Marauder (46 page)

All the same, they could not afford to leave without witnessing the Wanderer’s destruction; only then could they be sure.

This was not the first time Megan had watched a star die, for she had personally witnessed the destruction of three during that other, previous, life.

Twelve hours after the Wanderer had ripped the nova drive out from the
Ingersoll
, the Ship of the Covenant detected a second neutrino burst from the star. In the intervening time, they
had departed the moon to shelter in the cone of shadow behind the night side of the moon’s parent planet. There the Magi ship could, for a short time, carry out remote observations even while
the nova raged.

Bash was now lodged in his own cabin, which had appeared, newly formed, shortly after they exited the airlock bay. She had wordlessly guided him inside, finding there articles of clothing she
remembered him wearing years before, and long before he lost his mind to the Wanderer.

The Librarian had recreated it all from her own memories, of course, though she did not like to be reminded of how easily it could reach inside her head.

Before long, the rim of the planet behind which they were sheltering began to burn with incandescent light as the wavefront of the nova detonation struck it. Megan saw valleys filling up with
liquid fire, and the sharp-edged silhouettes of mountain peaks melting.

‘Is there any way of seeing the Wanderer?’ she asked. ‘Can we be sure it hasn’t found a way to jump out of range?’

We tapped into a visual feed from the
Ingersoll
’s sensor arrays just before it was destroyed,
replied the Librarian.
You may find it interesting viewing.

Screens appeared before Megan, showing a multiplicity of views from the
Ingersoll
’s perspective. The cameras had survived just long enough to show the star
expanding in size, growing to fill the entire sky with terrifying speed.

The perspective shifted to show the Wanderer under extreme magnification, accelerating towards the system’s outer darkness. It had by now fully regained its former shape. Ancillary data
informed her that it had engaged in a programme of rapidly re-engineering a number of its components so as to absorb the energy the nova drive required for it to make an interstellar jump.

But too late.

She watched the wavefront of the nova strike the Wanderer. It began to come apart again, unable to maintain its integrity beneath the onslaught of superheated plasma expanding at a substantial
fraction of the speed of light. The whole thing had an uncanny, dreamlike quality to it, perhaps partly because what she was seeing there had occurred in millionths of a second, and was slowed down
for her benefit.

The cameras flared white, and died.

It was closer to making its escape than you might prefer to know
, continued the Librarian.
There are still a few Wanderer components surviving in this system’s Oort region,
more than a light year out, so it can still rebuild itself, given time.

‘But how long will that take?’ asked Megan.

A thousand years, more or less.

She nodded and let her shoulders sag. ‘It doesn’t have a nova drive any more. We don’t have to worry about it again for a long time yet, if ever. I think that’s good
enough for now, don’t you?’

She left her own cabin and made her way through to Bash’s, where she laid her head on his lap and succumbed to racking sobs. She had lost Gabrielle, and now she feared Bash was gone
forever alongside the Wanderer, leaving behind only this hollow, helpless shell. She was alone again.

That’s not quite true
, the Librarian reminded her.

In that same moment, she felt fingers brushing gently against her hair. It took her a moment to realize that she was not imagining it.

Over the next several hours the Magi ship listened out for those few remaining components that the Wanderer had seeded throughout the system’s Oort region, but it soon
became clear that they were running silent, waiting for the intruder to depart before beginning their long resurrection. To flush all of them out, and destroy them, would take decades or even
centuries, the Librarian explained to Megan. Even then, there could be no guarantee of finding all of them. Besides, the Wanderer had almost certainly left components behind in other star systems
it had visited, and from those it could eventually reconstitute itself.

But when that day came, the Librarian assured her, it would find other Magi ships ready and waiting for it.

The planet behind which they had sheltered from the nova inevitably began to disintegrate under the onslaught of superheated plasma, so the Magi ship made a short-range jump of half a light
year. The craft’s encounter with the Wanderer had seriously depleted its energy resources, and it now needed a few days to prepare for the first in a series of much longer jumps.

Megan – or Dakota, as she had once again come to think of herself – hardly needed to ask where it was taking them next. They were clearly on their way to a confrontation with the
Maker Swarm.

After that first brief touch of his fingers, Bash had reverted to his familiar near-vegetative state, and remained that way despite her desperate coaxing and prompting. She returned to her own
quarters, and woke later from a long and dreamless sleep only to find that Bash, and even his newly formed quarters, had completely disappeared.

She stared, dumbfounded, at the smooth expanse of wall where his cabin door had been. She then yelled out for the Librarian, demanding its presence instantly.

‘We are merely attempting to repair the damage done to your friend by the Marauder,’ explained the Librarian, from beside her shoulder. As ever it appeared from nowhere, as if it had
been hovering just out of sight, unnoticed and unheard until it was required. ‘In your past life, your body was similarly absorbed into the ship’s own flesh in order to carry out
necessary changes and repairs.’

‘You don’t do anything for nothing,’ she remarked. ‘And you certainly didn’t ask my damn permission.’

‘We didn’t need to,’ the Librarian replied, ‘as he gave it himself.’

She stared dumbfounded at it. ‘He did?’

‘He well understands the necessity of the extensive rebuilding of his neural pathways that must be undertaken,’ the Librarian continued. ‘And, yes, it is also an opportunity to
interrogate his implants for more information about the Wanderer and the Core Transcendence. We know very little about the civilization that created the Wanderer, after all.’

Bash returned a week later and she found, to her delight, that he seemed to be more aware of his surroundings than ever before. He was even able to speak a few simple words,
though that clearly exhausted him, and after less than a minute his eyes would drift away from hers, staring at some unseen horizon. His full recovery, assuming the ship was successful in aiding
him, was clearly going to be long and protracted. There would, she realized with sadness, be none of those sudden bursts of lucidity that Gabrielle claimed to have experienced in Bash’s
presence.

When he vanished a second time, she tried to suppress her anxiety over what changes the ship might be making to him, and instead distracted herself by linking into the Magi ship’s external
senses and watching the face of the galaxy shift and morph with each successive jump across unimaginable gulfs of space. Before long, the Calafat-Holt Cluster, in which the Wanderer had been hiding
for so long, had visually shrunk to nothing.

She thought often of Gabrielle’s baby, Evie, and knew her duty was to find her. Knowing that the Maker Swarm had to be dealt with first did nothing to reduce her heartache every time she
thought about what might have happened to the child.

Bash this time returned to her after a period of little more than a day, and his disappearances and subsequent reappearances would soon become a regular occurrence. She could never predict how
long he might remain with her on each occasion, and she fought to suppress the fear that these absences might grow longer and longer, until finally he never returned at all.

She dreamed, on one occasion, of wandering through a house where some of the rooms were left forever in darkness, while others remained brightly lit. Somehow or other, she realized upon waking,
she had been dreaming about Bash. But each time he returned – and, to her relief, he always did come back – he seemed a little more voluble, a little more his old self, until eventually
the intervals between his absences grew longer and longer, and then they ceased entirely.

But, as much as it gladdened her to see him restored, it was clear that something had changed in him. He was quieter, more withdrawn, no longer as effusive as he had once been. But, then, she
had changed as well; death, as she had long since learned, tended to do that to a person. And for a long time Bash had been more dead than alive.

Then, just a few months away from their final encounter with the Maker Swarm, the ship detoured to pick up a passenger.

Like all its kind, the Atn reminded Dakota of a giant turtle crossbred with a scrapheap. It now stood before them, in yet another docking bay inside the Magi ship which had not
existed until moments before. Its massive wedge-shaped head swung from side to side as it regarded first Dakota, then Bash and finally the Librarian. A scratchy and abrasive sound, like a heavily
distorted trumpet, eventually emanated from it.

‘It says hello,’ explained the Librarian, standing on the creature’s other side.

‘That was saying hello?’ joked Bash. ‘What the hell does it sound like when it’s angry?’

He enunciated each word very carefully, in the manner of someone unused to exercising their vocal cords. His voice still faltered occasionally even now, and had not yet regained the quiet
strength that Dakota remembered.

The Librarian regarded him with a perplexed expression, then turned to Dakota to say, ‘I’ve prepared quarters for our guest.’

‘Just to be clear,’ persisted Bash, ‘you’re seriously telling me this thing can really stop the Swarm?’

‘We believe, or at least hope, it can,’ the Librarian replied, ‘with the aid of data we recovered from the Wanderer regarding the means by which that entity once destroyed an
entire Swarm.’

‘Right.’ Bash nodded, still looking far from convinced. ‘A bunch of Magi ships specially designed for the purpose couldn’t pull it off, but this septic tank on legs can .
. . how, exactly?’

Dakota failed to suppress a grin. ‘You know,’ she said to the Librarian, ‘you really haven’t been very forthcoming on just
how
this is going to work.’

‘Or about our stopping here,’ added Bash. ‘You
might
have mentioned it sooner than you did.’

They hadn’t been told about this rendezvous until just a few days before, when Dakota had noticed, from her regular monitoring of their progress across the galaxy, that their
faster-than-light jumps were becoming shorter and shorter, arrowing in on a particular region deep in interstellar space, and half a dozen light years from any star. Even when the Magi ship had
matched course and speed with an Atn clade-world – an asteroid converted into a combination of living quarters and space-bound manufactory – the Librarian had been vague as to why.

‘We now understand,’ said the Librarian, ‘the means by which the Wanderer destroyed another Swarm. By using that method, we have been running simulations to identify the
optimum approach to neutralizing this Swarm, and it became rapidly apparent that our greatest chance of success in doing so lies with the Atn. We would have been more forthcoming before now but,
until we felt sure of engaging the strategy with the highest chance of success, there was really very little to tell.’

‘But there’s still just the one of him?’ Bash insisted. ‘Or her. It. Whatever.’

‘I’m guessing,’ said Dakota, ‘this has something to do with the Atn’s original purpose. I mean the reason they were created.’

‘Huh?’ Bash stared at her.

The Librarian glanced over at him. ‘A long time ago,’ it explained, ‘the first Atn were fashioned out of a Maker Swarm’s components.’

‘Seriously?’ said Bash, looking between the two of them as the Atn shifted and rumbled and turned its head this way and that. Dakota wondered if it understood what they were
saying.

‘They were the Magi’s first attempt at destroying the Swarms,’ Dakota explained. ‘They essentially reprogrammed a Swarm in order to hunt down other Swarms, but somewhere
down the line they forgot their purpose.’

‘How do you know all this, Megan?’ he asked.

‘From my previous life,’ she said. ‘I found out a lot about them from a Shoal member I met a couple of times. And it’s not Megan any more, remember?’

‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘I keep forgetting.’

Sure you do
, she thought. Bash was clearly having a hard time dealing with her sudden re-adoption of her previous identity.

‘The Atn essentially evolved to become a new species,’ the Librarian continued. ‘They were only one of many possible solutions to the problem of the Swarms – solutions
including the Magi ships.’

‘So why not reprogram the Atn again, and get
them
to wipe out the Swarms?’ asked Bash.

‘They’re a sentient species,’ said Dakota, ‘and they possess free will. So you can’t just go randomly repurposing them like that.’ She cast a wary look at the
Librarian. ‘Please tell me that’s not what you’re intending to do.’

‘No,’ the Librarian reassured her. ‘Our friend here –’ it reached out to pat the alien’s flank – ‘is going to do something much more
interesting.’

‘Well, whatever the hell it’s going to do,’ said Bash, watching as the creature suddenly lurched towards the exit leading from the docking bay, its joints scraping and rasping
with every movement, ‘it’s either going to be fucking spectacular or the biggest anticlimax in history.’

Once they resumed their voyage towards the Swarm, their Atn passenger immediately began a long and laborious process of rebuilding itself. The quarters created for it by the
Librarian resembled nothing so much as a garage constructed by a blind man, crammed as it was with various engineering implements that moved and operated according to the Atn’s will. She and
Bash made a point of visiting it on occasion, watching in wonder as the Atn replaced first its limbs and then its carapace, until it resembled something chillingly close to a Swarm component. If it
was even aware of their presence, it showed no sign of it.