Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Fine,” Aveling said.

  He had the look of a serious hard bastard, the kind who was even more intimidating because he appeared intelligent and cultured, while also giving off the unavoidable impression that he could kill anyone in the room before they’d taken their next breath. She had been told nothing about him, but she knew instantly that he was a veteran of the war and that he had probably killed more Slashers than she had met in her life, and that he had probably never missed a night’s sleep because of it.

  “I’d still really like someone to tell me what I’m doing on Phobos,” Auger said as Aveling’s party led her away from the shuttle, with two snake robots slithering along behind.

  “What do you know about Phobos?” Aveling asked. He sounded as if his voice box had been stitched back together from tatters, reconstructed like a shredded document.

  “I know to keep away. Other than that, not much. Mars is basically civilian, but you military boys have the moons sewn up pretty tight.”

  “The moons offer the perfect strategic platform for defending the planet against Slasher incursions. Given the existing security measures already in place, they’re also a perfect venue for conducting any sensitive business that might come our way.”

  “Do I count as sensitive business?”

  “No, Auger. You count as a pain in the ass. If there’s one thing I hate more than civilians, it’s having to be nice to them.”

  “You mean this is you being nice?”

  They led Auger to a small, windowless chamber with a couple of closed doors leading away into other rooms. The room contained three seats, a low table and a flagon of water accompanied by two glasses. A grey cabinet occupied one wall, crammed with magnetic tapes in white plastic spools, with a p-mail hopper set next to it.

  They left her alone. Auger poured herself a glass of water and sipped at it experimentally. She had finished half the glass when one of the other doors whisked open and a short, tough-looking woman entered. She had an efficient, low-maintenance bob of straw-coloured hair, framing a face that might have been pretty except for the scowl that seemed moulded into it. She wore coveralls with many pockets and loops, the top zipped low enough to reveal a grubby white T-shirt beneath. Quick, intelligent eyes appraised Auger. The woman took the stub of a cigarette from her lips and flicked it into one corner of the room.

  “Verity, right?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  The woman leaned down, rubbed one hand against her thigh and then offered it to Auger. “Maurya Skellsgard. Have those pricks been treating you all right?”

  “Well…” Auger began, suddenly lost for words.

  Skellsgard sat down on one of the other seats and helped herself to some water. “What you have to understand about those people—and believe me, it took me a while to arrive at this conclusion—is that you’re better with them than without them. Aveling is a cold-hearted son of a bitch, but he’s our cold-hearted son of a bitch.”

  “Are you military?” Auger asked.

  Skellsgard downed her glass of water in one gulp, then poured another. “Hell no—I’m just a snotty-nosed academic. Until a year ago I was happily minding my own business trying to come up with a mathematical treatment of pathological matter.” Anticipating Auger’s question she continued, “The normal mathematics of wormhole mechanics says you need something called exotic matter to enlarge and stabilise a wormhole throat. That’s matter with negative energy density—already seriously weird stuff. But as soon as we got our hands on a few crumbs of intelligence about the hyperweb, it became clear that this wasn’t really a wormhole in the classical sense. Pretty soon we realised we needed something several degrees weirder than exotic matter to make it hang together. Hence… pathological matter.” She shrugged. “We’re physicists. You have to allow us our little jokes, no matter how piss-poor they are.”

  “It’s all right,” Auger said. “You should hear some of the jokes archaeologists think are funny.”

  “I guess we’re both in the same boat, then: a pair of pain-in-the-ass civilian experts Aveling has no choice but to work with.”

  Auger smiled. “That guy just loves civilians, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh yes, can’t get enough of ’em.” Skellsgard emptied her glass a second time. Her knuckles were barked and grazed, dark crescents of grime caked under her very short fingernails. “I heard about the tribunal. Sounds as if they’ve got you by the short and curlies.”

  “I deserve it. I nearly killed a boy.”

  Skellsgard waved that away. “They’ll fix him, if his family’s as rich and influential as I heard they are.”

  “Well, I hope they do fix him. He wasn’t a bad kid.”

  “What about you? I heard that you’re married to Peter Auger.”

  “Was married to him,” Auger corrected.

  “Hmm. Please don’t tell me Mr. Perfect is really a pig behind closed doors. I don’t think I could stand having my illusions shattered.”

  “No,” Auger said, wearily. “Peter’s a decent enough man. Not perfect… but not bad, either. I was the problem, not him. I let my work take over.”

  “I hope it was worth it. What else? Any kids?”

  “A boy and a girl I love very much, but who I don’t make enough time for.”

  Skellsgard looked sympathetic. “I guess that must have simplified things when it came to Caliskan’s nice little offer.”

  “They’d have thrown away the key,” Auger said, “put me somewhere like Venus Deep. By the time I got to see my kids again they’d have barely recognised me. At least this way I have a chance of coming through this with my life at least vaguely intact.” She shifted in her seat, uneasy about discussing her private life. “Of course, it might help if I knew what the hell it is I’m supposed to do.”

  Skellsgard regarded her shrewdly. “What have they told you so far?”

  “They told me about the Slasher intelligence on the ALS objects,” Auger replied.

  “Good. That’s a start, at least.”

  “They said they’d found a way into one. They also told me I was supposed to go inside. I guess Phobos has something to do with that.”

  “More than a little. About two years ago, the USNE found an inactive portal right here, buried under a couple of kilometres of Phobos topsoil. That was when I was drafted on to the team. I’m the closest thing to an expert on hyperweb travel outside of the Polities. Which, I hasten to add, isn’t saying much. But at least now we have a real one to play with.”

  “And you’ve made it work?”

  “As long as you don’t mind a bumpy ride.”

  “And the Slashers still know nothing about it? How come they didn’t find it when they were running Phobos?”

  “They didn’t look deep enough. We only stumbled on it by accident, when we were excavating a new living chamber.”

  Auger suddenly felt very awake and very alert. “I want to see it.”

  “Good. That was sort of the idea of bringing you here in the first place.” Skellsgard hitched up a frayed sleeve to glance at her watch. “We’d better get a move on. There’s an incoming transport due any minute.”

  “I still don’t know what Paris has to do with all this.”

  “We’ll come to that,” Skellsgard said.

  The chamber was large and very nearly spherical, the incurving walls gouged and blasted from coal-dark Phobos core material and then sprayed with some kind of plastic on to which platforms, lighting rigs and catwalks had been bolted or glued. Occupying much of the interior was a glass sphere about half as wide as the chamber, supported in a complex cradle of bee-striped struts and shock-absorbing pistons. Catwalks, caged ladders, pipes and conduits wrapped the sphere in a gristle of metal and plastic. White-clad technicians perched at various locations around the sphere, tapping equipment into open access ports. With their headphones, goggles and gloves they looked like safecrackers engaged in some spectacular heist.

  “We’re just in time,” Skellsgard said,
consulting an instrument-crammed panel bolted to one bar of the viewing cage in which they stood. “Transport hasn’t come through yet, but we’re already picking up bow-shock distortion ahead of it.” On the panel, the needles on numerous analogue dials were twitching into the red. “Looks like it was a rough ride. Hope they packed their barf bags.”

  The technicians had cleared out of the area around the recovery bubble. Machines moved into different positions. Auger even noticed three snake robots in defensive/offensive postures, poised like spitting cobras.

  “They expecting something nasty?” she asked.

  “Just a precaution,” Skellsgard said. “Once that ship’s in the pipe, we can’t communicate with it or the remote portal at E2. That’s a thirty-hour communications blackout. It makes us twitchy.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Theory says there’s no way that the Slashers could tap into this leg of the hyperweb even if they knew it existed. But theory might be wrong. Also, we’re defending against the possibility that the E2 portal might have been compromised by what the military boys are calling ‘indigenous E2 hostiles.’ ”

  The needles on the analogue dials jammed hard into the red. From somewhere beyond the bubble—shining through it with X-ray intensity—came a cruel blue light, brighter than the sun. Auger turned away, holding a hand over her eyes. She could make out the sketchy, anatomical shadows of her finger bones. As quickly as it had arrived the light was gone, leaving only a tracery of pink afterimages on her retinas. Through pained eyes, Auger squinted at the bubble just in time to see a blur of motion as the incoming transport arrived. The ship rammed into the cradle like a piston. The cradle lurched, cushioning the deceleration. This happened in absolute silence. Then the cradle reached the limit of its motion and the entire glass bubble bulged visibly, compressing its huge pneumatic supports with an enormous steely groan, followed by a slow, sighing relaxation back to its original position.

  “You keep mentioning E2,” Auger said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Earth Two,” Skellsgard said, without batting an eyelid.

  Somewhere, the vacuum integrity of the bubble had been breeched. Air shrieked into it, the breeze already tugging at Auger’s hair. Klaxons and warning lights went berserk. Auger renewed her grip on the cage’s support railing. The white-suited technicians were already scurrying back to their posts.

  “That looked rough,” Auger remarked.

  “They’ll live,” Skellsgard replied.

  “Has anyone not lived?”

  “Once, back when we were still ironing out glitches in the system. It wasn’t pretty, but we’ve learned a few things since then.”

  The transport began to descend, passing into some kind of enclosed structure nestling in the base of the bubble. Doors sealed it from view.

  “C’mon,” Skellsgard said. “Let’s take a closer look.”

  Auger followed her through a network of caged ladders down to the lower level. The glass bulb of the bubble loomed over them. It had been patched and sealed in many areas, with fresh star-shaped flaws marked and dated in luminous paint.

  “All this was built in a year?”

  “It’s been two years since they found the portal,” Skellsgard said. “Hey, give the military guys some credit—they did make some progress before I came on the team. Even if most of it consisted of poking the portal with a series of increasingly large sticks.”

  “All the same… I’m still pretty impressed.”

  “Well, don’t be. We’ve been as clever as we can be, but we couldn’t have achieved any of this without a healthy dose of Slasher know-how. And I don’t just mean the kind of intelligence we got from Peter.”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “Technical assistance,” Skellsgard said. “Contraband technology. Not just the obvious stuff like the robots, but control gear—cybernetics, nanotech, all the stuff we need to interface with the pathological-matter mechanisms of the original portal.”

  “How did you steal that kind of thing?”

  “We didn’t. We asked nicely and we got it.”

  Beneath the bubble, the newly arrived transport emerged from the airlock structure, lowering on a piston-driven platform. The cylindrical craft was shaped like an artillery shell, its skin a rococo crawl of complex pewter-coloured machinery. There was evidence of damage. Hinged banks of machinery packed around the cylinder were either mangled or missing entirely, sheared off leaving patches of bright metal. Various panels and ports had been ripped free, exposing scorched, frayed viscera of wiring and fuel lines. The whole thing still smelled faintly of burning oil.

  “Told you it was a rough crossing,” Skellsgard said. “But she should be good for another round-trip, once we get her patched up again.”

  “How many trips did it take for her to get into that state?”

  “One. But it’s not usually that bad.”

  The ship slid sideways on its platform. Two of the three snake robots slinked over to it, weapons and sensors popping out of their head spheres. A gang of white-clad technicians were already fussing over the transport, plugging bits of equipment into it and making cautious hand gestures to each other. One of them shone a torch into the dark patch that was one of the cabin windows. Meanwhile, one of four intact transports slid over from a storage rack, guided by other technicians. Auger watched as it moved up into the airlock, disappearing and then re-appearing inside the recovery bubble, with its nose aimed towards the far wall. The pressure leak had already been fixed and most of the klaxons had now fallen silent. Odd as it seemed, it all had the feeling of business as usual.

  “What’ll happen now?” Auger asked.

  “They’ll run some pre-flight checks, some tests on the ship and the weather conditions in the link. If everything behaves itself, we’ll be looking at an insertion in about six hours.”

  “Insertion,” Auger repeated thoughtfully, looking at the blunt machine and the narrowing shaft it was aimed at. “It’s all very phallic, isn’t it?”

  “I know,” Skellsgard said confidingly, “but what can you do? The boys must have their toys.”

  She opened a cabinet and pulled out two white smocks. She passed one to Auger and donned the other one, closing the Velcro seams tightly. “Let’s see how they’re doing, shall we?”

  With the snake robots still monitoring events, the technicians used a variety of heavy-duty tools to open the ship’s airlock. It finally gave way with a gasp of equalising air pressure, then swung open and aside on complex hinges. Warm red light spilled from the interior of the transport. One of the technicians climbed aboard, then re-emerged a minute or two later accompanied by a cropped-haired woman dressed in what looked like the interior layer of an environment suit. The woman supported one arm with the other, as if she had fractured or broken a bone. A man emerged behind her, his face pale and drawn, etched with what looked like years of fatigue. Skellsgard pushed through the retinue of technicians and spoke briefly to the two passengers before giving them both a reassuring hug. A medical team had appeared from somewhere and began fussing over the two arrivals as soon as Skellsgard had finished with them.

  “They had it pretty rough,” she told Auger. “Hit some bad throat turbulence during the insertion at the other end. But they’ll live, which is what matters.”

  “I thought hyperweb travel was supposed to be routine.”

  “It is—if you have the experience that the Slashers do. But we’ve only been doing this for a year. They can squeeze a liner through their portals and not touch the sides. For us, it’s a major headache just to get one of these dinky little ships through in one piece.”

  “What were you saying about Slasher technology just now? How can there be Slasher involvement with this if you say they don’t even know about this place?”

  “We have our share of sympathisers amongst moderate Slashers, people who think the aggressive expansionism needs a moderating influence.”

  “Defectors and tra
itors,” Auger said scornfully.

  “Defectors and traitors like me,” said a man’s voice from behind them.

  Auger turned to face a slender, sleekly muscled individual of uncertain age. He moved within a silver cloud of attendant machines, twinkling at the limit of vision. Auger stepped back, but the man raised a reassuring hand and closed his eyes. The cloud of machines diminished, sucked back into his pores like a time-lapse explosion in reverse.

  Standing before her now, he looked almost human.

  The latest generation of Slashers—as Auger had forgotten to her cost with Cassandra—were often indistinguishable from children. This neotenous trend was a matter of efficient resource utilisation: smaller people not only used fewer consumables but were also easier to move around—an important factor even given the near-limitless power of the Slasher bleed-drive. But this Slasher man looked fully adult, albeit youthful. Either he predated the neotenics (and their unstable prototypes, the war babies) or he belonged to one of the factions that retained some nostalgic bond with old-style humanity.

  He had flawless, unlined skin the colour of honey, and liquid brown and slightly sad-looking eyes that none the less glittered with an easy enthusiasm. Despite the chamber being too cold for Auger’s tastes, the man wore only a single layer of clothing: simple white trousers and a white shirt loosely cinched across his chest.

  “This is Niagara,” said Skellsgard. “As you might have gathered, he’s a citizen of the Federation of Polities.”

  “It’s all right,” Niagara said. “I won’t be the least bit offended if you call me a Slasher. You probably regard the term as an insult.”

  “Isn’t it?” Auger asked, surprised.

  “Only if you want it to be.” Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. “A slash and a dot,” he said. “I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century. It’s less a stigma than a mark of community.”