“And do you care about that community?” Auger asked.
“In a broad sense, yes. But I’m not above betraying it if I think its longer term interests are best served that way. How much do you know about the current tensions in the Polities?”
“Enough.”
“Well, let me refresh your memory on the basics. There are now two opposing factions within the Federation: the aggressors and the moderates. Both parties broadly support the same goal of repairing the Earth. Where they differ is in their approach to the USNE. The moderates are happy to negotiate access to Earth via reciprocal deals: access to the hyperweb, licensed use of bleed-drive and UR technologies, that sort of thing.”
“Eve was only tempted by one apple,” Auger said. “The USNE still remembers what your brilliant machines did to our planet.”
“None the less, the offer is on the table. As you’ll have gathered from your dealings with Cassandra, the moderates are serious about this proposal.”
“And the aggressors?”
“The aggressors take the view that the USNE will never sign a deal with the moderates—that there are too many people who think like you, Verity. So why wait for something that will never happen? Why not just take Earth now, by force?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“They can and they will. The only thing stopping them has been a certain trepidation: the fear that the Threshers would destroy Earth rather than let it fall into Slasher hands. A ‘scorched-earth’ policy in the most literal sense. Tanglewood is more than just an orbital community. It’s also a repository for enough targeted megatonnage to turn the Earth into a glowing cinder.”
“So what’s changed?”
“Everything,” Nigara said. “For one thing, the battle planners think they may be able to take Tanglewood quickly enough to prevent those warheads from being deployed en masse. Even if they can’t, the new models for repairing the Earth suggest that the warhead strike could be… tolerated. We can brush radioactivity under the carpet using continental subduction zones. And when we restock the planet, the re-introduced organisms will be modified to tolerate an enhanced level of background radiation.”
Auger shuddered, imagining what that kind of tectonic reorganisation implied for her beloved cities. “So an invasion is inevitable?”
“I’m saying it is rather more likely now than it was six months ago. That’s why some of us—moderates—have long advocated a strengthening of the Thresher position. Call it a deterrent.”
“And it’s that simple? You help us make this alien junk work just so that we will have a chance of standing up to your own people when the shit comes down?”
“Would it help if I made it sound more complicated than it really is?”
“Excuse me if I don’t take you at your word, Niagara, but I’ve only met two Slashers in my life and one of them was a lying little shit.”
“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “Cassandra is one of the staunchest moderates in the entire movement. If you ever needed a friend in the Polities, she’s it.”
Skellsgard interposed herself between Auger and the Slasher, holding up her hands as if blocking a fight. “I know this comes as a shock,” she said to Auger, “but they really aren’t all villains who’d sooner see us wiped out of existence.”
“Believe me, I sympathise with your position,” Niagara said to Auger. “I know that terraforming Earth would erase your life’s work. I’m simply of the opinion that the end would justify the means.”
“Do you believe that, Niagara: that the end always justifies the means?” Auger asked.
“Mostly,” he said. “And some would say that—judging by your own track record—you share something of the same philosophy.”
“Over your dead body.”
“Or the dead body of a boy?” He shook his head. “Sorry. That was uncalled for. But the point remains: you’ve always had a certain unflinching instinct for what needs to be done to achieve a particular outcome. I admire that, Verity. I think you have every chance of completing this mission.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said. “How much do you know about all this?”
“I know that sensitive property has gone missing at the other end of that hyperweb connection, and that you are excellently equipped to recover it.”
“Why can’t you recover it?”
“Because I don’t know the territory like you do. Nor does Skellsgard, or Aveling, or anyone else in this organisation. The only person who did know it well enough was Susan White, and she’s dead.”
“That’s a detail Caliskan didn’t quite get around to telling me.”
“Would it have made a difference to your decision?”
“It might.”
“Then he was right not to mention it. But there’s more to my answer than you might be aware of. It’s not just that I don’t know the territory. I can’t even enter it—I would die if I tried.”
“And me?”
“You won’t find it a problem.” Niagara turned to face the transport that had just been loaded into the bubble. Technicians were still attending to various details around the outside, but everything about their actions suggested that all was going according to plan.
“You want me to get in that thing, don’t you? Without a clue as to what’s at the other end.”
“It’s a thirty-hour journey,” Niagara said. “There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on the way.”
“Can I back out?”
“It’s a little late for that now, don’t you think?” Without waiting for an answer from Auger, he turned his attention to Skellsgard. “Is she ready for her language lesson?”
“Aveling said to do it now. That way she’ll have time for it to bed in before she reaches E2.”
“What language lesson?” Auger asked.
Niagara raised a hand. A mist of twinkling silver machines erupted from his palm and crossed the space to Auger’s head. She felt the onset of a bright shining migraine, as if her skull was a fortress being stormed by an army in flashing chrome armour, and then she felt nothing at all.
She came round to a headache, a falling sensation and a voice in her ears speaking a language she should not be able to understand.
“Wie heisst Du?”
“Ich heisse Auger… Verity Auger.” The words slipped out of her mouth with ridiculous ease.
“Good” the voice continued, in English this time. “Excellent, in fact. That’s taken very nicely.” It was Maurya Skellsgard speaking, sitting to her left in the confined space of what she guessed must be the hyperweb transport. On Auger’s other side, in the third of the three seats, was Aveling.
They were in free fall.
“What’s happening?” Auger asked.
“What’s happening,” Aveling said, “is that you were speaking German. Niagara’s little machines rewired your language centre.”
“You have French as well,” Skellsgard added.
“I already had French,” Auger replied huffily.
“You had an academic understanding of written French skewed to towards the later years of the Void Century,” Skellsgard corrected. “But now you can really speak it.”
Auger’s headache intensified, as if someone had just tapped a very small tuning fork against her skull and made it ring. “I wouldn’t have agreed to have this…” She wanted to say “shit,” but the word stalled somewhere between her brain and her voice box. “This horrid stuff in me.” Where the hell had “horrid” come from, she wondered?
“It was either have it or forfeit the mission,” Aveling said. “In thirty hours you’ll be in Paris, acting alone, with only your wits to help you. No weapons, no comms, no AI assistance. The only help we can give you is language.”
“I don’t want machines in my head.”
“In which case,” Skellsgard said, “it’s your lucky day. They’ve already been flushed out, leaving only the neural structures they created. The downside is that those structures won’t last for ever—
two, maybe three days once you get to Paris. Then they’ll start eroding.”
Curiosity got the better of Auger. “Why not leave the machines in, if it makes so much difference?”
“Same reason Niagara can’t come with us,” Skellsgard replied. “The censor wouldn’t let them through.”
“The censor?”
“You’ll see it soon enough,” Aveling said, “so don’t worry your pretty little head about it. That’s our job.”
Auger felt the buzzing, slightly brittle alertness that came with too much coffee and too much intense study. Once, about fifteen years earlier, she had studied mathematics so furiously that after an evening manipulating complex bracketed equations, simplifying forms and extracting common terms, her brain had actually started to apply the same rules to spoken language, as if a sentence could be bracketed and simplified like some quadratic formula for radioisotope decay. That was how she felt now. She only had to look at a colour or shape and her new language structures would gleefully shriek the corresponding word into her skull, in a mixed cacophony of German, French and English.
“I could get very angry about this—”
“Or you could just get over it and accept that it had to be done,” Skellsgard said bluntly. “I promise you there’ll be no side effects.”
Auger knew that it was senseless to protest any further. The machines had already come in and done their worst. The simple fact was that had this ever been presented to her as a rational choice, she would still have chosen it over the tribunal.
If that made her a hypocrite, ready to accept Slasher science when it suited her, so be it.
“I’m sorry if all this seems abrupt,” Skellsgard said sympathetically. “It’s just that we really didn’t have time to sit around and debate things. We need that lost property back in safe hands as soon as possible.”
Auger forced a sort of calm upon herself. “I take it we’re on our way?”
“It was a successful insertion,” Aveling said.
They were sitting three abreast, surrounded by instruments, controls and fold-down panels. The technology was a curious mixture of the very robust and the very fragile-looking modern, including some equipment that had obviously come straight from Slasher sources. Holding things together were bolts, nylon tie-lines and spitlike swabs of heavy-duty epoxy. Aveling had one hand on a joystick mounted on a fold-down panel in front of him. Above the panel was a flat screen displaying a series of irregular concentric lines, like a drunkenly fashioned cobweb, with the lines slowly oozing out towards the edge of the screen. Some kind of navigation system, Auger guessed, representing their flight through the hyperweb. Of the outside view nothing could be seen, since the ship’s armoured shutters were locked tight.
It was about as exciting as a ride in an elevator.
“Well, now that we’re all in this together,” she said, “I presume you can tell me what it’s all about.”
“What we generally find,” Skellsgard said, “is that it’s easier if we show you. That way we skip the whole ‘you can’t expect me to believe this shit’ stage.”
“What if I promise not to doubt a word that you say? After all, I’ve already seen the artefacts in Caliskan’s office. I’m pretty sure they weren’t faked.”
“No, they were all real.”
“Which means they must have originated somewhere. Caliskan said they hadn’t been preserved, and yet they appeared to come from somewhere around nineteen fifty-nine.”
“Which would tend to imply…” Skellsgard prompted.
“That you’ve found a way back to nineteen fifty-nine.” She paused, choosing her next words with care. “Or at least something that looks a lot like nineteen fifty-nine, even if it isn’t exactly right in all the details. Is that far from the mark?”
“No, it’s pretty close, actually.”
“And this version of nineteen fifty-nine is inside the ALS object that Peter talked about. The one he said you’d found a way into.”
“They told us you were good,” Skellsgard said.
“So where does Paris come into it?”
“At the end of this hyperweb is something very like Paris. You’ll enter it and make contact with an individual named Blanchard.”
Auger kept her voice calm, taking this one step at a time. “Someone else from the team, like White?”
“No,” Skellsgard said, glancing at Aveling. “Blanchard’s E2 indigenous.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he grew up inside it. Meaning he has no idea he isn’t living in the real Paris, on the real Earth, in the real twentieth century.”
Something like ice passed through Auger. “How many are there like him?”
“About three billion. But don’t let that put you off.”
“All you have to do,” Aveling said, “is find Blanchard and recover the item that Susan White passed to him for safekeeping. It won’t be difficult. We’ll give you an address, which will be within easy reach of your point of entry. Blanchard will be expecting you.”
“I thought you said—”
Aveling cut her off. “You’ll pose as Susan White’s sister. She’ll already have told him to hand over the goods to you if you show up. Aside from anything else, that’s why we needed a woman.”
Auger thought for a moment, trying to assimilate all this new and puzzling information. Her mind was full of questions, but she quickly decided that as much as she wanted to know every detail of the task, she had best begin with the basics.
“And the nature of this lost property?”
“Just some papers in a tin,” Aveling said. “They’ll mean nothing to Blanchard, but everything to us. You persuade Blanchard to give you the tin. You make sure the papers are inside. Then you return to us—with the papers—and we put you on the first transport home.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is.”
“Then why do I have the nagging suspicion that there must be a catch?”
“Because there is,” Skellsgard said. “We don’t know for sure what happened to Susan, but we do know that she felt threatened, and that she gave those papers to Blanchard for safekeeping. There’s a chance she was murdered.”
Aveling withdrew his attention from the oozing lines of the navigational display and sent Skellsgard an irritated look. “She didn’t need to know it was murder,” he said. “If it was murder.”
“I felt she did,” Skellsgard replied, shrugging.
“Well,” Auger said, “was it murder or not?”
“She fell,” Aveling said. “That’s all we know.”
“Or was pushed,” Skellsgard said darkly.
“I’d really like to know which it was,” Auger insisted.
“It doesn’t matter,” Aveling said. “All you need to know is that E2 is hostile territory—which is something White forgot. She was careful to begin with: they always are. Then she exceeded the remit of her mission, took risks and ended up dead.”
“What kind of risks?”
Before Aveling could get a word in edgeways, Skellsgard said, “Susan felt she was on to something—something big, something significant. Because she wouldn’t return to the portal, all we got from her were cryptic messages, things scribbled on postcards. If she’d at least taken the time to build a radio sender, or return to the base station, she could have told us something more concrete. But she was too busy chasing leads, and in the end it got her killed.”
“Supposition,” Aveling said.
“If we don’t think she was on to something,” Skellsgard said, “why are we in such a hurry to get those papers back? It’s because we think there might be something in them, isn’t it?”
“It’s because we can’t risk cultural contamination,” Aveling corrected. “Analysed with the right mindset, the papers might reveal White’s origin. We don’t know how indiscreet she was. Until we get the papers, we’re in the dark.”
Skellsgard looked at Auger. “I guess all I’m saying is… take care out
there, OK? Just get in and do the job. We want you back in one piece.”
“Really?” Auger asked.
“Oh, sure. Can you imagine what the return trip would be like if I only had Aveling for company?”
NINE
It was the middle of the morning by the time Floyd returned Custine to Susan White’s apartment, heavy toolkit in one hand. Custine’s practicality never ceased to amaze him: the man could turn his hand to almost anything, whether it was repairing the Mathis, fixing the plumbing in their apartment or attempting to repair the jury-rigged receiving equipment of a dead spy. Floyd knew a little about fixing boats, but that was about his limit. He had questioned Custine once about where this practicality came from, but the only explanation Custine had offered was that a certain skill with electricity and metal was very useful for an interrogator in the Crime Squad.
That was as much as Floyd wanted to know.
He waited in the car while Custine was let in, then drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for another five minutes until Custine’s form loomed in the fifth-floor window. Custine did not expect to get any results before the middle of the afternoon, but they had arranged to speak by telephone at two regardless.
Floyd pulled away from Blanchard’s street and drove to Montparnasse, negotiating the smaller side streets until he found the house where he had left Greta the night before. In daylight the house seemed a little more cheerful—but only a little. Greta opened the door and escorted him up to the sparsely stocked kitchen that the tenant Sophie had shown him around the night before.
“I called the telephone company,” Floyd said. “It should be working now.”
“So it is,” Greta said, surprised. “Someone rang through on it only an hour ago, but I was so distracted that I didn’t really think about it. How did you persuade the company to reconnect her? She still can’t afford to pay them.”
“I told them to put the charges on my bill.”
“You did?” She cocked her head. “That’s awfully decent of you. You’re not exactly rolling in money either.”
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