“Cut your thrust five seconds before impact,” Sajaki said. “We don’t want the heat to trigger a defensive reaction.”
“No,” Sylveste said. “That’s the last thing we want.”
He assumed the suit would protect him from the fall, though it took an effort of will to follow Sajaki’s instructions, slipping into freefall five seconds before his feet were due to touch the crystal. The suit bulged slightly, projecting cushioning armour plates. The density of the gel-air rose and for a moment he almost blacked out. But when the impact came, it was almost too gentle to register.
He blinked, and realised he had fallen on his back. Great, he thought—very dignified. Then the suit righted itself and popped him back on his feet.
He was standing in Cerberus.
THIRTY-FIVE
Cerberus, Interior, 2567
“How long now?”
“We’ve been out a day.” Sajaki’s voice sounded thin and distant, though his suit was only a few tens of metres away from Sylveste. “We still have plenty of time; don’t worry.”
“I believe you,” Sylveste said. “At least, part of me does. The other part isn’t so sure.”
“That other part might be me,” Calvin said quietly. “And no, I don’t believe we still have plenty of time. We might do, but I don’t think we should count on it. Not when we know so little.”
“If that’s meant to inspire confidence…”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Then shut up until you’ve got something constructive to say.”
They were kilometres into the second layer of Cerberus now; good progress by some yardsticks, since they had descended more vertical distance now than the tallest mountains on Earth—but it was still too slow. At this rate they would never make it back in time, if they even succeeded in reaching whatever destination they were striving towards. Before then, the bridgehead would surely have given in to the tireless expulsive energies being directed against it by the crustal defences, and it would be digested or spat away into space like an unwanted pip.
The second layer—the bedrock on which the snakes writhed, and into which the roof-supporting trees thrust their roots—had a crystalline topography, markedly different to the kind of quasi-organic look of the overlying structures. They had been forced to thread their way downwards in the narrow interstices between the densely packed crystal forms, like ants navigating between courses of brickwork. It was slow work, and it quickly depleted the suits’ reaction reservoirs, since all the downward movement had to be constantly checked by thrust. At first Sylveste had suggested that they use the monofilament grapples which the suits could deploy (or grow, or extrude; he did not bother himself with the details), but Sajaki had argued him out of it: it would have conserved reaction mass, but it would also have greatly delayed their descent, since hundreds of kilometres still lay below them. Apart from that, it would also have limited them to strictly vertical motion, which would have made them easy targets for hypothetical counter-insurgent systems. So they flew most of the time, stopping when necessary to ablate small quantities of Cerberus material. So far, Cerberus had not objected to their vampiric activities, and the crystals contained enough heavy trace-elements to feed the thruster reservoirs.
“It’s as if it doesn’t know we’re here,” Sylveste said.
Calvin answered him. “Maybe it doesn’t. Not much can have reached this far down in living memory. The systems designed to detect intruders and defend against them might have atrophied through disuse—assuming they ever existed in the first place.”
“Why do I have the impression you’re suddenly trying to cheer me up?”
“I suppose I have your best interests at heart.” He imagined Calvin smiling, though there was no visual component to the simulation. “In any case, I believe what I just said. I think the deeper we go, the less likelihood we’ll have of being recognised as something unwanted. It’s like the human body—-the greatest density of pain receptors lies in the skin.”
Sylveste remembered a stomach cramp he had once experienced through drinking too much cold water during a surface hike out from Chasm City, and wondered if there was even a glint of truth in what Calvin had just said to him. It was reassuring though; of that there was no doubt. But did it also mean that everything deeper would be half-sleeping; as if the mighty defences of the crust were now meaningless, because what lay below no longer worked as the Amarantin had intended? Was Cerberus a treasure chest which, though firmly locked and burnished to a high polish, contained nothing but rusting junk—if that?
There was no sense thinking that way. If any of this meant anything, if the last fifty years of his life (and perhaps even more than that) had been anything other than delusional obsession, there had to be something worth finding. The feeling was nothing he could articulate, but he was more sure of it than he had ever before been sure of anything.
Another day of descent passed; during intervals Sylveste slept, being awakened by his suit only when something notable occurred, or the external scene changed beyond some inbuilt tolerance and the suit decided that he had better be awake to witness it. If Sajaki slept Sylveste was unaware of it, but he ascribed this to the generally odd physiology of the man; his blood thickened by medichines, constantly cleansing; his Juggler-configured mind able to do without the auditing hours of normal sleep. When the going was easiest, they descended at a maximum rate of one kilometre a minute, which usually happened when some deep abyssal shaft hove into view. The return would be quicker, of course, since the suits would know the way they had come, barring changes in the structure of Cerberus itself. Now it was not uncommon for them to descend for several kilometres before hitting a dead end, or a shaft too narrow for safety, at which point they would retreat to the last branch point and attempt another route. It was pure trial and error, since the suit sensors could not see more than a few hundred metres ahead at any point, blocked by the massive solidity of the crystal elements. But, kilometre by kilometre, they made slow progress, bathed always in sickly turquoise-green light spilling from the crystals.
Gradually the character of the formations had been altering; there were shards here many kilometres across, impassive and immobile as glaciers. All the crystals were attached to one another, but the vaultlike spaces and vertiginous rifts between them gave the impression that they were floating freely, as if in mute denial of the world’s gravitational field. What were they, Sylveste wondered? Dead matter—literally, crystalline—or something stranger? Were they components; parts of some world-englobing mechanism which was too large to be glimpsed or even imagined? If they were machines, they must have been exploiting some hazy state of quantum reality, where concepts like heat and energy dissolved into uncertainty. Certainly, they were as cold as ice (the suit’s thermal sensors told him this), and yet beneath their translucent faces he sometimes sensed tremendous subliminal motion, like the ticking guts of a clock glimpsed through a veil of lucite. But when he asked the suit to investigate with its senses, the results it sent back were too ambiguous to be much help.
After forty hours of rambling descent they made a significant and helpful discovery. The crystal matrix thinned out in a transitional zone only a kilometre deep, exposing shafts wider and deeper than any they had yet encountered; more deliberate in design. They were two kilometres in width, and each of the ten shafts they examined fell towards convergent nothingness for two hundred vertical kilometres. The walls of the shafts emitted the same slightly nauseating green radiance as the crystal elements, and they shivered with the same underlying sense of pent-up motion, suggesting that they were parts of the same mechanisms, though fulfilling some very different function. Sylveste remembered what he knew about the great pyramids in Egypt; how they were riddled with shafts which had been dictated by the construction technique; escape routes for the workers who sealed the tombs within. Perhaps something similar applied here, or perhaps the shafts had once served to radiate the heat of engines now quietened.
Disc
overing them was a godsend, since it enormously quickened their rate of descent, but that gift was not without its hazards. Constrained by the linear walls of the shaft, there would be nowhere to seek refuge if an attack came, and only two possible directions of escape. Yet if they delayed further, they would face imprisonment in Cerberus when the bridgehead collapsed; no more palatable a fate. So they risked using the shafts.
They could not simply fall. That had been possible before, when the vertical distance was no more than a kilometre or so, but here the very size of the shafts brought unanticipated problems. They found themselves drifting mysteriously towards the walls, and had to keep applying bursts of corrective thrust to stop themselves being dashed against the rushing precipice of sickly jade. It was Coriolis force, of course: the same fictitious force which curved wind vectors into cyclones on the surface of a rotating planet. Here, Coriolis force objected to a strictly linear descent, since Cerberus was rotating, and Sylveste and Sajaki had to shed excess angular momentum with each movement closer to the core. Yet compared to their earlier slow progress, it was gratifyingly rapid.
They had fallen a hundred kilometres when the attack began.
“It’s moving,” Volyova said.
Ten hours had passed since leaving the lighthugger. She was exhausted, despite having catnapped for odd hours, knowing that she would need the energy soon. But it had not really helped; she needed more than little intermissions of unconsciousness to begin to heal all the physiological and mental stress of recent days. Now, though, she was fully awake, as if at the limits of fatigue her body had grudgingly accessed some stagnant pool of reserve energy. Doubtless it would not last, and there would be an even heavier premium to pay when she had exhausted this stop-gap—but for now she was glad of the alertness, however transitory.
“What’s moving?” Khouri asked.
Volyova nodded at the shuttle’s glaringly white console, at the readout windows she had called into being across its horseshoe profile.
“What else but the damned ship?”
Pascale yawned awake. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is we have trouble,” Volyova said, fingers dancing on the keyboard to call up other readouts, though she did not really need confirmation of this. Bad news carried its own certification. “The lighthugger is on the move again. This means two things, neither of them good. Sun Stealer must have reinstated the major systems I disabled with Palsy.”
“Well, ten hours wasn’t bad—at least it allowed us to get this far.” Pascale nodded at the nearest positional display, which showed the shuttle more than one third of the distance to Cerberus.
“What else?” Khouri asked.
“What it implies, which is that Sun Stealer must now have gained enough experience to manipulate the drive. Previously it was something he was only cautiously investigating, in case he harmed the ship.”
“Meaning what?”
Volyova indicated the same positional readout. “Let’s assume he now has total control of the drive and knows the tolerances. The ship’s current vector puts it on an intercept trajectory with us. Sun Stealer’s trying to reach us before we reach Dan, or even the bridgehead. We’re too small a target at this range—beam weapons would disperse too much to hit us, and we could outmanoeuvre all the sub-relativistic projectiles just by executing a random flight path—but it won’t be long before we’re within kill-range.”
“Just how long is that?” Pascale frowned. It was not, Volyova thought, the woman’s most endearing habit, but she endured it expressionlessly. “Don’t we already have a massive head-start?”
“We do, but now there’s nothing to stop Sun Stealer ramping the lighthugger’s thrust all the way up to multiple tens of gees—accelerations we simply can’t match without pulping ourselves in the process. But that’s not a problem for him. There’s nothing left alive aboard that ship which doesn’t run around on four legs and squeak and make a mess when you shoot it.”
“And maybe the Captain,” Khouri said. “Except I don’t think he’ll be much of a consideration.”
“I asked how long,” Pascale said.
“If we’re lucky, we might just reach Cerberus,” Volyova said. “But it wouldn’t give us much time to scout around and have second thoughts. We’d have to get inside just to avoid the ship’s weapons. And even then we’d have to get pretty deep inside.” She dredged a clucking laugh from somewhere inside herself. “Maybe your husband had the right idea all along. He might be in a much safer position than any of us. For the time being at least.” Patterns resolved in the walls of the shaft, areas of crystal beginning to glow a little more intently than the rest. The patterns were so vast that Sylveste did not immediately recognise them for what they were: vast Amarantin graphicforms. It was not simply their size, in fact, but also the fact that they were rendered differently from any he had seen before; almost another language entirely. In an intuitive flash he realised that he was seeing the language used by the Banished; the flock which had followed Sun Stealer into exile, and eventually to the stars. Tens of thousands of years spaced this writing from any example he had ever seen, which made it even more of a miracle that he was able to tease any sense out of it at all.
“What are they telling us?” Calvin asked.
“That we’re not welcome,” Sylveste said, half astonished that the graphicforms spoke to him. “To put it mildly.”
Sajaki must have picked up his subvocalisation. “What, exactly?”
“They’re saying that they made this level,” Sylveste said. “That they manufactured it.”
“I guess,” Calvin said, “that you’ve finally been vindicated—this place really was the handiwork of the Amarantin.”
“In any other circumstances this would call for a drink,” Sylveste said, but he was only paying half attention to the conversation now; fascinated by what he was reading; by the thoughts which were springing into his mind. More than once he had felt this feeling when deep into the process of translating Amarantin script, but never before with this fluency, or this sense of total certainty. It was enthralling, and not a little terrifying.
“Please go on,” Sajaki said.
“Well, it’s what I said: a warning. It’s saying we shouldn’t progress any further.”
“That probably means we’re not far from what we came for.”
Sylveste had that feeling as well, though he could not justify it. “The warning says there’s something below we shouldn’t see,” he said.
“See? Is that what it says, literally?”
“Amarantin thought is very visual, Sajaki. Whatever it is, they don’t want us anywhere near it.”
“Which suggests that whatever it is has value—don’t you agree?”
“What if it really is a warning?” Calvin said. “I don’t mean a threat; I mean a genuine heart-felt plea to keep away. Can you tell from the context if that’s the case?”
“If it was conventional Amarantin script, perhaps.” What Sylveste did not add was that he felt that the message was exactly what Calvin had implied, though there was no way he could rationalise that feeling. It did not deter him, though. Instead, he found himself wondering just what could have driven the Amarantin to this; what was so bad that it had to be encased in a facsimile of a world and defended by the most awesome weapons known to a civilisation? What was so unspeakable that it could not simply be destroyed? What kind of monster had they created?
Or found?
The thought jarred home, seeming to find a vacant hole in his mind where it fitted precisely. As if it belonged there. They found something; Sun Stealer’s flock. Far out on the edge of the system, they found something.
He was still trying to deal with the certainty of that feeling when the closest of the graphicforms detached from the shaft, leaving a hollow recess where it had been a second earlier. Others followed; whole words, clauses and sentences unpeeled from the shaft and loomed around him, vast as buildings, circling Sajaki and Sylveste with raptorial patience. The
y floated free, suspended by some unguessable mechanism invisible to the suit defences; no gravitational or magnetic fluctuation. For a moment Sylveste was stunned at the sheer alienness behind the objects, but then he grasped that there was a kind of indisputable logic at play here. What made more sense than a warning message which, when transgressed, enforced itself?
But suddenly there was no time for detached consideration.
“Suit defences to automatic,” Sajaki said, voice rising an octave only above his routine implacable calm. “I believe these things seek to crush us to death.”
As if he really needed telling.
The floating words had them spherically corralled now, and had commenced a ponderous spiralling-in. Sylveste let his suit do its thing, visual shields snicking down to guard against the retina-melting glare of plasma-bursts, all manual control modes temporarily suspended. It was for the best: the last thing his suit needed was a human being trying to do the job better than it could do. Even with the dense shielding in place, Sylveste’s vision was aflame with fireworks, photon events triggering his circuits, and he knew that there must have been fryingly intense multi-spectrum radiation just beyond the skin of his suit. He registered bucking surges of motion; episodes of up/down thrust (he assumed) so intense that he passed in and out of consciousness like a train threading a series of short mountain tunnels. He assumed that his suit was trying to cut and run, and with each crushing deceleration was being thwarted.
Finally he blacked out long and hard.
Volyova ramped up the Melancholia’s thrust, until it was nudging four gees of steady acceleration, with intermittent random-swerves programmed in for extra effect, in case the lighthugger launched any kinetics. It was the most they could withstand without protective suits or tabards; more than was comfortable, especially for Pascale, who was even less accustomed to this sort of thing than Khouri. It meant they could not leave their seats, and that movement of their arms had to be restricted to a minimum. But they could speak, after a fashion, and even hold something approximating a coherent discussion.
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