Mammoth Books presents Merlin's Gun Read Online Free PDF

from the ship, and I can tell you that the Brittlestar is a source of intense gravitational radiation. It’s like a beacon, sitting there, pumping out gravity waves from somewhere near its heart. There’s something inside it that is making spacetime ripple periodically.”
    â€œYou think Merlin went inside it, don’t you?”
    â€œSomething
happened, that’s for sure. This is the last log Merlin filed, on his approach to the object, before a month-long gap.”
    It was another mumbled soliloquy – except this time, his sobs were of something other than despair. Instead, they sounded like the sobs of the deepest joy imaginable. As if, finally, he had found what he was looking for, or at least knew that he was closer than ever, and that the final prize was not far from reach. But that was not what made Sora shiver. It was the face she saw. It was Merlin, beyond any doubt. But his face was lined with age, and his eyes were those of someone older than anyone Sora had ever known.
    The fifth and sixth planets were the largest.
    The fifth was the heavier of the two, zones of differing chemistry banding it from tropic to pole, girdled by a ring system that was itself braided by the resonant forces of three large moons. Merlin believed that the ring system had been formed since the Flourishing. A cloud of radiation-drenched human relics orbited the world, dating from unthinkably remote eras; perhaps earlier than the Waymaker time. Merlin swept the cloud with sensors tuned to sniff out weapons systems, or the melange of neutrino flavors that betokened Husker presence. The sweeps all returned negative.
    â€œYou know where the gun is?” Sora asked.
    â€œI know how to reach it, which is all that matters.”
    â€œMaybe it’s time to start being a little less cryptic. Especially if you want me to help you.”
    He looked wounded, as if she had ruined a game hours in the making. “I just thought you’d appreciate the thrill of the chase.”
    â€œThis isn’t about the thrill of the chase, Merlin. It’s about the nastiest weapon imaginable and the fact that we have to get our hands on it before the enemy, so that we can incinerate
them
first. So we can commit xenocide.” She said it again: “Xenocide. Sorry. Doesn’t that conform to your romantic ideals of the righteous quest?”
    â€œIt won’t be xenocide,” he said, touching the ring again, nervously. “Listen: I want that gun as much as you do. That’s why I chased it for ten thousand years.” Was it her imagination, or had the ring not been on his hand in any of the recordings she had seen of him? She remembered the old man’s hands she had seen in the last recording, the one taken just before his time in the Brittlestar, and she was sure they carried no ring. Now Merlin’s voice was matter of fact. “The structure we want is on the outermost moon.”
    â€œLet me guess. A white pyramid?”
    He offered a smile. “Couldn’t be closer if you tried.”
    They fell into orbit around the gas giant. All the moons showed signs of having been extensively industrialized since the Flourishing, but the features that remained on their surfaces were gouged by millennia of exposure to sleeting cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Nothing looked significantly younger than the surrounding landscapes of rock and ice. Except for the kilometer-high white pyramid on the third moon, which was in a sixteen-day orbit around the planet. It looked as if it had been chiseled out of alabaster some time the previous afternoon.
    â€œNot exactly subtle,” Merlin said. “Self-repair mechanisms must still be functional, to one degree or another, and that implies that the control systems for the gun will still work. It also means that the counter-intrusion systems will also be operable.”
    â€œOh, good.”
    â€œAren’t you excited that we’re about to end the