Marauder (23 page)

She ordered the lifeboat to give chase.

Megan? Do you hear me?

It was Tarrant again.

You think I’m finished, but I’m not. I’ve come through worse and survived. I’ll kill you a thousand different ways, over and over and—

She cut the connection before he could finish.

It took a good fifteen minutes to rendezvous with the rogue nova drive, which had stabilized sufficiently to cease spinning and match course with Megan’s lifeboat. The cage to the rear of
the lifesupport units opened wide, like the leaves of a flower spun from silver mesh, closing around the drive as it was manoeuvred into position.

Megan worked feverishly, running a systems update that allowed the drive to integrate with the lifeboat’s low-level AI. Once that was completed, crude drive-spines dotted around the
lifeboat’s hull flickered with eerie lightning, sucking energy out of the interstellar void.

The stars shimmered and changed. Megan laughed, pounding the interior of her life-support unit with her fists. But the laughter turned to sobs, with tears cascading down her cheeks.

She forced herself to take deep, even breaths, then activated the cryonic circuits. She was now going to sleep for a long, long time, but get home she would. And when she awoke under some
different star, with the familiar chatter of human worlds filling the comms circuits, she would remember Bash and ask his spirit to forgive her – before she set about picking up whatever
pieces remained of her former life.

2763 (the present)

A few hours after Gabrielle, the Speaker-Elect of the Sacerdotal Demarchy of Uchida, had been taken on board a dropship by the man she had known as Karl Petrova, but who was in
truth some stranger named Tarrant, she felt the ship begin to rumble around her.

She had run from Tarrant after telling him she was pregnant with his child, and hidden herself within a storage locker in another part of the dropship. She had curled up in a ball in the zero
gravity, her eyes still full of the images Tarrant had shown her – of vast waves spreading inland through the Demarchy, crushing everything and wiping whole cities and towns out of
existence.

He was, in some way she did not yet understand, responsible for this devastation. That made her, in a sense, an accessory to the worst of all imaginable crimes.

This thought was more than she could bear, and she determined to find an airlock and throw herself out into the vacuum without a suit – or hunt for something sharp enough to cut through
the tender flesh of her wrists. But, even as she entertained these thoughts, another part of her felt a deep determination to go on living so as to resist whatever Tarrant had planned for her, with
all her might.

Tarrant came and searched her out, after a while.

‘You have a choice,’ he declared, staring down at her. ‘Either you ride back down in the cockpit with us, or you’ll go back inside the medbox if you don’t behave
yourself.’

If you don’t behave yourself
. As if she were still a child.

She blinked away angry tears, her hand reaching instinctively to protect her belly. ‘But if I spend too much time inside a medbox, mightn’t it hurt my—?’

‘I already told you I don’t care about that,’ he snapped, gripping the frame of the doorway one-handed.

Gabrielle wondered what kind of man he had been before becoming the one she had known as Karl Petrova. Had he a family, perhaps, or children? She found that difficult to imagine.

‘I’ll behave,’ she said quietly, unable to keep a slight edge out of her voice. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Back down to Redstone, before very long.’ He seemed stiff, reserved, as if holding something back. ‘Somewhere a long way from Dios, in fact, around the other side of the
world.’

‘To meet more of your Freehold friends?’

‘Clean up and get yourself to the cockpit,’ he demanded, stepping back out of the storage cupboard. ‘And don’t be long. I don’t want to have to come looking for you
again.’

Gaby found her way to the dropship’s head and studied herself in the tiny mirror. She looked like a wreck: her skin was puffy and bruised, her hair a tangled mess from
its immersion in the icy river water. She dug around inside several of the drawers until she found a disposable comb, along with a pair of scissors.

She picked up the scissors, studying them beneath the head’s unforgiving light. They were small, cheaply fabricated, but sharp. How easy it would be, she thought, to draw their razor-sharp
edges through the soft tissue of her wrist . . .

No
. She felt a flare of anger, both at herself and at Tarrant. In a way, that would feel like letting him win.

She put the scissors back down, then tried to pull the comb through the knots in her hair. It proved to be a hopeless task and she stared at her reflection in despair. She looked like some
discarded rag doll come to life, wrapped in the folds of oversized coveralls. How could she have fallen so very far?

She ran some water, which formed a wobbling globe as it emerged from the tap, then dipped her hands into it, in the way she had seen people doing via the Tabernacle, before moistening her eyes
and cheeks. Pressing a button below the mirror activated a device that sucked the remaining moisture away.

She picked up the scissors and began to work them through a clump of hair, cutting it close to her scalp. The strands came away easily, and she stared at her reflection once more, remembering
how long and lustrous her hair had been. But that had been another person, another life.

She kept on cutting, thrusting each severed clump of hair into a chute marked DISPOSAL. It whined briefly before sucking them away.

Slowly, a new person emerged in the mirror: boyish in looks, with hair curling around her ears and sticking up on top in spiky clumps. The grooves and lines of her implants were much more
visible than before, making her appear somehow strange and alien.

With each whir of the disposal unit, another chunk of her past life was sucked away: Thijs, Karl Petrova, all those petty little restrictions she had endured, the oppressive weight of Mater
Cassanas’s watchful gaze (was the old woman even still alive?). On finishing, she looked again at that unfamiliar reflection and thought:
This is the face of a murderer. This is the face
of a woman whose greatest love committed genocide
.

But, instead of seeing a stranger, she felt as if she were seeing herself clearly for the very first time.

She made her way back through the ship to the cockpit, seeing as she entered that the man named Briggs was now seated on another couch, surrounded by such a density of projected data that he was
almost invisible behind it all.

Tarrant’s eyes widened slightly when he saw what she had done to her appearance, but he recovered quickly. ‘You took your goddamn time,’ he snarled.

I’m sorry
, she almost said, but checked herself.

As she climbed into an unoccupied couch, several virtual panels appeared around her, demonstrating how to secure herself properly. Then she glanced over at Briggs and saw that some of the
projections surrounding him were maps of various terrains, mostly containing snow-capped mountains and deep river valleys. She recognized these images as the Montos de Frenezo: a part of Redstone
that was particularly mountainous and extremely inhospitable, even compared to the rest of the planet. But it had the advantage – from the Freehold’s point of view – of being
riddled with caverns and caves and uncountable hiding places. This was the base whence they struck out against the Demarchy, as well as the other Uchidan states.

Other views showed Redstone’s horizon gradually losing its curvature, the deep black of orbital space sliding out of view as the dropship descended. The entire craft shivered around her as
it bit once more into atmosphere.

It wasn’t long before Gabrielle again felt the familiar tug of gravity. The views around Briggs had changed again, now showing clouds punctuated by occasional sharp-edged mountain
ridges.

They banked, dropping through the cloud layer and heading towards a broad valley lying between two taller peaks, their slopes littered with ancient scree. The dropship shuddered violently as its
drive-fields reduced its rate of descent prior to a final landing.

The craft around her quivered one last time as it dropped onto frozen and stony soil, its bulkheads creaking and pinging as if in protest.

Tarrant quickly and expertly released himself from his restraints, then turned to point towards her. ‘Out.’

Briggs had unbuckled himself almost before the dropship had settled into place, data still rippling around him as he lifted himself out of his couch by grasping hold of the two straps dangling
overhead. He gave Tarrant a brief nod, then exited the cockpit while Gabrielle was still struggling with her own restraints.

Tarrant grew impatient waiting, and quickly and expertly unfastened her. Gabrielle glanced past his shoulder at the video feeds showing the outside of the dropship, which were still running
above Briggs’s couch. She saw half a dozen ancient-looking trucks, two-storey affairs possessing tractor wheels, now approaching them along the valley floor. They had been painted to match
the mottled reddish-browns and whites of the mountains and, even from a distance, it was clear that they had been repaired and re-repaired many times.

‘What now?’ she asked, standing.

‘Follow Briggs,’ he said, gesturing to the open hatch.

They found Briggs waiting for them at the airlock, already clad in cold-weather gear and with a breather mask strapped in place. Tarrant quickly followed suit, then supervised
Gabrielle as she did the same.

When they finally stepped out onto the ramp, she saw the morning sun had barely risen over the peaks towering above them on either side. The sight of them made her catch her breath. The trucks
she had seen through the cockpit monitors had rolled to a halt nearby, while several bearded Freeholders with hard eyes and old-fashioned breather masks stood waiting.

One of the Freeholders came over and took Tarrant in a bear hug, clapping him soundly on the back.

‘Ah, it’s been a long time, Cuyàs,’ said Tarrant.

The man Cuyàs turned to look at Gabrielle. ‘This can’t be her, Gregor,’ he said, his accent sounding thick and guttural to her ears. ‘All this effort, just so you
can kidnap some girl?’

‘Remember, it’s what’s in her head that counts,’ Tarrant replied.

Cuyàs grinned. ‘I’ll admit I had my doubts, Gregor. But I’ve never seen anything so astonishing in all my life. We didn’t just hurt the Demarchy – we near as
damn
destroyed
it. And we never could have managed it without you.’ He looked around. ‘However, we should not tarry here. We need to go before the orbital platforms zero in on
us. Let’s not fuck up, this close to our final victory, eh?’

With that, he turned to his men – Gaby could see at least a dozen of them, all heavily armed, their eyes scanning the nearby peaks – and barked a series of commands. Several of the
men darted past them to board the dropship.

‘We have a camp not far from here,’ said Cuyàs, nodding towards the nearest of the trucks. He snapped his fingers at two of the remaining soldiers, and jabbed a finger at
Gabrielle. Two of the men trotted forward, each taking hold of one of her arms and pulling her along after Tarrant and Cuyàs, as they made for the truck.

‘And my friends?’ asked Tarrant (
Gregor
Tarrant, it seemed, for Gabrielle had not failed to notice the Freeholder addressing him by that name). ‘Are they here
yet?’

Cuyàs shook his head. ‘No, but they should be arriving from orbit shortly.’ He glanced again at Gabrielle. ‘Can we be certain the Accord won’t come looking for
her?’

‘The Grand Barge is by now a pile of kindling spread all up and down the Ka River,’ Tarrant replied. ‘We took care of Thijs and the others first, in case they might have had a
chance of getting away before the waves hit. Anyone mounting a rescue operation is going to assume she’s dead, along with everyone else on board. When do you intend to begin the main
assault?’

They came to a stop by the designated truck. ‘We’ve had units spread all through the hills bordering the Demarchy for a good while now. And some have already started to push deep
into their territory, now the waters are beginning to recede. The rest of us are currently mobilizing, and we should be moving en masse in just another few days. In the meantime we’ve been
picking off a few scattered Demarchy troops and outposts – not that there’s much fight left in the few who survived.’

‘Well,’ said Tarrant, ‘sounds to me like you should be able to walk right in there.’

‘Except,’ Cuyàs pointed out, ‘we still have the Accord to deal with, which remains my greatest concern.’

‘The important thing to remember,’ said Tarrant, ‘is that they don’t give a damn about the Demarchy. All they care about is that Magi ship and whatever information it may
have locked away inside it. Remember to keep your forces at a distance from it – don’t do
anything
that might give the Accord reason to think you might cause a problem for it.
Then there should be a relatively smooth transition of power.’

‘And yourself?’ asked Cuyàs. ‘Are you going to stick around for the fight?’

Tarrant laughed and shook his head. ‘No, I’m going off-world. I don’t think it’s at all likely I’ll be back.’

Cuyàs nodded, something glinting in his eye. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best.’ He glanced again at Gabrielle. ‘And the girl?’

‘She goes with me.’

‘Amazing to think some mere child could be so important.’ Cuyàs’s eyes flicked back to Tarrant. ‘Or that the contents of her mind could be so enormously
valuable.’

Gabrielle sensed a new tension in the air, which made the muscles of her belly tighten in fear. Cuyàs was making a point of not looking at her.
He’s thinking of taking me away
from Tarrant
, she thought.

‘Perhaps I should remind you,’ Tarrant stepped closer to Cuyàs, his voice low and dangerous, ‘that Otto Schelling will be here shortly.
If
anything were to go
wrong, or if there were to be any . . .
disagreements
, then I feel sure he would be more than happy to provide the Accord as well as the surviving Uchidan states with the precise
coordinates of your primary bases of operations.’