“It’s her,” Molinella confirmed, releasing his hold.
“You know it’s me,” Auger said, shaking her head to clear her vision of afterimages. “We’ve already met. Don’t you remember?”
“Sit down,” Molinella ordered. “We have a lot to get through.”
“Give me a break,” Auger snapped. “We’ve only just left port. We have another five days until we get to Mars.”
“Five days would barely cover it even if we had the luxury of that much time.” Molinella fixed her with the blank expression of a tailor’s dummy. As before, both agents wore suits, but this time the cut was not quite as formal. They could, Auger supposed, just about pass for a pair of slightly straitlaced Thresher newlyweds.
“But we don’t have five days,” Ringsted said. “For security reasons, we must complete your briefing today.”
“Are you not staying on this ship until we reach Mars?” Auger asked.
“Yes,” Ringsted said. “As Caliskan doubtless explained, the Slashers will have this ship under observation, just as they monitor all long-range Thresher traffic. We couldn’t get a person on or off the Twentieth in mid-voyage without attracting far too much attention, and attention is the one thing we don’t want right now.”
“Well, then. What’s the hurry?”
“Is that door shut?” Ringsted asked, looking over Auger’s shoulder. “Good. Now pull up a chair. We have a lot to discuss.”
“First of all, I need to show you something,” Molinella said. He reached into his jacket pocket—the same place he kept the pen—and removed a matt-black cylinder like a cigar holder. He unscrewed the top and slid out a hypodermic, dense with bright-green fluid.
“While you were waiting for the ship,” Ringsted said, “you were fed and watered in Caliskan’s section of Contigencies.”
“I know,” Auger said.
“What you don’t know is that there were harmless chemical tracers in your food. They’ve worked their way into your body and tagged themselves on to every new memory you’ve laid down since you became Caliskan’s guest.”
Molinella took up the narrative. “The agent in this syringe reacts with those tagged neural structures, dismantling them. Again, the effects won’t be fatal, but you’ll remember nothing that Caliskan told you, and nothing that we’re about to tell you. In fact, you won’t retain a single memory from this entire period. Of course, we’ll only use it on you if we absolutely have to.”
“So if I screw up, or even get on your nerves, I’ll wake up with a large hole in my memory.”
“Which won’t be much help on the eve of a tribunal,” Molinella added. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, shall we?”
“Let’s,” Auger agreed, with exaggerated pleasantness. “But you still haven’t told me why I need to learn all this now.”
“The reason,” Molinella said patiently, “is that a day from now there will only be one person on this ship who knows anything about the contents of this briefing. And no, that doesn’t mean that Agent Ringsted and I are going anywhere.” He returned the syringe to its container and the container to his pocket, patting it gently. “If you see us outside this room once this briefing is over, treat us like any other pair of passengers. There’ll be no point in asking us further questions. We literally won’t remember you.”
“We’ll begin with the essentials,” Ringsted said. “The lights, please, Agent Molinella.”
Molinella stood up and dimmed the cabin lights.
“This is very cosy,” Auger began, but she had barely opened her mouth when patterns of light appeared on one blank wall of the cabin. She traced the rays back to a ruby-stoned ring on Molinella’s finger.
The patterns of light resolved into what she presumed was the seal of the Contingencies Board, accompanied by a warning that the ensuing information was covered by a level of security so chillingly high that Auger had never even heard of it.
“Aren’t I supposed to have signed something by now?” she asked.
Ringsted and Molinella looked at each other and laughed. “Just watch,” the woman said. “And save your questions for later.”
The security seal vanished, replaced by a picture of what Auger assumed to be the Milky Way galaxy, seen from above.
And then a man appeared, superimposed over the image of the galaxy. He wore a mid-grey suit with red cuffs and looked very athletic, his muscles straining against the seams of the fabric. He was very handsome and self-assured and Auger recognised him with a jolt.
It was Peter.
“Hello, Verity,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of apology and mild embarrassment. “I suspect this probably comes as something of a surprise. All I can do is apologise for the secrecy, and hope that you’ll forgive me—all of us, in fact—for the necessary subterfuge.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but Peter raised one palm and flashed a knowing smile. “No, don’t say anything. You’ll just have to listen to what I have to say and fill in the gaps yourself. I’ll do my best not to leave out anything critical.”
“Peter,” she said, unable to stop herself. “What are…”
Oblivious of her interruption, the recording continued. “Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, shall we? Everything you think you know about me is correct. I am in the diplomatic service, and I have just returned from an extended tour of the Polities, culminating with a trip into the hyperweb. That’s the public story, and it’s all true. But there’s more to it than that. I was also functioning as an undercover agent, gathering intelligence while playing the role of a sweet-talking airhead diplomat.” He smiled again, anticipating his ex-wife’s reaction to this news. “At, I should add, considerable risk to both myself and my friends amongst the Slashers. Things are getting very serious out there now, and spies aren’t looked upon too favourably. As it is, I’ve probably exhausted my usefulness. A pity, as I rather enjoyed being a spook.” Peter’s measured, actorly voice seemed to come from somewhere in the cabin, rather than the projector ring.
“I suppose I should get to the point, though. And the point, rather predictably, is the hyperweb itself.” Peter turned around and spread a hand across the face of the Milky Way, like a farmer casting seed. A bright web of lines appeared, transecting the spiral, and then the entire ensemble rotated to reveal a three-dimensional structure. “This is our best guess as to the extent of the hyperweb network as mapped by Slasher explorers,” he said. “It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a rendering like this. When explorers pop out of the far end of a given portal, unless they’ve exited near some unique, immediately recognisable landmark, like a supernova remnant or a super-massive outgassing star, there’s no way for them to calculate exactly where they are in the galaxy. All they can do is fix their position using reference points, for which purpose pulsars turn out to be rather more suitable than stars.”
“Who made it?” Auger muttered under her breath. “That’s all we really care about.”
Something twinkled in Peter’s eye as he turned back to the camera. How well he knew her, she thought, even now. “The one thing we don’t know is who built it. Neither do our friends in the Polities. Of course, there’s a great deal of guesswork, some of it rather compelling. The system is clearly of alien origin, but whoever built it—and presumably used it—doesn’t seem to be around any more.” Peter, Auger could tell, was rather enjoying this. From airhead, vain diplomat to airhead, vain spy: it really wasn’t much of a leap. Then she rebuked herself for her snideness, conjecturing that Peter would almost certainly have been executed (or something worse) had his duplicity become known to his Slasher hosts.
She felt a flicker of admiration: quite unlike her, and most especially so where her ex-husband was concerned.
“What we suspect is this,” Peter continued. “The system is old. It’s been here for hundreds of millions of years, at the very least. It may be nearly as old as the solar system. Most of the portals that the explorers have found are anchored
to solid bodies: terrestrial planets, moons, large planetoids. The Sedna portal is a classic example, and as far as the Slashers know it’s the only active portal in our system.”
Something made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It was the way he said “as far as the Slashers know.”
Peter tuned back to the representation of the Milky Way, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “We still have no idea how the damned thing functions. Even the Slashers are in the dark on that one, despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise. They have some theories about metric engineering—triple-bounded hypervacuum solutions to the Krasnikov equations, that kind of thing. But really, if we’re all honest with ourselves, they’re pissing in the wind.” He tapped a finger against his upper lip. “But let’s give them credit where it’s due. They found a way to use it. They grafted some of their technology on to the portal mechanisms, found a way to manipulate the throat geometry so they could squeeze a ship through in more or less one piece. You have to admire them for that. Like it or not, they’re way ahead of us.”
Peter laced his hands behind his back, standing with his legs spaced slightly apart. “Now let’s talk hard numbers. How far have they reached? What have they actually found out there?”
Auger sat forward, sensing that some kind of climax was imminent.
“We still don’t know exactly when they found the Sedna portal,” Peter said. “Our best guess is that it was somewhere around fifty years ago, between twenty-two ten and twenty-two fifteen. Since then they’ve surveyed—or at least visited—somewhere in the region of fifty to sixty thousand solar systems. Pretty impressive, by anyone’s measure. There’s just one nagging little problem: they haven’t actually found anything to justify all this effort.”
Auger nodded to herself. She paid scant attention to rumours about the hyperweb, but even so, one thing kept shining through: the whole affair was a bitter disappointment.
“Or at least,” Peter continued, “nothing they want us to know about. It’s tricky for them, really. They want access to Earth, and the only thing they can really offer us—apart from a drip-feed of UR and other dangerous little toys—is permission to use the hyperweb as paying passengers. So they try to dress up the brutal truth of what they have found out there, which is an endless catalogue of dead, uninhabitable rocks and crushing cold giants.” Peter unlaced his hands from behind his back and leaned conspiratorially toward the camera. “The funny thing is, though, that even if they had found something out there, they probably wouldn’t tell us that either.”
“Please get on with it,” Auger said, as if it would make any difference.
“The illusion,” Peter said, “that the hyperweb has turned up nothing of value is maintained even in Slasher circles, at surprisingly high levels of security. That’s why it’s been such a tough old nut to crack.”
Now the picture behind him changed again. It zoomed in on one specific arm of the galaxy, the scene behind him punctuated by stars. Something loomed out of the darkness between them: a blue-grey world of unnatural smoothness, one crescent picked out in orange-red by an off-stage sun or cluster of suns. The other limb was a frigid blue, like the colour of moonlight on snow. The view zoomed towards the sphere, until it was much larger than Peter. At this extreme magnification, it was possible to make out some detail on the surface of the sphere. It was nothing at all like the texturing and weathering of a planetary surface.
The sphere was made up of countless neatly interlocked platelets, arranged in a pattern of mind-numbing regularity. It looked less like a planet than some crystalline molecule or virus.
“Let’s bring in some scale here,” Peter said.
A box surrounded the sphere. Numbers popped up on the axes, indicating that the diameter of the sphere was around nine or ten of whatever units of measurement were in force.
“What…” Auger began.
“These numbers are units of one light-second,” Peter said. “The sphere is nearly ten light-seconds in diameter. To put that into context, you could fit the sun into that structure and still have plenty of elbow room. You couldn’t fit in the Earth as well, since the Earth’s orbit around the sun is eight light-minutes wide, or about fifty times too big to fit into the sphere. But if you put the Earth in the middle, you’d have more than enough room to include Earth’s moon.”
“Excuse me,” Auger interrupted, “but was it me, or did he just call that thing a structure?” The agents ignored her, and she grudgingly returned her attention to the recording.
“I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that we’ve actually found something unambiguously alien,” Peter said. “After all, we always knew they were out there somewhere. The hyperweb is all the evidence we need of that. But to find something this huge… well, I don’t think anyone was expecting that. The first big question, of course, is what the hell is it? And the second big question, what can it do for us?”
The sphere shrank, receding to a dot and finally to nothing. Now the view of the galaxy returned, with the intricate ratlines of the hyperweb superimposed as glowing vectors. “Now for surprise number two: the Slashers have found more than one of these things. In fact, they’ve found around twenty of them, spread throughout the galaxy.” Peter clicked his fingers and blue-grey spheres the size of golf balls dropped into place on the map. “You can’t see it on this scale, so you’ll have to take my word for it that none of these objects show up in any significant location, other than always being within easy reach of a portal. The Slashers call them ‘ALS objects,’ ALS standing for ‘anomalous large structure.’ Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? And if they’ve found twenty in such a short period of time—and since we know that the hyperweb is much more extensive than the mapped connections would imply—we can be sure that there must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these things out there. Sitting between stars, brooding like eggs.” Peter waited a beat. “Or time bombs.”
The image changed again, focusing once more on a single blue-grey ALS sphere. The view had a pared-down, schematic quality to it. The spherical shading faded, leaving only a ring of very thin material.
“This is the cross section,” Peter said. “The Slashers mapped the interior using neutrino tomography. They put a fifty kilowatt neutrino laser on one ship and flew it to one side of the ALS. Another ship carried a corresponding neutrino detector—an array of ultra-stiff sapphire crystals primed to undergo lattice vibration on the arrival of a single neutrino. The transmitting ship varied the path of its beam through the ALS, while the receiver ship kept track along the predicted beam, measuring the rise and fall in neutrino flux as the beam passed through the ALS at different angles. What they found indicated a hard, thin shell of unknown composition about one kilometre thick. They also detected a significant concentration of mass at the core, forming an inner sphere a few thousand kilometres in radius. In other words planet-sized, and with exactly the density profile you’d expect for a typical large terrestrial like Venus or Earth. The rest of the sphere seems to be hard vacuum, to the limit of the neutrino sweeps.”
Auger turned to Ringsted and Molinella. “This is amazing, no question. It scares me that you’re even telling me this stuff. But I still don’t understand what any of it has to do with me or my tribunal.”
“You’ll see,” the woman said.
Peter was still speaking, oblivious of her interruption. “Based on these clues, the Slashers concluded that the ALS objects were physical shells wrapped around planets. Sometimes the planets even seem to be enclosed complete with moons. It is evidence of a very advanced technology—comparable even with the hyperweb itself. But why do this? Why imprison an entire world inside a dark sphere, isolating it from the rest of the universe? Well, maybe they aren’t dark inside. No one knows that for sure. And maybe they only look like prisons from the outside. The state of matter inside that shell could be something very odd indeed. Are these planets that have been quarantined because of some awful crime or biological cataclysm? Are they antimat
ter worlds that have somehow drifted into our galaxy, and must be shielded from outside contact on their way through? Are they something worse? According to our intelligence, the Slashers have no idea in spite of all their research. Just a lot of guesswork.”
Peter stared into the camera, his eyes gleaming, and he permitted himself the tiniest of self-satisfied smiles, the merest crinkle lifting the corners of his mouth.
“Well, we think we know. You see, we’ve found a way into one of the spheres that the Slashers know nothing about. And you, Verity, are going to take a little trip inside.”
SEVEN
Floyd’s telephone dredged him from sleep just after eight in the morning. It hadn’t stopped raining since he had returned from Montparnasse. It lashed against the window in hard diagonal lines, the wind chivvying the glass in its loose-fitting metal frame. Somewhere else in the apartment he heard Custine whistling cheerily, pottering around with washing-up. Floyd grimaced. There were two things he hated early in the morning: telephone calls and excessively cheerful people.
Still half-dressed from the night before, he stumbled out of bed and picked up the telephone. “Floyd,” he said, his voice thick from what little sleep he had managed. “And how are you, Monsieur Blanchard?”
This seemed to impress his caller. “How did you know it was me?”
“Call it a hunch.”
“It’s not too early for you, is it?”
Floyd scraped grit from the corners of his eyes. “Not at all, monsieur. Been up for hours, working on the case.”
“Is that so? Then perhaps you have something to tell me.”
“Early days, yet,” Floyd said. “Still collating the information we gathered last night.” He stifled a yawn.
“Then I presume you have a few leads already?”
“One or two,” he said.
Custine bustled in, pushing a mug of black coffee into Floyd’s free hand. “Who is it?” Custine asked in a stage whisper.
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