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  She realized that Bash needed to be seen by a specialist back home, but out here the best that could be done for him was the auto-medicinal equivalent of applying a splint. And that meant she would have to do double-duty on the command deck until he was ready to resume his duties.

  At least Tarrant had shown the good grace to vacate their shared quarters by the time she had returned from the medbay. They were now within a few light years of C-H45k – their target system, and the Wanderer’s hiding place. Just from the drain on the ship’s plasma stores, she knew that Sifra and Tarrant had been sending more messages back to Otto Schelling.

  The two of them kept their promise, each taking turns to watch her carefully. They also made a point of being conspicuously armed at all times. But she could still hide herself away inside the astrogation chair’s petals, the only place on board the Beauregard she felt remotely safe any more.

  She had been there, the day before, when the Beauregard had suddenly come under the focus of a powerful and highly directional tach-net signal emanating from somewhere deep inside the C-H45k system.

  According to Sifra, the Wanderer had followed the same strategy before, broadcasting a faster-than-light hailing signal towards the Kelvin once it had come within a few light years. She had thought immediately of the legends of Sirens calling ancient Greek ships to their ruin on treacherous rocks, but said nothing.

  Sifra arrived on the command deck just then, parking himself in front of a console and thus disturbing her solitude. He glanced towards the folded petals of the astrogation chair.

  Any luck deciphering that signal? he asked, as if nothing had changed on board.

  She pictured her fingers wrapped around his throat. she replied.

  Are you sure that’s not what it is?

 

  Sifra nodded. Other species previously managed to figure out how to talk to it.

 

  Well, said Sifra, that’s the reason for all the back and forth with Kjæregrønnested. Want to hear what they’ve come up with?

  She gritted her teeth.

  He made a sweeping gesture across the top of his console, and in response more images appeared within her personal datascape. What she saw looked like an exercise in pointillistic chaos – thousands of multi-hued dots arranged in no initially discernible manner, but recognizable as Meridian text.

 

  He touched the console and some of the dots began to pulse with light. See the way the highlighted figures are arranged in a specific pattern? They found the same string of data in Shoal records concerning their own, later, encounter with the Wanderer. I want you to run an analysis on the signal and see whether there’s any correlation.

  It took mere moments to find the exact same pattern buried within the millions of petabytes of data currently being beamed towards them. Despite everything, Megan felt a rush of elation.

 

  Our guess is that string is some kind of handshake protocol the Meridians – as well as the Shoal – used to identify themselves to the Wanderer.

 

  We want you to incorporate that string in a microburst transmission and send it back to the Wanderer. If we get some kind of an acknowledgement, we’ll know whether we’re on the right track or not.

 

 

  It took her a while to compile a return transmission incorporating Sifra’s handshake string. The message was large and complex enough to drain the batteries by nearly ten per cent when she sent it off in a single tach-net burst.

  As soon as this was done, Megan severed her link to the ship’s primary systems. The petals slid back into the base of the chair as she stood up for the first time in some hours, rolling her shoulders and stretching her neck to try and unkink it. Sifra, thankfully, had long since left.

  Bash walked on to the command deck just as she was stepping down from the chair. He was closely followed by Tarrant, wearing his pistol holstered by his side.

  sent Bash, glancing towards her. He looked a lot thinner than he had done just a couple of days ago, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

 

 

  She nodded, and stood aside as Bash pulled himself into the chair without even meeting her eyes. The petals slid back up and around him.

  Megan sent.

 

 

 

  Megan stared at the closed petals for a moment, then found her way out of the command deck.

  SIXTEEN

  Megan

  Megan slept for twelve straight hours before she awoke with a chill on her skin. She had dreamed of floating in darkness, listening to a voice that was like nothing she had ever heard before. It had been indistinct, as if she was hearing some muffled conversation through a wall.

  Then the memory of the past few days came crashing back down on her. She lay there with her eyes still closed, wondering where she could find the will to survive the coming days, and where to . . .

  An idea came to her.

  She dragged herself out of her cot, still thinking it over. She was due to relieve Bash, and she knew that if she didn’t get moving soon, Tarrant would come looking for her. And the thought of him walking into her quarters was more than she could stand.

  She stumbled over to the tiny kitchenette, dialling up a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge laced with as many neuro-enhancement supplements as she could persuade the ship to give her without making it think she was aiming for a deliberate overdose. While she ate, she linked back into the ship’s data-net, her mind still churning over the possibilities.

  For the first time in a long while, she started to feel excited.

  She discovered that Bash had been keeping busy. Maps of the target system were arranged everywhere around his datascape, including images of all of the inner planets.

  he said, sensing her electronic presence hovering nearby.

 

 

  she replied. The enhancements were kicking in, making her feel as awake as if she’d just plunged herself bodily into a pool of ice water.

 

  sent Megan.

  sent Bash.

 

  />
 

 

 

  He laughed.

 

  There was a significant pause before he replied.

 

 

  Megan felt her face grow hot, but forged on regardless.

 

 

  sent Bash,

  she retorted.

 

 

  He was silent again for a moment. he said eventually.

 

 

  she said,

  sent Bash.

 

 

 

 

  She laughed.

 

  she said, a grin spreading across her face.

  sent Bash,

  He signed off. Megan picked up her coffee and found it had turned cold. She knew Bash didn’t really believe the plan could work. And maybe he was right. But he was also right when he had said it was better than doing nothing.

  She still hadn’t lost her sense of excitement. She would make it work.

  The next few days, prior to their final jump into the system, were only outwardly uneventful. Bash ran some simulations and used them to develop a set of custom modifications for the lifeboats, without Tarrant or Sifra becoming any the wiser. Before long, the engineering deck’s fabricators were stripping down a lifeboat in preparation for rebuilding it.

  Megan meanwhile prepared the way for the core dump that would eject the Beauregard’s nova drive into space. The mounting within which the drive nestled sported a cluster of miniaturized drive-spines, making it a self-contained starship in its own right. Following an emergency core dump, it could, if necessary, jump to any one of a number of pre-programmed destinations, in order to evade capture.

  But if the Wanderer didn’t attack, she and Bash were going to have to figure out something else. She wondered if it might be possible to provoke the Wanderer in some way, but, given that they still didn’t know how to get it even to respond to them, the chances seemed remote.

  ‘You can’t even get the Wanderer to acknowledge our signal,’ she said in exasperation, later that day, as she stepped back down from the chair to find Tarrant waiting for her. ‘Except I got the distinct impression that the Kelvin’s crew found some way to talk with it before it attacked.’

  Tarrant had been sitting with one booted foot up on a console, turning a Freeholder knife this way and that under the deck lights. ‘That’s correct,’ he replied, without looking up.

  ‘So what happens when we get there?’ she asked. ‘How are you going to talk to it? Shouldn’t you have told us that by now?’

  He gave her a thin smile. ‘It’ll all be taken care of soon enough,’ was all he said.

  Five days after its crew’s violent confrontation on the command deck, the Beauregard finally ramped up for a long jump into the target system, with Megan occupying the chair. Sifra’s idea of using Meridian hailing codes had failed to provoke any kind of response, which left her wondering what the two men would do, should the alien entity still prove unwilling to communicate at closer range.

  Then the stars around the Beauregard changed abruptly, and new data from the external sensors began flooding into her datascape. She pushed most of it to one side, for the moment engaging solely with the incoming visuals.

  She floated in space, her virtual body immune to the cold and radiation. Great billowing clouds of gas obscured the star itself, the colour of the clouds ranging from deep red to brown and yellow. Somewhere at the heart of those clouds lay a single massive star comprising more than twenty standard solar masses, its outer layers stripping away as it entered its last few million years of life.

  According to the Kelvin’s initial survey, a few tiny rocky worlds orbited the giant, but this close in, and with so much interference affecting their long-range sensors, it was nearly impossible to acquire accurate readings on anything. The gas and dust clouds were so dense that the Wanderer could be hiding almost anywhere amongst them and indeed, if it weren’t for the original beacon signal to home in on they might never have been able to figure out where within the system it might be.

  As hiding places went, thought Megan, there could be few better.

  One of those worlds was a pockmarked and airless wasteland with a largish moon, about a thousand kilometres in diameter, around which the Wanderer currently orbited.

  Once she’d run a standard all-systems check following the latest jump, Megan returned to the short-ran
ge visuals that the Kelvin had recorded during its closest encounter with the Wanderer. Something kept drawing her back to those pictures of twisted, root-like limbs extending from a central mass that measured at least a couple of kilometres across. They never failed to make her skin crawl. The Wanderer looked more like a wind-tossed seed coated in barbs than the product of some ancient civilization.

  She zoomed in on the image, noting yet again the peculiarly granular quality of the Wanderer’s hull. It looked as if it had been smashed into tens of thousands of pieces, then carefully glued back into a misshapen whole.

  Something brushed against her thoughts.

  Something alien.

  She swallowed hard and opened her eyes to the pitch darkness inside the chair’s folded-in petals. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, as if something was lurking in the dark unseen.

  She sensed Bash coming online. he asked.

 

 

 

  he replied.

  she sent.

  Bash’s response was full of scorn.

 

 

 

  sent Bash,

  Megan felt her eyes widen, her hands gripping the armrest of her chair.