Mammoth Books presents Merlin's Gun Read Free Page A

were.”
    â€œWhen I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won, within a handful of centuries.” Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. “But even then,” Merlin continued, “things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.”
    â€œSo you became a mercenary.”
    â€œFreelancer, if you don’t mind. Point was, I realized that I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.” He smiled. “You see, even legends are haunted by legends!”
    He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin’s lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures predating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together – as well as he could – an underlying framework of what might just be fact.
    â€œThere’d been another war,” Merlin said. “Smaller than ours, spread across a much smaller volume of space – but no less brutal for all that.”
    â€œHow long ago was this?”
    â€œForty or forty five kiloyears ago – not long after the Waymakers vanished, but about twenty kays before anything we’d recognize as the Cohort.” Merlin’s eyes seemed to gaze over; an odd, stentorian tone entered his voice “In the long dark centuries of Mid-Galactic history, when a thousand cultures rose, each imagining themselves immune to time, and whose shadows barely reach us across the millennia . . .”
    â€œYes. Very poetic. What
kind
of war, anyway? Human versus human, or human versus alien, like this one?”
    â€œDoes it matter? Whoever the enemy were, they aren’t coming back. Whatever was used against them was so deadly, so powerful, so
awesome,
that it stopped an entire war!”
    â€œMerlin’s gun.”
    He nodded, lips tight, looking almost embarrassed. “As if I had some prior claim on it, or was even in some sense responsible for it!” He looked at Sora very intently, the glittering finery of the ship reflected in the gold of his eyes. “I haven’t seen the gun, or even been near it, and it’s only recently that I’ve had anything like a clear idea of what it might actually be.”
    â€œBut you think you know where it is?”
    â€œI think so. It isn’t far. And it’s in the eye of a storm.”

    They lifted from the shard, spending eight days in transit to the closest Way, most of the time in frostwatch. Sora had her own quarters; a spherical-walled suite deep in
Tyrant
’s thorax, outfitted in maroon and burgundy. The ship was small, but fascinating to explore, an object lesson in the differences between the Cohort that had manufactured this ship, and the one Sora had been raised in. In many respects, the ship was more advanced than anything from her own time, especially in the manner of its propulsion, defenses, and sensors. In other areas, the Cohort had gained expertise since Merlin’s era. Merlin’s proctors were even stupider than those Sora had been looking after when the Husker attack began. There were no familiars in Merlin’s time, either, and she saw no reason to educate him about her own neural symbiote.
    â€œWell,” Sora said, when she was alone. “What can you tell me about the legendary Merlin?”
    â€œNothing very much at this point.” The familiar had been communicating with the version of itself that had infiltrated
Tyrant,
via Merlin’s suit. “If