Mammoth Books presents Merlin's Gun (2 page)

Yet now there was this newcomer. Sora crisscrossed the crater, laying a line of metallic monofilament; doubling back on her trail many times until a glistening scribble covered the crater. It looked like the work of a drunken spider, but the familiar assured her it would focus more than satisfactorily at radio frequencies. As for the antenna, that was where Sora came in: her suit was sheathed in a conductive epidermis; a shield against plasma and ion-beam weaponry. By modulating current through it, the familiar could generate pulses of radio emission. The radio waves would fly away from Sora in all directions, but a good fraction would be reflected back from the crater in parallel lines. Sora had to make gliding jumps from one rim of the crater to the other, so that she passed through the focus momentarily, synchronized to the intervals when the other ship entered view.

After two hours of light-transit time, the newcomer vectored toward the shard. When it was much closer, Sora secreted herself in a snowhole and set her suit to thermal stealth-mode. The ship nosed in; stiletto-sleek, devilishly hard to see against the stars. It was elongated, carbon-black, and nubbed by propulsion modules and weapons of unguessable function, arrayed around the hull like remora. Yet it carried Cohort markings, and had none of the faintly organic attributes of a Husker vessel. Purple flames knifed from the ship's belly, slowing it over the crater. After examining the mirror, the ship moved toward the pod and anchored itself to the ice with grapples.

“How did something that small ever get here?”

“Doesn't need to be big,” the familiar said. “Not if it uses the Waynets.”

After a few minutes, an access ramp lowered down, kissing the ice. A spacesuited figure ambled down the ramp. He moved toward the pod, kicking up divots of frost. The man – he was clearly male, judging by the contours of his suit – knelt down and examined the pod. Ribbed and striped by luminous paint, his suit made him seem naked, scarred by ritual marks of warriorhood. He fiddled with the sleeve, unspooling something before shunting it into a socket in the side of the pod. Then he stood there, head slightly cocked.

“Nosy bastard,” Sora whispered.

“Don't be so ungrateful. He's trying to rescue you.”

“Are you in yet?”

“Can't be certain.” The familiar had copied part of itself into the pod before Sora had left. “His suit might not even have the capacity to store me.”

“I'm going to make my presence known.”

“Be careful, will you?”

Sora stood, dislodging a flurry of ice. The man turned to her sharply, the spool disengaging from the pod and whisking back into his sleeve. The stripes on his suit flicked over to livid reds and oranges. He opened a fist to reveal something lying in his palm; a designator for the weapons on the ship, swiveling out from the hull like snake's heads.

“If I were you,” the familiar said, “I'd assume the most submissive posture you can think of.”

“Sod that.”

Sora took steps forward, trying not to let her fear translate into clumsiness. Her radio chirped to indicate that she was online to the other suit.

“Who are you? Can you understand me?”

“Perfectly well,” the man said, after negligible hesitation. His voice was deep and actorly; devoid of any accent Sora knew. “You're Cohort. We speak Main, give or take a few kiloyears of linguistic drift.”

“You speak it pretty well for someone who's been out there for ten thousand years.”

“And how would one know that?”

“Do the sums. Your ship's from seven thousand years earlier than my own era. And I've just taken three thousand years of catnap.”

“Ah. Perhaps if I'd arrived in time to waken you with a kiss you wouldn't be quite so grumpy. But your point was?

“We shouldn't be able to understand each other at all. Which makes me wonder if you're lying to me.”

“I see.” For a moment she thought he heard him chuckling to himself; almost a catlike purring. “What I'm wondering is why I need to listen to this stuff and nonsense, given that I'm not the one in current need of rescuing.”

His suit calmed; aggressor markings cooling to neutral blues and yellows. He let his hand drop slowly.

“I'd say,” the familiar said, “that he has a fairly good point.”

Sora stepped closer. “I'm a little edgy, that's all. Comes with the territory.”

“You were attacked?”

“Slightly. A swarm took out my swallowship.”

“Bad show,” the man said, nodding. “Haven't seen swallowships for two and a half kiloyears. Too hard for the halo factories to manufacture, once the Huskers started targeting motherbases. The Cohort regressed again – fell back on fusion pulse drives. Before very long they'll be back to generation starships and chemical rockets.”

“Thanks for all the sympathy.”

“Sorry . . . it wasn't my intention to sound callous. It's simply that I've been traveling. It gives one a certain – how shall I say? Loftiness of perspective? Means I've kept more up to date with current affairs than you have. That's how I understand you.” With his free hand he tapped the side of his helmet. “I've a database of languages running half way back to the Flourishing.”

“Bully for you. Who are you, by the way?”

“Ah. Of course. Introductions.” He reached out the free hand, this time in something approximating welcome. “Merlin.”

It was impossible; it cut against all common sense, but she knew who he was.

It was not that they had ever met. But everyone knew of Merlin: there was no word for him other than legend. Seven, or more properly ten thousand years ago, it was Merlin who had stolen something from the Cohort, vanishing into the Galaxy on a quest for what could only be described as a weapon too dreadful to use. He had never been seen again – until, apparently, now.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” Sora said, when he had shown her to the bridge of the ship he called
Tyrant
; a spherical chamber outfitted with huge black control seats, facing a window of flawless metasapphire overlooking cometary ice.

“Don't overdo the gratitude,” the familiar said.

Merlin shrugged. “You're welcome.”

“And sorry if I acted a little edgy.”

“Forget it. As you say, comes with the territory. Actually, I'm rather glad I found you. You wouldn't believe how scarce human company is these days.”

“Nobody ever said it was a friendly Galaxy.”

“Less so now, believe me. Now the Cohort's started losing whole star-systems. I've seen world after world shattered by the Huskers; whole strings of orbiting habitats gutted by nuclear fire. The war's in its terminal stages, and the Cohort isn't in anything resembling a winning position.” Merlin leaned closer to her, sudden enthusiasm burning in his eyes. “But I've found something that can make a difference, Sora. Or at least, I have rather a good idea where one might find it.”

She nodded slowly.

“Let's see. That wouldn't be Merlin's fabulous gun, by any chance?”

“You're still not entirely sure I'm who I say I am, are you?”

“I've one or two nagging doubts.”

“You're right, of course.” He sighed theatrically and gestured around the bridge. In the areas not reserved for control readouts, the walls were adorned with treasure: trinkets, finery, and jewels of staggering artistry and beauty, glinting with the hues of the rarest alloys, inset with precious stones, shaped by the finest lapidary skill of a thousand worlds. There were chips of subtly colored ceramic, or tiny white-light holograms of great brilliance. There were daggers and brooches, ornate ceremonial lasers and bracelets, terrible swords and grotesque, carnelian-eyed carnival masques.

“I thought,” Merlin said, “that this would be enough to convince you.”

He had sloughed the outer layer of his suit, revealing himself to be what she had on some level feared: a handsome, broad-shouldered man who in every way conformed to the legend she had in mind. Merlin dressed luxuriously, encrusted in jewelry which was, nonetheless, at the dour end of the spectrum compared to what was displayed on the walls. His beard was carefully trimmed and his long auburn hair hung loose, evoking leonine strength. He radiated magnificence.

“Oh, it's pretty impressive,” Sora said. “Even if a good fraction of it must have been looted. And maybe I am half convinced. But you have to admit, it's quite a story.”

“Not from my perspective.” He was fiddling with an intricate ring on one forefinger. “Since I left on my quest” – he spoke the word with exquisite distaste – ‘I've lived rather less than eleven years of subjective time. I was as horrified as anyone when I found my little hunt had been magnified into something so . . . epic.”

“Bet you were.”

“When I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won, within a handful of centuries.” Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. “But even then,” Merlin continued, “things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.”

“So you became a mercenary.”

“Freelancer, if you don't mind. Point was, I realized that I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.” He smiled. “You see, even legends are haunted by legends!”

He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin's lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures predating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together – as well as he could – an underlying framework of what might just be fact.

“There'd been another war,” Merlin said. “Smaller than ours, spread across a much smaller volume of space – but no less brutal for all that.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Forty or forty five kiloyears ago – not long after the Waymakers vanished, but about twenty kays before anything we'd recognize as the Cohort.” Merlin's eyes seemed to gaze over; an odd, stentorian tone entered his voice “In the long dark centuries of Mid-Galactic history, when a thousand cultures rose, each imagining themselves immune to time, and whose shadows barely reach us across the millennia . . .”

“Yes. Very poetic. What
kind
of war, anyway? Human versus human, or human versus alien, like this one?”

“Does it matter? Whoever the enemy were, they aren't coming back. Whatever was used against them was so deadly, so powerful, so
awesome,
that it stopped an entire war!”

“Merlin's gun.”

He nodded, lips tight, looking almost embarrassed. “As if I had some prior claim on it, or was even in some sense responsible for it!” He looked at Sora very intently, the glittering finery of the ship reflected in the gold of his eyes. “I haven't seen the gun, or even been near it, and it's only recently that I've had anything like a clear idea of what it might actually be.”

“But you think you know where it is?”

“I think so. It isn't far. And it's in the eye of a storm.”

They lifted from the shard, spending eight days in transit to the closest Way, most of the time in frostwatch. Sora had her own quarters; a spherical-walled suite deep in
Tyrant
's thorax, outfitted in maroon and burgundy. The ship was small, but fascinating to explore, an object lesson in the differences between the Cohort that had manufactured this ship, and the one Sora had been raised in. In many respects, the ship was more advanced than anything from her own time, especially in the manner of its propulsion, defenses, and sensors. In other areas, the Cohort had gained expertise since Merlin's era. Merlin's proctors were even stupider than those Sora had been looking after when the Husker attack began. There were no familiars in Merlin's time, either, and she saw no reason to educate him about her own neural symbiote.

“Well,” Sora said, when she was alone. “What can you tell me about the legendary Merlin?”

“Nothing very much at this point.” The familiar had been communicating with the version of itself that had infiltrated
Tyrant,
via Merlin's suit. “If he's impersonating the historical figure we know as Merlin, he's gone to extraordinary lengths to make the illusion authentic. All the logs confirm that his ship left Cohort-controlled space around ten kiloyears ago, and that he's been traveling ever since.”

“He's back from somewhere. It would help if we knew where.”

“Tricky, given that we have no idea about the deep topology of the Waynet. I can search the starfields for recognizable features, but it'll take a long time, and there'll still be a large element of guesswork.”