Marauder (17 page)

Megan slept for twelve straight hours before she awoke with a chill on her skin. She had dreamed of floating in darkness, listening to a voice that was like nothing she had
ever heard before. It had been indistinct, as if she was hearing some muffled conversation through a wall.

Then the memory of the past few days came crashing back down on her. She lay there with her eyes still closed, wondering where she could find the will to survive the coming days, and where to .
. .

An idea came to her.

She dragged herself out of her cot, still thinking it over. She was due to relieve Bash, and she knew that if she didn’t get moving soon, Tarrant would come looking for her. And the
thought of him walking into her quarters was more than she could stand.

She stumbled over to the tiny kitchenette, dialling up a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge laced with as many neuro-enhancement supplements as she could persuade the ship to give her without
making it think she was aiming for a deliberate overdose. While she ate, she linked back into the ship’s data-net, her mind still churning over the possibilities.

For the first time in a long while, she started to feel excited.

She discovered that Bash had been keeping busy. Maps of the target system were arranged everywhere around his datascape, including images of all of the inner planets.

he said, sensing her electronic presence hovering nearby.

she replied. The enhancements were kicking in, making her feel as awake as if she’d just plunged herself bodily into a
pool of ice water.

sent Megan.

sent Bash.

few advantages we have over those two sons of bitches.>

Beauregard
to get ourselves home, Bash.>

He laughed.

There was a significant pause before he replied.

Beauregard
’s nova drive and install it in one of the lifeboats. We’d have to make modifications, a lot of them, but—>

or Tarrant even
noticing
?>

Megan felt her face grow hot, but forged on regardless. automatic most of the time, anyway, producing replacement drive-spines, hull components and all the rest of the stuff the ship needs to keep itself functioning. If we programmed them to make
modifications to one of the lifeboats, there’s really very little chance they’d get to know about it.>

sent Bash,

she retorted.

long.>

He was silent again for a moment. he said eventually.

lot less time between jumps. We can make it back home a hell of a lot faster than a ship massing as much as the
Beauregard
does.>

designed to remove a nova drive from a ship in order to prevent its capture. It needs the permission of the registered senior crew before the command deck AI will accept it. And right now, that
means Tarrant.>

she said, the
Kelvin
without warning. If it attacks the
Beauregard
as well, that’s when its systems can trigger a core dump and push the nova drive outside the hull. But we need to
have the modified lifeboat ready to go the moment the Wanderer makes its move.>

<
If
it makes its move,> sent Bash. <
If
the ship’s integrity is damaged.
If
both Tarrant and Sifra, by some miracle, fail to notice what’s going
on. Do you see how much of a long shot all of this is?
If
,
if
, and
if
.>

She laughed.

you
haven’t ever done that. Rather be doing something than nothing, baby. And if we’re going to get screwed, might as well try and screw them back,
right?>

she said, a grin spreading across her face. its name is, and get the hell home.>

sent Bash, we’re going to do this, let’s make sure we do it
right
.>

He signed off. Megan picked up her coffee and found it had turned cold. She knew Bash didn’t really believe the plan could work. And maybe he was right. But he was also right when he had
said it was better than doing nothing.

She still hadn’t lost her sense of excitement. She would
make
it work.

The next few days, prior to their final jump into the system, were only outwardly uneventful. Bash ran some simulations and used them to develop a set of custom modifications
for the lifeboats, without Tarrant or Sifra becoming any the wiser. Before long, the engineering deck’s fabricators were stripping down a lifeboat in preparation for rebuilding it.

Megan meanwhile prepared the way for the core dump that would eject the
Beauregard
’s nova drive into space. The mounting within which the drive nestled sported a cluster of
miniaturized drive-spines, making it a self-contained starship in its own right. Following an emergency core dump, it could, if necessary, jump to any one of a number of pre-programmed
destinations, in order to evade capture.

But if the Wanderer didn’t attack, she and Bash were going to have to figure out something else. She wondered if it might be possible to provoke the Wanderer in some way, but, given that
they still didn’t know how to get it even to respond to them, the chances seemed remote.

‘You can’t even get the Wanderer to acknowledge our signal,’ she said in exasperation, later that day, as she stepped back down from the chair to find Tarrant
waiting for her. ‘Except I got the distinct impression that the
Kelvin
’s crew found some way to talk with it before it attacked.’

Tarrant had been sitting with one booted foot up on a console, turning a Freeholder knife this way and that under the deck lights. ‘That’s correct,’ he replied, without looking
up.

‘So what happens when we get there?’ she asked. ‘How
are
you going to talk to it? Shouldn’t you have told us that by now?’

He gave her a thin smile. ‘It’ll all be taken care of soon enough,’ was all he said.

Five days after its crew’s violent confrontation on the command deck, the
Beauregard
finally ramped up for a long jump into the target system, with Megan
occupying the chair. Sifra’s idea of using Meridian hailing codes had failed to provoke any kind of response, which left her wondering what the two men would do, should the alien entity still
prove unwilling to communicate at closer range.

Then the stars around the
Beauregard
changed abruptly, and new data from the external sensors began flooding into her datascape. She pushed most of it to one side, for the moment
engaging solely with the incoming visuals.

She floated in space, her virtual body immune to the cold and radiation. Great billowing clouds of gas obscured the star itself, the colour of the clouds ranging from deep red to brown and
yellow. Somewhere at the heart of those clouds lay a single massive star comprising more than twenty standard solar masses, its outer layers stripping away as it entered its last few million years
of life.

According to the
Kelvin
’s initial survey, a few tiny rocky worlds orbited the giant, but this close in, and with so much interference affecting their long-range sensors, it was
nearly impossible to acquire accurate readings on anything. The gas and dust clouds were so dense that the Wanderer could be hiding almost anywhere amongst them and indeed, if it weren’t for
the original beacon signal to home in on they might never have been able to figure out where within the system it might be.

As hiding places went, thought Megan, there could be few better.

One of those worlds was a pockmarked and airless wasteland with a largish moon, about a thousand kilometres in diameter, around which the Wanderer currently orbited.

Once she’d run a standard all-systems check following the latest jump, Megan returned to the short-range visuals that the
Kelvin
had recorded during its closest encounter with the
Wanderer. Something kept drawing her back to those pictures of twisted, root-like limbs extending from a central mass that measured at least a couple of kilometres across. They never failed to make
her skin crawl. The Wanderer looked more like a wind-tossed seed coated in barbs than the product of some ancient civilization.

She zoomed in on the image, noting yet again the peculiarly granular quality of the Wanderer’s hull. It looked as if it had been smashed into tens of thousands of pieces, then carefully
glued back into a misshapen whole.

Something brushed against her thoughts.

Something alien.

She swallowed hard and opened her eyes to the pitch darkness inside the chair’s folded-in petals. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, as if something was lurking in the dark unseen.

She sensed Bash coming online. he asked.

was
, until a couple of seconds ago.>

he replied.

she sent.

Bash’s response was full of scorn.

message coming from it, but we both experienced something that I’m pretty sure only a machine-head could understand or experience.>

sent Bash, us
. Specifically, you and me.>

Megan felt her eyes widen, her hands gripping the armrest of her chair.

we’re
machines too – because
of our implants.>