Marauder

by Gary Gibson

‘I think I can jump down from here,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It doesn’t look too deep.’

  She slid a little further, then gravity took over, and she began to slide, her feet and hands skittering helplessly. She fell through the air for a brief moment, then landed feet-first in the freezing cold water barely a second later. The water came up to her waist, deep and cold enough to make her teeth chatter. ‘Bash next,’ she called back up.

  ‘How?’ Gabrielle yelled back, in exasperation.

  ‘Just . . . give him a goddamn push, okay? He’s like a cat. He’ll land the right way up.’

  I hope.

  Bash came sliding down the hull a moment later, his feet and hands trying and failing to find purchase on the surface. He landed with an almighty splash, then came upright, shaking his head like a dog and sending off a spray of water.

  Gabrielle was next, letting out a small shriek of shock as she dropped, rear end first, into the water.

  ‘Move,’ yelled Megan, pointing towards some low hills nearby, dotted with snakehead bushes. ‘That way.’

  Without further discussion, they each took hold of one of Bash’s arms – which was starting to feel like the most natural thing in the world to do.

  Gabrielle glanced back at the dropship as they splashed their way on to the shore. ‘Are we really in that much danger?’ she asked, her teeth chattering as violently as Megan’s.

  ‘Remind me again: how much do you know about anti-matter containment systems, Gabrielle?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then you’re going to have to take my word for it that we don’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it blows.’

  They left the shore behind and pushed on between the bushes, scraping past curling black branches with bulbous tips. ‘Just a little bit further,’ urged Megan, knowing it would be just too ironic if they got blown to smithereens this close to being home free.

  They soon came to a narrow pass between two hills: a steep-sided gorge with a trickle of water descending towards the lake from higher ground. The bushes became less dense, and the going therefore marginally easier, except they had to keep stopping to untangle Bash from clawing branches.

  Just as they reached the far side of these hills, the sky behind them suddenly flared white. This was followed a moment later by a roar that shook the ground right beneath their feet.

  Gabrielle stared back the way they had come. ‘Was that . . . was that the dropship?’

  Megan squeezed her eyes shut to eliminate the after-images. She could still see the outline of the hill rendered in bright, pulsing colours.

  A pall of smoke rose high into the air and some of the bushes at the gorge entrance were burning merrily, now sending up their own plumes of acrid smoke.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Megan, ‘that was the dropship.’ And my second crash-landing in just a couple of days. It occurred to her that they were all likely to be affected by residual radiation, so the sooner each of them could get inside a medbox, the better.

  Gabrielle’s face had turned completely white above the rim of her breather mask, having not realized until now just how much danger they had been in. ‘How much anti-matter was in that thing?’ she asked shakily.

  ‘A pinhead’s worth,’ said Megan. ‘And that’s all it takes.’ She reached inside her coat and adjusted the heating elements, turning them all the way up. She saw Gabrielle do the same first for herself, and then for Bash. Before long, all three of them were billowing clouds of steam, as their jackets dried them from the inside out.

  ‘We should get going,’ announced Megan. ‘But before we do, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did Tarrant do anything that might prevent you communicating mind-to-mind?’

  Gabrielle only looked confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We’re both machine-heads,’ said Megan. ‘That means we can talk privately via our implants. Like you did back there with Bash, right?’

  Gabrielle thought for a moment. ‘Before we came here, Tarrant shot something into my neck, some kind of machine. He called it—’

  ‘An inhibitor?’ Megan interrupted.

  Gabrielle nodded. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘There are ways of telling,’ said Megan. ‘Like the bruise on the back of your neck. And the fact I just tried and failed to communicate with you through my implants.’

  ‘Oh.’ Gabrielle instinctively reached up to touch her skin there.

  ‘Soon as we find a medbox, we’ll make getting rid of that thing a priority.’ She glanced up towards the horizon. ‘Sunset is still a couple of hours away, and that settlement we were aiming for is a good twenty kilometres from here. We should try and cover as much ground as we can before then. We don’t want to stick around here one second longer than we have to.’

  Gabrielle nodded. ‘Sure.’ She stepped over and touched her fingers to Bash’s elbow. Megan watched, astonished, as Bash followed her lead with surprisingly little prompting.

  ‘Has he spoken to you again since you came looking for me?’ asked Megan, sensing a touch of bitterness in her tone.

  Gabrielle appeared not to notice it. ‘Not a peep,’ she replied.

  Megan nodded and swiftly stepped over to take Bash’s other arm. ‘You up for a long walk?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Beats getting shot at.’

  An hour later, they could still see the same dark plume of smoke spiralling high into the evening sky behind them.

  For a while, they followed what looked like an animal trail, exhaustion reducing both women to silence. The land on one side of them dropped away into a deep crevasse, at the bottom of which Megan could see a river churning. There were hills up ahead that looked likely to prove a challenge, but a cluster of canopy trees stood closer, just a few kilometres away and rising tall above the surrounding landscape. If they became too exhausted, or the weather deteriorated, they could at least shelter there for a while.

  The sight of these trees reminded Megan of the first time she had ever met Bash, and she glanced sideways at his broad features, wishing she could share this same memory with him. Somehow it felt almost as if she’d come full circle.

  She ignored the tiny voice in the back of her head that was whispering how they could get to the settlement so much quicker if they just left him behind.

  In fact it took nearly six hours of walking, including a number of detours, to reach the nearest of those canopy trees. In the meantime, they had covered seven or eight kilometres at most.

  Megan called a halt as soon as they were under cover. She noticed Gabrielle staring up at the tree’s immense canopy, her eyes roving up the length of the massive trunk to its apex. If this girl’s life had been as sheltered as she suspected, it was entirely possible she had never before seen one close up.

  They sat wherever they comfortably could amongst the roots, taking the weight off their legs with joint groans of satisfaction. Gabrielle pulled Bash down into a sitting position beside her, then leaned back and closed her eyes, for long enough that Megan thought she must have fallen asleep. But then finally Gabrielle lifted her head once more, and looked in her direction.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Megan, ‘exactly how Bash communicated with you, back in those caves.’

  Gabrielle shrugged. ‘It’s like I told you. I heard his voice inside my head.’

  Megan frowned. ‘That’s what doesn’t make sense. Why could he communicate mind-to-mind with you, while I couldn’t?’

  ‘I had wondered about that,’ Gabrielle admitted.

  ‘Did he say anything else?’ she asked. ‘Apart from telling you to find me, that is?’

  She nodded. ‘He said he’s been fighting some kind of war.’

  Megan stared at her. ‘A war?’

  ‘It didn’t make any sense to me either. He talked about something called a wanderer. He said it was hiding something.’

  Megan felt the breath catch in her throat. She forgot about her exhaustion, the pain in her feet and the throbbing in her band
aged shoulder. She looked over at Bash – poor, sightless Bash – and felt a shiver of awe mixed with fear.

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked.

  ‘He said something about being lost for a very long time, and that he could only stay for a while.’ Gabrielle shook her head. ‘I can’t even begin to tell you what he might have meant.’

  Megan felt her cheeks growing moist, and wiped the tears away before they could freeze solid on her skin.

  ‘Does any of this mean anything to you?’ asked Gabrielle.

  ‘I feel crazy for saying it but, yes, it does.’ Megan scratched at the dirt with one boot, waggling and stretching her toes until the pain felt slightly duller. The fit of her breather mask was not quite perfect, and it had chafed her skin as they walked away from the lake. She drew in a breath, then lifted the mask from her face for a moment, sliding her hand under and scratching at her cheek for one long, luxurious moment before dropping it back into place.

  ‘I already know who you are,’ she said to Gabrielle. ‘But I think it’s time you know who I am.’

  The girl regarded her uncertainly, as the wind rustled the feathered canopy overhead. ‘I had wondered, obviously.’

  ‘I was the Speaker-Elect before you, Gabrielle.’

  Gabrielle stared at her uncomprehendingly. ‘I . . . I was about to say that’s impossible, but for some reason I believe you.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know why I do, but I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  She peered at Megan for a moment, then looked back towards the lake, now lost somewhere over the far horizon. ‘The official story I heard was that there had been an attempt to kidnap the Speaker-Elect before me, which was why they made Karl – I mean, Gregor Tarrant – my bodyguard. But he told me once that he had heard other stories, that the girl before me somehow escaped, with help, and that the official story was just a cover-up. But he couldn’t find any proof and decided it was just a rumour, and nothing more.’

  Megan felt her blood chill. If Tarrant had kept digging further, he might eventually have worked out who she really was.

  ‘It’s slightly more complicated than that,’ she said.

  She told Gabrielle about her flight through Dios with Malcolm – and how she had no memories of her previous life in the Demarchy. Gabrielle’s eyes widened and her skin turned even paler than from just the cold.

  ‘You don’t remember anything?’ asked Gabrielle.

  ‘Not a thing. I know that her – my – name was Esté, but that’s all.’

  ‘So what they were going to do to me . . . they had already done to you. And now you have all Dakota Merrick’s memories?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not her,’ Megan replied, a touch defensively.

  ‘But you are her, aren’t you? We’re both genetically identical to her, so if you have her memories as well, then . . .’

  Megan shook her head adamantly. ‘That still doesn’t make me her. She died centuries ago. I have no . . .’

  No responsibility for the things she did or the decisions she made, she had almost said.

  ‘Who is he, really?’ asked Gabrielle, changing the subject. ‘Gregor Tarrant, I mean. Before we escaped, I knew him as Karl Petrova. What does he even want from me?’

  ‘He wants an opportunity to merge you with the Ship of the Covenant himself, then give you to the Wanderer so it can use you the same way Tarrant wants to use Bash – as a means to an end.’ She went on to tell Gabrielle about her first encounter with the alien entity, and the circumstances whereby Bash had been reduced to a near-vegetative state.

  ‘That’s so terrible,’ said Gabrielle, her eyes downcast, once Megan finished the whole story.

  ‘Gabrielle, I have to ask . . . is Tarrant the father of your child?’

  Gabrielle lowered her gaze to the stony black ground at her feet, then nodded. ‘I feel such a fool.’ Her hand folded over her belly. ‘All the time, he was telling me such ridiculous lies, and I believed him because I wanted to.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to keep it?’

  Gabrielle darted a surprised glance towards her. ‘It didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s all I have left . . . as Bash is all you have left.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘That’s the reason you came to find Bash, isn’t it? Because you care about him.’

  ‘One of the reasons,’ Megan admitted. ‘That, and the fact that Tarrant will dispose of him as soon as he gets what he wants from the Wanderer.’

  ‘Was he . . . was Bash your lover?’

  ‘No. No, he wasn’t,’ said Megan. ‘But I’ve never felt closer to anyone else in my life. He . . . saved me, Gabrielle. He’s family now – the only one that ever really meant a damn to me, and the only one who knew the truth about who I really am.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right: he’s all I’ve got left.’

  ‘And when this is all over?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘Do you think you can cure him, fix him?’

  ‘Until you told me about him speaking to you in some way, I didn’t think that was possible. But if I could just get him to talk to me the same way he did with you . . .’ She shook her head, unable to keep the pain out of her voice. ‘I’m going to take him with me myself, to the Wanderer, and make my own deal with it.’

  Gabrielle looked at her with alarm. ‘Why?’

  ‘When I . . . when Dakota died, she was hunting something called a Maker Swarm. It’s like a cloud of machines, in their millions, all capable of travelling at light speed, and all utterly inimical towards other civilizations. That’s what’s heading our way, and I have to try and find a way to stop it.’

  Gabrielle stared at her, then shook her head, looking away.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to take in,’ said Megan.

  The girl shook her head. ‘You have no idea.’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t the Magi ships just go and do something about the Swarm themselves?’

  ‘They were designed not to be able to function – to carry out actions – without having a controlling intelligence, a pilot. It was a way of preventing them from evolving into just as much of a potential threat as the Swarms themselves. It means they cannot act autonomously. So they alerted me – someone who’s effectively part-Magi and who understands the threat – knowing I’d then have to act. We’re forever connected to the Magi ships, you and me. We were made by them, in a sense.’

  ‘You make it sound as if we’re not really human,’ the other woman remarked.

  ‘I’m not sure that we are, to be honest. I think the ships had some way of knowing where the Swarm was, and which way it was heading, and let me know.’

  ‘Then why is it coming here?’ asked Gabrielle.

  ‘I told you how Dakota died when she was visiting a Maker Swarm halfway across the galaxy. Before it killed her, the Swarm learned things from her about us – about humanity.’

  ‘What does it want with us?’

  ‘The Swarms are programmed to prevent the rise of any advanced interstellar civilizations. If they’d ever discovered that the Shoal Hegemony had bucked the trend for as long as it did, they’d have tried to destroy them, too. But the Hegemony is gone, and now it’s the Accord which is growing into a true interstellar civilization. Unfortunately that makes us a target, and that’s why I need to fly out to the Wanderer and negotiate with it. I believe it knows something that could help us stop the Swarm before it arrives.’

  ‘How can you be sure the Wanderer will help you, after what it did before?’

  ‘I can’t. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to turn me down once it knows what I have to offer.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Gabrielle.

  Megan hesitated, and realized she had been on the verge of telling her the truth of what she intended. But before she could say anything more, Gabrielle looked past Megan, her eyes growing suddenly wide. She scrambled to her feet.

  ‘Look,’ she pointed. ‘Over there, coming this way.’

  Megan stood up, realizing she could hear a faint rumble somewhere far
off in the distance. She looked in the same direction as Gabrielle, and saw multiple pairs of headlights coming their way. She could even hear the sound of heavy treads crunching across ice and rock.

  She glanced at Gabrielle and thought about telling her to run, but knew it was already too late.

  Whoever had found them – whether it was Tarrant, or someone else – there was nowhere left for them to hide.

  A high-built truck pulled to a halt just a short distance away, looking far newer than anything Megan had seen in the Montos de Frenezo. Gabrielle stepped up beside her, taking a tight grip of her hand.

  Light played across them, almost blinding them.

  ‘Hey there!’ a voice shouted in an accent that didn’t sound at all as if it came from Redstone. ‘We saw that dropship going down. Were you on it?’

  ‘Yes, we were,’ Megan called back, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the brilliant light. ‘Who are you people?’

  ‘Thank God,’ said the owner of the voice, coming closer. Megan saw it was a woman, short and round and swaddled in brightly coloured survival gear. ‘We were pretty sure there weren’t any survivors, but then we saw your tracks heading this way. How many of you are there?’

  ‘Just three,’ replied Megan as the woman stepped up close to her.

  ‘Hey, Lloyd!’ the woman shouted, turning towards the trucks behind her. ‘Kill those goddamn lights. You’re blinding them!’

  The lights dimmed. ‘Martha Stiles,’ announced the woman, holding out a gloved hand towards Megan. ‘We’re based fourteen or so klicks from here, and you guys look like you could really use a hot meal.’

  ‘More than you could even begin to imagine,’ was Megan’s heartfelt reply.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Even with the trucks, it still took a couple of hours to get back to the settlement on the far side of the hills.

  Low, grey-coloured domes loomed out of the encroaching night as they pulled to a halt. Several of Stiles’s fellow workers had clearly waited up for their return, and they proved to be friendly but eager to find out just what had happened to the dropship.

  Stiles shooed them away, then guided the three newcomers into a building which proved to be a communal refectory. By now, Megan had worked out that Stiles must be in charge of this research base, and her suspicion was confirmed when the woman told her, over hot coffee and freshly baked char siu, that she was project director for a long-term study of the canopy trees. They were trying, she explained, to find some way to adapt the same techniques the trees used to create their self-contained microclimates, as part of ongoing research into terraforming low-viability worlds.