Marauder (27 page)

‘Not yet,’ said Schelling. ‘Maybe this is our best chance finally to talk to the Wanderer directly.’

Schelling stepped closer to Bash, who let out a piercing animal shriek that stopped him in his tracks.

‘Listen to me,’ Schelling addressed Bash. ‘We’ve got something we know you want – information about the Magi and also about the Makers. Tell me if you understand
me.’

For the first time, Bash’s eyes actually focused on Schelling. Something about his expression sent a chill through Megan: it wasn’t human.

‘Mmmm-
machine
,’ said Bash. ‘For moving between.
Stars
.’

‘Do you understand what we’re offering you?’ said Schelling. ‘Information about the Magi and the Makers.’

Bash’s expression morphed rapidly from childish delight to terrible pain. ‘Magi,’ he grunted. ‘Yes.’

‘And in return, we want whatever it is you gave the Meridians.’

Megan covered her mouth. It was all too horrible to have to see Bash like this.

‘Mmm . . . ust come,’ said Bash. ‘
Come.
Here.’

‘It still hasn’t agreed to anything, General,’ Tarrant remarked quietly.

‘Yes, I’m aware of that,’ Schelling snapped, then he turned back to Bash. ‘We won’t come to you unless you agree to our terms first. And if you try and hurt us
again, we’ll destroy you. Do you understand? We will destroy you utterly.’

‘Yes,’ Bash replied. ‘I understand.’

‘And our terms?’ said Schelling, almost shouting now. His skin was flushed, and damp with perspiration. ‘Will you give us what we ask for in return?’

Bash ducked his chin down almost to his chest. Ye . . . mmph . . .
yes
.’ He jerked upright, his eyes rolling upwards until only the whites were visible. All of a sudden his
muscles unclenched and he slumped forward, sliding off the chair.

Tarrant ducked around, catching hold of him before Bash landed on the floor.

‘He’s gone into cardiac arrest,’ shouted Tarrant. ‘We need to get him in a medbox immediately.’

Megan pushed past Schelling and Sifra, took one of Bash’s arms and draped it over her shoulder, then helped Tarrant drag him back out and along the corridor towards the medboxes they had
passed earlier. Tarrant held on to him while she cracked the lid of one of them open, then they both lifted him inside before closing it again.

‘Dear God,’ said Schelling, stepping up beside them. ‘I have never in all my days seen anything like that before.’

Sifra arrived at that same moment. ‘Nor me either. The damn thing’s never talked to us
directly
before.’

Schelling turned to Megan. ‘You’ve just proven your worth, Miss Jacinth,’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t ever have believed
it.’

Megan nodded wordlessly, feeling too tired to care what he wanted to say.

It’s all over
, she realized; everything she had fought for. She had managed to escape from these people, then all too easily walked back into their arms. Perhaps, she thought, she
deserved nothing better than whatever fate waited for her now at Schelling’s hands.

Before long the guards returned to lead her back out and across the courtyard, the bioluminescent algae clinging to the roof of the cavern still shining down on them. It felt wrong, somehow, to
witness such beauty under such dreadful circumstances.

Megan’s despair only increased as they locked her inside a windowless room. Despite her fatigue it took her a long time to fall asleep, and when she finally did, curled up in a foetal
position on the floor, she dreamed of that moment she had been reborn, on an examination table, over twenty years before.

2742 (twenty-one years before)

Megan remembered her first ever breath with razor-sharp clarity. She had opened her eyes, her last memory being that of dying, and found herself strapped to a table. Half a
dozen faces, all of them entirely unfamiliar, stared down at her with cold and calculating gazes.

She had died when a star, in its final death throes, had torn apart the Magi ship she had piloted to the very edge of the galaxy, in the hope of finding some way to halt the Nova War then
threatening life throughout the Milky Way. Her search had led her to a Maker Swarm, a cloud of interlinked alien machines whose sole purpose was to prevent the rise of other interstellar
civilizations, only for it to cripple and then destroy her precious ship.

As she lay immobilized on that table, she knew herself only as Dakota Merrick. She did not yet know that her thoughts and memories now occupied the body of a young woman who had, until only a
few hours before, been the Speaker-Elect of the Demarchy of Uchida.

One of those gazing down at her – a fresh-faced young man who introduced himself as Thijs – took it upon himself to explain to her, in precise and laborious detail, exactly how she
had come to be where she was – and what they wanted from her. She had actually died, he explained, more than two centuries earlier, and had subsequently been resurrected by yet another Magi
ship. And if she wanted to live for more than just the next few hours, she would do exactly what was required of her.

She had died
. Then somehow the same Magi ship that had transported her to the Maker Swarm had, in its last moments of existence, transmitted her memories and thoughts to others of its
kind. And one of those others had subsequently come to crash, burned and crippled, here on Redstone.

If she only cooperated, Thijs explained, she would be allowed to live. Failure to cooperate, however, would cause her to be tortured until she divulged the information they wanted –
information she could already sense looming large in the data-repositories of her machine-head implants.

As she had stared up at those callous and overfed faces, she knew deep down in her gut that they were lying to her. They had no intention of letting her survive, whether or not she cooperated.
They had brought her back to life just so they could murder her all over again once she was no longer of use to them.

She had refused to cooperate, in the strongest terms possible. She kicked out with one foot, catching one of them under the chin. He staggered away, clutching at his throat. It then needed all
of the rest of them to hold her down on the table.

She watched, helpless, as the one called Thijs stepped over to a trolley carrying a variety of instruments, some of them razor-sharp, arranged in neat rows on its surface. He had lifted one up,
and it glittered as it caught the light.

A dreadful eternity passed for her on that examination table.

After a few hours, they left her still strapped to it, bruised and bleeding and half mad, with the promise that they would return soon. And, when they did, Dakota knew she would tell them
anything and everything they wanted to know.

And then, she also knew with equal certainty, they would kill her.

She lay there for a long time, whimpering and sobbing beneath the mercilessly bright lights, until she heard the sound of approaching footsteps, a steady rhythm like the ticking of a clock
measuring out the last seconds of her life.

But the young man who stepped through the door of the chamber moments later was not one of her torturers.

‘Esté,’ said the stranger, his face full of alarm and shock as he stepped further into the room. He dropped a heavy backpack onto the floor next to the examination table on
which Dakota lay strapped. ‘Esté, what have they
done
to you?’

He hurriedly undid the straps holding her down, then reached out his fingers to her cheek. Despite herself, Dakota flinched from his touch.

He frowned and withdrew his hand. ‘I came for you,’ he said. He wore a military uniform of some kind. ‘Just as I told you I would.’ His eyes passed over her bruised and
torn flesh, as if seeing her injuries for the first time. ‘But I never imagined
this
. . .’

She sat up carefully, unsure of how she should respond to him or what she should say. Glancing past him, she saw to her dismay that someone else had now entered the cell behind him. It was a
girl with large, dark eyes, her head cleanly shaven, and wearing a plain paper smock identical to the one Dakota wore.

She returned her gaze to her would-be rescuer. Whoever this young man was, she felt sure he was suffering from a case of mistaken identity. She was in no mood to correct him, however.

‘Esté?’ she echoed, as he helped her down from the table. She found it difficult to stand at first, and had to grab hold of the edge of it with both hands. ‘That’s
my name?’

He frowned, his expression now becoming deeply confused. ‘What the hell are you talking about? It’s
me
, Malcolm, and we need to get you out of here.’

‘I’m having trouble remembering things,’ Dakota said carefully.

He put both hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes. ‘Esté, for God’s sake, you don’t seriously mean to say you don’t
remember
me?’

Esté
, she realized, must be the name of the Speaker-Elect – the girl who had formerly occupied this body. And this man Malcolm, she guessed, had been her lover. Somehow,
either one or both of them must have discovered the truth about what would happen to her once she became merged with the Magi ship.

Or rather, she suspected, they had uncovered
part
of the truth as it had been explained to her by Thijs. It was obvious that Malcolm had no idea that the process Esté had
undergone mere hours before had driven all of her thoughts and memories into oblivion.

She stared at Malcolm with a mixture of pity and horror, wondering how she could possibly tell him his sweetheart was gone forever, and that someone else entirely now resided within her
skull.

But if she did, she reminded herself, he might not feel so committed to rescuing her.

‘Yes. I remember,’ she said, reaching out with one faltering hand to touch his cheek. ‘Malcolm, it’s just . . . the things they did to me make it hard to think
straight.’

He stared at her for another long moment, then kneeled by his rucksack, pulling out clothes, a pair of boots and some breather masks.

‘Get dressed,’ he said, handing her the garments and one of the masks. ‘We don’t have much time.’

The clothing proved to be a uniform similar to Malcolm’s own, and was clearly tailored for a male wearer. She tore off her paper smock and hurriedly pulled it on. The uniform hung loose on
her, but it proved a great deal warmer than the smock.

She glanced up towards the girl standing shivering by the door, looking dejected and frightened.

Malcolm turned to the girl, too. ‘Get on the table,’ he told her. ‘And, remember, tell them nothing.’

She nodded and stepped forward, taking care not to even look in Dakota’s direction. She climbed wordlessly onto the table and lay back, as Malcolm secured her ankles and wrists with the
same straps used before.

‘What’s going on?’ Dakota demanded. ‘What the hell are you doing to her?’

‘She’s our decoy,’ he replied. After securing the final strap, he grabbed hold of Dakota’s wrist and pulled her towards the door. ‘They’ve been sending guards
to check on you every half-hour, so we need to go now, before they return.’

Dakota reached up and touched her own scalp for the first time, only to discover, with a shock, that she was just as bald as the other girl.

‘My hair,’ she exclaimed, ‘what happened to it?’

‘They shaved it off, remember?’ he said. ‘To “facilitate the bonding process”?’

She studied the girl again, looking so young and so very frightened. ‘We can’t just leave her here like this,’ she said. ‘They might—’

‘Her family’s been very well compensated,’ interrupted Malcolm impatiently. ‘She’s not here against her will.’

‘But she’s not even bruised or scarred,’ said Dakota. ‘Surely they’ll figure out what you’ve done, the moment they see her?’

‘The guards are simply expecting to find a bald girl strapped to a table,’ snapped Malcolm. ‘Thijs himself won’t be returning for at least another hour, and that’s
all the time we need. Now
hurry
!’

‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘We can’t—’

‘For God’s sake, Esté,’ he exploded, raising his voice for the first time. ‘We discussed this already and we agreed. It’s either you or her, except she gets
a choice in the matter. Now come
on.
’

She felt too weak to resist as he dragged her out of the room and along a passageway. They descended several flights of steps before arriving at an airlock, next to which lay the bodies of two
men in uniforms identical to Malcolm’s own. One of the men had a dark stain spreading across his chest, while the head of the other seemed to be twisted at an odd angle.

Dakota studied Malcolm with new respect as he hauled the airlock door open, and she wondered what kind of woman Esté must have been to inspire such fierce, and deadly, devotion.

Inside the airlock, a pair of cold-weather jackets and matching over-trousers hung on hooks. They quickly pulled them on.

‘Here.’ Malcolm handed her a thick, knitted cap, which she looked at questioningly as she took it from him. ’To help keep you from being recognized,’ he explained, then
nodded to her head. ‘And to hide those.’

Dakota reached up again to feel the bumps and contours of the implants beneath her scalp. Clearly Esté had been a machine-head as well. The cap, when she put it on, fit warm and snug
around her ears. She next pulled on her breather mask and followed Malcolm out into a crisp, cold night.

Glancing behind, her gaze moved up along the broad curve of a Magi ship’s hull, looming above the building from which they had just emerged. It looked like some vast leviathan of the deep,
washed up from unknowable depths and towering over everything beneath it.

She looked further to see that the ship actually leaned against the broad face of a cliff. Dozens of other buildings circled the base of the ship like watchful guardians, and were interlinked by
a tangle of metal walkways and stairways.

Turning the other way, she saw a three-metre-high wall, illuminated by tall arc lights, standing perhaps a hundred metres away. She followed it with her eyes and realized that it ran all the way
around the Magi ship itself and the various buildings surrounding it.