Mammoth Books presents Merlin's Gun

Book 417: Mammoth Books

by Alastair Reynolds

Genres: Science Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When Sora's swallowship is taken out by a swarm during the war she is rescued by Merlin, a legendary man who has allegedly discovered a super-weapon built by the Way creators; a gun so powerful it I said to have stopped the previous war. Sora is sceptical, though, for Merlin has been missing for ten thousand years, yet he has not aged a day. As the current war between aliens and humans intensifies, the need to find this weapon becomes unquestionably urgent. They must find the gun before the enemy does and incinerates them. Can their quest to save humanity and end the war be achieved with Merlin's gun?

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

Though Welsh born, and having spent his developing years in Cornwall and Scotland, Alastair Reynolds (b. 1966) moved to the Netherlands in 1991 where he spent the next twelve years working for the European Space Agency until taking the plunge to become a full-time writer in 2004. He is best known for his Revelation Space sequence of novels that began with Revelation Space in 2000. This series is full of innovation in both its projection of future technology and its realization of alien and evolving human biology and cultures. He writes as if that technology already exists. You get that same feeling of immediacy and understanding in this following novella, which takes to the ultimate one of those wonderful space opera clichés of the weapon that can destroy the universe.

Punishment saved Sora.

If her marksmanship had not been the worst in her class, she would never have been assigned the task of overseeing proctors down in ship’s docks. She would not have had to stand for hours, alone except for her familiar, running a laser-stylus across the ore samples the proctors brought back to the swallowship, dreaming of finishing shift and meeting Verdin. It was boring; menial work. But because the docks were open to vacuum it was work that required a pressure suit.

“Got to be a drill,” she said, when the attack began.

“No,” her familiar said. “It really does seem as if they’ve caught up with us.”

Sora’s calm evaporated.

“How many?”

“Four elements of the swarm; standard attack pattern; coherent-matter weapons at maximum range . . . novamine counter-measures deployed but seemingly ineffective . . . initial damage reports severe and likely underestimates . . .”

The floor pitched under her feet. The knee-high, androform proctors looked to each other nervously. The machines had no more experience of battle than Sora, and unlike her they had never experienced the simulations of warcreche.

Sora dropped the clipboard.

“What do I do?”

“My advice,” her familiar said, “is that you engage that old mammalian flight response and run like hell.”

She obeyed; stooping down low-ceilinged corridors festooned with pipes, snaking around hand-painted murals that showed decisive battles from the Cohort’s history; squadrons of ships exchanging fire; worlds wreathed in flame. The endgame was much swifter than those languid paintings suggested. The swarm had been chasing Snipe for nine years of shiptime, during which time Sora had passed through warcreche to adulthood. Yet beyond the ship’s relativistic frame of reference, nearly sixty years had passed. Captain Tchagra had done all that she could to lose the swarm. Her last gamble had been the most desperate of all; using the vicious gravity of a neutron star to slingshot the swallowship on another course, one that the chasing ships ought not have been able to follow, unless they skimmed the neutron star even more suicidally. But they had, forcing Snipe to slow from relativistic flight and nurse its wounds in a fallow system. It was there that the swarm attacked.

Near the end, the floor drifted away from her feet as ship’s gravity faltered, and she had to progress hand over hand.

“This is wrong,” Sora said, arriving in the pod bay. “This part should be pressurized. And where is everyone?”

“Attack must be a lot worse than those initial reports suggested. I advise you get into a pod as quickly as you can.”

“I can’t go, not without Verdin.”

“Let me worry about him.”

Knowing better than to argue, Sora climbed into the nearest of the cylindrical pods, mounted on a railed pallet ready for injection into the tunnel. The lid clammed shut. . .