Marauder (32 page)

After only a couple of minutes, both women were panting with exertion. ‘I’m pretty sure,’ said Gabrielle, in between gasps, ‘this isn’t the activity recommended for
expectant mothers.’

With a lot of cursing and muttering, they managed to guide Bash out through the hatch and into the cramped passageway beyond. Megan next located the escape hatch just about where she’d
expected to find it.

Gabrielle disappeared back inside, returning with a bag stuffed full of the rations and with some cold-weather gear for Bash. They both dressed hurriedly, then worked together to get him dressed
suitably and a mask over his face. By the time they were done, Megan’s skin was slicked with perspiration.

She tapped a code into a panel next to the emergency hatch, and a small red light began to blink: slowly at first, then more rapidly.

‘Stand well back,’ warned Megan. ‘Cover your eyes – and his, too.’

Gabrielle did as she was told, tugging Bash back away from the hatch. They crouched a few metres back along down the passageway, feet braced expectantly against the sloping deck.

Explosive bolts blew the hatch loose, filling the air with acrid-smelling smoke and leaving their ears ringing. Freezing cold air rushed in even as the pressure equalized.

Megan was first out through the hatch. She crouched on the broad curving surface of the hull, feeling the ship roll very slightly beneath her, then leaned back in.

‘Get one of his arms up to me,’ she called down.

She heard the sound of cursing as Gabrielle shoved Bash directly beneath the hatch and then lifted one of his arms up towards her. Megan secured a good solid grip on his hand.

‘C’mon, Bash,’ she muttered, trying hard not to topple back through. ‘Climb the fuck up for mommy.’

Bash’s pupils contracted in the bright daylight, his other arm hanging uselessly by his side. Megan fought back a sudden wave of despair. What if they couldn’t get him out? What
then?

‘Climb, damn you,’ she cried, finally losing her temper. ‘Get the
fuck
up here, you son of a bitch. You were able to talk to her, so don’t stand there pretending
you don’t fucking understand me!’

She could feel now she was close to losing it. She’d had too little respite from a constant struggle for survival over the past several days. ‘Up, damn you!’ she yelled.
‘Climb up!’

In that same moment Bash blinked, then she saw him reach up with his spare hand, his fingers tightening around the hatch’s coaming.

Her heart began to thud.
He heard me.

She held on to him, pulling and grunting with the sheer effort. Gabrielle was doing her best to help him climb up, but the space was too tight and the angle too difficult for her to be of any
real use.

The muscles in Bash’s arm flexed, and he rose up and through the hatch. Megan grabbed hold of his shoulders as he emerged, and let out a cry of delight.

‘That’s my baby!’ she yelled, putting all her strength into hauling him the rest of the way out. It felt like delivering the world’s largest child. He was soon crouching
on the hull, staring mindlessly off towards the horizon, while Gabrielle also climbed out.

‘Shouldn’t we get out of here?’ she said, her face shiny with perspiration.

Megan nodded, then carefully began to work her way down the smooth expanse of the hull to where it curved into the water below.

‘I think I can jump down from here,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It doesn’t look too deep.’

She slid a little further, then gravity took over, and she began to slide, her feet and hands skittering helplessly. She fell through the air for a brief moment, then landed feet-first in the
freezing cold water barely a second later. The water came up to her waist, deep and cold enough to make her teeth chatter. ‘Bash next,’ she called back up.

‘
How?
’ Gabrielle yelled back, in exasperation.

‘Just . . . give him a goddamn push, okay? He’s like a cat. He’ll land the right way up.’

I hope
.

Bash came sliding down the hull a moment later, his feet and hands trying and failing to find purchase on the surface. He landed with an almighty splash, then came upright, shaking his head like
a dog and sending off a spray of water.

Gabrielle was next, letting out a small shriek of shock as she dropped, rear end first, into the water.

‘Move,’ yelled Megan, pointing towards some low hills nearby, dotted with snakehead bushes. ‘That way.’

Without further discussion, they each took hold of one of Bash’s arms – which was starting to feel like the most natural thing in the world to do.

Gabrielle glanced back at the dropship as they splashed their way on to the shore. ‘Are we really in that much danger?’ she asked, her teeth chattering as violently as
Megan’s.

‘Remind me again: how much do you know about anti-matter containment systems, Gabrielle?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then you’re going to have to take my word for it that we don’t want to be
anywhere
near that thing when it blows.’

They left the shore behind and pushed on between the bushes, scraping past curling black branches with bulbous tips. ‘Just a little bit further,’ urged Megan, knowing it would be
just too ironic if they got blown to smithereens this close to being home free.

They soon came to a narrow pass between two hills: a steep-sided gorge with a trickle of water descending towards the lake from higher ground. The bushes became less dense, and the going
therefore marginally easier, except they had to keep stopping to untangle Bash from clawing branches.

Just as they reached the far side of these hills, the sky behind them suddenly flared white. This was followed a moment later by a roar that shook the ground right beneath their feet.

Gabrielle stared back the way they had come. ‘Was that . . . was that the dropship?’

Megan squeezed her eyes shut to eliminate the after-images. She could still see the outline of the hill rendered in bright, pulsing colours.

A pall of smoke rose high into the air and some of the bushes at the gorge entrance were burning merrily, now sending up their own plumes of acrid smoke.

‘Yeah,’ said Megan, ‘that was the dropship.’
And my second crash-landing in just a couple of days.
It occurred to her that they were all likely to be affected by
residual radiation, so the sooner each of them could get inside a medbox, the better.

Gabrielle’s face had turned completely white above the rim of her breather mask, having not realized until now just how much danger they had been in. ‘How much anti-matter was in
that thing?’ she asked shakily.

‘A pinhead’s worth,’ said Megan. ‘And that’s all it takes.’ She reached inside her coat and adjusted the heating elements, turning them all the way up. She
saw Gabrielle do the same first for herself, and then for Bash. Before long, all three of them were billowing clouds of steam, as their jackets dried them from the inside out.

‘We should get going,’ announced Megan. ‘But before we do, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did Tarrant do anything that might prevent you
communicating mind-to-mind?’

Gabrielle only looked confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘We’re both machine-heads,’ said Megan. ‘That means we can talk privately via our implants. Like you did back there with Bash, right?’

Gabrielle thought for a moment. ‘Before we came here, Tarrant shot something into my neck, some kind of machine. He called it—’

‘An inhibitor?’ Megan interrupted.

Gabrielle nodded. ‘How did you know?’

‘There are ways of telling,’ said Megan. ‘Like the bruise on the back of your neck. And the fact I just tried and failed to communicate with you through my implants.’

‘Oh.’ Gabrielle instinctively reached up to touch her skin there.

‘Soon as we find a medbox, we’ll make getting rid of that thing a priority.’ She glanced up towards the horizon. ‘Sunset is still a couple of hours away, and that
settlement we were aiming for is a good twenty kilometres from here. We should try and cover as much ground as we can before then. We don’t want to stick around here one second longer than we
have to.’

Gabrielle nodded. ‘Sure.’ She stepped over and touched her fingers to Bash’s elbow. Megan watched, astonished, as Bash followed her lead with surprisingly little prompting.

‘Has he spoken to you again since you came looking for me?’ asked Megan, sensing a touch of bitterness in her tone.

Gabrielle appeared not to notice it. ‘Not a peep,’ she replied.

Megan nodded and swiftly stepped over to take Bash’s other arm. ‘You up for a long walk?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Beats getting shot at.’

An hour later, they could still see the same dark plume of smoke spiralling high into the evening sky behind them.

For a while, they followed what looked like an animal trail, exhaustion reducing both women to silence. The land on one side of them dropped away into a deep crevasse, at the bottom of which
Megan could see a river churning. There were hills up ahead that looked likely to prove a challenge, but a cluster of canopy trees stood closer, just a few kilometres away and rising tall above the
surrounding landscape. If they became too exhausted, or the weather deteriorated, they could at least shelter there for a while.

The sight of these trees reminded Megan of the first time she had ever met Bash, and she glanced sideways at his broad features, wishing she could share this same memory with him. Somehow it
felt almost as if she’d come full circle.

She ignored the tiny voice in the back of her head that was whispering how they could get to the settlement so much quicker if they just left him behind.

In fact it took nearly six hours of walking, including a number of detours, to reach the nearest of those canopy trees. In the meantime, they had covered seven or eight
kilometres at most.

Megan called a halt as soon as they were under cover. She noticed Gabrielle staring up at the tree’s immense canopy, her eyes roving up the length of the massive trunk to its apex. If this
girl’s life had been as sheltered as she suspected, it was entirely possible she had never before seen one close up.

They sat wherever they comfortably could amongst the roots, taking the weight off their legs with joint groans of satisfaction. Gabrielle pulled Bash down into a sitting position beside her,
then leaned back and closed her eyes, for long enough that Megan thought she must have fallen asleep. But then finally Gabrielle lifted her head once more, and looked in her direction.

‘Tell me,’ said Megan, ‘exactly how Bash communicated with you, back in those caves.’

Gabrielle shrugged. ‘It’s like I told you. I heard his voice inside my head.’

Megan frowned. ‘That’s what doesn’t make sense. Why could he communicate mind-to-mind with you, while I couldn’t?’

‘I had wondered about that,’ Gabrielle admitted.

‘Did he say anything else?’ she asked. ‘Apart from telling you to find me, that is?’

She nodded. ‘He said he’s been fighting some kind of war.’

Megan stared at her. ‘A
war
?’

‘It didn’t make any sense to me either. He talked about something called a wanderer. He said it was hiding something.’

Megan felt the breath catch in her throat. She forgot about her exhaustion, the pain in her feet and the throbbing in her bandaged shoulder. She looked over at Bash – poor, sightless Bash
– and felt a shiver of awe mixed with fear.

‘Anything else?’ she asked.

‘He said something about being lost for a very long time, and that he could only stay for a while.’ Gabrielle shook her head. ‘I can’t even begin to tell you what he
might have meant.’

Megan felt her cheeks growing moist, and wiped the tears away before they could freeze solid on her skin.

‘Does any of this mean anything to you?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘I feel crazy for saying it but, yes, it does.’ Megan scratched at the dirt with one boot, waggling and stretching her toes until the pain felt slightly duller. The fit of her
breather mask was not quite perfect, and it had chafed her skin as they walked away from the lake. She drew in a breath, then lifted the mask from her face for a moment, sliding her hand under and
scratching at her cheek for one long, luxurious moment before dropping it back into place.

‘I already know who
you
are,’ she said to Gabrielle. ‘But I think it’s time you know who
I
am.’

The girl regarded her uncertainly, as the wind rustled the feathered canopy overhead. ‘I had wondered, obviously.’

‘I was the Speaker-Elect before you, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle stared at her uncomprehendingly. ‘I . . . I was about to say that’s impossible, but for some reason I believe you.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know
why I do, but I do.’

‘Why?’

She peered at Megan for a moment, then looked back towards the lake, now lost somewhere over the far horizon. ‘The official story I heard was that there had been an attempt to kidnap the
Speaker-Elect before me, which was why they made Karl – I mean, Gregor Tarrant – my bodyguard. But he told me once that he had heard other stories, that the girl before me somehow
escaped, with help, and that the official story was just a cover-up. But he couldn’t find any proof and decided it was just a rumour, and nothing more.’

Megan felt her blood chill. If Tarrant had kept digging further, he might eventually have worked out who she really was.

‘It’s slightly more complicated than that,’ she said.

She told Gabrielle about her flight through Dios with Malcolm – and how she had no memories of her previous life in the Demarchy. Gabrielle’s eyes widened and her skin turned even
paler than from just the cold.

‘You don’t remember
anything
?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Not a thing. I know that her –
my
– name was Esté, but that’s all.’

‘So what they were going to do to me . . . they had already done to you. And now you have all Dakota Merrick’s memories?’

‘Yes, but I’m not her,’ Megan replied, a touch defensively.

‘But you
are
her, aren’t you? We’re both genetically identical to her, so if you have her memories as well, then . . .’