Chapters (50)
- Cover
- MARAUDER
- HISTORICAL ARCHIVES SUBSECTION C/5 category ALPHA
- 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
- EPILOGUE
- TIME LINE
- SHOAL TRILOGY
- EVENTS FOLLOWING EMPIRE OF LIGHT AND PRECEDING MARAUDER
- Acknowledgements
- Also by Gary Gibson
Tarrant stared at her, his expression hard. No, Megan, well keep trying until we get some kind of result.
TWENTY
Megan
Tarrant kept to his promise. Over the next week, Megan was forced to undergo more attempts at communicating with the Wanderer, using Bash as a go-between or a bridge, as the two men chose to refer to it. And gradually, as the hours and then days passed, she learned to communicate with it, after a fashion.
More and more, Marauder struck Megan as a far more apt name for the alien vessel.
By now, the Beauregard had performed a slingshot manoeuvre around the star, still on its way to the moon around which the Wanderer orbited. The violence of the solar wind emanating from the systems Wolf-Rayet star caused endless problems with the external sensor arrays, making it nearly impossible to get accurate readings about anything outside the ship itself.
They then climbed into acceleration berths for the braking procedure that would place them into orbit around the moon, which, along with its parent world, had grown to become a visible disc. Before long, they slipped into orbit around the moon, and then back into zero gravity. The Wanderer was now visible to the naked eye, orbiting much closer to the tiny worlds surface.
It rapidly became clear from Megans communications with the Wanderer that what little had so far been gleaned from the Alyeska digs represented only the beginning of a much larger story.
The Wanderer had, she discovered, been drifting through the Milky Way for the better part of two million years, and perhaps even longer. It was the product of a machine-civilization it called the Core Transcendence, that had once resided close beside the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.
Two million years earlier, the Makers had arrived at the centre of the galaxy, challenging the Core Transcendences dominance. She saw their black-hulled ships, constructed on a scale to beggar comprehension, swooping through the star systems scattered throughout the black holes accretion disk. Their passage warped the physics of space-time, shattering worlds.
Megan herself suffered more fits, and worse ones. One time, she woke inside a medbox only to discover, upon emerging, that she had blacked out after her last bridging session. Tarrant showed her a recording of her body spasming, blood running from her nose, as Tarrant and Sifra dragged her into the medbay.
But what happened to her was as nothing compared to the effects of the procedure on Bash.
The physical changes in him, after just a few days, shocked her. He continued to lose weight at a tremendous speed, and when he moved at all, it was with the feeble and shaky gestures of a very elderly man. Indeed, every step he took appeared to involve great and ponderous effort. Whenever he spoke, it was in monosyllables, and there were times when he clearly had difficulty remembering who she was.