Marauder (24 page)

The two men glared at each other above fixed smiles. Then light flared from behind them, and Gabrielle turned to see the dropship from which they had just disembarked lifting up and accelerating
into the sky.

The tension broke, and Cuyàs laughed. ‘That’s what I like about you,’ he said, grinning. ‘You’re a snake, Gregor Tarrant, and too damn smart for your own
good.’

Tarrant took hold of Gabrielle’s arm, guiding her up a ramp and into the rear of the truck, where she took a seat on one of the two facing benches. A couple of the Freeholders meanwhile
climbed into the front cabin, where Tarrant joined them, chatting with them briefly as the truck ground into motion.

‘He was going to take me from you, wasn’t he?’ said Gaby, her voice full of scorn after Tarrant had stepped back through, to take a seat opposite her.

‘You heard what I said. He knows it would be over for them. He was just testing to see how far he could push me.’

‘You don’t feel even an ounce of regret for everything you’ve done, do you?’

‘It’s a fact of life that innocent people get hurt on the path towards a greater good, Gabrielle. I really wish it was otherwise.’

He actually believes that
, she realized. And there was nothing she could do or say that would change his mind or cause him to see things any differently.

She stared out of the window of the truck, thinking of the life growing inside her belly, and wondered if she would live long enough to ever see its face.

Megan boosted Sarbakshian’s jump-car high into Redstone’s stratosphere, the force of acceleration crushing her back into her seat. The pressure relented as the
landscape became more curved, until finally the car reached low orbit and she became weightless.

She watched the dawn chase the night across the planet’s northern hemisphere. Even from this altitude, the damage done to the Demarchy was clearly enormous. Great brown and grey streaks
mottled the entire west coast of the continent on which the Demarchy lay. The lights of cities and outlying settlements speckled the globe everywhere but along that coast. She dreaded to think of
what it must be like for the few survivors wandering through the ruins down there.

She began thinking about what lay ahead. The Tabernacle was rife with speculation about just when the Accord would send heavy forces into the Montos de Frenezo to strike back against the
Freehold forces hiding there. She had, at most, a few days to track Bash down and get him out before that entire mountain range became one huge battleground.

Redstone revolved beneath her, the Demarchy slipping into night while another, craggier continent came into view. The jump-car began dipping downwards, shaped-fields flickering into life all
around its hull as it roared on through the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Less than two hours after departing Aguirre, the vehicle was cruising just a few hundred metres above a gorge in the foothills of the Montos de Frenezo. A river lying to the east sparkled blue
and white.

Alerts began to flower around Megan, warning her that she was entering an Accord restricted zone. She swept them away, focusing instead on the dusty jagged peaks ahead. She was now fewer than a
hundred klicks from where Sarbakshian’s tracer told her that Sifra’s dropship had only recently touched down.

Something appeared then on the jump-car’s radar, about a hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of her current location. Whatever it was, it was clearly too small to be carrying
passengers.

The radar display floating before her blinked and changed. The blip was now only a hundred and thirty kilometres away, and closing in on her fast.

She felt her brow prickle with sweat. That had to mean it was a missile of some kind. Possibly it had been launched automatically, but almost certainly it belonged to the Freehold.

She tried to see if she could pick up echoes from its internal circuitry, something that might allow her to gain access to its control systems and divert it. But when that didn’t work, she
wasn’t really surprised. Weapons and bombs had actually become dumber and cruder over the past few centuries, making them proof them against such attempts at remote intervention. The best she
could hope for was to outrun it.

The blip jumped again. Suddenly it was a great deal closer, altering its course slightly to match hers, and still closing.

Definitely a missile
, she thought. However fast Sarbakshian’s pride and joy might be, the missile was clearly a lot faster. She could try and outmanoeuvre it, but the g-forces
required would render her unconscious, possibly even kill her.

That left her with a simple choice: land now or die.

The blip moved once more. It was now just ninety kilometres away.

She pushed a map of the mountain range into the air next to her, doing her best to stay calm and not panic. She saw a glowing dot that represented Sifra’s dropship, while another dot
represented the encroaching missile.

She felt a jolt of shock when she realized just how fast it was closing. Seventy-five kilometres . . .

Sixty-five . . .

Sixty . . .

She was beginning to wonder if she would have time even to land before it hit her.

She brought the jump-car right down until it was skimming just above the ground. Meanwhile the gorge had disappeared behind her, the jump-car nosing over jumbled peaks, and dipping down again as
it followed the course of a winding river valley.

The valley walls began to widen and become less steep, merging with the foothills of a tall and particularly forbidding-looking peak rising to the East.

Megan searched frantically for some place flat enough for her to land. The missile was now only twenty-five kilometres away, and she could almost feel it nosing up behind her.

There
. She spotted a flat pebbled area to the north-west, where the valley twisted to one side. She set the jump-car instantly to land, its propulsion fields flickering as it lost
speed.

Fifteen kilometres. Megan realized she was holding her breath.

She pulled herself out of her seat and ran into the hold, locating the secret bulkhead door and hauling out as many of Sarbakshian’s weapons as she could. She threw them through the
doorway leading into the cockpit.

Ten kilometres. She looked up front and saw dust blowing up around the windshield, as the jump-car settled onto the hard-frozen soil. She dumped the armful of weaponry she held and scrabbled for
her cold-weather gear, fumbling it on as fast as she could, before pulling up the hood and fastening it at the front. She searched around for her breather mask, and for one terrible, lurching
moment, was unable to find it. Then a cry of relief when she realized she had folded it up earlier and stuffed it in one pocket of her jacket.

Five kilometres, and closing fast. This wasn’t at all how she’d imagined things would pan out.

She hit the emergency release button on the car’s hatch. It swung open, air gusting outwards. She had a rifle slung over one shoulder, and several of the short-use beam weapons stuffed
into any available pocket that wasn’t already jammed full of ammunition. Lastly, she grabbed up a rucksack she’d at least had the foresight to load with a couple of bottles of water and
some survival rations, and threw it down onto the barren grey soil, before jumping down and snatching it up again.

She started to run, her legs pumping as fast as they would go. All she had to do now was get clear in time and—

Something picked her up and sent her hurtling against a boulder. White light flared all around her, followed by a wave of intense heat. She rolled onto her front, gloved fingers digging into the
half-frozen soil . . . and felt darkness steal over her.

When Megan finally regained consciousness, she saw that the sun had moved a considerable distance further across the sky.

She stared around in a daze for some moments, then struggled to push herself upright. Something in her shoulder hurt like hell, particularly if she tried turning her head to the right.

Checking the inbuilt interface on her cold-weather gear, she found that its built-in heating circuits had kicked in automatically. It was the only reason she was still alive.

Megan struggled to her feet by leaning against the boulder next to her, before taking a look around. Her breath rasped loudly inside her breather mask. A trail of dark smoke rose into the sky
from a mass of tangled wreckage that was no longer recognizable as the jump-car.

Damn it
, she thought.

She searched around until she found the rifle she’d taken from the vehicle, then found her rucksack lying nearby and strapped it back on.

Her first thought was to put as much distance between herself and the wreck as possible, in case someone was already on their way to check for survivors. That meant getting as far away from the
crash site as she could manage, regardless of the multitude of aches and pains afflicting her.

By the time Megan reached the crest of a hill, just ten minutes later, she was utterly exhausted. She tried to access the Tabernacle, but was unsurprised to find she couldn’t, having
already been warned that the Freehold jammed anything more advanced than analogue radio within range of their hideouts.

Glancing around the slopes below the hill, there was nothing to be seen but desolate terrain, stretching out to the horizon. She knew her circumstances were hopeless: lost in an utterly
inhospitable environment and surrounded on all sides by fanatical and murderous Freeholders. But she had to keep moving, or give up any hope of staying alive.

Eventually she started to make her way down the other side, looking east along the length of a valley, in the same direction she had been flying before getting shot down. It was somewhere in
that direction that Sifra’s dropship had landed.

The walking got a little easier after another half-hour, but for all she knew it might take days to reach the dropship – assuming it was even still there, by the time she reached its
landing point.

A small voice in her head urged her to give up. Sifra surely wouldn’t have landed in the middle of nowhere; he’d have aimed for one of the Freehold’s main mountain bases, which
meant Bash was by now almost certainly under the guard of God knew how many murderous lunatics adorned with neck tattoos.

As the sun kept moving across the sky, she stopped frequently to rest. Whenever she glanced behind her, she could still see a rising column of smoke from the downed jump-car. It didn’t
look that far away at all.

Give up
, that same small voice kept insisting.
Find a way back home
.

But she couldn’t do that. Not with so very much at stake.

The valley walls grew steeper, with narrow, rubble-filled ravines branching off to each side. A little while later, she came to a halt, seeing a column of dust rising up ahead.

With a start, she realized that it came from a line of trucks making their way in her direction. She stood and watched numbly as one of the vehicles broke ahead of the pack, bouncing its way
straight towards her.

She licked suddenly dry lips. They had clearly spotted her. Tiny black dots, which had been hovering above the convoy like fireflies swarming above a campfire, were now moving in her direction
as well: drones, and almost certainly hunter-killers at that. Against them, the weapons she carried would be worse than useless.

Megan glanced around frantically, noticing a dense thicket of desiccated jug-leaf bushes spreading all across one side of the hill. She darted towards them. They wouldn’t provide much
cover, but it might be enough to fool the drones for a few minutes until she could figure something out.

She pushed her way in deep amongst the tangled bushes, their dry branches scratching viciously at her exposed flesh. From there she saw a dark shape flying immediately overhead, before it
doubled back again. A mechanized voice said something unintelligible; by the sound of it, the drone’s speech circuits were shot to hell.

Through the dense tangle of bushes, she could barely make out the dark shape of the machine, but from its movements she guessed it must be zeroing in on her, most probably by detecting her heat
signature.

She aimed the rifle and fired. The drone spun in the air for a moment, then darted away.

Megan made a break for it, snow and dirt puffing around her ankles as she dived from cover. To lighten her load, she deliberately left her rucksack, containing its vital supply of water and
food, among the bushes. She knew she’d be dead in no more than a day or two out in the open without her supplies, but maybe if she could get away from those drones and trucks, she could
double back after nightfall and retrieve them.

She slid and half fell or half ran down the hillside, aiming for one of the ravines. Some of the boulders filling each ravine were the size of houses, but there were enough gaps between them to
let her find her way through – and there would be no way for the trucks to follow her.

A second drone now overtook her, dropping in height as it slowed and turned back towards her. Lenses suspended beneath its body zeroed in on her face. She raised her rifle again.

Before she could take aim and fire, something hit her hard in the back, and sent her crashing to all fours. She rolled onto her side and saw that a third drone had come up on her from behind.
Vortexes of dust went spinning up from the ground beneath where the two drones now hovered, stationary.

Her breath rasping harshly, the back of one shoulder icy-cold and numb where something had struck it, she listened helplessly to the sound of heavy treads crunching over icy soil as a truck
pulled up nearby. She heard its doors opening and slamming shut, followed by the sound of footsteps coming closer.

A shadow fell across her, and Megan looked up into the familiar face of Gregor Tarrant, only partly hidden behind a breather mask.

‘I used to dream of a day like this,’ he began, his voice strangely distorted. ‘I used to think about all the ways I could kill you. But now I think I just feel sorry for you.
Megan, what the hell are you doing all the way out here?’