Marauder by Gary Gibson Read Free Book Online

together in her bedchamber, and her skin grew increasingly chill as awful detail followed upon awful detail.
    At first, the Demarchy had been intent on dismantling the alien craft with the aim of penetrating its secrets. Extraordinarily powerful though it was, it had suffered incredible damage, for its
drive-spines and much of its outer shell had been burned away during re-entry. But then this woman – this Dakota Merrick – had suddenly emerged, disoriented but physically intact, from
the Magi ship. The Demarchy’s investigators had interrogated her for days, running tests that confirmed her physiology to be entirely human.
    And yet there was evidence that she was not the
original
Dakota Merrick. She was clearly a clone of some kind, one whose last memory, prior to emerging from the ship, was of dying
halfway across the galaxy, some centuries before.
    This clone proved to be entirely unwilling to fulfil the task for which the Magi ship had apparently brought it back to life; nor was it willing to cooperate with the Demarchy’s
interrogators. They had resorted to torture in the hopes of gleaning from Merrick any information relating to the Magi ship that might be turned to the Demarchy’s military or political
advantage.
    Their attempt proved wildly successful, for Merrick’s clone proved to be in some way able to tap into the wealth of knowledge contained within the Magi ship’s memory banks, and it
imparted some of this knowledge under duress. But then the clone died while fleeing its guards, and before they had a chance to extract any more.
    That might have been that, but the scientific and technological data the Demarchy of Uchida had thereby gained was valuable enough to barter in return for financial and military aid from the
Accord. With such support, the neighbouring River Concord States were beaten into submission, while the Freehold – once the dominant military force on Redstone – was eventually reduced
to a few violent extremists living in mountain caves.
    But even that wasn’t enough for the Demarchy’s rulers, Karl had told her, for they saw a way in which they could secure the Demarchy’s future for as long as the Magi ship
remained there by the shores of the Ka.
    They took tissue samples from the clone’s corpse, and from them fashioned a new clone of their own – one that they themselves could control. That first Speaker-Elect had grown to
adulthood with its own personality and memories – and none of Merrick’s – and had undergone surgery to install the machine-head implants that would allow it eventually to
communicate directly with the Magi ship.
    Once such a clone reached the age of twenty-one, the cerebral circuitry had matured sufficiently that the clone could be transported to Dios, and to the Ship of the Covenant. Each Speaker was
forced then to enter the alien starship, after which she would emerge once more carrying within her mind a cornucopia of data offered up by the ship in return for it not being torn apart by the
Demarchy’s engineers and scientists.
    The only problem, Karl continued, was that each time a Speaker returned from her encounter with the ship, her own personality and memories had been wiped and replaced with those of the long-dead
Dakota Merrick. And, each and every time, she proved just as wildly recalcitrant and unwilling to cooperate as before. The Demarchy’s interrogators found it necessary, on every such occasion,
to torture the clone until she gave them the information they wanted.
    At first, Karl explained, the Demarchy considered trying to keep each of the clones alive, or even to produce multiple clones, but the ship refused to divulge data to more than one such clone at
a time, perhaps realizing the speed with which it might otherwise be drained of knowledge; it also set a limit on how much data each clone could siphon from its memory banks. In this way the ship
ensured its indefinite survival, by giving the Demarchy of Uchida