Marauder (42 page)

‘Well?’ asked Schelling. ‘Did the Wanderer get our message?’

Gabrielle’s whole body felt cramped after emerging from the sensorium, her skin slick with sweat and her jaw aching.

‘I’m pretty sure it got it,’ she said, hungrily sucking in air. Bash looked as if the experience had been just as rough for him as well. His head was tipped back, his mouth
open and his chest rising and falling with hummingbird-like rapidity.

‘“Pretty sure” doesn’t cut it,’ snarled the General. ‘We need to be sure it understands very clearly what’ll happen if it doesn’t start
cooperating.’

Some hours had now passed since Gabrielle’s brief and interrupted conversation with Megan. Tarrant meanwhile had not reacted well to the suggestion that they should stay clear of the
Wanderer, nor had he believed Megan’s claim that it had refused to deal with her. As far as he was concerned, this was little more than a thinly veiled ruse designed to dissuade them.

‘I think it understands just fine,’ said Gabrielle, fighting to hide her irritation. General Schelling was, she had long since learned, a man used to getting his own way. ‘I
was very clear about the nova mine.’

‘And what about the negotiations it promised?’ Schelling demanded peevishly.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ replied Gabrielle. ‘I didn’t get anything that felt remotely like a straight answer – or an answer at all.’

Schelling’s face turned a fiery red. Tarrant stepped up beside him and put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember we’re dealing with something entirely alien,’
Tarrant said to him. ‘You can’t always make sense of how something like that might react.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Schelling demanded. ‘Just sit and wait?’

‘That’s exactly what we do,’ Tarrant replied. ‘It’s not as if we have any other choice. But at the first sign that it might already be negotiating with Megan,
we’ll send it off to whatever hell it has waiting for it.’

After they reached orbit above the moon a day later, she and Bash were returned to their quarters having spent some hours in acceleration couches. Entirely worn out, Gabrielle
was soon fast asleep, until she felt a hand shaking her awake some time deep during the
Ingersoll
’s artificial night.

She opened her eyes to see Bash kneeling beside her bunk. At first she stared at him for long seconds, trying to absorb this new development. Finally she sat bolt upright.

‘Bash – how can you . . . ? I mean, how did you . . . ?’ She tripped over her own words, unable to complete a full sentence.

‘I’ve been waiting for the right time,’ he replied.

She rubbed at her face with one hand, still groggy from interrupted sleep and fatigue. ‘Right time? Right time for
what
?’

‘To kill the Wanderer,’ he said. ‘If we can.’

‘I don’t understand. First you’re dead to the world for months . . . and now you’re here actually talking to me?
What
is
going on
?’

He laid a hand over hers. ‘Don’t you remember what I told you?’ he said. ‘I’ve been fighting a war, but now’s the time to end it. But first you have to
understand some things.’

‘What things?’ She was sobbing now, frightened and confused.

He reached out and gently took hold of her other hand as well. ‘I only have a little time – same as before. You just need to listen,’ he said, his face shadowy in the dim light
of the cabin. ‘And listen carefully.’

‘To what?’

In that moment, their quarters vanished from around her.

Gabrielle found herself somewhere else – not in space, exactly, but in a grey and featureless void. She could sense that her physical body lay somewhere nearby, and yet, when she turned to
look for it, she saw only a confusing mass of threads that hung in emptiness, burning with light.

This tangle of threads, she somehow knew, was the
Ingersoll
itself, seen from a perspective she struggled to comprehend. Further away she could see other structures, but on a scale that
defied comprehension.

Think of this as the mainframe that the entire universe runs on
, she heard Bash say.

She twisted around until she spotted a tightly wound knot of light floating in the void close by her. This, she sensed, was Bash.

What happened?
she cried out.
Where are we? What happened to us?

You could call this information space
, said Bash.
The thing you have to understand is that the universe is just one giant computer, computing itself. Dig down far enough into the
quantum level of reality, and all that’s really happening is an exchange of information regarding mass, velocity, energy – all of that, and more. The Makers want to change the
fundamental rules by which all of it works. All this you see is a virtual data system created by races even older than the Makers themselves. It’s threaded deep into the weave of reality, so
deep you can’t ever see it.

And . . . this is where you’ve been? All these years?

Here and so many other places
, said Bash.
When the Wanderer first entered my mind, the last time I was out here, it wanted to pick me apart, to try and understand who we are and how
we work. It took my body and discarded my mind, like a landlord evicting an unwanted tenant. But I didn’t die. I remained in one piece. And every now and then I sneak back into the old place
for a little while, just as I have now.

Then why didn’t the same thing happen to Megan?
asked Gabrielle.

She’s different – just as you’re different
, said Bash.
The Magi changed you; made you too strong.

Are you going to help us? Is that why you came to me just now?

I came to warn you
. The pattern of light shifted slightly.
The Wanderer isn’t a single unified entity, as it appears to be. It’s made up of tens of thousands of
individual craft, just like the Maker Swarms, except that they’re all clustered together into a single body.

So?

So
, said Bash,
that fact alone makes it near as damn indestructible. As long as it can split off even a few of its components and leave them somewhere in the outer part of this
system, if not even further away, it can always reconstitute itself, whatever happens in the meantime to the main part of its body. Each component contains the memories and knowledge of the whole.
So even if most of it – hell, nearly all of it – was destroyed in a nova, it would still find a way to grow back to its former strength, even if it took a thousand years, or ten
thousand. Time means nothing to things like that. All that means it has nothing
– nothing –
to fear from the nova mine. And, when it’s ready to attack, it’ll
separate into its individual components, and the
Ingersoll
will be defenceless in the face of it.

Gabrielle remembered then how the Wanderer always spoke in a clashing multiplicity of voices.
You said the Wanderer was keeping a
secret, one you were trying to find?

And I found it
, said Bash.
Thanks to Megan
.

What did she do?

The Wanderer launched an attack on her Magi ship. It was a ruse, so it could ransack the ship’s memory banks and find what it was looking for – and it found it.

But what is it?
asked Gabrielle.

In order to help you really understand the answer to that question, I need to show you something, Gaby. That way, you’ll understand what the Wanderer intends, not just for the human
race, but for all life throughout the galaxy
.

The void twisted around Gabrielle, and she now saw the Wanderer, surrounded by billions of blazing stars.

She was in the heart of the galaxy, witnessing events that had taken place millions of years before. She was seeing the Core Transcendence in all its terrible glory.

New data flooded into Gabrielle’s implants, indistinguishable from her natural memory. The Makers, she learned, had transformed the supermassive black hole occupying the centre of the
Milky Way into a kind of computer. In some way, they had used entangled pairs of virtual particles along the edge of the black hole’s event horizon – the point beyond which light could
never escape it – as a means of processing phenomenal amounts of data. And this, in turn, somehow allowed the Makers to dig deep into the underlying informational structure of space-time
itself, and thereby alter it on a fundamental level.

It dawned on her then just what the Makers were doing. They were remaking the universe by hacking its operational constants.

Now do you see?
asked Bash.
The Wanderer wants to use the
Ingersoll
’s drive to fly itself directly to the core of the Milky Way. Because the nova drive takes a ship
out of normal space, it’ll be able to make a kamikaze run right past the defences the Makers have erected all around the black hole.

And then?

It’ll detonate its nova drive at the point where it crosses the event horizon, disrupting the processes run by the Makers. Done the right way, it could cause a temporary but very real
shift in certain physical constants, destroying not only the Makers but every living thing for up to a couple of hundred thousand light years’ distance
.

The whole galaxy, in other words. It was getting hard to take in.

But surely it’d take hundreds of thousands of years for a change like that to spread outwards from the core of the galaxy, even at the speed of light?

No, Gabrielle
, said Bash,
it’s going to be instantaneous, because the effect is propagating through information space, not through space-time as we know it. Light speed,
gravity, mass – none of those mean anything here. They’re all epiphenomena of information space and are therefore subject to it, rather than the other way around.

But why do that? Why destroy all life in the galaxy?

The Wanderer isn’t programmed to care about anything but killing the Makers
, Bash replied.
Anything else is just collateral damage. The only time it ever thinks about other
life forms is when they have something it can put to its own advantage.

But it still has to get hold of the
Ingersoll
’s nova drive
, she pointed out.
And Tarrant and the rest aren’t in any hurry to let that happen.

It’s already too late for them
, said Bash.