Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

“It can’t be that technically demanding or you’d already have automated it. Talk to me, Skellsgard.”

  She blinked. “It’s a question of waiting thirty, forty seconds after departure, then dropping power levels to about ten per cent.”

  “Using those switches you’ve already shown me?”

  “More or less.”

  “I think even a lowly history grunt can handle that. All right: let’s start prepping the ship. You can tell me the rest while we do it.”

  “That is not the way we’re doing this,” Skellsgard said.

  “Listen to me: if you don’t get medical attention for that leg, you’re going to lose it.”

  “So they’ll grow me a new one. I always fancied a ride out to one of those Polity hospitals.”

  “You want to take that chance? I don’t think I would, especially with all hell breaking loose back home.”

  “I can’t let you do this,” Skellsgard insisted.

  Auger took out the war baby’s weapon and flashed it at Skellsgard. “You want me to start pointing this at you? Because believe me, I will. Now let’s prep the ship, sister.”

  EIGHTEEN

  At two in the afternoon, Floyd looked up as the brasserie door swung open. He had already looked up several dozen times since ordering his last coffee, as patrons came and went, and there were another three empty coffee cups on his table, along with a froth-lined beer glass and the stale crumbs of a nondescript sandwich. It was still raining outside, water sluicing down across the doorframe from a broken gutter above it. The patrons got a soaking when they left or arrived, but no one seemed to complain. Even Greta, when she arrived, seemed more relieved to find him still there than annoyed at the weather.

  “I thought you’d have gone already,” she said, shaking her umbrella. Her clothes were dark with rain, her hair frizzy and tipped with tiny dewdrops.

  “I figured it was best to keep with the original rendezvous,” Floyd said. He removed his coat from the seat opposite, where he had placed it to prevent anyone else from joining him at the table. He had wanted a clear view of the window, and of the hotel opposite, in the hope that he might see Verity Auger coming or going. “I must admit, though, that I was beginning to worry I’d got the wrong brasserie. What happened?”

  “She left,” Greta said, sitting down with visible relief. “Almost as soon as I’d put down the telephone, I saw her leaving the hotel.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “I’d kill for one.”

  Floyd signalled the waiter to their table and ordered another coffee for Greta. “So tell me what happened. You followed her, obviously. Did she look like she was checking out of the hotel?”

  “No—she didn’t have anything with her other than a handbag. For all I knew she was going to be back in five minutes. But I couldn’t take that chance.”

  “You were right not to. Did you keep up with her?”

  “I think I’ve got a bit better at this tailing business since this morning. I kept my distance and tried to change my appearance every block or so: folding up my umbrella, putting on my hat, sunglasses, that sort of thing. I don’t think she saw me.” Greta spooned sugar into the coffee and gulped it down in almost one mouthful.

  “Where did she go?”

  “I followed her all the way to Cardinal Lemoine. That’s where I lost her.”

  “Lost her how?”

  “That’s the funny thing,” Greta said. “I was with her all the way into the Métro station. I followed her to the platform and kept my distance. I hid behind some chocolate-vending machines. A train came in and then another. She didn’t get on either of them, but they were all going in the same direction.”

  “Weird,” Floyd said.

  “Not as weird as what happened after that. Between one moment and the next she disappeared completely. She simply wasn’t on the platform.”

  “And no other train had come and gone?”

  Greta lowered her voice, as if aware of how absurd her account sounded. “I’m certain of it. I also know that there is no other exit she could have taken, not without walking right past my hiding place.”

  Floyd sipped at his own coffee. By the fourth cup he had ceased tasting it, the drink purely a mechanical aid to his alertness. “She can’t just have vanished into thin air.”

  “I never said she did. It looked that way, but there were a few other people waiting on the platform and I decided to brazen it out and ask them if they’d seen anything. At that point I figured I didn’t have a lot to lose.”

  “You were probably right,” Floyd said. “What did you get?”

  “At least one of the witnesses was certain he’d seen Auger jump down on to the tracks and disappear into the tunnel at the end of the platform.”

  Floyd digested this while he drained his coffee cup. “There’s something about Cardinal Lemoine,” he said. “Blanchard said he’d seen Susan White behaving very oddly near that station. He saw her enter the station with a heavy suitcase and come out a few moments later with an empty one. It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “But why would a woman disappear into a Métro tunnel?”

  “For the same reason anyone else would: there’s something in it that matters to them.”

  “Or else they were both mad,” Greta said.

  “I can’t discount that possibility, either. Did you see her come out again?”

  “I waited forty-five minutes. There was some kind of interruption in the service for a couple of minutes, but then the trains started running normally again. Several dozen trains went through. No one came back out of the tunnel.”

  “And no one thought to report any of this to the station staff, or the police?”

  “Not the man I was talking to,” Greta said. “He wasn’t the sort you’d catch doing anything so responsible.”

  Floyd called for the bill. “All right. The way I see it, we have two choices if we want to find Auger again. We can cover the hotel in case she goes back there, or we can cover Cardinal Lemoine and hope she comes out of the tunnel or goes back in again, if somehow we missed her coming out.”

  “What about the next station up the line? What if she walked all the way through?”

  “I’m hoping she didn’t. Anyway, that would make even less sense than going into the tunnel in the first place. I can only assume that she must have arranged to drop off or collect something from inside the tunnel.”

  “You talk about ‘covering’ as if we have limitless manpower,” Greta said. “Whereas in fact we have two people, and one of them needs to be looking after her aunt.”

  “I know,” Floyd said. “And I won’t ask anything else of you. What you’ve done already has been a great help.”

  “But I lost her,” Greta said.

  “No. You established that there’s something going on with Verity Auger that doesn’t fit with her story. Until now there was still a faint chance that she might have been telling the truth about being Susan White’s long-lost sister.”

  “And now?”

  Floyd wiped his upper lip clean of the moustache of coffee froth that had gathered there. “Now? Now I’d put good money on both of them being spies.”

  “You’re in much too deep,” Greta said. “If Custine was here he’d tell you exactly the same thing: take what you have and hand it over to the right people, Floyd. They have no axe to grind with you.”

  “I have to get Custine off the hook, Greta. And the only way I’m going to do that is by following this woman.”

  “You liked her, didn’t you?”

  Floyd reached for his coat. “She wasn’t my type.”

  “Maybe so, but you liked her all the same.”

  Floyd shook his head, laughing at the thought of it. But he couldn’t look Greta in the eye.

  In the armoured glass bulb of the recovery bubble, the status lights of the transit ship blinked on and off with hypnotic regularity. “Rotating,” Skellsgard said, leaning against one of the high-level consoles. “You sure about this,
Auger?”

  “Just tell me what to do. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  The bee-striped holding cradle began to swivel, turning the ship through 180 degrees. Unlike the gleaming machinery surrounding it, the transit ship looked like some impossibly battered relic from a museum of space history: the kind of capsule that would have been flown back from space by seat-of-the-pants jockeys relying on grit and slide-rule calculations to get themselves home. Auger had to remind herself that the ship had accrued all this damage during a single passage between portals, and that it would be approximately twice as battered by the time it emerged on Phobos, about thirty hours from now.

  “Ship looks healthy enough,” Skellsgard said, tapping through monitor options. “Which is a good thing—we have enough problems with the throat without having to worry about the ship as well.”

  “You think you can last all the way home?”

  Skellsgard nodded. “I’ll make it. It’s not as if I have much of a choice, is it?”

  “This is the way it has to happen,” Auger said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a rescue party launched the instant you get through.”

  “They’ll be on their way as soon as is humanly possible. You have my word on that.”

  “All right. Let’s get you strapped in.”

  Auger helped Skellsgard along the high-level catwalk that led to the airlock set into the side of the recovery bubble. Skellsgard was getting weaker, Auger noticed: even with the attention she had received from the first-aid kit, she was clearly sliding towards unconsciousness. Auger just hoped she could get the woman underway before that happened. She was still hoping for another run-through of the commands required to keep the throat from sphinctering tight.

  The airlock clammed open on heavy-duty piston-driven hinges. Auger barely remembered dragging herself out of the ship, it seemed so long ago. Gently, she assisted Skellsgard through the lock and into the pressurised connecting bridge that crossed to the waiting ship. “I think maybe I should splint that leg before I zip you in,” Auger said.

  “No time. I don’t want to delay your rescue by one second more than is necessary. Anyway, they might have shredded me pretty good but I don’t think anything’s broken. Stop worrying on my account, all right? You’ve already helped me enough.”

  Inside the ship was the arrangement of three acceleration couches Auger had come to know so well on the way over. Blotting out the woman’s moans of discomfort, she laid Skellsgard on the right-hand couch, buckled the restraints securely around her and then folded down the navigation and communications panel. Auger reached for the loose tangle of the in-flight catheter system, assuming Skellsgard would not have the strength to crawl back to the tiny toilet. “You want me to plug you in before you fly?”

  “I’ll manage,” Skellsgard said, grimacing. “And if I don’t, I think my dignity will take it. You have any thoughts about what I should tell Caliskan when I get back?”

  Auger reached into her jacket and took out the one piece of paper she had been able to salvage from the attack. “Can you hold out a minute? I need to write something down.”

  “Just in case I fall into a coma?”

  “That’s one consideration, but I also need to write something down for myself.”

  Auger left the ship and returned to one of the high-level consoles, where she had seen a notepad and pen. She ripped out a clean sheet of paper and wrote down everything she thought she had gleaned from Susan White’s paperwork. Then she unfolded the piece of paper she had retrieved from the tunnel—the letter from the manufacturing works in Berlin. She flattened the letter on the desk and on another sheet of paper took down the particulars of the plant, including the address and the name of the man who had written to White. Then she jogged back to the ship, relieved to find Skellsgard still conscious.

  “This is the only piece of documentation the war baby didn’t make off with in the tunnel,” she said, slipping the letter into Skellsgard’s chest pocket. “Don’t forget it’s there.”

  “I won’t.”

  Auger then folded the sheet containing her observations and placed it with the letter. “This is everything I’ve figured out so far. It’s not much, but maybe Caliskan can work out what’s going on. Anyway, I might know a bit more when I get back from Berlin.”

  “Who said anything about Berlin?”

  “I’m following one of the leads Susan White never got around to herself.”

  Skellsgard shook her head warningly. “That’s extremely dangerous. In Paris you’re never more than an hour away from the portal if anything goes wrong. How long will it take you to get back from Berlin?”

  “It doesn’t matter: the portal’s no use to me until the ship returns. I’m pretty sure I can make it to Berlin and back in plenty of time.”

  “You mean you don’t know for certain?”

  “I haven’t had time to plan this to the last detail,” Auger said. “All I know is that there’s a lead in Berlin and Susan would have followed it up if she hadn’t been killed. I owe it to her to do what I can. There’s an overnight train leaving tonight and I plan to be on it. I’ll be in Berlin by tomorrow morning, and with any luck I’ll be on my way back by the evening.”

  “With any luck,” Skellsgard echoed.

  “Look, don’t worry about me. Just get yourself home and make sure Caliskan sees those pieces of paper. I have a feeling the letter is more important than any of us realise.”

  Skellsgard squeezed Auger’s hand. “You really don’t have to send me back instead of you.”

  “I know.”

  “But I do appreciate it. It’s a brave thing you’re doing.”

  Auger squeezed the other woman’s hand in return. “Listen, it’s no big hardship. It gives me a chance to see a bit more of this world before they pull me out of it for good.”

  “You almost sound convincing.”

  “I mean it. As much as part of me would love to be riding that ship back with you, there’s another part that just wants to soak up as much of E2 as I can. I’ve barely scratched the surface, Skellsgard. That’s all any of us has done.”

  “Take good care of yourself, Auger.”

  “I will.” Auger stood back from the cabin. “All right. Let’s close you up and get this show on the road.”

  “You’re clear on those throat adjustments?”

  “If the ride gets bumpy, you’ll know why.”

  “Reassuring as ever.”

  Auger pushed the door until it was nearly closed, then stepped away as servo-motors completed the job. Only a few inches of armoured metal now separated her from Skellsgard, but she suddenly felt vastly more alone. She walked back through the airlock, then ran through the sequence of umbilical disconnection commands, ending with the retraction of the connecting bridge. Through the scuffed and scratched window in the side of the ship, Skellsgard gave her a final thumbs up. Auger walked back to the main ring of consoles and tried to blank everything from her mind except the procedure necessary for dispatching the ship.

  None of the individual steps were particularly difficult. Initial throat stabilisation and launch were handled by a preprogrammed routine that worked exactly as advertised. In the translucent bronze structures of the alien machinery, the suspended sparks and filaments of amber light quickened their movements almost imperceptibly. The surrounding clots and plaques of human machinery throbbed and flickered with red and green status lights and indicator numerals. On the console before her, analogue dials lurched hard into the red, but she had been told to expect this and kept her nerve. The grilled catwalk beneath her feet began to vibrate. She increased the power to the throat machines and a metal toolkit slid off a console halfway across the room, spilling spanners and torque wrenches to the ground and making her jump.

  On the panel, a sequence of lights changed one by one to orange: throat aperture was now wide enough to accept the ship. The geodesic stress indices were low enough not to rip it to shreds, provided it plunged straight down the middle
without grazing the sides.

  Auger found a pair of protective goggles and bent the stalk of a microphone to her lips. “You getting all this, Skellsgard?”

  Her reply buzzed from a grilled speaker in the console. It sounded thin and distant, as if she was hundreds of kilometres away. “Everything looks OK from in here. Let’s get this over with.”

  Auger checked that the orange lights were holding steady. “Injecting in five seconds.”

  “Spare me the countdown. Just do it.”

  “Here goes, then.”

  The movement was more violent than Auger had been expecting. The cradle suddenly lurched forward, propelling the ship faster and faster. In an eyeblink, cradle and ship had exited the main globe of the recovery bubble, the entire structure creaking in response to the sudden transfer of momentum. From her vantage point, Auger watched the ship haring down the mirror-lined injection tunnel, picking up speed like a torpedo. Two or three seconds later, the cradle reached the limit of its guidance rail and slammed to a halt, lobbing the ship ahead of it on the lazy arc of a ballistic trajectory. The throat of the wormhole—exposed now that the iris had opened—was a vortex of blue and violet static discharge just ahead of the ship, gaping like the mouth of a starfish. Spring-loaded arms whipped out from the ship’s sides and glanced against the incurving wall, spitting coils of light and molten metal. An instant later they sheared away, warped into toffeelike shapes. But they’d done the work they were designed for, nudging the transport out of harm’s way. With a final shower of golden sparks, the ship picked up yet more speed at an impossible rate, diminishing to a dot of light in a heartbeat.

  All round her, emergency klaxons and warning strobes had come on. A recorded voice began to repeat a message about unsustainable power levels. Above the din she heard a distant voice: “Auger… you reading this?”

  Auger leaned closer to the microphone, checking her watch at the same time. “Guess you’re on your way. How was it?”

  “Interesting.” Skellsgard’s voice was already breaking up, becoming thready. Routing communications through the link was difficult enough when there was no ship en route, but it was almost impossible otherwise.