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  When Megan finally regained consciousness, she saw that the sun had moved a considerable distance further across the sky.

  She stared around in a daze for some moments, then struggled to push herself upright. Something in her shoulder hurt like hell, particularly if she tried turning her head to the right.

  Checking the inbuilt interface on her cold-weather gear, she found that its built-in heating circuits had kicked in automatically. It was the only reason she was still alive.

  Megan struggled to her feet by leaning against the boulder next to her, before taking a look around. Her breath rasped loudly inside her breather mask. A trail of dark smoke rose into the sky from a mass of tangled wreckage that was no longer recognizable as the jump-car.

  Damn it, she thought.

  She searched around until she found the rifle she’d taken from the vehicle, then found her rucksack lying nearby and strapped it back on.

  Her first thought was to put as much distance between herself and the wreck as possible, in case someone was already on their way to check for survivors. That meant getting as far away from the crash site as she could manage, regardless of the multitude of aches and pains afflicting her.

  By the time Megan reached the crest of a hill, just ten minutes later, she was utterly exhausted. She tried to access the Tabernacle, but was unsurprised to find she couldn’t, having already been warned that the Freehold jammed anything more advanced than analogue radio within range of their hideouts.

  Glancing around the slopes below the hill, there was nothing to be seen but desolate terrain, stretching out to the horizon. She knew her circumstances were hopeless: lost in an utterly inhospitable environment and surrounded on all sides by fanatical and murderous Freeholders. But she had to keep moving, or give up any hope of staying alive.

  Eventually she started to make her way down the other side, looking east along the length of a valley, in the same direction she had been flying before getting shot down. It was somewhere in that direction that Sifra’s dropship had landed.

  The walking got a little easier after another half-hour, but for all she knew it might take days to reach the dropship – assuming it was even still there, by the time she reached its landing point.

  A small voice in her head urged her to give up. Sifra surely wouldn’t have landed in the middle of nowhere; he’d have aimed for one of the Freehold’s main mountain bases, which meant Bash was by now almost certainly under the guard of God knew how many murderous lunatics adorned with neck tattoos.

  As the sun kept moving across the sky, she stopped frequently to rest. Whenever she glanced behind her, she could still see a rising column of smoke from the downed jump-car. It didn’t look that far away at all.

  Give up, that same small voice kept insisting. Find a way back home.

  But she couldn’t do that. Not with so very much at stake.

  The valley walls grew steeper, with narrow, rubble-filled ravines branching off to each side. A little while later, she came to a halt, seeing a column of dust rising up ahead.

  With a start, she realized that it came from a line of trucks making their way in her direction. She stood and watched numbly as one of the vehicles broke ahead of the pack, bouncing its way straight towards her.

  She licked suddenly dry lips. They had clearly spotted her. Tiny black dots, which had been hovering above the convoy like fireflies swarming above a campfire, were now moving in her direction as well: drones, and almost certainly hunter-killers at that. Against them, the weapons she carried would be worse than useless.

  Megan glanced around frantically, noticing a dense thicket of desiccated jug-leaf bushes spreading all across one side of the hill. She darted towards them. They wouldn’t provide much cover, but it might be enough to fool the drones for a few minutes until she could figure something out.

  She pushed her way in deep amongst the tangled bushes, their dry branches scratching viciously at her exposed flesh. From there she saw a dark shape flying immediately overhead, before it doubled back again. A mechanized voice said something unintelligible; by the sound of it, the drone’s speech circuits were shot to hell.

  Through the dense tangle of bushes, she could barely make out the dark shape of the machine, but from its movements she guessed it must be zeroing in on her, most probably by detecting her heat signature.

  She aimed the rifle and fired. The drone spun in the air for a moment, then darted away.

  Megan made a break for it, snow and dirt puffing around her ankles as she dived from cover. To lighten her load, she deliberately left her rucksack, containing its vital supply of water and food, among the bushes. She knew she’d be dead in no more than a day or two out in the open without her supplies, but maybe if she could get away from those drones and trucks, she could double back after nightfall and retrieve them.

  She slid and half fell or half ran down the hillside, aiming for one of the ravines. Some of the boulders filling each ravine were the size of houses, but there were enough gaps between them to let her find her way through – and there would be no way for the trucks to follow her.

  A second drone now overtook her, dropping in height as it slowed and turned back towards her. Lenses suspended beneath its body zeroed in on her face. She raised her rifle again.

  Before she could take aim and fire, something hit her hard in the back, and sent her crashing to all fours. She rolled onto her side and saw that a third drone had come up on her from behind. Vortexes of dust went spinning up from the ground beneath where the two drones now hovered, stationary.

  Her breath rasping harshly, the back of one shoulder icy-cold and numb where something had struck it, she listened helplessly to the sound of heavy treads crunching over icy soil as a truck pulled up nearby. She heard its doors opening and slamming shut, followed by the sound of footsteps coming closer.

  A shadow fell across her, and Megan looked up into the familiar face of Gregor Tarrant, only partly hidden behind a breather mask.

  ‘I used to dream of a day like this,’ he began, his voice strangely distorted. ‘I used to think about all the ways I could kill you. But now I think I just feel sorry for you. Megan, what the hell are you doing all the way out here?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she rasped. ‘I left you for dead. You should have stayed that way.’

  She glanced past him, towards the truck, where two men, both clearly Freeholders, had also disembarked. They stood on either side of a girl, in her early twenties perhaps, her eyes wide and visibly frightened above her breather mask. From the way the two men held her, she was clearly a prisoner of some kind. The tufts of roughly cut hair sticking out from her scalp could not conceal the fact that she was also a machine-head. Megan instantly tried to link to her but found that she couldn’t.

  There was something hauntingly familiar about the girl, and after a moment it hit her. She had seen the girl’s face regularly via the Tabernacle’s news feeds. Here in front of her stood the Speaker-Elect of the Demarchy of Uchida . . .

  Just as Megan herself had once been, until she found a way to escape.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Megan

  The two Freeholders left the other girl in Tarrant’s care while they hauled Megan up from the ground, before carrying her into the back of another truck that pulled up next to the first. They strapped her into a seat in the rear and climbed into the front cabin.

  The truck reversed, then turned to rejoin the rest of the convoy, which had meanwhile come to a halt. Every time the vehicle bumped over a rock, a spike of agony shot through Megan’s injured shoulder.

  Seeing Tarrant again was one thing. Seeing him in the company of the supposedly deceased Speaker-Elect was something she was having trouble either processing or understanding.

  Megan watched through a window as they bounced along the valley floor. The convoy got under way again and, after another hour, they began to make their way down through a narrow gulch, following the course of a dried-out riverbed before finally arriving at the base of
a high cliff, above which mountainous slopes became lost in misty clouds.

  A huge tented shape sat on the floor of the riverbed, immediately beneath a broad overhang of the cliff. It was only as the truck drew closer to this vast canvas shroud, painted the same colours as the surrounding landscape, that Megan could see the stanchions of a dropship peeking out from underneath. She guessed immediately it was the one that Sifra had used to transport her to Redstone.

  The truck continued past the dropship, following a trail leading into a wide passageway carved out of the mountainside right beneath the overhang. The passageway angled downwards, its interior illuminated by a long sequence of lights strung from the arched roof, and eventually dwindling out of sight. A subtle shift in the pitch of the truck’s engine noise told Megan they had passed through a pressure field.

  The truck continued through a number of caverns, some natural and some clearly drilled out of the bare rock, before coming to a halt in a low, wide tunnel that clearly doubled as a makeshift hospital. A few dozen canvas cots had been arranged in rows against a wall, along with – of all things – an actual operating table, surrounded by trays of surgical instruments and bits and pieces of ancient-looking equipment. The two Freeholders left Megan in the charge of a single watchful guard and a gaunt, elderly-looking man who told her he would tend to her wounds.

  She pulled off her breather mask as she perched on the edge of a cot while the doctor – at least, she assumed he was a doctor – examined her shoulder. She sat with folded arms concealing her breasts, her shirt lying by her side, till he informed her she had nothing more than a sprained shoulder and some severe bruising. It seemed the drone had used gel-capsule bullets, good for incapacitating people while leaving little in the way of actual physical damage.

  He pushed an ice compress against her shoulder, then gave her some bitter liquid to drink before telling her to catch some sleep. The guard then cuffed one of her wrists to the rail of the cot and left her there.

  At least they weren’t going to kill her instantly. That had to count for something, even if she suspected that Sifra was behind this decision. He had made it clear, after all, that he still had need for both herself and Bash.

  Studying the ancient scars on the hands and face of the Freehold doctor, it had occurred to Megan that if the man had ever visited a body clinic, he hadn’t been back there for a very long time indeed. It wasn’t really until her guard cuffed her to the cot, giving her an opportunity to notice that one of his ears consisted of little more than scar tissue, that she understood how little access these people had to modern medical technology. All they had were primitive, half-forgotten surgical and medicinal techniques that spoke of dreadful deprivation.

  She glanced towards the nearby operating table and shuddered to think of what they might have done to her if her injuries had been more serious.

  Megan awoke some hours later, to hear the distant booming and hissing of what might be machinery, or equally well some subterranean river coursing through the bowels of the Montos de Frenezo.

  Someone nearby cleared his throat, and she stifled a grunt of shock when she saw Tarrant sitting on the edge of a cot next to her own.

  ‘Hello, Megan,’ said Tarrant. ‘Long time no see.’

  He had changed since she had last seen him: any fat on his face had diminished with age, leaving him hollow-cheeked and hungry-looking. But his eyes remained just as startling as on their first encounter aboard the Beauregard.

  ‘Gregor,’ she acknowledged haltingly. ‘Come to gloat?’

  There was no sign of her guard or anyone else. They were all alone.

  ‘Anil made the mistake of underestimating you when he left you alone on that dropship,’ he said, then shook his head slowly. ‘He won’t make that same mistake again, and neither will I. The only thing keeping him from killing you is his loyalty to the General.’

  ‘That girl . . .’ said Megan. ‘The one who came out of the truck with you . . . ?’

  ‘Is none of your business,’ Tarrant replied. He stood up and came to stand beside her, reaching down to stroke her cheek with one finger. She flinched away.

  ‘Do you know, Megan,’ he said, ‘how very easy it would be for me to kill you right now?’

  She squirmed as far away from him as she could get, given she still had one hand cuffed to the cot’s metal rail. ‘You had something to do with what happened to the Demarchy, didn’t you?’ she asked him. ‘That’s why you’re working with the Freehold. You’re even more of a murderous, deceitful, untrustworthy son of a bitch than I thought.’

  ‘Mr Tarrant can’t take all of the credit for the Demarchy,’ said another voice, coming closer.

  Megan twisted the other way to see a man with bristly white hair approach from out of the shadows. Anil Sifra and several heavily armed Freeholders followed in his wake.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ the white-haired man continued, as he came to a halt before her cot, ‘it took dozens of people working in unison for over two years to bring about the events of the past few days.’ He nodded towards Tarrant. ‘That’s not to say that Gregor’s role wasn’t vital.’

  ‘You’re Otto Schelling,’ Megan said, realizing. ‘You disappeared along with a bunch of nova mines, right after strenuously denying they ever existed.’

  Schelling gazed down at her. ‘I prefer to be addressed as General Schelling. You’ve caused me more trouble than I could have believed was possible, Miss Jacinth. You wouldn’t be alive right now if not for the fact we still have a use for you.’

  ‘Worse luck,’ said Sifra tonelessly.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ said Megan.

  ‘Gregor,’ said the General, ‘get someone to uncuff her from that cot, would you?’

  Tarrant gave him a tight-lipped glance. ‘Sir, it’s too much of a risk having her here. We don’t need her, and it’s better all round if we find some other way of—’

  ‘You’ve already made your objections abundantly clear,’ snapped Schelling. ‘Now do what the hell you’re told.’ He gave Megan a brittle smile. ‘And then we can find somewhere comfortable to continue our conversation.’

  Two heavily armed Freeholders led her downslope, with Sifra, Tarrant and General Schelling taking the lead. They passed a cluster of digging machines that stood quiescent amidst piles of rubble, before turning into a cathedral-sized cavern made eerily beautiful by patches of bioluminescent algae clinging to its walls and ceiling.

  They were heading, she realized, towards a huddle of prefab buildings erected in the centre of the cavern. Standing on a platform next to one of these buildings was a huge industrial-scale fabricator that looked both newer and in far better condition than anything else she had seen since entering the Freehold base.

  Tarrant led her inside one of the buildings, while the soldiers waited outside. She found herself ushered into a small bare room, followed by Schelling and Sifra.

  ‘Are we secure in here?’ Schelling demanded, as Tarrant pushed the door shut.

  Tarrant nodded. ‘It checks clean for listening devices, General. Our hosts won’t be able to listen in.’

  Megan wondered what they had to say that they didn’t want even the Freehold to overhear.

  ‘Good,’ said Schelling, stepping over to a small table in one corner and picking up a bottle. He poured a splash of its contents into three glasses, before handing one each to Tarrant and Sifra. Then he turned to Megan and gestured with his own glass towards a chair set against the wall. ‘Sit,’ he said.

  ‘I’d rather stand,’ said Megan.

  ‘You can either sit,’ said Schelling menacingly, ‘or I can ask Anil to work you over with his gloves. He’s still very upset about the state you left his dropship in, you know. So the choice is yours.’

  Megan stared at him for a moment, then sat down.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Schelling, turning to the others and raising his glass. ‘To a job exceedingly well done. I almost can’t believe it went as well as it did.’
r />   They drank, but Tarrant still looked troubled. ‘Sir . . .’

  ‘I know I’ve kept some things from you while you’ve been stuck here on Redstone, Gregor,’ Schelling interrupted him, ‘but there were good reasons for it. If we’d told you we were intending to bring Jacinth here to Redstone, you might have tried to stop us.’

  Schelling next turned to Megan, raising his glass to her too. ‘Although I must say it was very kind of you, Miss Jacinth, to deliver yourself to the exact place we were intending to bring you anyway.’

  The muscles in Tarrant’s jaw worked noticeably for a moment before he replied. ‘Sir, myself and Anil were stuck on that goddamn wreck for two years – two fucking years – before rescue came. All because of her,’ he said, jabbing his glass in Megan’s direction. ‘You cannot expect me to ignore that fact.’

  ‘Gregor,’ said Schelling, ‘you’ve been a sterling example to us all, but you need to put some things behind you. You have to see our goals clearly. It’s what lies ahead of us that matters now.’

  He turned again to Megan. ‘A while back, I initiated a research programme to try and re-establish communications with the Wanderer through Mr Bashir, once it became clear he was still linked to it in some way.’ He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, the results were less than positive.’

  ‘So Anil told me already. You murdered a bunch of machine-heads in the process.’

  Schelling ignored that remark. ‘All of which makes your own ability to communicate with the Wanderer via Bashir, without losing either your mind or your life, somewhat unique for reasons we do not as yet understand. The question for us now is, can you repeat the trick?’

  ‘What we really need to know,’ said Sifra, his eyes bright and cruel and alert, ‘is what the hell makes her so different from the rest?’

  ‘The last thing I want,’ said Megan, ‘is to do anything to help a bunch of genocidal murderers.’

  ‘Anil seems to believe you were planning on paying a visit to the Wanderer yourself,’ said Schelling.