to communicate with it, after a fashion.

  More and more, ‘Marauder’ struck Megan as a far more apt name for the alien vessel
.

  By now, the Beauregard had performed a slingshot manoeuvre around the star, still on its way to the moon around which the Wanderer orbited. The violence of the solar wind emanating from the system’s Wolf-Rayet star caused endless problems with the external sensor arrays, making it nearly impossible to get accurate readings about anything outside the ship itself.

  They then climbed into acceleration berths for the braking procedure that would place them into orbit around the moon, which, along with its parent world, had grown to become a visible disc. Before long, they slipped into orbit around the moon, and then back into zero gravity. The Wanderer was now visible to the naked eye, orbiting much closer to the tiny world’s surface.

  It rapidly became clear from Megan’s communications with the Wanderer that what little had so far been gleaned from the Alyeska digs represented only the beginning of a much larger story.

  The Wanderer had, she discovered, been drifting through the Milky Way for the better part of two million years, and perhaps even longer. It was the product of a machine-civilization it called the Core Transcendence, that had once resided close beside the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.

  Two million years earlier, the Makers had arrived at the centre of the galaxy, challenging the Core Transcendence’s dominance. She saw their black-hulled ships, constructed on a scale to beggar comprehension, swooping through the star systems scattered throughout the black hole’s accretion disk. Their passage warped the physics of space-time, shattering worlds.

  Megan herself suffered more fits, and worse ones. One time, she woke inside a medbox only to discover, upon emerging, that she had blacked out after her last bridging session. Tarrant showed her a recording of her body spasming, blood running from her nose, as Tarrant and Sifra dragged her into the medbay.

  But what happened to her was as nothing compared to the effects of the procedure on Bash.

  The physical changes in him, after just a few days, shocked her. He continued to lose weight at a tremendous speed, and when he moved at all, it was with the feeble and shaky gestures of a very elderly man. Indeed, every step he took appeared to involve great and ponderous effort. Whenever he spoke, it was in monosyllables, and there were times when he clearly had difficulty remembering who she was.