He smiled but broke eye contact. All right, he said, moving to grab an item of his clothing floating within reach, heres another question. Why dont you ever talk about your past?

She let out a sigh. Because I dont like talking about it, she said, snatching some of her own clothes out of the air.

But . . .

Wasnt 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, doesnt he? he prodded, but she didnt 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 Kjregrnnesteds 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 vessels 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 . . .

Stop being ridiculous, she told herself. There was almost certainly a perfectly good explanation for all of it. She had just helped him commit mass murder, after all. Both their lives were at stake now, and not just hers. She could hardly expect him to behave the same way, under such circumstances, as when they were alone in her bedchamber.

And yet that voice full of doubt kept shrieking at her from somewhere deep inside her own head. What about the tidal wave? Or the way he looked at you when he called you an angel of death. And why are there Freeholders here? And . . .