Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You saved us,” Auger said. “And when I was injured, when Floyd came back to rescue me, you stayed with me.”

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “You could have fled my body… abandoned me in Paris. I’m sure your machines would have coped until they found another host. You could have made do with Floyd, after all.”

  “You have the wrong idea about us,” Cassandra said. “I would never have abandoned you. I would rather have died than live with that.”

  “Then I’m grateful.”

  “You saved me as well. After all that has gone between us, it was nothing I counted on. You have my thanks, Auger. I just hope that in some way this has taught both of us a lesson.”

  “I was the one who needed the lesson,” Auger said. “I hated you because you told the truth about me.”

  “Then I’ll make a small confession. Even as I was preparing to testify against you, I admired your dedication. You had the fire in your belly.”

  “It nearly burnt me.”

  “But at least you cared. At least you were ready to do something.”

  “This little mess,” Auger said, “is all because of people who were ready to do something. People like me, who always know when they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Maybe what we need is a few less of us.”

  “Or the right kind,” Cassandra said, shrugging. She shifted awkwardly. “Look, I’ll come to the point. I meant everything that I just said, but the reason I came to talk to you is very simple: it’s your choice now.”

  “What’s my choice?”

  “What you do with me. You’re healed. You no longer need me in your head to keep you alive.”

  “Then you’ve identified a new host?”

  “Not exactly. Tunguska would take me if he had spare capacity… which he doesn’t, not with all the extra tactical processing he’s having to do. The same goes for the rest of the crew. But there are techniques. They can hold my machines in suspension until we return to the Polities and find a host.”

  “Answer me truthfully: how stable would that suspension be, compared to you remaining where you are?”

  “The suspension procedure is more than capable—”

  “Truthfully,” Auger said.

  “There’d be some additional losses. Impossible to quantify, but almost inevitable.”

  “Then you’re staying put. No ifs, no buts.”

  Cassandra flicked aside her lick of black hair. “I don’t know what to say. I never expected this kindness.”

  “From me?”

  “From any Thresher.”

  “Then I suppose we both had things wrong. Let’s just hope we aren’t the only ones who can find some common ground.”

  “There’ll be others,” Cassandra said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t play our part. When we’ve dealt with Niagara, when we’ve returned to Sedna, there’ll be some very raw wounds that need healing.”

  “If anyone’s left alive.”

  “We’ll just have to hope things haven’t gone to the brink. If they haven’t… if the progressive Threshers and the moderate Slashers can put their differences aside… then there may be hope for all of us. Whatever the case, an example of co-operation could make all the difference.”

  “An example like us, you mean?”

  The little girl with the dark hair nodded. “I’m not saying I should stay in your head for ever. But when the peace is being negotiated, someone who could be trusted by both parties might be a very important player indeed.”

  “Or they might choose not to trust us at all.”

  “That’s a risk,” Cassandra conceded. “But one I’d be prepared to take.” Then something seemed to amuse her. “And you never know, Auger.”

  “Never know what?”

  “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  After much insistence, Tunguska finally caved in and permitted Auger to walk around the ship. She was washed and alert, the voices in her head no longer quite so insistent. A sheet of intelligent bedclothing hugged her every move, preserving her modesty and—whenever she caught a glimpse of herself in some polished surface or actual mirror—quietly flattering her as well, she noticed. A little while ago, she would have been appalled at the thought of allowing Slasher machinery to become so intimate with her. Now, whenever she tried to summon the appropriate reflex disgust, it just wasn’t there. In spite of her little tête à tête with Cassandra, she wondered whether this was because the machines were surreptitiously doctoring her thoughts, or whether the events of the last few days had finally forced her to realise that not everything about the Slashers was automatically repugnant. At the same time, she wondered if she really needed an answer. The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.

  Tunguska and Floyd sat on one side of an extruded table, watching patterns play across the wall opposite them. As Auger approached the table, a chair bulged up from the floor in anticipation.

  “You’re quite sure you feel well enough for this?” Tunguska asked.

  “I’m fine. Cassandra and I have come to an… accommodation.”

  Tunguska offered her the newly formed seat. She took it, sitting between the two men. Tunguska was dressed in a simple two-piece outfit of white flannel, slashed low across his broad, hairless chest, while Floyd wore a clean white shirt, with black trousers supported by striped elastic braces. Those were definitely not the clothes that Floyd had been wearing when they left Paris, so Tunguska must have conjured them up for him. She wondered if he had dug them out of some obscure memory, or followed Floyd’s specifications.

  “We have an echo from Niagara’s ship,” Tunguska said, gesturing towards one of the image panels on the wall. Gold-threaded lines formed a flowing contour map reminiscent of the navigational display in the transport, but with a great deal more complexity. Cryptic symbols hovered in boxes around the edge of the diagram, connected by thin lines back to knotty features in the contour plot. As the features shifted and merged, the symbols altered from one perplexing configuration to another.

  “We’re sending acoustic signals up the line,” Tunguska continued, “using the same high-speed propagation layer you employ for your navigation and communications channel.”

  “I thought you’d have come up with something more sophisticated than that by now,” Auger said.

  “We’ve tried various things, but the acoustic technique is still the only reliable method open to us. As you probably know, it’s difficult to push a signal through when a ship is in transit. The ship acts as a mirror, bouncing the signal back to us with a high reflection efficiency.”

  “And you’re getting a signal from Niagara?”

  “A faint one,” Tunguska said, “but definitely there. With a smaller craft, there’d be various things he could try to damp the return bounce. But that’s a big, fat ship, and it doesn’t leave him with a lot of scope for stealth.”

  “All right,” Auger said. “If you can bounce a signal off him, can you tell how far ahead he is?”

  “Yes. Of course, spatial distance is a rather slippery concept in hyperweb transit—”

  “Just give me your best guess.”

  “His ship must be about two hundred kilometres ahead of us. Assuming the usual propagation speed, he’ll exit about an hour before we do.”

  “Two hundred kilometres,” Auger said. “That doesn’t sound all that far.”

  “It isn’t,” Tunguska agreed.

  “Then haven’t you got something you can fire ahead of us, something that will cover the distance before his ship exits the tunnel?”

  “Yes,” Tunguska said, “but I wanted to discuss it with you before I acted.”

  “If you have something,” Auger said, “then damn well use it.”

  “I have beam weapons,” T
unguska told her. “But they don’t work well in the hyperweb for the same reason that EM pulses are ineffective—due to scattering off the tunnel lining. That leaves missiles. We have six warhead-tipped devices with bleed-drive propulsion.”

  “So use them.”

  “It’s not that simple. Objects under thrust behave unpredictably in the hyperweb: that’s why we surf the throat wave, rather than flying through under our own power.”

  “It’s still worth a try.”

  Tunguska kept his voice level, but his face was beginning to show concern. “Understand the risk. With a beam weapon, we’d have a degree of surgical control if we could get close enough to avoid the scattering effect. We could disable his ship sufficiently to prevent him from making it to the next portal.”

  “I’m not interested in disabling him. I’m not interested in interrogation, or whatever it is you’d do to Niagara if you got your hands on him. I want a clean kill.”

  “Don’t underestimate the value of interrogation,” Tunguska said quietly, with the gently reproving note of a kindly schoolmaster. “This conspiracy is almost certainly wider than one man. If we lose Niagara, we lose any hope of catching his associates. And what they have attempted once, they may attempt again.”

  “But you just said you can’t disable him.”

  “Not in the hyperweb,” he said, raising a finger. “But if we can catch his ship in open space, between portals… then we might have a chance.”

  Auger shook her head. “Too much risk of him getting away.”

  “We’ll still have the missiles,” Tunguska said. “But the one thing they’re not is surgical.”

  She imagined a school of swift, dolphinlike missiles skewering Niagara’s ship, blowing it apart in a soundless orgy of light. “I’m not going to shed any tears over that.”

  “Or over your own death, which would doubtless ensue in the process? It would be suicide, Auger. His ship is carrying the Molotov device. That’s enough antimatter to crack open a moon, and it’s only two hundred kilometres away.”

  Tunguska was right. It would have occurred to her sooner or later, but she was so fixated on killing Niagara that she had not really considered what his execution would actually entail.

  “Even so,” she said, forcing out the words one by one, “we still have to do it.”

  Tunguska’s expression was grave but approving. “I thought you’d say that. I just had to be sure.”

  “What about Floyd?” she asked, her voice quavering as the realisation of what she had just decided slowly sunk in.

  “Floyd and I have discussed the matter already,” Tunguska said. “For what it’s worth, we arrived at the same conclusion.”

  She turned to Floyd. “Is that true?”

  Floyd shrugged. “If that’s what it takes.”

  Still looking into Floyd’s eyes, she said, “Then launch your missiles, Tunguska. And quickly, before any of us changes our minds.”

  The faintest of shudders ran through the floor.

  “It’s done,” Tunguska said. “They’re launched and running.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Two hundred kilometres up the pipe, she thought. It was nothing in spatial terms. The missiles should have leapt across that distance in an eyeblink. But the hyperweb appeared to actively stifle attempts to pass through it more rapidly than the normal speed of a collapse wave. The missiles—according to Tunguska’s telemetry—were streaking ahead of his ship, following the expected acceleration curves for their mass and thrust, just as if they had been deployed in external space. For a little while it was even possible to bounce an electromagnetic pulse off them, or read the acoustic signal induced by their exhaust as it washed in a widening cone against the tunnel sides. But then something began to happen to them. They slowed, their acceleration curves levelling out, as if they had flown into spatial treacle. The faint, dwindling whisper of data from each missile reported no anomalies… but they were no longer travelling ahead with sufficient speed to intercept Niagara’s ship.

  Tunguska stared at the spread of tactical displays—which were more for their benefit than his, Auger suspected—with obvious dissatisfaction. “This is what I feared,” he said. “There’s no telling whether any of them will reach Niagara in time.”

  “Will we know when it happens?” she asked.

  “Would you like to know?”

  “I’d like to know that we’d succeeded, before…” Hervoice trailed off. There was no need for her to state the obvious.

  “I’m afraid you probably won’t have that luxury. It’s anyone’s guess how the matter-antimatter fireball will travel back down the pipe, but it’s likely to be swift. There’ll be no time to reflect on victory. Equally, your deaths will be mercifully swift.”

  Auger didn’t need reminding that she had effectively signed her own death warrant if one of the missiles got through. She was trying to push that knowledge to one side, but it kept squirming back to the forefront of her thoughts.

  “Will you sense anything?” Floyd asked Tunguska.

  “I’ll have an inkling,” he said. “When the fireball hits the skin of my ship, the information from the hull sensors should reach my skull an instant ahead of the destructive wave itself.”

  “Giving you enough time to form a thought?” Auger asked, lacing her hand tightly with Floyd’s. “Enough time to extract a crumb of comfort that your sacrifice will have been worth it?”

  “Perhaps.” Tunguska smiled at them. “It doesn’t have to be a very complicated thought, after all.”

  “I’m not sure I envy you,” Auger said.

  “And perhaps you’re right not to, but there it is. I could disable the connection between my neural machines and the hull sensors, but I don’t think I have the nerve.” He looked back at one of the wall images, studying it with suddenly alarmed eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Auger asked.

  “Nothing that I didn’t expect, I suppose. The telemetry feeds from all the missiles are now silent.”

  “Does that mean the missiles are dead?” Floyd asked.

  “No—not necessarily, just that the data they’re trying to send back to us can’t find its way home. The missiles probably can’t hear our signals to them, either. They’ll have switched to autonomous flight mode.”

  “Somehow I preferred it when we knew for certain that they were still out there,” Floyd said.

  “Me, too,” Tunguska said. Then he reached out and placed his own hand over theirs, and the three of them sat in silence, waiting for something to happen, or for everything to stop happening.

  Silence was the one thing Auger didn’t want. It left a vacuum in her head into which certain thoughts were too easily able to slip. She wanted the easy cadences of normal human conversation, the gossip and the small talk. She wanted to be able to think about anything other than that killing wall of furious light, the explosion that might even now be rushing towards them, faster than any advance information of its arrival could possibly travel. Faster than any possible news of success. How long had it been since the missiles had streaked away? She had lost all sense of time; it could have been minutes or hours. But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

  She looked at the other two—Floyd and the Slasher both—and knew that in their own way they were working through exactly the same thought process. As if in some silent acknowledgement of this, all three of them chose that moment to tighten their hands together.

  Suddenly, a convulsive change occurred in the displays on the wall. Auger had an instant to register this, and another instant to let the implications unravel in her head. One of the missiles must have found its mark, and now the ship had detected the approaching hellfire…

  But the voices in her head, quiet of late, told her no, that was not what
was happening.

  It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.

  In another instant—another tick of the clockwork grind of consciousness—the ship began to execute some drastic evasive manoeuvre. Auger had just enough time to feel her weight shifting dangerously to one side when her gown stiffened into a protective cocoon and the furniture, floors and walls reshaped themselves into a protective matrix.

  Then came the awful moment when the ship forced its breathing apparatus down her throat.

  She experienced a momentary blissed-out sense that, in truth, being smothered into helplessness was actually quite pleasant…

  Two or three missing frames of consciousness.

  Information trickled into her skull, via Cassandra’s machines. They were talking to Tunguska and the rest of the ship.

  One of their own missiles had just locked on to them. The peculiar spatial properties of the hyperweb tunnel had confused its navigation system, while the echoing babble of chaotic EM signals had caused it to disregard the message that Tunguska’s ship was friend, rather than foe. There was no time to aim and fire the beam weapons. The ship had flexed itself, bending its hull to let the missile slip by at the last instant, like a supple combatant avoiding a lethal stab. Once the missile had streaked past into the portion of the tunnel behind the ship, an emergency detonation command had gnawed into its tiny, murderous mind and made it self-trigger.

  The explosion had caused a local alteration in the geometry of the tunnel cladding, sending propagation shocks haring away in all directions; meanwhile, re-radiated energies bounced around in a storm of short-wavelength photons, chewing through the protective armour of Tunguska’s ship and into the soft living tissues of the passengers within.

  Sensing further danger, the ship kept its occupants locked within the gee-load cushioning while it strained ahead with every sensor that could claw some scrap of information about the forward state of the tunnel. The reverberations from the missile blast had blinded the acoustics, for now at least. Frantically, the ship switched to backup systems it would never have relied upon during normal flight. Neutrino lasers and wide-spectrum EM pulses peered into the bright, swallowing mouth.