Marauder Read Free Page B

forehead. He smelled terrible, and she guessed he hadn’t been
bathed in quite some time.
I’ll bet they keep those mogs in better condition
.
    Bash’s eyes were large and brown and quite as beautiful as she remembered them. When she had first met him, she had been struck by his size – two metres of muscular mass accompanied
by the sweetest personality imaginable. Now, much of that muscle was gone, leaving him so emaciated that Megan found herself wondering when he had last been fed.
    His breathing faltered, and caught. His eyes seemed to focus on her for one brief moment.
    Megan felt her own breath catch in her throat.
He knows I’m here. He must do. He . . .
    But then his eyes lost focus again, and once more he stared off into some unknowable vista.
    She shakily exhaled, realizing it was foolish of her to have expected anything else. The Bash she knew was gone, and now all that was left was this sad, sorry shell of a man.
    She stroked his scalp again, feeling for the ridges and crenellations beneath the skin that identified him as a fellow machine-head. Without him she could not reawaken the link that Tarrant had
once forged between Bash and the alien entity known to some species as the Wanderer – but to others as the Marauder.
    Megan rocked back on her heels, pressing her hands against her eyes. A long time ago, when she was much younger, she had convinced herself she was in love with Bash. When she told him so, he had
laughed and informed her, not unkindly, that she wasn’t his type. When she asked what his type was, he had glanced across the bar they were sitting in, towards a cluster of male Alliance
officers gathered around a nearby table.
    At first she had been crushed, but she soon understood that what she had mistaken for romantic love was instead something deeper and more lasting. It was a bond like that between brother and
sister, or father and daughter: a bond that had first formed on the day of her sudden and unexpected rescue.
    In a very real sense, she owed him her life.
    It was easy for her to imagine what he might say now, were he capable of saying anything at all. She could picture his easy sardonic smile, hear the warm full tones of his voice.
    ‘Remember the first time we met?’ she whispered.
    His unspoken reply echoed in her ears.
Sure I do, Megan. It was
on Redstone. I remember it as if it were yesterday.
    ‘I was so scared that night.’ She remembered how she had fled through crowded city streets, desperate to escape a terrible fate.
    The first time I saw you
, she remembered him once saying,
you looked so cold I wanted to wrap you up like a baby
.
    ‘You were the only one I could trust. The only one I could tell the truth to.’
    Your secret was always safe with me, honey. You know that.
    His eyes still stared past her, betraying no hint of awareness. Megan smiled to herself, then felt her own eyes grow moist.
    ‘You took me under your wing and I hid there for years,’ she murmured.
    And then she had stayed with him, following him all the way back to Kjæregrønnested and the Three Star Alliance; and then she had met Gregor Tarrant, and been forced to watch as he
sentenced Bash to a fate worse than death – before tearing Megan’s life apart forever.

TWO
Gabrielle
    On the first morning of the Grand Pilgrimage, Speaker-Elect Gabrielle woke up with stomach cramps that made her wince. She waited for the worst of the pain to pass, then opened
her eyes to see a look of concern on the face of the old woman standing by the foot of her bed.
    ‘Madame Gabrielle?’ enquired Mater Cassanas. ‘Are you all right?’
    Gabrielle stared across an ocean of linen at Cassanas’s inquisitive expression, then looked away, bunching her fists tightly beneath the heavy restricting sheets as the pain returned, then
faded just as quickly once more. She stared past the gold and silver statuary adorning the bedchamber, past its high ceiling decorated with scenes from the Book of Uchida, and out