“I always thought they suited me. Can’t you crank the blinds open just a crack? It might tell us something.”
She groped for an objection, but found none that she thought likely to convince him. Besides, he was right: at the very least it would tell them something, even if the information had no practical value. But she would still rather know where she was. It was, she supposed, a basic human need.
“I don’t even know if they’ll open,” she said, “after the pounding we took back there.”
“Just try it, Auger.”
She folded down the control console and found the switch that operated the armoured window shutters. Just when she had convinced herself that nothing was going to happen—that the shutters must be buckled tight—a fan of hard light cleaved the cabin in two. One of the shutters was broken, but the other was still operational. She allowed it to open to the width of three fingers, then held it at that position.
She squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes. After more than a day in the subdued lighting of the cabin, the glare was intensely bright. But it was not the murderous electric-blue radiance of the tunnel.
The light blinked out.
The light returned.
“It’s timed with our rotation,” she said after a moment. “It’s as if there’s a light source to one side of us, rather than all around us.”
“Does that make any sense?”
“No. But then neither does the fact that we’re alive.”
Floyd’s seat was positioned too far from the window to let him see through it. “Can you see anything you recognise?” he asked.
“No,” Auger said. She allowed the shutter to open to its fullest extent, but she could still only tell that there was a light source somewhere outside. “I’m going to leave my seat, see if I can get my head closer to—”
“Easy, soldier. That’s not a job for someone in your condition.” Floyd was already trying to extricate himself from his seat harness, his fingers sliding over the complex plastic buckles.
“You can talk.”
The harness released him. The tumbling continued, but because it was now regular and confined to one axis of rotation, Floyd was able to push himself out of the seat without too much difficulty. He used one arm to brace himself against the cabin wall, and another to lever himself closer to the window, keeping one foot hooked around the rest at the base of the seat.
“Careful, Floyd,” Auger said, as he pressed his face to the glass. “Do you see anything out there?”
“There’s a bright light off to one side,” he said. “I can’t see it directly. But there is something else out there.”
“Describe it.”
“It comes into view once every rotation. It’s like…” He adjusted his position, the effort etched in his face. “A bright smudge. Like a cloud, with lights in it. Lights around it, as a matter of fact. Some of them moving, some of them flashing. There are dark things in front of the cloud, moving outwards.”
She tried to visualise whatever it was he was seeing, and drew a comprehensive blank. “That’s it? That’s all you can see?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, what colour is it?”
Floyd looked back at her. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly the guy to ask when it comes to colours.”
“You mean you’re colour-blind?” Despite her fears, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Hey, isn’t that a little rude?”
“I’m not laughing at you, Floyd. I’m laughing at us. We make quite a pair, don’t we? The colour-blind detective and the tone-deaf spy.”
“Actually, I meant to ask you about…” But Floyd trailed off. “Auger, you may not want to hear this, but damned if that thing doesn’t seem to be getting smaller.”
Whatever Floyd was seeing, it bore no relationship to anything Auger had been told to expect during her mission briefing. It meant, surely, that something very odd and unanticipated had happened to them.
She felt a prickle of comprehension, like an itch at the back of her head. “Floyd, I think I have an idea—”
“There’s something else out there as well. It’s very big. I can just see the edge of it.”
“Floyd, I think we’ve slipped into a different part of the hyperweb. Skellsgard said there was no way any other tunnel could intersect with the one we were in… but what if she was wrong?” Auger forced herself to calm down and speak more slowly. “What if there was a junction, and we found it by accident when we were bouncing around back there? Or what if we hit the wall so hard we actually punctured it and slipped through into an adjacent part of the network?”
“Are you listening to me, Auger?” Floyd said, staring at her as if she’d gone completely insane. “I’m telling you there’s something really, really big out there.”
“The light source?”
“No. Not the light source. It’s on the other side of the sky. It almost looks like…”
Auger reached out to the console panel again. “Get back in your seat. I’m going to try something hopelessly optimistic.”
“My kind of girl. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see if there’s any juice left in those steering jets.”
“We already tried that,” Floyd said, lowering himself back into his seat and pulling the harness tight. “They died on us.”
“I know. But the system might have been reading empty even when there was a tiny amount of pressure left in the reservoir.”
Floyd gave her an odd look. “You said it didn’t work like that.”
“I lied. I swatted down your suggestion because I was feeling nasty and petulant. Not that it would have done us much good back then, anyway—”
“Of course not.” He sounded hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not dealing with this very well, OK? Believe it or not, this isn’t a situation I find myself in every day.”
“Consider yourself forgiven,” Floyd said.
“Look,” Auger said, “all I need is a couple of squirts of reaction mass, just enough to kill our spin, or even simply to alter it so that we have a different view.”
“You might make things worse.”
“I think we have to risk it.” Her hand closed on the joystick. She flipped up the trigger guard and readied her finger, trying to picture the orientation of the tumbling ship from the outside. Skellsgard had not told her how to recover from a spin of this kind—the briefing had never envisaged that things could go this splendidly, abjectly wrong—but all she had to do was change things slightly, just enough to bring something else into view. Then, in a sudden fit of misery, she wondered what the point of that would be, given that she had already failed to make any sense of Floyd’s initial impressions…
She squeezed the trigger. Instead of the usual sequenced percussion of steering jets, all she heard was a low, dying hiss that faded as soon as it had begun. Earlier, with the emergency systems blaring and the impacts making an unholy din, she would never have heard that feeble whisper of last-ditch thrust.
Would it be enough? She had felt nothing that would indicate a change of course.
But the angle of the light source—the scything fan of light that touched the cabin interior with each rotation—had altered slightly.
“All right,” she said. “My turn to look now.”
Auger released her seat harness, and with great effort and equal discomfort she managed to stand and brace herself so that she had a view through the window. The ship continued to tumble. The light source flared hard into view, making her squint and avert her eyes in reflex. It was an intense white disk with the faintest tinge of yellow. It looked, in fact, a lot like the Sun.
Then Floyd’s smudge came into view. She had to hand it to him: his description was on the mark. It was a ruby-red nebula, like a blow-up from an astronomical photograph, flecked with spangles of light, smears of brighter red and clotted with very dark patches, like dust lanes. Even as she watched, even before th
e rotation had pulled it out of view, a hard pink light flared within the cloud and died.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Then the rotation brought something else into view. It was a gently curved arc of rust-orange, fringed by a pale wisp of atmosphere. Unlike the smudge, this was something she had definitely seen before. She could even pick out the white scratches of the tethered dirigible lines, and the ribbon-bright channels of the irrigation network.
This was the other thing Floyd had seen.
“It’s Mars,” she said, hardly believing her own words. “The big thing—”
“And the light?”
“The Sun,” she said. “We’ve come out around Mars. We’re in the solar system.”
“But you said…”
She looked at the light-pocked smudge again. Just as Floyd had described, it appeared slightly smaller than the last time she had seen it—even though the smudge itself seemed to be roiling and expanding, like the cloud from an explosion…
And then the brightest light she had ever imagined—brighter even than the radiance of the wormhole throat—rammed through the smudge, like sunlight piercing a stained-glass window, and reached a crescendo like a second sun. Then it faded, dying like the last chip of the setting sun, and when darkness had returned, the smudge was completely dark, undisturbed by any smaller flashes.
“Where’s Phobos?” Auger asked.
THIRTY-ONE
There was nothing more that could be done to slow the ship’s tumbling motion. Auger kept the shutter open, and periodically one of them would climb up and examine the view, but the safest and easiest thing was to stay strapped into their seats. Damaged as it was, the transport did not actually seem to be getting any worse: no more systems had broken down since their emergence around Mars, and the cabin pressure had stabilised at just under one-third of an atmosphere. It was too thin to sustain life, so they kept the masks on, but at least they did not have the chill of vacuum to contend with. With the battery-powered heaters still running, the ambient temperature was low, but not unbearably so.
“We’re safe, for now,” Auger said. “All we have to do is sit tight until someone figures out where we are.”
“And someone will manage that?”
“Count on it. They’ll be scouring every centimetre of space looking for us right now. Even if there isn’t a working transponder on this thing, they’ll find us with their own sensors. It will only be a matter of time.”
Her confidence had a thin, brittle edge to it, like ice that might break at any moment.
“I take it from this that you have a theory about how we survived?” Floyd asked.
“Aveling’s people must have taken the decision to destroy Phobos,” she said. “That smudge of dust and gas is all that’s left of the moon. We must have hit a little debris coming through it, but not enough to do us any harm.”
“They blew up a whole moon? Isn’t that rather drastic?”
“It was the only way to save us,” she said. “They must have picked up our bow-shock distortion and realised that we were coming in much too fast to decelerate into the recovery bubble. But the bubble’s only function was to maintain vacuum at the wormhole throat. If they got rid of the pressurised chamber—and Phobos with it—then they wouldn’t need the bubble. We’d have been emerging into vacuum anyway.”
“But you said they wouldn’t have much warning of our imminent arrival,” Floyd said.
“They must have had a procedure in place for just this contingency,” she said. “Emergency evacuation measures to get everyone off the moon in a couple of minutes. Nuclear demolition charges sewn throughout the whole thing, ready to take it apart at the press of a button, giving us a clear route to space.”
“All that, in a couple of minutes?”
“There’s no other explanation, Floyd.”
“Well, I can think of one off the top of my head: somebody else blew up that moon, and our arrival didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”
“No, Floyd,” she said patiently, as if lecturing a child on some arcane matter of the adult world. “Nobody else blew up that moon. That’s not the way we do things around here. We may be in a state of crisis, but no one in their right mind…” Then she froze, and made a small clicking noise in the back of her throat.
“Auger?”
“Fuck. I think you might actually be right.”
“And there was me kind of hoping I’d be wrong.”
“There were explosions in that debris cloud,” she said, remembering the staccato flashes of light, “as if something was still going on there. As if they were still fighting.”
“Who could have blown up that moon?”
“If it wasn’t deliberate, if it wasn’t set off by demolition charges, then only the Slashers could have done it.” She followed the slow, fatigued churning of her exhausted mental processes. She was too tired to think clearly, or else she would never have considered the possibility that Phobos might have been blown up for her benefit. “That last flash,” she said. “The really bright one?”
“Yes?”
“I think that was the wormhole dying. We were surfing the collapsing end of it all the way home. We popped out, then the collapsing end of the pipe hit its own throat. It was like a stretched rubber band snapping back on itself. I think the blast took out all the combatants left near the debris cloud.”
“And my way back home?”
“It’s gone. The link is finished.”
“I figured as much.”
“I’m sorry, Floyd,” she said.
“You don’t have anything to apologise for. I got myself into this every step of the way.”
“No, that isn’t true. I have to take some of the blame. I should never have let you cross the censor, and I definitely shouldn’t have let you get aboard this ship.”
“Face it, kid: you’d never have got home without me.”
She had no answer for that. He was right: without Floyd’s help, she would have died somewhere along the now-collapsed thread of the hyperweb, dashed to pieces in an unwitnessed fireworks display.
“That still doesn’t make it right,” she said. “I’ve ripped you away from everything and everyone you ever knew.”
“You had no choice.”
She touched her wound. It was hot and tender again, as if the inflammation had begun to return. The UR she had taken was not the kind that stayed inside the body for ever. The little machines had probably dismantled themselves by now, donating their essence into the chemical reservoir of her body. She had assumed that she would be getting expert medical attention as soon as the ship popped into the recovery bubble.
“Are you all right?” Floyd asked.
“Just a bit crisp around the edges. I’ll handle it.”
“You need medical attention.”
“And I’ll get it just as soon as they pull us out of this can.”
“If they’re looking for us,” Floyd said.
“They will be. Skellsgard will have told Caliskan that we’re on our way back and also that we have important information.”
“You ready to tell me a little more about why this matters so much? I mean, now that we’re here…”
“Take a look out of the window again, Floyd. Take a look at Mars.”
Auger told him about Mars. She told him about Silver Rain, and what it had done to that world.
Silver Rain was a weapon, cultivated during the last conflict between the Slashers and the Threshers from samples of the original rogue nanotechnological spore that had ended life on Earth. With deft, snide brilliance, the military scientists of the USNE—aided by defectors from the Polities, who supplied the necessary expertise in nanotech manipulation—had taken the excessively crude bludgeon of the original spore and honed it into something sharp and rather lovely, like a Samurai sword. Then they had seeded it into the thickening atmosphere of the partially terraformed Mars, the spore encased in myri
ad ceramic-jacketed ablative pellets, and it had sunk down to the surface, spreading across a vast footprint.
The Polities had never assumed that their enemy would use nanotechnology against them. It was the one thing that the Threshers abhorred above all else.
It therefore made an ideal weapon of surprise.
Silver Rain was very difficult to detect. The Polity specialists on Mars were expecting something much cruder, and consequently their nanotech filters were tuned to ignore something so fine, so cunning, so deadly. It infiltrated organisms quietly, initially doing no harm. Not just people and animals, but every living thing that the colonists had persuaded to survive on Mars. It slipped through seals and airlocks; through skin and cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier. Even the droves of nanotechnological mechanisms that the Slashers carried within their own bodies failed to recognise the intruder. It was that good; that precise.
And for days it did nothing except insinuate itself more thoroughly into the colonists’ world. It seeped into the irrigation system and used the canals to travel beyond the original infection footprint. It transmitted itself by means of physical contact between people and animals. It used the weather, riding the winds. It replicated itself, efficiently and systematically, but never consuming resources that would have drawn it to anyone’s attention. People began to report that they were feeling a little under the weather, as if about to come down with a mild cold.
But no one in the Polities had come down with a cold in living memory…
The USNE battle planners had programmed Silver Rain to trigger on 28 July 2243. It was a coincidence that the day and the month happened to be shared with the events of the Nanocaust: the timing of the Silver Rain deployment had been dictated by strategic considerations elsewhere in the war. But once that coincidence became apparent, the generals saw no need to alter their plans. It would send a signal—subtle or otherwise—to the Polities. This is payback, it said. This is the price you pay for the harm your ideological ancestors did to Earth.
When the trigger was operated, every infected organism died in the same convulsive instant as the machines erupted, little time bombs crammed inside every living cell. Recording systems showed people stopping in mid-stride, mid-sentence, mid-thought. They fell to the ground, every biological event in their bodies aborted like a rogue computer process. They didn’t bleed. They didn’t even undergo any of the medically recognised phases of putrefaction. They just became a kind of dust, loosely organised into the shapes of corpses. When the cities and settlements began to fail, pressure-containment systems breaking down through lack of human maintenance, the corpses simply blew away like so many piles of ash.
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