Authors: Gary Gibson
‘But . . .’
‘Wasn’t that the big selling point of the Three Star Alliance,’ she asked, ‘that you get to leave your past behind? Nobody cares who you were or what you did before you
got there.’
‘But Bash knows, doesn’t he?’ he prodded, but she didn’t answer.
Over the next week, Tarrant conducted a series of long, private discussions with Sifra about what they would do once they reached the target system, and so he and Megan saw
less of each other than usual. In a way, she was relieved, because she was frightened he might try again to get her to talk about her past – and even more frightened of what she might tell
him.
She dug deeper than ever before into the Wanderer data. By now she had read all the summaries and detailed analyses put together by Kjæregrønnested’s data-archaeologists, and
had begun working directly on some as yet untranslated Meridian records. She constructed her own linguistic and mathematical algorithms based on their findings, using her heuristic circuits to
process the information. She hoped thereby to find some way of closing the remaining gaps in the data.
To her surprise, she found much more than she could ever have anticipated.
2763 (the present)
Karl ignored Gabrielle throughout the short voyage that followed, after leading the Freeholder with whom he had been having a discussion down the passageway traversing the boat
and out of earshot.
Unsure what to do with herself, Gabrielle took a seat on a narrow bench, where she could feel the vibrations from the vessel’s engine as it carried them towards the bank of the river. The
sense that something was very wrong kept growing inside her, particularly the way Karl had looked at her, as if she were nothing more than a distraction or a nuisance, rather than the woman he
loved . . .
Stop being ridiculous
, she told herself. There was almost certainly a perfectly good explanation for all of it. She had just helped him commit mass murder, after all. Both their lives
were at stake now, and not just hers. She could hardly expect him to behave the same way, under such circumstances, as when they were alone in her bedchamber.
And yet that voice full of doubt kept shrieking at her from somewhere deep inside her own head.
What about the tidal wave? Or the way he looked at you when he called you an ‘angel of
death’. And why
are there Freeholders here? And . . .
She shut the voice out and tried to activate her Tabernacle link, in the hope of distracting herself. To her shock, she discovered that she could not access it. She had no way of finding out any
more information about the impact Abramovic had described, or the resultant tidal wave.
She reached up and touched the back of her neck, where Karl had injected her with what he had called an ‘inhibitor’. Supposedly it made tracking her via her implants impossible, and
she wondered if it might also be the reason why she was unable to access the Tabernacle.
There was little to do, then, but pass the time staring out of a porthole, though she was barely able to see anything beyond the surging waters outside, and the dim outline of hills growing ever
nearer. She eventually caught sight of an antiquated-looking jetty extending from the shore. The rhythm of the turbines soon changed subtly and, after another minute or two, the boat bumped gently
up against the wharf.
One of the Freeholders reappeared from the passageway, handing Gabrielle another, better-quality jacket and a new breather mask. ‘Put these on,’ he instructed.
She slipped on the new gear, while the Freeholder pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, quickly checking that the seal was effective. Once she was ready, with her mask on, he yelled back along
the passageway that he was about to open the hatch.
The rest, including Karl, then reappeared and pulled on their own breather masks, while their compatriot cracked the external hatch. Karl himself went out first, then gestured for her to follow
him. She only did so with increasing reluctance. There was little she could do under the circumstances but comply, at least until Karl gave her some kind of proper explanation of what was going
on.
Waves slapped hollowly against the underside of the dock as Gabrielle climbed out onto the jetty. She spotted a decrepit-looking emergency shelter nearby on the shore.
The voice of doubt manifested itself again, this time louder than before.
He’s been working with the Freehold.
They must, she realized, have been the ones holding Mater
Cassanas’s son prisoner all this time.
Hard as it was to believe, the only conclusion was that Karl was acting as a double-agent. He must have been funnelling information back to the Freehold the whole time he had been in the employ
of the Demarchy. Despite his supposed successes in locating their hideaways, she had heard Abramovic and others complain bitterly that no matter how much firepower they threw at the Freehold, they
always managed to pop up somewhere else, and stronger than ever.
And no wonder, since Karl himself had most frequently led these supposedly punitive expeditions against the Freehold, when he wasn’t busy safeguarding her.
The men around her all glanced up, and she followed their gaze, at the same moment hearing a dull roar from above. A dropship was descending towards them from out of the night sky, with
drive-fields flickering around its hull. For a moment she thought they had been caught, and that the approaching craft was an Accord patrol come to return her to the Demarchy.
Karl and his Freeholder companions, however, watched the craft’s descent with equanimity. Once the dropship had settled down onto the hard frozen soil, half a dozen metres away, Karl took
charge of Gabrielle once more, tugging her towards the craft as light spilled out from its interior.
Gabrielle felt a sudden, powerful instinct urge her not to get on board the craft. She tried to shake herself loose from Karl, but his grip only became tighter.
‘Move,’ he snapped, dragging her forward. It was the first word he had said to her since picking her up and throwing her into the river’s freezing waters.
One of the Freeholders followed them. Karl paused at the dropship’s ramp and turned to him. ‘It’s all up to you from this point on, De Meer,’ he said. ‘The impact
wave should hit before very long.’
De Meer nodded, and slapped Karl on the shoulder. ‘You’ve been a good friend to us, Tarrant. Maybe we finally have a chance at getting back everything we lost.’
Tarrant?
Gabrielle stared between the two men in confusion. Why had De Meer addressed Karl by that name?
Karl nodded towards the boat bobbing gently in the starlight. ‘Can you get away before the wave arrives here?’
‘We have our own air transport waiting nearby,’ De Meer replied. ‘We’ll be able to watch Dios drown from above.’
Karl laughed at that, and the two men embraced as if they were old comrades. Gabrielle thought suddenly of the tens of thousands of pilgrims who had converged on Dios for Ascension Day. Then De
Meer turned without another word, and went to rejoin his companions who were waiting by the dock.
‘Inside,’ said Karl, his expression hardening again as he turned back to her.
Gabrielle stared at him. ‘That name, he called you . . .’
He grabbed her by the shoulder, nearly throwing her into the dropship. The hatch closed behind them, and Gabrielle swallowed hard as the airlock rapidly cycled through. The inner door opened and
he pushed her into a bay where a man was waiting, wearing a jumpsuit similar to her own.
‘Get her inside a medbox,’ instructed Karl, pulling off his breather mask and pushing her towards the other occupant, ‘before hypothermia sets in.’
The man saluted him. ‘You’ll need attention too, sir,’ he said, stepping up beside Gabrielle. ‘And the sooner the better, once we’re out of here.’
‘I want to know why that man called you Ta—’
Karl whirled towards her, grasping her by the jaw. ‘Now, you listen to me,’ he hissed, leaning in close, ‘things are going to be very, very different from now on. What I say,
you do. Is that clear?’
She hated herself for nodding wordlessly, but she had never been so frightened, not even back on board the Grand Barge while waiting for the right moment to kill a roomful of people.
Karl gestured with his chin towards the waiting crewman. ‘Briggs here is going to put you in a medical unit for a while. Until we get to where we’re going, Gabrielle, you’re
going to keep your mouth shut and do whatever the hell you’re told.’
Briggs led her to a tiny medbay, where he left her to strip off her coveralls before she climbed into the warm embrace of a medbox.
She remembered using such machines in her youth, when she had first received her machine-head implants. Cilia-like feelers attached themselves to her skin as she lay back inside it, punching
barbiturates through her skin even before the lid had fully closed over her. In the moments before consciousness slipped away, she felt the craft shudder as it lifted up.
The next thing Gabrielle was aware of was the sound of the medbox unsealing itself with a soft hiss. She had a sense that some hours had passed. She now sat up slowly, blinking in the harsh
glare of the overhead lights.
She experienced a falling sensation, but everything around her looked still and silent.
We must be in orbit
.
She had never been off-world before and yet, despite being unfamiliar with the sensation of weightlessness, she discovered it was not unpleasant. She recalled learning, long ago, that the DNA of
the earliest human colonists had been tweaked in order to optimize their chances of surviving the rigours of space travel. That meant she would never feel space-sick.
Climbing out of the medbox, she found the same oversized coveralls she had been wearing when she first boarded the dropship. Once she had tugged them back on, she realized that her boots were
gone, replaced by a pair of slippers with soft, rubberized soles better suited for onboard life.
She wondered who was piloting this craft, and if they were a machine-head like her. There was something intoxicating about the idea of controlling an entire vessel through one’s mind, but
when she reached out and tried to interface with the control systems, she quickly found they were inaccessible to her.
Damn Karl and his inhibitor.
Moving with the extreme caution of the inexperienced, Gabrielle pulled on the slippers, then gently pushed herself towards the medbay exit. Being in motion felt like flying. She then carefully
made her way along a claustrophobically narrow corridor that followed the curve of the craft’s hull, until she came to an open hatch wedged between banks of instruments and bracketed
conduits, and heard voices on the other side.
She climbed through the hatch and found herself inside what she guessed must be the cockpit or bridge. She noticed more instrument banks angled over and around a number of acceleration couches,
and a Tabernacle projection floating just below what she took to be the ceiling.
Karl was seated in one of the couches, which had been adjusted so that he could look straight up at the projection. There was no sign anywhere of Briggs. She saw Karl make subtle gestures with
his fingers, to which the projection responded by first rotating one way and then the other, before suddenly fading to be replaced by some new set of data.
Gabrielle looked more closely at the images, and saw great floods of water flowing around the roots of a canopy tree. She saw whole buildings and enormous vehicles bouncing and spinning in the
tempest.
Karl glanced briefly towards her, then continued flicking through more images.
‘What is that?’ asked Gabrielle, now afraid to get too close to him.
‘I tapped into an Accord news feed,’ Karl replied, twitching his hand towards the projection as he spoke. ‘Take a look at this.’
The images changed, the projection expanding until it filled nearly the whole of the cramped cockpit.
This time, instead of a canopy tree, she saw floodwaters surging around towers and the shattered ruins of buildings. It was clearly a drowned city, but Gabrielle didn’t recognize it as
Dios until the camera view panned around to show the Ship of the Covenant. The buildings, walls and bridges that had once surrounded it had all now been swept away.
She put her hand to her mouth, the breath stilled in her throat.
The camera view then shifted to take in more of the surrounding landscape. The docks were entirely submerged. Gone were the grand towers, capped by silver and gold minarets, that had stood at
the Gates of Dios to greet pilgrims as they arrived. Further inland was yet more devastation, a flattened wasteland of debris where once had been homes and places of work, of worship and of
entertainment. In their place were surging black waters filled with the bodies, she realized with a deep and absolute certainty, of countless pilgrims.
She felt her gorge rise and swallowed hard. Dios had almost literally ceased to exist.
She stared at Karl. ‘How . . . ?’
‘An impact,’ replied Karl, ‘just like Abramovic said. The news feeds are speculating over an unidentified asteroid.’
Gabrielle shook her head. ‘That’s not possible – not in this day and age. The Accord would have seen it coming.
We’d
have seen it coming. We have orbital
defences.’
‘Unless,’ said Karl, ‘you have friends in the outer system who can make sure no one sees it coming. Or at least not until it’s much, much too late.’
The view had shifted to the waters still spreading inland, hundreds of kilometres from the shores of the Ka, and sweeping away towns and villages. The waves looked as if they might easily rise
to a hundred metres in height.
‘I don’t believe you. That’s impossible.
Someone
would have known.’
He laughed, and looked back over at her. ‘I can’t make up my mind if you’re wilfully blind or just stupid, so let me explain it so you can understand: the Freehold has had
agents working on this for years. Don’t get me wrong: it took a hell of a lot of planning to circumvent the security networks and get the right people into the right positions, but it’s
not impossible. Or are you really going to deny the evidence of your own eyes?’