Fortunately, there had been no false alarms since these guns were reloaded – a difficult, dangerous, time-consuming job in its own right – and so there was only one empty slot in each magazine.
The guns’ normal muzzle velocity was one hundred kilometres per second, far in excess of Michaelmas’s escape velocity. That was a consequence of their original use defending ships against high-speed collisions: they needed quick reaction times and extreme penetrating power, to shatter micro-meteorites into harmless ions. That made them good as anti-ship defences (not that they had ever been tested in that capacity) but not so effective against over-the-horizon targets like our two suits. To function in that mode, the guns’ muzzle velocities needed to be dropped by a factor of ten, preventing the slugs from flying off into interplanetary space, going into orbit around Michaelmas, or hurling themselves halfway around the world before coming back to ground.
With the muzzle velocity damped, it was possible to aim a slug at a point only tens of kilometres away: out of the line of sight, but only just over the horizon. But the downside was that the penetrating force was also much reduced: kinetic energy fell off with the square of velocity, so a tenfold reduction in muzzle velocity meant a hundredfold drop in stopping power.
Still: what could stop a ship should also be able to stop a suit, even if it was a hundredth of its usual effectiveness. But with just eighteen slugs, and no means of reloading the guns in anything less than a day, we had to consider each shot very carefully.
I still wanted some explanation for the suits that allowed us to avoid destroying them. I was even hopeful that Brianna Bettancourt might dredge something up in our next meeting. But until such clarification was forthcoming, or an overture came from the suits themselves, or whoever had sent them, we had to proceed on the assumption of hostile intent. It was agreed that the first two shots (sent in quick succession, but not simultaneously) would be lobbed to fall short of the suits by about a kilometre: presenting no danger to the suits but providing a clear demonstration of our capabilities. Two shots arriving in the same spot meant that we could demonstrate the repeatability of our aiming. If that deterrent failed, the next two lobs would fall closer still. If those failed, the next pair of shots would be intended to land exactly on the suits.
The suits had passed out of reach of the first set of eyes, but Cantor and the other analysts still had their seismophone readings. The signals were faint, but just strong enough to enable triangulation to within an error margin about twenty metres across. That was too imprecise to guarantee a kill, but good enough for the purposes of our warning shots. I assigned all necessary authority to Chung, and was not even back at the infirmary when the lights wavered. That was the railguns sucking power from our already-strained generators.
The passenger had sensed it too. She was awake and alert.
‘I didn’t think you’d come back quite so quickly, Miguel. Is everything all right?’
I put on a smile under my mask. ‘Why wouldn’t it be all right?’
‘There was a power dip just now. I wondered if there was a problem with your settlement.’
I eased into the seat next to her.
‘You’ll have to get used to a lot more than the occasional flicker. Sometimes we have to go onto emergency power for days at a time. We use flywheels, deep underground. They used to be part of the manoeuvring system of the Salmacis, but now they help us ride out power interruptions. They can’t run indefinitely, though. Sometimes it gets dark and cold in these caverns.’
‘Perhaps I’d be better off going back into the casket?’
‘No – never that. But it’s probably going to be a harder life than anything you experienced on Haven. We have very basic medicine; we get by on a restricted diet, though it meets our nutritional needs, and when we get a bad year we have to go onto double rationing, as if our normal conditions weren’t enough of a challenge. We haven’t allowed children to be born in Sun Hollow in twelve years.’
‘Then you’re not going to live very long.’
‘We have a little while left.’
‘Do you have children, Miguel? I can’t remember if I asked you before.’
‘I don’t have my own children, no. But my wife has a daughter from her previous marriage. Her name is Victorine. She’s as dear to me as if she were my own.’
‘And your wife?’
‘Nicola.’ I tensed; this was supposed to be about our guest, not my own background. ‘Brianna, do you remember what I asked you the last time we spoke? About two people who might have been part of your expedition?’
She constructed the frown again, forming those even, symmetrical dimples in her brow. ‘I tried to remember, but it’s still hard to bring things into focus. Maybe if you told me a little more about what you know?’
I reached for the package I had brought into the room. It was a flat, book-sized box with tattered edges. I set it onto her bed, dutifully avoiding any sort of contact and opened the box. I took out a folding board with perforated holes and a bag of coloured pegs.
She looked at me with over-embellished delight, as if I had tipped a bounty of treasure onto the sheet.
‘You brought a game! Do you like games? I like games.’
‘I had someone go to my house and fetch it. I thought it might help to unblock some mental pathways if you have something else to focus on.’ I jammed two sets of coloured pegs into their starting positions, then explained the extremely rudimentary rules.
‘I see it, Miguel. It’s not too complicated. I think we can play right now.’
‘Perhaps a warm-up game?’
‘If you say so.’
I let her go first, and went easy on her during the opening moves. It was a simple game, but that did not mean that there were not layers of complexity buried within it; traps and subtleties waiting to spring out like vipers. While we took turns, I edged the conversation around to some of the things that had been troubling me – troubling all of us, in fact – since her rescue.
‘I asked you about what had happened before the explosion. You didn’t remember, but maybe it would help if I explained our difficulty.’
‘Please, ask whatever you wish.’
‘Our ships were travelling towards each other with a combined closing speed of thousands of kilometres per second: more than two per cent of the speed of light.’
‘That doesn’t seem terribly fast.’
‘It isn’t – not for interstellar ships like the Silence in Heaven. But it’s very fast for anything moving through a solar system. After the explosion, your casket should have kept moving with about the same relative speed as the original ship, give or take a margin of error. But it didn’t: it ended up on a velocity vector much closer to that of my own ship. Granted, I still needed time to match my speed and position with yours – but it was feasible to do it.’
‘Lucky for me.’
‘Lucky for you indeed.’ The peg game carried on. My opponent had made some predictably poor moves in the opening rounds, but now she was making up for it, putting me under pressure. A quick learner, I thought to myself – or just possibly someone who had not needed to learn the game at all. ‘There’s another odd factor, Brianna. Somehow, you were able to send a distress signal to my ship. But it wasn’t picked up by any other of our receivers.’
‘Perhaps they’re not working as well as you’d wish.’
‘Or perhaps you managed to locate my ship and aim a very narrow communications beam at it.’
She broke off from pondering her next move – any one of the available options was likely to put her at an advantage over me. A look of slow puzzlement came upon her face.
‘You seem . . . not quite to trust me.’
‘I want to trust you,’ I said. ‘That’s normal when you risk your life to save someone – and I risked all of ours by not shooting you out of the sky when I had a chance. But you’re not making it easy.’ I paused. ‘That power dip you registered? It was two of our guns, firing kinetic energy slugs ov
er the horizon.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘To send a message to a pair of suits that are walking towards us, across the surface of Michaelmas.’ I watched her reaction as carefully as I could, hoping for some fracture in that flawless armour. ‘Two empty suits, as near as we can judge. It can’t be a coincidence that you’ve all arrived on Michaelmas at the same time. Those suits must have come from the Silence in Heaven, just like you, and like you they must know more about us than we’d like to think. You knew about my ship. These suits know about the location of Sun Hollow.’
‘And the message you meant to deliver?’
‘Stop. Come no closer until you’ve declared your intentions.’
‘You think that will persuade them?’
I reflected on my answer.
‘More that I worry about what those suits are going to contain in the future.’
We played on for a few more moves, with my chances of drawing against her, let alone defeating her, diminishing to distant theoretical possibilities.
‘How would that work, exactly? Do you think someone’s going to get inside those suits, and then go somewhere?’
‘I don’t know. I’m currently trying very hard not to rule anything out.’
‘Right answer.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I mean that right now you can’t help wondering if I’ve got something to do with the suits, so you’re very wisely leaving your options open.’
‘I can’t help but draw a connection,’ I said, regarding her with faint unease. ‘Do you have other friends out there who sent you to us who need to get you back?’
‘I think if I had friends, I’d remember them.’
We entered the endgame. Although I could have drawn it out for a few more moves, it would only have delayed the inevitable.
I made my last move, a deliberate sacrifice.
‘You let me win,’ she protested.
‘No, I just spared us both a drawn-out bloodbath. I could never win from the position you put me in.’
‘I think you give in too easily. Perhaps that was always your central weakness.’ She uttered these words as if they were a normal continuation of our conversation, rather than some blindsiding swerve. ‘Each of you had your faults, but that was yours.’
‘Each of us?’
She grabbed my fingers before I could withdraw my hand from the board. Although I was wearing surgical gloves, her nails bit through the fabric, digging into my skin. There was a sharp pressure, then she relaxed her grip.
I snatched back my hand, as startled and dumbfounded by that as I had been by her words.
‘What the hell are you?’
‘I was wondering how long it would take you to ask.’ She smiled, watching as I rubbed the wounded hand, feeling where she had punctured both the glove and the flesh beneath it. ‘You needn’t worry: that was a formality. No harm will come of it.’
‘What are you?’ I asked again. ‘Who sent you?’
She laughed once. ‘I sent me.’
She spread the fingers of her hand, the ones that had just punctured my glove. One by one the nails were turning black, not along a gradient from top to bottom but as if each were a screen, filling with interstellar darkness.
I got out of the room, still rubbing my hand. Kyrgiou was standing next to an orderly, leafing through some patient notes, seemingly unaware of anything that had happened with the passenger.
‘Are you all right, Administrator?’
I sealed the door behind me. ‘Get security here, and don’t let anyone into that area. She moves from that bed, tries anything at all, they put a boser pulse through her neck.’
‘You’ve changed your tune.’
I tore off the glove, showing Kyrgiou my palm. ‘She just did something to me. Jabbed her nails into my skin, and then her nails turned black. I don’t think she put a toxin into me, unless it’s really slow-acting, but I ought to be feeling the effects by now. And why would she use a slow-acting toxin?’ My voice was racing, and so was my heart, but I put both of these effects down to nervous excitement, rather than anything swimming in my blood. ‘We missed something. Those nails of hers must be artificial.’
‘What did they do to you?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps you should quarantine me. If she’s brought an infectious agent into Sun Hollow . . .’
‘We didn’t miss anything, Administrator.’ But Kyrgiou had already pressed the emergency summons button, calling assistance down from Sanctum. Alma Chung arrived first, carrying a small boser pistol, and behind her came three more heavily equipped and armoured Sanctum security personnel, with excimer rifles, stun-truncheons and axes. Just behind them, puffing, was a ruddy-cheeked Morgan Valois.
‘What the hell, old man?’
The passenger was still in bed, idly moving the pegs in and out of the pegboard, whispering something to herself.
‘Situation,’ Alma Chung demanded.
‘We’ve been . . . set up, in some way,’ I floundered, still trying to assemble the facts into something that made passing sense. ‘She’s not what she seems.’ I showed them both my palm. ‘I think I’ve been sampled. Her nails are some kind of analysis system. Micro-laboratories. Nanotechnology.’
‘What the hell?’ Valois echoed, as if stuck in a loop. ‘We scanned her. Didn’t we, Doctor Kyrgiou?’
‘There was nothing. No implants, no prosthetic augmentation, neither mechanical nor biological.’
‘I saw something,’ I insisted. ‘Inside her.’
‘Your mirage again,’ Kyrgiou said.
I waved my palm. ‘If she can do this, then what else can she do? She hid one thing; she can hide another. Maybe I just got a glimpse of something, before she gained control.’
‘We played back the recording,’ Kyrgiou reminded me.
‘Then she was able to retroactively alter it,’ I said, shivering a little at the idea. ‘She dropped her guard for an instant, made an error, corrected it.’
Chung’s guards were pressing against the glass, checking the readiness of their weapons.
‘Orders?’ Chung asked.
‘Go in. Surround her, but don’t touch her. Make it plain that she’s only one mistake away from being shot dead. And watch out for those nails.’
When she was satisfied that the passenger was under armed restraint, and unlikely to do any further harm, Chung joined Valois and me in the Red Room, gathered around the glowing map of the status table, with its radial markings, surface contours and illuminated marker prisms. Cantor and the other analysts were working hard to keep the table updated, their voices low but urgent, like surgical assistants during a difficult operation.
‘You’d better get that seen to,’ Valois was saying.
‘Later,’ I answered, shaking away the tingle in my palm where I could still feel the puncture wounds. ‘Whatever she did to me, it’s done. Did the over-the-horizon shots work?’
‘They struck,’ Valois said carefully. ‘Two warning shots, two closer strikes, and the two that were meant to stop them dead. The seismometers took a little time to clear after all those impacts. The suits are still coming.’
‘For certain?’
‘Both suits, same gait. No sign of damage from the seismic traces. It’s as if they walked right through the bombardment and nothing touched them.’
I nodded and tried to find something to cling to. ‘Then our positional estimates were off. We still have six slugs in each railgun, don’t we? Once they come over the horizon, they can aim more accurately, and we can dial them up to full power.’
‘I hope so,’ Valois said.
Chung narrowed her eyes. ‘Why would you only hope so?’
‘Because I can’t help feeling our passenger knows our capabilities almost as well as we do.’ Valois shot me a weary look. ‘Next time you find a waif and stray out among the stars, old man, perhaps leave it there? I don’t know who or what you’ve brought into our nest, but she’s not welcome.’
‘If I’d known . . .’
‘The oldest litany in the book.’ But his demeanour shifted to one of sympathy. ‘I’d have done the same, for what it’s worth. We’re hiding from monsters, not trying to become them.’
‘But she might be one,’ Chung said, reflecting for a moment before continuing. ‘What’s our assessment? Could she be the thing we feared all along: a wolf construct, a biological infiltration measure?’
‘She’s something else,’ I said with certainty.
‘You know this, Administrator, or you feel it?’
‘Just before she grabbed me, she spoke to me in a way that made it feel personal. As if her interest lay in me, rather than Sun Hollow. That’s not how a wolf construct would operate. They regard us as vermin, not individuals.’
‘Perhaps they’re evolving new strategies?’ Valois said.
‘There’s a thing inside that biological body: the object I saw in her ribcage. There was easily room in it for a magnetic pen and a few grains of antimatter. It wouldn’t even need to be a powerful bomb to destroy all of Sun Hollow – a mini-nuke would be more than sufficient. So why not let it off the moment she arrived?’
Valois scratched under his nose. ‘Intelligence gathering?’
‘Unless she’s using a wolf communication channel we don’t know about, no signals can escape beyond Michaelmas,’ Chung replied. ‘You know this, Morgan.’ Her subtext: do not waste my time voicing untestable hypotheses.
I caught Cantor’s eye. ‘Time until line-of-sight acquisition?’
‘About thirty minutes, Administrator, depending on the exact path the suits follow. Do you want to issue another warning, or engage on sight?’
‘We have six slugs left in each gun: twelve in total. That should be more than enough but I don’t want a single slug wasted. Decapitating those suits may not be enough to stop them, so reserve fire until at least half the suit is over the horizon. Understood?’
‘Understood, Administrator.’
Chung said: ‘I’d like to begin moving a security detachment to the far end of the twenty-kilometre tunnel in case those suits try and force their way in. If we move now, there’s time to set up a defensive position with the heavy Breitenbachs. The team can also lay demolition charges to collapse the tunnel if the suits make it through the lock.’
Inhibitor Phase Page 7