Free Mammoth Books presents Merlin's Gun by Alastair Reynolds Page B

routines that formed language.
    â€œYou lied again!”
    â€œThis time I plead innocence. I just put you in a position where you couldn’t give me the order you were about to. Seemed the best thing under the circumstances.”
    â€œI’ll bet it did.” In that instant of stalled thought, the pod had turned opaque, concealing the starscape and the debris of the ship. “What else?”
    The pod turned glassy across its upper surface, revealing a slowly wheeling starscape above filthy ice. The glass, once perfectly transparent, now had a smoky luster. “Once you were sleeping,” the familiar said, “I used the remaining fuel to guide the pod to a cometary shard. It seemed safer than drifting.”
    â€œHow long?” Sora was trying to guess from the state of the pod, but the interior looked as new as when she had ejected from
Snipe.
The sudden smokiness of the glass was alarming, however: Sora did not want to think how many years of cosmic ray abrasion would be required to scuff the material to that degree. “Are we talking years or decades, or more than that?”
    â€œShall I tell you why I woke you, first?”
    â€œIf it’s going to make any difference . . .”
    â€œI think it makes all the difference, quite frankly.” The familiar paused for effect. “Someone has decided to pay this system a visit.”
    Sora saw it on the map now, revised to account for the new relative positions of the celestial bodies in this system. The new ship was denoted by a lilac arrow, moving slowly between Waynet transit nodes; the thickened points where the Way lines interecepted the ecliptic plane.
    â€œIt must have a functioning syrinx,” Sora said, marveling, and for the first time feeling as if death was not the immediately preferable option. “It must be able to use the Ways!”
    â€œWorth waking you up for, I think.”
    Sora had eight hours to signal the ship before it reached the other node of the Waynet. She left the pod – stiff, aching, and disorientated, but basically functional – and walked to the edge of a crater; one that the familiar had mapped some years earlier. Three thousand years earlier, to be precise, for that was how long it had taken to scratch the sheen from the glass. The news had been shocking, at first – until Sora realized that the span of time was not in itself important. All that she had ever known was the ship; now that it was gone, it hardly mattered how much time had passed.
    Yet now there was this newcomer. Sora crisscrossed the crater, laying a line of metallic monofilament; doubling back on her trail many times until a glistening scribble covered the crater. It looked like the work of a drunken spider, but the familiar assured her it would focus more than satisfactorily at radio frequencies. As for the antenna, that was where Sora came in: her suit was sheathed in a conductive epidermis; a shield against plasma and ion-beam weaponry. By modulating current through it, the familiar could generate pulses of radio emission. The radio waves would fly away from Sora in all directions, but a good fraction would be reflected back from the crater in parallel lines. Sora had to make gliding jumps from one rim of the crater to the other, so that she passed through the focus momentarily, synchronized to the intervals when the other ship entered view.
    After two hours of light-transit time, the newcomer vectored toward the shard. When it was much closer, Sora secreted herself in a snowhole and set her suit to thermal stealth-mode. The ship nosed in; stiletto-sleek, devilishly hard to see against the stars. It was elongated, carbon-black, and nubbed by propulsion modules and weapons of unguessable function, arrayed around the hull like remora. Yet it carried Cohort markings, and had none of the faintly organic attributes of a Husker vessel. Purple flames knifed from the ship’s belly, slowing it over the crater. After