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  MARAUDER

  Marauder is set a few centuries after the events described in Stealing Light, Nova War and Empire of Light, and is a standalone work.

  HISTORICAL ARCHIVES SUBSECTION C/5 category ALPHA

  [From the offices of the Corso Institute of Non-Human Languages & Ciphers, in collaboration with the Accord Stellar Archaeology and Weapons Research Division. Presented by the Department of Alien Affairs during a plenary session of the Accord Central Chambers of Government at Ymir in 2745.

  Please note this document contains restricted information and is rated PRIORITY RESTRICTED ACCESS.]

  SUMMARY

  The first Nova War of record is known to have taken place a hundred and sixty thousand years ago in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. This conflict, which is believed to have lasted millennia, was made possible by the same ‘nova drive’ technology that enables our own starships to travel at faster-than-light speeds. The Magi, a multi-species collective that then dominated the LMC, had discovered that the nova drive was also a weapon of enormous destructive power – one capable of obliterating entire star systems, and billions of lives, at a single stroke.

  Fragmentary Shoal records show that the nova-drive technology originated not with the Magi, but with a far older alien civilization known as the Makers, who appear to have been responsible for seeding caches of this and other advanced technologies throughout both the LMC and our own Milky Way. No other species is known to have independently discovered a means to travel faster than light, and attempts by Accord researchers to reverse-engineer existing drives have so far met only with failure.

  Our extensive analysis of recovered historical records, several hundreds of thousands of years old, lends credence to the idea that these caches were intended as a kind of trap, albeit of a highly sophisticated nature. Any species sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar civilizations without the benefit of faster-than-light travel, so the thinking goes, would naturally exploit the contents of any Maker cache they might stumble across in their process of expansion. Given sufficient time to discover the drive’s inherently destructive properties, they would ultimately destroy themselves either through internal unrest or during conflict with other species.

  Following the cessation of this earliest known Nova War, the surviving Magi built fleets of autonomous starships and directed them to seek out Maker caches and destroy them. The majority of these ‘Magi ships’ were later destroyed by the Shoal Hegemony who, forewarned by events in the LMC, created a stable empire controlling interstellar traffic throughout much of our own Milky Way – until they, too, were destroyed by internal factionalism and an aggressive territorial war conducted with a neighbouring species two centuries ago.

  The Shoal Hegemony’s departure from the greater galactic stage has since allowed for humanity’s rapid expansion, by making use of nova drives recovered either from derelict Shoal craft or from the Maker cache in the Tierra system. Such rapid growth, however, makes it difficult to keep track of the devices – and, given their hugely destructive potential, we recommend prioritizing the acquisition by any means necessary of all extant nova drives, including those recently recovered by independent human colonies such as the Three Star Alliance.

  Taking control of this technology is therefore an essential step towards preventing the occurrence of another Nova War.

  We do, however, anticipate strong resistance from the Three Star Alliance in particular, and a draft proposal has been prepared regarding the possibility of military action should current negotiations fail to reach a satisfying conclusion.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  ONE

  Megan

  June 2763, 82 Eridani System (the present)

  Megan Jacinth watched as the ship that had carried her down to Avilon’s surface lifted up once more, its drive-fields flickering as it passed through the former asteroid’s atmospheric containment field. She had been the only passenger.

  The stars overhead were still in visible motion, unsurprising given that Avilon had only jumped into this system within the last few hours. Avilon was a boosted world, after all – a landscaped rock barely a few hundred kilometres in diameter, with a gravity engine at its heart and a containment field to keep its atmosphere from dissipating. Light and heat came from fusion globes, orbiting outside the containment field like tiny suns.

  She looked around at the wide, dusty plain on which she now stood. The horizon appeared so close that it made her feel as if a single step might send her toppling over its edge.

  She reached into the satchel slung across her shoulders and pulled out a band, using it to tie back her shoulder-length dark hair, flecked here and there with silver. Then she started to walk.

  Megan hadn’t been walking for much more than an hour before some instinct caused her to glance up. She glimpsed a black outline occluding the stars and growing larger by the second as it descended towards her. It appeared that her arrival had not, after all, gone unnoticed.

  She stumbled backwards as a machine came thudding down onto the cracked dirt before her. Starlight glittered from its glassy black skin and armour-plated struts. Judging by the markings on its carapace, it was one of Avilon’s security mechs, set to guard against unauthorized intrusions.

  Megan stared at it in shock. Even though she’d been prepared for something like this, actually coming face to face with such a deadly machine was another matter. Her body instinctively wanted to turn and run, but she was all too aware of just how much firepower the mech was carrying. She’d be dead before she could take a single step.

  Moving with exaggerated care, she reached inside her satchel and removed a stubby tube made of copper-coloured metal and
dark plastic. She held it out towards the mech, at the same time pressing a small switch on the side of the device.

  She waited for something to happen – but nothing did. She stared at the mech, dry-mouthed and unsure of what to do next.

  The mech began to probe the machine part of her consciousness with informational feelers, looking for possible points of entry. It had already detected the cerebral implants she used to interface with starships. A brilliant white light flared out from the mech’s torso, dazzling her. Then a sudden gust of air from its turbo jets sent her coat flailing around her legs.

  She kept the override unit held out before her in one trembling hand. But suddenly the idea that this little box – this cheap, prefabbed gizmo of hacked-together circuitry and stolen override codes – could possibly protect her seemed utterly futile. She was outclassed, and she knew it.

  Kazim had assured her endlessly of the device’s efficacy, but at that moment she found herself wondering whether she might have made a terrible mistake by relying on him. It had since occurred to her that if anything were to happen to her, all those contacts she had so carefully built up over the years would have no choice but to deal with him directly – and then Kazim’s profits from the illegal exportation of sans de sezi, out of Corkscrew, would surely increase by a not inconsequential margin.

  The machine’s servos whined faintly, its carapace splitting apart to reveal intricate glittering machinery underneath. It was, she realized to her further dismay, focusing its attack systems directly on her.

  At the same time, a low rumble built up somewhere deep within the machine’s core, building towards a crescendo.

  The paralysis that had gripped Megan until that moment suddenly slackened. She stumbled backwards, preparing to take her chances and run . . .

  The noise cut off abruptly, the machine’s attack systems folding themselves away and the carapace closing back over them once more.

  She felt suddenly numb with relief. Maybe Kazim hadn’t been lying after all—

  A flickering beam of energy shot out at her from another section of the mech, propelling a flood of fire through her nerve endings. She fell backwards, slamming the rear of her skull on the ground, her jaw clamped in a rictus grin as her body twitched and shuddered.

  She caught sight of the mech leaping back into the sky, like some oversized mechanical locust, before rapidly vanishing out of sight amidst the stars.

  With an extreme effort, she was just about able to turn her head to where she could see Kazim’s override unit lying near one outstretched hand.

  I’ll kill you, thought Megan, in those last moments before consciousness slipped away. I should never have listened to you, Kazim, you lying piece of shit.

  Megan finally came to again some hours later, the grass feeling cool and damp beneath her cheek. Beside her knelt a heavily muscled man with intricate tattoos on his neck and a look of deep concentration as he searched through the contents of her satchel. She instantly noticed he had a rifle slung over one shoulder.

  She tried to say something, but her tongue felt sluggish and unresponsive. Even trying to form a few words made the muscles in her throat ache, and she could barely feel her arms and legs as she tried to move them. Nevertheless, a faint tingling in her extremities suggested the return of sensation, though she could no more command them to obey her than she could sprout wings and fly away.

  She glanced beyond the man and saw a spider-truck parked nearby, with two headless and bare-chested figures standing next to it. These were bead-zombies, she realized, their bodies controlled by microscopic devices implanted in the nub of spinal column that protruded from the healed-over stumps of their necks. Each carried a long, curved sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  Bead-zombies were, she knew from experience, incapable of feeling pain. Taking them on in a fight was a good way of getting yourself sliced into chunks, regardless of how much damage you might inflict on them in the meantime.

  But the zombies didn’t worry her nearly so much as the neck-tattoos on the man still searching through her satchel. They signified that he was a Freeholder and a native of Redstone, and the tattoos represented the number of people he had killed in one-to-one combat. He wore a traditional Freehold blade on his hip, its haft wrought in a fine filigree the colour of jade and ivory, depicting stylized human figures in close combat.

  He stood up suddenly, slinging her satchel over the shoulder not burdened by his rifle, and looked down at her. ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘What the hell do you think?’ she tried to say, but the words emerged half-slurred. Her tongue felt like something that had crawled into her mouth for shelter and died there.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He leaned down, took hold of her under her armpits, then began dragging her towards the spider-truck and the waiting bead-zombies. Her boots left dark grooves in the dusty yellow soil.

  He slammed her upright against the side of the truck, between two of its legs, propping her there with one hand against her shoulder. The bead-zombies had turned towards him, from which she deduced they must both be slaved to his control.

  ‘It’s wearing off now, right?’ asked the Freeholder. ‘The stuff the mech shot you with?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she mumbled, then coughed, though it was getting easier to talk. ‘What the hell do you want with me?’ she managed to ask. ‘And who the fuck are you, anyway?’

  ‘Sifra warned me you’d be a pain in the ass,’ he replied, taking his hand away from her shoulder. ‘He wasn’t kidding.’

  Megan just about managed to stand upright without his support. ‘Sifra?’ She swallowed hard. ‘Anil Sifra?’

  One corner of his mouth curled upwards. ‘So you do know him.’

  ‘No.’ Megan shook her head. ‘No, I’m not going anywhere if he’s—’

  The Freeholder sighed loudly, then hauled her over to an open hatch at the rear of the truck. She yelled in protest as he pushed her inside a cramped and windowless compartment with a metal floor and walls before slamming the door shut.

  I’m sorry, Bash, she thought, feeling all her carefully wrought plans slipping through her fingers like so much water. Looks like I’ve failed you again.

  A few minutes later, she felt the vehicle stagger into motion. The ceiling was low enough to force her to sit bent over. Her head banged against the hard surface above her when the truck lurched suddenly as it picked up speed, but before long it had achieved a smooth, steady rhythm, bouncing only slightly as it leaped around the tiny planetoid’s circumference.

  Before long the numbness in her limbs had nearly worn off, but it was soon replaced by intense cramps. She flexed and stretched her arms and legs to try and ease the pain, but that was far from easy in such a confined space. When she felt sufficiently recovered, she banged and kicked at the door of the cramped compartment, throwing all her rage and frustration at it, until she finally ran out of physical energy.

  She then made up for it by screaming abuse at her Freeholder captor at the top of her lungs, even though she knew he almost certainly couldn’t hear her from where he sat in the truck’s cabin. Which was a shame, because she thought some of the insults she’d just come up with were particularly inventive.

  She finally slumped down again, her rage and fury replaced by a kind of numb emptiness.

  Sifra.

  How could he possibly have known she was coming here? Her plan had seemed so simple when she had first worked it out, back on Corkscrew, which lay a hundred and fifty light years distant:

  1: Make her way to 82 Eridani, where the world of Redstone was located.

  2: Avoid, by any means necessary, actually setting foot on Redstone itself.

  3: Wait in one of the outer-system refinery settlements for Avilon to make its scheduled stop in-system.

  4: Land on Avilon, bypassing its security protocols with the aid of the override device provided for her by Kazim.

  5: Find Bash and rescue him from whatever hole Sifra had squirrelled h
im away in all these years.

  6: Fly to the Wanderer and save the human race from all-too-certain extinction.

  An agenda clean and uncomplicated – in principle at least. But, as ever, real life in all its complexity had got in the way. Just finding a way to land undetected on Avilon had required the negotiation of numerous deals and also the payment of bribes that had drained her remaining finances. Numerous favours had been called in. And, if not for Kazim, part-owner and investor in several ships used for smuggling sans de sezi as well as being the nearest thing she’d had to a friend these past several years, she would never have got even this far.

  But, for all her preparations, there had remained the unanswered question of just how the hell she was going to get Bash out of the high-security medical facility he was supposedly being held in. And that, added to her discovery that Sifra’s reach extended deep inside Avilon’s global security network, made her job close to impossible.

  It then occurred to her that her only remaining option was to admit defeat and turn herself in to Avilon’s civilian authorities. She might not be able to save Bash, but it was still a hell of a lot better than letting Sifra get his hands on her.

  She managed to access the local data-net via her implants and quickly found a responsive AI representing Avilon’s civilian council. She explained to it that she had been kidnapped and gave a brief description of her abductor and the spider-truck.

  A few seconds later, the truck came to a sudden, lurching halt. She heard the hollow thump of a door opening somewhere overhead, then the sound of boots hitting the ground.

  The door cracked open once more, and the Freeholder peered in at her, haloed by bright artificial daylight that hurt her eyes.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ he said, holding up one fist and then flinging its fingers open. An Avilon Security ID materialized in the air, before fading after a few moments. ‘Otherwise I’ll have to knock you out for the rest of the journey.’