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  ‘To meet more of your Freehold friends?’

  ‘Clean up and get yourself to the cockpit,’ he demanded, stepping back out of the storage cupboard. ‘And don’t be long. I don’t want to have to come looking for you again.’

  Gaby found her way to the dropship’s head and studied herself in the tiny mirror. She looked like a wreck: her skin was puffy and bruised, her hair a tangled mess from its immersion in the icy river water. She dug around inside several of the drawers until she found a disposable comb, along with a pair of scissors.

  She picked up the scissors, studying them beneath the head’s unforgiving light. They were small, cheaply fabricated, but sharp. How easy it would be, she thought, to draw their razor-sharp edges through the soft tissue of her wrist . . .

  No. She felt a flare of anger, both at herself and at Tarrant. In a way, that would feel like letting him win.

  She put the scissors back down, then tried to pull the comb through the knots in her hair. It proved to be a hopeless task and she stared at her reflection in despair. She looked like some discarded rag doll come to life, wrapped in the folds of oversized coveralls. How could she have fallen so very far?

  She ran some water, which formed a wobbling globe as it emerged from the tap, then dipped her hands into it, in the way she had seen people doing via the Tabernacle, before moistening her eyes and cheeks. Pressing a button below the mirror activated a device that sucked the remaining moisture away.

  She picked up the scissors and began to work them through a clump of hair, cutting it close to her scalp. The strands came away easily, and she stared at her reflection once more, remembering how long and lustrous her hair had been. But that had been another person, another life.

  She kept on cutting, thrusting each severed clump of hair into a chute marked DISPOSAL. It whined briefly before sucking them away.

  Slowly, a new person emerged in the mirror: boyish in looks, with hair curling around her ears and sticking up on top in spiky clumps. The grooves and lines of her implants were much more visible than before, making her appear somehow strange and alien.

  With each whir of the disposal unit, another chunk of her past life was sucked away: Thijs, Karl Petrova, all those petty little restrictions she had endured, the oppressive weight of Mater Cassanas’s watchful gaze (was the old woman even still alive?). On finishing, she looked again at that unfamiliar reflection and thought: This is the face of a murderer. This is the face of a woman whose greatest love committed genocide.

  But, instead of seeing a stranger, she felt as if she were seeing herself clearly for the very first time.

  She made her way back through the ship to the cockpit, seeing as she entered that the man named Briggs was now seated on another couch, surrounded by such a density of projected data that he was almost invisible behind it all.

  Tarrant’s eyes widened slightly when he saw what she had done to her appearance, but he recovered quickly. ‘You took your goddamn time,’ he snarled.

  I’m sorry, she almost said, but checked herself.

  As she climbed into an unoccupied couch, several virtual panels appeared around her, demonstrating how to secure herself properly. Then she glanced over at Briggs and saw that some of the projections surrounding him were maps of various terrains, mostly containing snow-capped mountains and deep river valleys. She recognized these images as the Montos de Frenezo: a part of Redstone that was particularly mountainous and extremely inhospitable, even compared to the rest of the planet. But it had the advantage – from the Freehold’s point of view – of being riddled with caverns and caves and uncountable hiding places. This was the base whence they struck out against the Demarchy, as well as the other Uchidan states.

  Other views showed Redstone’s horizon gradually losing its curvature, the deep black of orbital space sliding out of view as the dropship descended. The entire craft shivered around her as it bit once more into atmosphere.

  It wasn’t long before Gabrielle again felt the familiar tug of gravity. The views around Briggs had changed again, now showing clouds punctuated by occasional sharp-edged mountain ridges.

  They banked, dropping through the cloud layer and heading towards a broad valley lying between two taller peaks, their slopes littered with ancient scree. The dropship shuddered violently as its drive-fields reduced its rate of descent prior to a final landing.

  The craft around her quivered one last time as it dropped onto frozen and stony soil, its bulkheads creaking and pinging as if in protest.

  Tarrant quickly and expertly released himself from his restraints, then turned to point towards her. ‘Out.’

  Briggs had unbuckled himself almost before the dropship had settled into place, data still rippling around him as he lifted himself out of his couch by grasping hold of the two straps dangling overhead. He gave Tarrant a brief nod, then exited the cockpit while Gabrielle was still struggling with her own restraints.

  Tarrant grew impatient waiting, and quickly and expertly unfastened her. Gabrielle glanced past his shoulder at the video feeds showing the outside of the dropship, which were still running above Briggs’s couch. She saw half a dozen ancient-looking trucks, two-storey affairs possessing tractor wheels, now approaching them along the valley floor. They had been painted to match the mottled reddish-browns and whites of the mountains and, even from a distance, it was clear that they had been repaired and re-repaired many times.

  ‘What now?’ she asked, standing.

  ‘Follow Briggs,’ he said, gesturing to the open hatch.

  They found Briggs waiting for them at the airlock, already clad in cold-weather gear and with a breather mask strapped in place. Tarrant quickly followed suit, then supervised Gabrielle as she did the same.

  When they finally stepped out onto the ramp, she saw the morning sun had barely risen over the peaks towering above them on either side. The sight of them made her catch her breath. The trucks she had seen through the cockpit monitors had rolled to a halt nearby, while several bearded Freeholders with hard eyes and old-fashioned breather masks stood waiting.

  One of the Freeholders came over and took Tarrant in a bear hug, clapping him soundly on the back.

  ‘Ah, it’s been a long time, Cuyàs,’ said Tarrant.

  The man Cuyàs turned to look at Gabrielle. ‘This can’t be her, Gregor,’ he said, his accent sounding thick and guttural to her ears. ‘All this effort, just so you can kidnap some girl?’

  ‘Remember, it’s what’s in her head that counts,’ Tarrant replied.

  Cuyàs grinned. ‘I’ll admit I had my doubts, Gregor. But I’ve never seen anything so astonishing in all my life. We didn’t just hurt the Demarchy – we near as damn destroyed it. And we never could have managed it without you.’ He looked around. ‘However, we should not tarry here. We need to go before the orbital platforms zero in on us. Let’s not fuck up, this close to our final victory, eh?’

  With that, he turned to his men – Gaby could see at least a dozen of them, all heavily armed, their eyes scanning the nearby peaks – and barked a series of commands. Several of the men darted past them to board the dropship.

  ‘We have a camp not far from here,’ said Cuyàs, nodding towards the nearest of the trucks. He snapped his fingers at two of the remaining soldiers, and jabbed a finger at Gabrielle. Two of the men trotted forward, each taking hold of one of her arms and pulling her along after Tarrant and Cuyàs, as they made for the truck.

  ‘And my friends?’ asked Tarrant (Gregor Tarrant, it seemed, for Gabrielle had not failed to notice the Freeholder addressing him by that name). ‘Are they here yet?’

  Cuyàs shook his head. ‘No, but they should be arriving from orbit shortly.’ He glanced again at Gabrielle. ‘Can we be certain the Accord won’t come looking for her?’

  ‘The Grand Barge is by now a pile of kindling spread all up and down the Ka River,’ Tarrant replied. ‘We took care of Thijs and the others first, in case they might have had a chance of getting away before the waves hit. Anyone
mounting a rescue operation is going to assume she’s dead, along with everyone else on board. When do you intend to begin the main assault?’

  They came to a stop by the designated truck. ‘We’ve had units spread all through the hills bordering the Demarchy for a good while now. And some have already started to push deep into their territory, now the waters are beginning to recede. The rest of us are currently mobilizing, and we should be moving en masse in just another few days. In the meantime we’ve been picking off a few scattered Demarchy troops and outposts – not that there’s much fight left in the few who survived.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tarrant, ‘sounds to me like you should be able to walk right in there.’

  ‘Except,’ Cuyàs pointed out, ‘we still have the Accord to deal with, which remains my greatest concern.’

  ‘The important thing to remember,’ said Tarrant, ‘is that they don’t give a damn about the Demarchy. All they care about is that Magi ship and whatever information it may have locked away inside it. Remember to keep your forces at a distance from it – don’t do anything that might give the Accord reason to think you might cause a problem for it. Then there should be a relatively smooth transition of power.’

  ‘And yourself?’ asked Cuyàs. ‘Are you going to stick around for the fight?’

  Tarrant laughed and shook his head. ‘No, I’m going off-world. I don’t think it’s at all likely I’ll be back.’

  Cuyàs nodded, something glinting in his eye. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best.’ He glanced again at Gabrielle. ‘And the girl?’

  ‘She goes with me.’

  ‘Amazing to think some mere child could be so important.’ Cuyàs’s eyes flicked back to Tarrant. ‘Or that the contents of her mind could be so enormously valuable.’

  Gabrielle sensed a new tension in the air, which made the muscles of her belly tighten in fear. Cuyàs was making a point of not looking at her. He’s thinking of taking me away from Tarrant, she thought.

  ‘Perhaps I should remind you,’ Tarrant stepped closer to Cuyàs, his voice low and dangerous, ‘that Otto Schelling will be here shortly. If anything were to go wrong, or if there were to be any . . . disagreements, then I feel sure he would be more than happy to provide the Accord as well as the surviving Uchidan states with the precise coordinates of your primary bases of operations.’

  The two men glared at each other above fixed smiles. Then light flared from behind them, and Gabrielle turned to see the dropship from which they had just disembarked lifting up and accelerating into the sky.

  The tension broke, and Cuyàs laughed. ‘That’s what I like about you,’ he said, grinning. ‘You’re a snake, Gregor Tarrant, and too damn smart for your own good.’

  Tarrant took hold of Gabrielle’s arm, guiding her up a ramp and into the rear of the truck, where she took a seat on one of the two facing benches. A couple of the Freeholders meanwhile climbed into the front cabin, where Tarrant joined them, chatting with them briefly as the truck ground into motion.

  ‘He was going to take me from you, wasn’t he?’ said Gaby, her voice full of scorn after Tarrant had stepped back through, to take a seat opposite her.

  ‘You heard what I said. He knows it would be over for them. He was just testing to see how far he could push me.’

  ‘You don’t feel even an ounce of regret for everything you’ve done, do you?’

  ‘It’s a fact of life that innocent people get hurt on the path towards a greater good, Gabrielle. I really wish it was otherwise.’

  He actually believes that, she realized. And there was nothing she could do or say that would change his mind or cause him to see things any differently.

  She stared out of the window of the truck, thinking of the life growing inside her belly, and wondered if she would live long enough to ever see its face.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Megan

  Megan boosted Sarbakshian’s jump-car high into Redstone’s stratosphere, the force of acceleration crushing her back into her seat. The pressure relented as the landscape became more curved, until finally the car reached low orbit and she became weightless.

  She watched the dawn chase the night across the planet’s northern hemisphere. Even from this altitude, the damage done to the Demarchy was clearly enormous. Great brown and grey streaks mottled the entire west coast of the continent on which the Demarchy lay. The lights of cities and outlying settlements speckled the globe everywhere but along that coast. She dreaded to think of what it must be like for the few survivors wandering through the ruins down there.

  She began thinking about what lay ahead. The Tabernacle was rife with speculation about just when the Accord would send heavy forces into the Montos de Frenezo to strike back against the Freehold forces hiding there. She had, at most, a few days to track Bash down and get him out before that entire mountain range became one huge battleground.

  Redstone revolved beneath her, the Demarchy slipping into night while another, craggier continent came into view. The jump-car began dipping downwards, shaped-fields flickering into life all around its hull as it roared on through the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  Less than two hours after departing Aguirre, the vehicle was cruising just a few hundred metres above a gorge in the foothills of the Montos de Frenezo. A river lying to the east sparkled blue and white.

  Alerts began to flower around Megan, warning her that she was entering an Accord restricted zone. She swept them away, focusing instead on the dusty jagged peaks ahead. She was now fewer than a hundred klicks from where Sarbakshian’s tracer told her that Sifra’s dropship had only recently touched down.

  Something appeared then on the jump-car’s radar, about a hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of her current location. Whatever it was, it was clearly too small to be carrying passengers.

  The radar display floating before her blinked and changed. The blip was now only a hundred and thirty kilometres away, and closing in on her fast.

  She felt her brow prickle with sweat. That had to mean it was a missile of some kind. Possibly it had been launched automatically, but almost certainly it belonged to the Freehold.

  She tried to see if she could pick up echoes from its internal circuitry, something that might allow her to gain access to its control systems and divert it. But when that didn’t work, she wasn’t really surprised. Weapons and bombs had actually become dumber and cruder over the past few centuries, making them proof them against such attempts at remote intervention. The best she could hope for was to outrun it.

  The blip jumped again. Suddenly it was a great deal closer, altering its course slightly to match hers, and still closing.

  Definitely a missile, she thought. However fast Sarbakshian’s pride and joy might be, the missile was clearly a lot faster. She could try and outmanoeuvre it, but the g-forces required would render her unconscious, possibly even kill her.

  That left her with a simple choice: land now or die.

  The blip moved once more. It was now just ninety kilometres away.

  She pushed a map of the mountain range into the air next to her, doing her best to stay calm and not panic. She saw a glowing dot that represented Sifra’s dropship, while another dot represented the encroaching missile.

  She felt a jolt of shock when she realized just how fast it was closing. Seventy-five kilometres . . .

  Sixty-five . . .

  Sixty . . .

  She was beginning to wonder if she would have time even to land before it hit her.

  She brought the jump-car right down until it was skimming just above the ground. Meanwhile the gorge had disappeared behind her, the jump-car nosing over jumbled peaks, and dipping down again as it followed the course of a winding river valley.

  The valley walls began to widen and become less steep, merging with the foothills of a tall and particularly forbidding-looking peak rising to the East.

  Megan searched frantically for some place flat enough for her to land. The missile was now only twenty-five kilometres away,
and she could almost feel it nosing up behind her.

  There. She spotted a flat pebbled area to the north-west, where the valley twisted to one side. She set the jump-car instantly to land, its propulsion fields flickering as it lost speed.

  Fifteen kilometres. Megan realized she was holding her breath.

  She pulled herself out of her seat and ran into the hold, locating the secret bulkhead door and hauling out as many of Sarbakshian’s weapons as she could. She threw them through the doorway leading into the cockpit.

  Ten kilometres. She looked up front and saw dust blowing up around the windshield, as the jump-car settled onto the hard-frozen soil. She dumped the armful of weaponry she held and scrabbled for her cold-weather gear, fumbling it on as fast as she could, before pulling up the hood and fastening it at the front. She searched around for her breather mask, and for one terrible, lurching moment, was unable to find it. Then a cry of relief when she realized she had folded it up earlier and stuffed it in one pocket of her jacket.

  Five kilometres, and closing fast. This wasn’t at all how she’d imagined things would pan out.

  She hit the emergency release button on the car’s hatch. It swung open, air gusting outwards. She had a rifle slung over one shoulder, and several of the short-use beam weapons stuffed into any available pocket that wasn’t already jammed full of ammunition. Lastly, she grabbed up a rucksack she’d at least had the foresight to load with a couple of bottles of water and some survival rations, and threw it down onto the barren grey soil, before jumping down and snatching it up again.

  She started to run, her legs pumping as fast as they would go. All she had to do now was get clear in time and—

  Something picked her up and sent her hurtling against a boulder. White light flared all around her, followed by a wave of intense heat. She rolled onto her front, gloved fingers digging into the half-frozen soil . . . and felt darkness steal over her.