She felt, more than heard, his chuckle emanate through the connection.
She laughed.
He laughed.
she sent back, with a tinge of sarcasm.
This time he really did laugh.
Megan replied.
he sent back.
She was surprised at how flustered the suggestion made her.
The words sounded lame even to her own ears.
sent Megan.
Over the following days, the constellations visible aft of the Beauregard shifted and morphed with each successive jump until they had become very nearly unrecognizable. They were travelling spinwards, following the direction of rotation of the Milky Way. Megan spent the first weeks of their voyage poring over all of the data related to the Wanderer; there was, she quickly discovered, enough material there for a lifetime of study, much of it highly academic in nature. She downloaded a variety of specialist-knowledge sets to her implants, so she could at least have some kind of idea just what it was she was looking at whenever it came to any of the more esoteric information.
Most other machine-heads Megan had met dreamed of buying into an expedition that made a big find, much as the Schellings had achieved with Alyeska. The Wanderer seemed to represent precisely such an opportunity, and yet the more she dug into the data, the more she had the sense that some of the information was missing. As if, she surmised, it had been deliberately omitted.
She left it alone for a while and tried to concentrate on her shipboard duties. There were replacement drive-spines to be manufactured and manoeuvred into place on the Beauregard’s hull, along with a thousand other tasks involving general maintenance and life-support that would normally be taken care of by a full crew. But with just the four of them on board, they were having to do triple, even quadruple, duty in order to keep things running.
All this work had the added advantage of distracting her from the strangeness of being on board this familiar ship without its usual complement of crew. In her imagination, the passageways and drop shafts seemed to echo with the voices of those who had accompanied her on previous trips. She regularly found her thoughts drawn back to those faces, and wondered when she might see them again, if ever.
Given that unaccustomed solitude, it was perhaps inevitable that she and Tarrant would become lovers, just as Bash had predicted.
Barely more than a month into their voyage, Megan made her way to the command deck to start her usual shift in the astrogation chair. Bash stood next to it, in an otherwise deserted deck, one corner of his mouth twisted up in a wry and knowing grin.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said, as she approached. ‘I knew Tarrant would find a way into your pants.’
Despite herself, Megan’s face coloured, and Bash almost choked from laughing.
‘How the fuck did you know?’ she asked.
He reached up and tapped the side of his head. ‘You were broadcasting loud and clear,’ he told her.
‘Belle’s tits,’ Megan exclaimed. ‘You were listening in?’
‘Not intentionally, no.’ Bash shrugged, still grinning. ‘You’ve really got to learn how to hide it better when you’re having sex. So?’
‘So, what?’
‘You like him?’
‘Sure.’ It was Megan’s turn to shrug. ‘I guess.’
‘You guess,’ Bashir repeated, clearly not fooled. ‘I don’t need to read your mind to see you like him a whole lot.’
She stepped past him, pulling herself up and into the astrogation chair, leaving the petals folded down while they still talked. ‘He wasn’t like I thought he would be.’
‘Which is?’
‘A blowhard, I guess . . . full of himself. But he’s not. In fact, he’s almost ridiculously charming.’
Bash’s expression grew fractionally more sober. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘you probably aren’t the first pretty girl he’s made feel that way.’
By the time they were halfway through their six-month voyage in search of the Wanderer, the Beauregard’s crew of four had fallen into patterns of behaviour that only rarely saw them all meeting at the same time. Megan found herself spending more and more of her off-duty hours with Tarrant, while Bashir disappeared for long hours with Sifra, the two of them poring over the Beauregard’s nova drive. Sifra, it now turned out, had trained as a drive-specialist.
Megan and Bash, however, maintained their customary habit of taking meals together on those occasions when neither of them was required in the astrogation chair. They spent long hours talking about all the ways they would spend their newfound wealth, once they returned home.
‘You know, it hit me that even if they parade us in triumph down the streets of Ladested,’ said Megan on one such occasion, ‘any time we step outside of Alliance territory, we’ll be targets. There’ll always be someone from the Accord gunning for us.’
Bash stopped, a spoonful of broth halfway to his mouth. ‘You mean like arrest us, for taking the Beauregard? Then we’ll just have to head the other way,’ he said, gesturing with the spoon as if to indicate the entirety of the universe beyond the hull. ‘There’s a whole galaxy out there, Megan.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
Bash sighed and finally put his spoon down, then sat back with both hands resting on the table. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘What?’ said Megan.
‘Whatever it is you’re thinking of saying to me, could you please just hurry up and say it?’
She pursed her lips. ‘Okay, fine. But this is between you and me, right?’
Bash cast a long gaze around the deserted refectory. ‘Sure. I promise I’ll keep my voice down, in case anyone’s listening.’
‘Funny.’ S
he sucked her lips for a moment. ‘Okay, it has to do with the Wanderer.’
‘Are you still digging through all that stuff? Even thinking about it all makes my brain ache.’
‘There’s just . . . something not right about some of it.’
‘Not right how?’ he asked.
She put down her own spoon and pushed her bowl to one side before leaning towards him. ‘Do you remember,’ she asked him, ‘what Gregor told us before we set out? He said that Otto Schelling’s research staff found out that both the Atn and the Shoal had prior contact with the Wanderer. That’s how they managed to locate it in the Calafat-Holt Cluster.’
‘Sure,’ said Bash. ‘What about it?’
‘Do you know the name the Shoal had for the Wanderer?’
Bash shrugged, playing again with his spoon. ‘I guess there’s no reason to think they’d give it the same name the Meridians did.’
‘They called it,’ she said, ‘the Marauder.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Sounds ominous.’
‘Doesn’t it? I mean, why give it a name like that?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t it suggest something . . . well, dangerous?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know. I guess maybe. How sure are you it’s an accurate translation?’
‘Well . . .’
‘You did the translation yourself?’ he asked.
‘I had to,’ she replied, a touch defensively. ‘I downloaded some learning modules. We don’t have any experts in alien languages on board.’
He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Have you talked to Gregor or Anil about this?’
She hesitated. ‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m increasingly sure some of the data’s been redacted. There are large chunks missing.’
Bash shrugged. ‘Maybe they only gave us the highlights. Or maybe there was stuff they just didn’t think we needed to know. Does it matter?’
‘I’ve spent a lot of time going over what those researchers dug up on Alyeska, and what I’ve found are huge gaps, not just little ones. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d notice just by casually browsing, but when you run a really deep analysis you find big, fat, glaring omissions. Look.’
She scrunched her hand into a fist, and when she opened it again, there was a tiny, glistening ball of light spinning silently just above her palm, visible only to herself and Bash. She slid her hand out from under it, then batted it towards Bash, who closed his own hand around it. She waited, sucking down some more of her broth, while he absorbed the information.
‘See?’ she said, after his eyes had focused on her once more. ‘At first it was just a suspicion, then I became sure of it.’
Bash sighed and gave her a weary look. ‘Megan, did you ever think about just asking them about the missing data?’
‘I did, but . . .’
‘But what?’ he asked. ‘What exactly are you afraid of?’
‘Well, what if they are deliberately keeping something back from us? What if there’s a reason the Shoal called it the Marauder instead of the Wanderer? Why would they want to keep anything like that back from us?’
‘Or maybe, now that you’re tight with Tarrant, you don’t like the idea that he’s been keeping something from you.’
Megan glared at him.
Bash chuckled, reaching out to put his hand on her arm. ‘Okay then, supposing you’re right. I’m not saying that maybe we shouldn’t ask questions, but if they’ve really been hiding something we should know about, then, under any normal circumstances, maybe that’s something we should be concerned about. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Sometimes there are things you need to know and things you don’t need to know. If they’re not telling us something, then maybe there’s a good reason for it.’
She stared at him, appalled. ‘We need to know everything, Bash, or how the hell are we going to know how to deal with whatever we end up finding out there?’
‘Look,’ said Bash, his tone getting defensive, ‘Tarrant and Sifra are both of them good men. Remember I was stuck on that moon along with him – with Tarrant, I mean – and the rest of the survivors from the Chesapeake, waiting for a rescue we nearly convinced ourselves was never coming. He’s the kind of man you’d follow through the gates of hell, because you know for damn sure he’d lead you back out again.’
‘I know it sounds stupid,’ she said quietly, ‘but something still just doesn’t feel right.’
He shook his head. ‘The time to worry, Megan, was before we even set out. Now we’ve just got to deal with the cards we’ve been given, and do the best we can. With this much riding on the four of us, I don’t see either of those guys holding anything back from us if we really needed to know it.’
‘I’m still going to talk to him,’ she muttered. ‘And if he doesn’t tell me, then . . .’
‘Then what?’ Bash asked, with a slight smile.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I’ll think of something.’
And yet something still kept Megan from confronting Tarrant. She tried to tell herself it was because Bash was right and she was just overreacting, that whatever reason there might be for some of the material being redacted, it was almost certainly a perfectly reasonable and mundane one. Chunks of incomplete records from some archaeological dig did not, after all, amount to a conspiracy.
But she knew there was another, more pertinent reason for her failure to act. At some point she had crossed a line and fallen, very, very hard, for Tarrant.
Bash was right in one respect; she was far from being the first girl who had fallen for Tarrant’s undoubted charms, and she had hoped that awareness would help her maintain a certain emotional, if not physical, distance. But they were a long way from home, with a long way to go still and a long way back again, with none of the companionship and support of the Beauregard’s usual complement of crew. Under the circumstances, maintaining that distance proved to be much harder than she’d thought.
She told herself that her nagging doubts meant nothing. The alternative explanation, after all, might be too much to bear.
Over the following weeks, the Calafat-Holt Cluster expanded towards them with each successive jump they made, until they had finally passed inside it. Megan spent long hours in the astrogation chair, the hard radiation baking the ship’s hull like warm sun directly on her skin, and the stellar dust flowing past the ship’s electromagnetic envelope like the kiss of a summer breeze.
And yet there were other things that concerned her, too. There were unusual readings emanating from the cargo pod that had come aboard the Beauregard just before their departure from Kjæregrønnested, but Tarrant refused to let her check it out in person, saying he’d prefer to take care of that personally.
‘Are you hiding something in that cargo pod?’ she finally asked him on one occasion.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But we do have some materials on board which are vital to negotiating with the Wanderer.’
‘Shouldn’t I know what they are?’
He had looked at her oddly. ‘Don’t make me say no, Megan.’
She subsequently hated herself for not pushing harder. And the next time they made love, she did so with a furious passion, her desire mingled with anger at herself for being so weak.
‘You don’t like it when people get too close, do you?’ Tarrant remarked to her, some time later, when they were just a few weeks out from the target system.
At that time, the ship was coasting at a steady velocity between jumps. The two of them floated together in a recreation sphere, the sweat still drying on their skin. Handholds and harnesses designed to overcome the physical limitations of zero-gravity sex floated around them like the fronds of deep-sea flora.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘I mean that sometimes your mind is clearly elsewhere: either running the ship or staring out at the stars.’
‘I’ve never done that,’ she argued, feeling slightly offended. ‘When I’m with you, I’m with you.’
/>
He assumed a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘All I’m saying is, it’s as if you’re holding yourself back – like you’re afraid of getting too close.’
‘That’s because I am,’ she said, gazing back at him frankly.
He smiled but broke eye contact. ‘All right,’ he said, moving to grab an item of his clothing floating within reach, ‘here’s another question. Why don’t you ever talk about your past?’
She let out a sigh. ‘Because I don’t like talking about it,’ she said, snatching some of her own clothes out of the air.
‘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.
TWELVE
Gabrielle
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 . . .