Marauder (7 page)

She fired a message off to Bash, to let him know she’d be waiting in the ship’s lounge. Then she exited the command deck without allowing herself a backward glance.

She had just got settled in, after grabbing a second squeeze-bulb of Irish coffee from the lounge bar, when Bash entered, accompanied by two other men. The first she
didn’t recognize but the second was immediately familiar, even if she couldn’t quite place him straight away. He was broad-chested and not a little handsome, and he carried himself with
a confidence just shy of arrogance. His companion, by contrast, was as thin as a rail, his hair a dense tangle of blond-brown hair above a goatee beard. Whenever he moved, it was in a slightly
jerky, bird-like fashion.

‘Megan Jacinth?’ asked the moderately familiar one in a loud voice.

She raised her squeeze-bulb in an ironic salute. ‘That’s me.’

She watched as the three of them made their way towards the circle of couches where she was sprawled. From the ease with which the two strangers navigated in the zero gravity, she could tell
that they had both spent a lot of time off-world.

‘Thanks for agreeing to wait for us here,’ said Mr Vaguely Familiar, pulling himself into a seat across from her and sliding an arm through a nearby loop to keep himself from
floating away. His skinny companion pulled himself down next to him, while Bash took his seat right opposite Megan. ‘My name,’ said the more attractive one, ‘is Gregor
Tarrant.’

Gregor Tarrant.
Megan sat up straight, suddenly embarrassed at her casual slouching. ‘I
thought
I recognized you from somewhere. You’re famous.’

Tarrant smiled self-deprecatingly, with a dismissive gesture. ‘Not really.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you
are
. Bash – I mean, Pilot Bashir – told me all about what happened. What you did was incredible.’

Tarrant and his goateed companion both chuckled and grinned. ‘I was just doing my job,’ said Tarrant.

Tarrant had been a junior officer on the
Beauregard
’s sister ship, the
Chesapeake
, on an exploratory expedition to a white-dwarf system sixteen light years from Al-Jahar.
There the
Chesapeake
had come under assault from automated attack systems left dormant since the Shoal–Emissary war of a few centuries earlier.

That attack had taken the expedition completely by surprise. As a result, the
Chesapeake
had suffered a devastating breach that vented its atmosphere and killed a full quarter of its
complement, including its captain, most of its senior staff and one of its two machine-head pilots. Bash was the fortunate one who had survived.

Tarrant, despite his relative inexperience, had somehow rallied the survivors and, regardless of repeated attacks, he had managed to keep them alive inside a hastily pressurized cavern located
on an airless moon, until rescue arrived nearly two months later. It was an extraordinary story, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Tarrant had been only twenty-four standard years old
at the time.

‘I think you’re being coy,’ Megan replied. ‘But I’ll say no more about it if you’d rather I didn’t.’

‘Just as long as you don’t have any unrealistic expectations of me,’ he said, and then gestured to his companion. ‘This is Anil Sifra, and he’s here in an advisory
capacity, as a representative of the First Families.’

Sifra.
Of course. He was from the same bracket as the Schellings and the Beauvoirs who – along with the Sifra Clan – were the most powerful of the Alliance’s founding
families.

Sifra nodded to her politely. ‘I know you must be wondering what the hell we’re doing here.’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ Megan replied, then regretted sounding so flippant.

‘We’re here to make you a proposal,’ Tarrant explained. ‘One we’ve already made to Mr Bashir here. It was his idea to bring you in on this, by the way. I hardly
need tell you that things haven’t been going well for the Three Star Alliance lately.’

‘If by not going well,’ said Megan, ‘you mean the Accord bent us over and ass-fucked us with the terms of their new treaty, then I’d be inclined to agree with
you.’

‘Now it’s my turn to embarrass
you
,’ said Tarrant. ‘I heard all about what you did at Kappa 659. You’re halfway to being a legend yourself, after the way
you bypassed that blockade.’

Kjæregrønnested’s First Families had made their fortune financing long-range expeditions after the Shoal–Emissary war inadvertently opened the galaxy up to humankind.
One of those expeditions had discovered Kjæregrønnested as well as Alyeska and Al-Jahar, all three of them habitable worlds orbiting stars that were separated from each other by no
more than a few light years.

Some amongst those same families had dreamed of creating a society based on their own values, one that reflected the pioneer spirit they believed necessary to the survival of the species out
there in the wider galaxy. These three colonies soon signed a treaty, forming the Three Star Alliance, just a few short years after the Accord – an interstellar polity comprising not only
humanity but a number of neighbouring species – had also come into existence.

The discovery of Meridian ruins beneath the kilometres-deep layer of ice covering much of Alyeska’s surface had been rapidly followed by the further discovery of a derelict Shoal coreship
out in the depths of interstellar space, no more than three light years from Al-Jahar. That abandoned, world-sized starship proved to contain an even more fabulous prize, one whose value could not
be measured: a cache of dozens of undamaged nova drives, enough to allow the Alliance to build its own independent fleet of starships. In one stroke, the Alliance had thus gained the potential to
challenge the growing economic and political power of the Accord.

But as the Accord grew in strength, it introduced more and more stringent regulations regarding the use of nova drives – including those recovered from the said coreship.

Megan was far from unsympathetic to the Accord’s fear that these nova drives might be used as weapons if they fell into the wrong hands. Indeed, the conflict between the Emissaries and the
Shoal had shown just how destructive the devices could be, for in just a few short years the two rival empires had laid waste to vast swathes of the Perseus Arm.

But where she and many others chose to differ was regarding the assumption that the nova drives would be automatically safer under the Accord’s control.

The Accord had then demanded that the Alliance hand over control of their entire superluminal fleet, with the claimed intention of leasing those same ships back to them – but carrying a
permanent contingent of Accord military and technical personnel aboard each of them.

That had been a demand too far for the First Families. When tensions reached a peak, Accord cruisers had set up a blockade of the derelict coreship, cutting off any escape route for the salvage
team at work on removing the last remaining drives.

Megan herself had been the pilot for the expedition sent to try and rescue the blockaded salvage workers.

‘The way some of the other machine-heads talk about you,’ said Tarrant, ‘it seems that what you did there bordered on the supernatural.’

Megan grinned. ‘Now you really
are
embarrassing me.’

‘Apparently you jumped your ship across fifteen AUs, and directly
inside
the coreship itself.’ Tarrant shook his head. ‘Something like that shouldn’t even be
possible.’

‘I swear it wasn’t such a big deal,’ she replied. ‘A large part of the coreship’s outer hull had already been torn away, so that left a pretty big gap to aim
for.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Tarrant, ‘but crossing from a distance of even
one
AU would scare anyone else to death. Look, what would you say if I told you there was a way to
change everything, and put the TSA back on top? In a way that the Accord wouldn’t be able to do anything about?’

Megan glanced at Bash, then turned back to Tarrant. ‘What is it you want from me, exactly?’

‘We’re here,’ said Tarrant, ‘because you’re one of the best machine-head pilots in the Alliance . . . and because we also need the
Beauregard
.’

‘You “need” the
Beauregard
?’ She could hardly mask her incredulity.

‘Please, Megan,’ said Bash, ‘hear him out.’

‘We’re here,’ said Sifra, ‘on the direct orders of Otto Schelling. What we’re now asking you for will be entirely voluntary.’

‘We need you to pilot the
Beauregard
, but leaving immediately,’ explained Tarrant. ‘As soon as you give us the word, Otto Schelling will authorize the payment of half
a million shares in high-value First Family commercial patents, with guaranteed per annum returns, into a private account under your own name.’

She glanced at Bash. ‘This is bullshit, right?’ she asked him. ‘They’re having me on.’

‘No bullshit, Megan – and I already accepted.’ A grin spread across his face. ‘Checked my account this morning and saw the sweetest line of zeros.’

‘The transfer will be handled by the Schellings’ own legal firm under the strictest secrecy,’ continued Sifra, ‘and the deal is cast iron, whatever happens. The Accord
won’t be able to trace it or touch it, either. If you decide you want to be part of this, we’ll authorize that transfer immediately. Think about the opportunities that it could buy for
a machine-head pilot.’

‘It’s enough to buy part-ownership in a ship,’ said Bash. ‘Hell, Megan, think what we could do if we pooled our money. Finance our
own
damn
expedition.’

‘Just what in hell is it you’re planning to do?’ she asked Tarrant.

‘We first need to know if you’re in or not,’ said Sifra.

Megan rolled her eyes. ‘In for
what
, exactly?’

‘A new expedition,’ said Tarrant, ‘deep into the galaxy – to find something called the Wanderer.’

‘What is it, precisely?’

‘You might regret asking me that question, Miss Jacinth, as it’s going to take me a while to explain.’

She looked down at her hand, and noticed the bulb of Irish coffee it was still clutching. She had entirely forgotten it was there.

She took a sip, then sat back, gazing off towards an image of Kjæregrønnested that was turning slowly on a screen at the far end of the lounge.

‘I’m all ears,’ she said.

The story of the Wanderer had started, Tarrant went on to explain, with a discovery made on Alyeska.

Until the discovery of the ruins beneath Alyeska’s ice, the Meridians had remained almost entirely unknown to mankind. Like the Shoal, they had once spread far and wide across the galaxy,
leaving colonies on hundreds of worlds. But, unlike other starfaring species, the Meridians had never stumbled across a Maker cache, and so never acquired the means of faster-than-light travel. It
would therefore have taken any one of their ships tens of thousands of years to travel from one end of their empire to the other.

It rapidly became clear to the archaeologists studying their ruins that, despite this, the Meridians had nonetheless undergone a dramatic spike in technological and scientific development within
a very short time frame. That meant either that the Meridians had indeed found a Maker cache – but somehow failed to take advantage of the faster-than-light technology contained therein
– or that their newfound technological sophistication had arrived by some other route.

What that route might be, Tarrant explained, had remained a mystery until the Schellings came into possession of data attributing this sudden spike to a machine-entity with whom a Meridian
expedition had made contact. They had named this entity – which had apparently been roaming the galaxy for millions of years at sub-light velocities – the ‘Wanderer’.

The Meridians had found the Wanderer willing to communicate, and even to trade information. It was, it seemed, looking for something. But as to what that might be, the Meridians either
hadn’t asked or had failed to record the answer. Analysts working under strictest secrecy had cross-referenced the newly discovered data with the historical records of other known spacefaring
species, quickly finding a correlation with the Atn, and even with the Shoal. They, too, it seemed, had had their own encounters with the Wanderer, albeit at a much later date.

The more they dug, the stranger the story became. The Meridians recorded that the Wanderer had been on the losing side of some kind of war, but there were no records to indicate who that war had
been fought against, or why.

All of this was incidental, however, to the fact that the Wanderer had apparently been blessed with a cornucopia of knowledge far in advance of that possessed by the Meridians. For a species
like the Meridians, however, knowledge was the only commodity of true value.

The Schellings reasoned that if the Wanderer still existed, and if it could be persuaded to impart some of the same knowledge that had triggered a technological and scientific renaissance
amongst the Meridians, then the entire balance of power would shift heavily in the Three Star Alliance’s favour – and then the Accord would finally be forced to come crawling.

Megan finished her coffee and let the bulb float away from her. ‘But if this . . . thing, this Wanderer, is so advanced,’ she asked, ‘what could we possibly have to offer it in
return, assuming it does even want to trade? It’s not just going to give us whatever we ask for without expecting something in return, is it?’

She looked between the two men, noting that their expressions were suddenly neutral.

‘You already have something in mind,’ she said slowly, ‘but you’re not going to tell me what it is – is that it?’

‘That has to stay a secret between me and Anil,’ said Tarrant, ‘and, of course, a few members of the Schelling family.’ He shrugged amiably. ‘Sorry.’

Megan made a face. She never liked being kept in the dark. ‘You really think that if we can find this thing, it’ll really make that much of a difference to the Alliance?’

‘Just a few scraps of scientific knowledge gleaned from the Alyeska digs were enough to make the First Families enormously rich and powerful,’ said Tarrant. ‘Imagine, then,
what the Wanderer could do for us.’