by Gary Gibson
Megan made her way inside one of the buildings and found only death. In an auditorium she discovered rows of corpses, their wrists tied behind their backs and neat holes drilled through the backs of their heads.
She pictured a night raid in which Freehold saboteurs had destroyed the dropship on the landing field, while others worked at neutralizing the perimeter defences and jamming all communications. Then she thought of Otto Schelling, and the vast resources such a man could provide.
Enough, perhaps, to equip an entire army.
Wandering on, she came eventually to the garage block. It contained more than a dozen vehicles, all of which appeared to have been sabotaged. But they included a bus that looked in slightly better condition than the rest and, having worked on it for a couple of hours, Megan managed to get its internal diagnostics running. After that, she was able to pinpoint the damage: a circuit board controlling the fuel systems had been ripped out, along with some other vital engine parts.
Locating a machine shed stocked with a fabricator, miraculously undamaged, she then managed to program it to produce some of the replacement parts, before finding somewhere to sit down and chew on a protein bar.
A couple of hours later, she had acquired some shiny new engine parts and a replacement circuit board.
As the bus powered up on her first try, Megan pressurized its cabin and pulled off her breather mask for the first time in a very, very long time. The canned air inside the vehicle tasted sweeter than spring blossoms.
After shutting the bus down again, she found her way into an empty dormitory block equipped with bunks and showers. After standing under a hard spray of hot water until her skin was raw and pink, she stepped out, dressed and then studied herself carefully in a mirror. The image confronting her was one she hardly recognized: positively gaunt, and with her clothes hanging loose on a bony frame.
More than a month and a half since setting out on Stiles’s truck, and it felt as if an eternity had passed.
Megan finally reached Aguirre just four days later, only to find that the Freehold had already paid the city a visit. After passing through half a dozen Accord checkpoints in the city’s outskirts, she joined a long tailback of traffic that then took hours to work its way through. At one point an Accord trooper carried out a cursory search of her bus, before waving her on.
By now she had picked up some idea of what had happened since her last visit here. Over the course of a week, waves of guerrilla fighters had struck periodically, flying low over the mountains and hills in stealthed gliders, and working in small isolated teams according to some prearranged plan. This series of carefully coordinated attacks had caught the overstretched Accord forces unawares. To make things worse, they had dressed themselves in the same heavy outdoor coats and breather masks worn by Aguirre’s own citizens, making it nearly impossible to tell friend from foe.
Sarbakshian’s place, when she finally reached it, turned out to have been demolished some time during the fighting. After poking half-heartedly through the still-smoking debris, she eventually found a body so badly charred that it was impossible to tell whose it might once have been.
So much for her nova ship, then.
Megan wandered on for a while until she came to a municipal garden dominated by a miniature canopy tree rising higher than most of the buildings surrounding it. She dug amidst its roots and pulled out a sprig of flowering lizard-tails with red and green blooms, then headed back to the ruins, laying her tribute on the chest of the cindered corpse.
‘Goodbye, Sabby,’ she said, under her breath. ‘You were a son of a bitch in more ways than one, but I still liked you better than most.’
She next returned to the apartment Sabby had loaned her, to find it undamaged. Entering the bedroom, she sat staring around her and feeling as if she’d lived an entire lifetime since she’d last been here. She stripped off her clothes and showered until the water sputtered and suddenly cut off, then she dug fresh garments out of a drawer, before gratefully binning the stinking rags she’d worn for all too long.
Finally she crawled into bed and slept, without dreams, for the next sixteen hours. Nevertheless, when she woke late the next evening, it was with a new plan almost fully formed in her mind.
It was something, she realized, that she should have thought of long before now.
The next day, Megan departed Aguirre for what she knew was the last time. News remained sparse and unreliable. There were conflicting stories that other cities belonging to the River Concord States had been seized by Freehold forces apparently intent on warring against all of Redstone’s Uchidan nations, and not just targeting the Demarchy. There was no way of verifying any of these reports, however.
Exiting the city, she guided the bus onto a highway that led to Dios, a long way further down the coast. Aguirre itself was built on a plateau and, as the road gradually wound its way down to sea level, the more evident the damage resulting from the floods became. In fact, it looked as if a hand as wide as the sky had reached down and swept the land clean of most signs of human habitation.
When she reached another checkpoint on the border between the Demarchy and the River Concord States, the Accord troops staffing it made it abundantly clear she would be allowed to go no further. The Freehold, it was explained to her, had turned the whole of the country beyond into a war zone. Thanking the checkpoint guards good-naturedly, she turned her bus around, and drove back the way she had come for a good ten or twenty kilometres, until she found a side road she’d spotted earlier. Before long she was on her way back towards Dios by a different route, this time encountering no more checkpoints.
At one stage she passed through what her maps assured her was a provincial town, but all she could see was waterlogged wreckage and ruins. Every now and then she came across small convoys of civilian vehicles, heavy bundles strapped on their roofs, heading slowly in the opposite direction. Small shanty towns had sprung up around the roots of a few canopy trees that had managed to survive the devastation. Some of the refugees she passed stared with disbelief as she drove by, heading in what they clearly considered to be the wrong direction.
Some hours later, as the sky darkened into dusk, she pulled up next to an Accord military convoy that appeared to have been destroyed in an attack. There were corpses scattered everywhere, and trucks and rover units reduced to piles of twisted wreckage.
Driving for a short distance back the way she had come, she kept a nervous eye on the landscape all around, then parked for the night in the shelter of a building that had been flushed out during the flood. Every now and then, before she fell fast asleep, she spotted the sleek shapes of Accord military cruisers cutting through the clouds overhead.
She woke once, in the middle of the night, to see beams of light playing across the horizon, then heard the distant thunder of heavy artillery. The flash of orbital beam weapons lit up the clouds from beneath as they struck at some unseen target on the ground, and more than likely, she thought, they were firing at whoever had destroyed the Accord convoy.
After that, she drove a lot more cautiously. Once, after catching sight of figures far off in the distance, she halted the bus and climbed up on its roof with a pair of binoculars to grab an enhanced video image. She saw men dressed in grey-and-white Freehold fatigues, weighed down under equipment and weapons. They were, she saw with relief, heading in the opposite direction to her. Clearly they hadn’t seen her.
She decided to wait out another night, then resumed her journey. By now, perhaps no more than another day’s drive from Dios, she could see the twisting, sinuous shape of one of the Ka’s major tributaries snaking off towards the west.
Setting out the next morning, she came across the site of another battle: the ruins of buildings were still smouldering, and there was a greater variety of corpses this time. Most of the Freehold dead sat inside appropriated civilian vehicles, and only their neck tattoos identified them as enemy soldiers, since they were dressed in civilian clothes. The craters pitting the roa
d all around them might have been caused by grenades or mines, or both.
Hearing a noise, she glanced up to see, above the curving expanse of a shattered biome, a half-dozen gun-drones locked in battle with an unseen enemy somewhere on the ground.
It occurred to Megan that driving a bus into Dios was likely to attract entirely the wrong kind of attention. She pulled the vehicle to one side of the road and slept again until nightfall. Then, shouldering an ultra-light rifle she had brought with her from Sarbakshian’s apartment, she set out to cover the rest of the way on foot.
Over the next couple of days, Megan continued through low-lying mounds of weed-entangled rubble that were all that was left of what had once been Dios’s satellite towns. She slept during daylight in some of the better-preserved ruins, wrapped up in a survival sleeping-bag, with her rifle close by her hand. She avoided moving during the day, and paralleled the roads from a distance, hiding whenever she heard the sound of approaching vehicles.
Before dawn one morning, she crested a hill on the outskirts of Dios, and found herself looking out across the mouth of the Ka River. Few of the city’s slender towers had survived the floods, and the stink of decay and death came to her strongly on the breeze. The sheer scale of so much tragedy now overwhelmed her.
She hid in the remains of an apartment building until nightfall, then made her way through rubble-strewn streets that were not entirely deserted. She occasionally caught sight of guerrillas moving in groups of two or three, chased by or chasing flocks of Accord gun-drones. She hid a couple of times, waiting for over an hour each time before daring to venture back out into the open.
It was nearly dawn by the time Megan reached the Ship of the Covenant. All the structures that had once surrounded it – the research labs, the dormitories and barracks – were gone, entirely swept away.
Her heart began beating harder and harder as she made her way to where the ship had come to rest against the shattered ruins of a skyscraper. Beyond an occasional flash off in the distance, or the occasional sound of gunfire far off across the ruins, she saw and heard nothing. The ship appeared to be entirely unguarded.
She stepped into the shadows, where the Magi ship’s hull pressed deep into the soil, then fell to her knees, opening up the machine part of her mind to the crowded intelligences she could already sense buried within. She could hear their murmuring voices, the gathered memories of a million long-dead civilizations.
They were waiting for her as they had always done – for the woman who had once been Dakota Merrick.
She got up and pulled off a glove, then reached out to touch the great ship with her fingers. The hull had a slight give to it, almost like living flesh, a fact that had never failed to surprise her in that other life.
The hull dimpled where she touched it, growing rapidly deeper and wider and forming deep shadows within. She waited, tense, as a tunnel formed before her, extending deep within the body of the ship.
Light appeared from the depths of that tunnel, glowing softly. She hesitated at the threshold.
Only then did Megan finally offer the ancient vessel her terms – and, to her surprise and pleasure, it agreed to them.
THIRTY-ONE
Gabrielle
Back at the research outpost, Gabrielle awoke to the sounds of gunshots and screaming.
Evie was also awake. Her tiny hands, as small and delicate as flowers, brushed Gabrielle’s face, her pink nose twitching as her eyelids parted.
She began to cry.
Gabrielle sat up, her heart pounding in her chest. Evie began to cry louder.
At first she thought the sounds were coming from somewhere outside, but after a moment she realized they were coming from inside the building.
In that instant, she knew Tarrant had found her.
‘Hush now,’ she said to the tiny girl in her arms, all wrapped up in swaddling clothes, and rocked her gently in her arms. But it was no use. Evie could clearly sense her mother’s fear.
Gabrielle slid out of bed and stepped over to the door of her quarters. It was just a little after dawn, and Paul and Jen were usually up first and into the refectory, before heading out to take whatever measurements Martha expected them to take, returning late each evening.
She listened, hardly able to breathe, and heard a voice.
It sounded like Sol – Sol with the hawklike nose, whose over two-metre frame was permanently stooped. He seemed to be pleading for his life.
Gabrielle heard someone mutter something, followed by a gunshot so loud and so near it might as well have passed through her own head. She let out an involuntary moan of fear and pressed herself up against the wall, next to the door, sliding down it until she was sitting on the floor. Evie screamed, as Gabrielle clutched her to her chest.
They had just killed Sol.
She looked around the room that had been her home for the past couple of months. Barely any time at all, really, but she already had so very, very many memories. The people here were utterly unlike anyone else she had ever met: kind and thoughtful and full of joy, with stories and gossip and friendship that made Gabrielle want so very badly to experience life a long way away from chilly Redstone. It was all a far cry from the cloistered existence she had known back in the People’s Palace.
Martha Stiles had become something like a mother to her, far more than Mater Cassanas ever had been. She had set the outpost’s fabricators to printing out special obstetrics equipment, then, with the aid of the medbay’s AI, had taken Gabrielle through every step of the birthing process. And when Martha had first laid the tiny baby against her breast, just a few days ago, Gabrielle, her damp hair still stuck to her forehead, had finally felt the last vestiges of her old life slip away.
Evie had been the name of Martha’s daughter, and when she had told Gabrielle the story of her child, and the illness which claimed her life, the name had somehow fitted. The first time Gabrielle had spoken to the tiny bundle in her arms, the baby smiled and let out a sound that was half gasp, half cry of delight.
Gabrielle shuffled, on her knees, across the floor of her room and squeezed herself into the tiny gap between the bed and a wall. Evie grasped at her mother’s face with her fingers, but she had stopped crying for the moment at least.
Gabrielle remained there waiting until the door finally swung open. Evie’s father entered, dragging Martha Stiles after him, one side of her face so badly swollen that one eye had almost closed. Her mouth was stained with blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martha huskily. ‘They threatened to kill even more of our people if I didn’t tell them where you were.’
Tarrant meanwhile said nothing, his face an emotionless mask.
A Freeholder guerrilla wearing fatigues stepped up behind him. ‘Find Anil Sifra,’ Tarrant turned to him, ‘and tell him to come here.’
With a nod, the guerrilla went on his way.
Tarrant’s gaze drifted down towards the tiny bundle clutched against Gabrielle’s shoulder.
‘Her name’s Evie,’ Gabrielle told him boldly, then watched as a clutch of emotions went to war across the man’s face. Perhaps there still was something human left within him after all.
He then let go of Martha, thrusting her towards another man with a scraggly blond goatee who had at just that moment appeared in the doorway. She guessed this newcomer must be Sifra. Gabrielle kicked out and screamed as Tarrant stepped forward, reaching down to drag her out of her hiding place.
Evie began crying, much louder this time.
She didn’t have the strength to resist as Tarrant took Evie from her grasp and lifted the child to his shoulder. Then Sifra stepped forward, and struck Gabrielle across the face with the back of his hand, before grabbing hold of her and dragging her into the corridor outside.
They hustled her and Martha along to the refectory, passing Sol’s slumped body on the way. Half his head was missing, and the wall behind him was liberally spattered with his blood.
The rest of the outpost staff were already gat
hered in the refectory. Tables and chairs had been pushed to one side, and they had been forced to kneel with their backs to a wall, their hands resting on top of their heads.
She could hardly bear to look at those white and terrified faces. The bodies of two of them already lay in the centre of the room, seemingly shot at point-blank range.
This carnage, she realized, was all her fault. If she and Megan hadn’t sought refuge . . .
Three Freehold guerrillas kept watch over the prisoners. They were dressed in grey-and-white camouflage, with breather masks hanging from straps around their necks, and all of them armed with rifles. Bash stood amongst them, restrained by a light grip on his upper arm.
No matter where she went, she seemed to find herself surrounded by death.
‘You didn’t need to do this,’ she reproached Tarrant, her voice a hoarse whisper and her whole body trembling. ‘You didn’t need to hurt any of them.’
‘They were trying to hide you from us,’ snapped Sifra in clipped tones. ‘Now tell me exactly how the hell Jacinth managed to steal the Ship of the Covenant.’
She stared at him in utter confusion.
‘Speak up, Gabrielle,’ ordered Tarrant. ‘She must have told you what she was going to do.’ Evie gurgled quietly against his shoulder, one of her hands touching his neck.
‘I swear I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,’ she replied, completely baffled. ‘She left here to find help, that’s all I know. That’s all anybody knows.’
‘She’s lying,’ snarled the man with the goatee.
‘No, Anil,’ said Tarrant, without taking his eyes off her. ‘Just look at her. She doesn’t have a damn clue what we’re talking about. None of them does.’
He stepped closer to the frightened woman. ‘Megan was sighted in the immediate vicinity of the Ship of the Covenant, just shortly before it lifted up from Dios. I had people tracking her from the moment she entered the city, and they watched her actually go inside the ship. How could she do that, when so many other machine-heads have failed during all the centuries since that thing landed?’
