‘I don’t see the tube yet,’ Thorn said.
‘You won’t, not until we’re much closer. It’s only thirteen kilometres across, and I doubt that we could see more than a hundred kilometres in any direction even without the storm.’
‘Do you have any idea what they’re doing?’
‘I wish I did.’
‘Planetary engineering, obviously. They ripped apart three worlds for this, Ana. They must mean business.’
They continued their approach, the ride becoming rougher. Vuilleumier dipped them up and down by tens of kilometres, until she decided not to risk any further use of the Doppler radar. Thereafter she held a steady altitude, the ship bucking and shaking as it slammed through vortices and shear walls. Alarms went off every other minute, and now and again Vuilleumier would swear and tap a rapid sequence of commands into the control panel. The air around them was growing pitch-dark. Mighty black clouds billowed and surged, contorted into looming visceral shapes. Thunderheads larger than cities whipped past in an instant. Ahead, the air pulsed and blazed with constant electrical discharges: blinding forked white branches and twisting sheets of baby blue. They were flying into a small pocket of hell.
‘Doesn’t seem like quite such a good idea now, does it?’ Vuilleumier commented.
‘Never mind,’ Thorn said. ‘Just keep us on this heading. The bogey hasn’t come any closer, has it? Maybe it was just a reflection from our wake.’ As he spoke, something else snared Vuilleumier’s attention on the console. An alarm started whooping, a chorus of multilingual voices shouting incomprehensible warning messages.
‘Mass sensor says there’s something up ahead, seventy-odd kilometres distant,’ she said. ‘Elongated, I think — the field geometry’s cylindrical, with an inverse “r” attenuation. That’s got to be our baby.’
‘How long until we see it?’
‘We’ll be there in five minutes. I’m slowing our rate of approach. Hold on.’
Thorn pitched forwards in his seat restraints as Vuilleumier killed the speed. He counted out five minutes, then another five. The smudge on the passive radar display held its relative position, slowing as they did. Strangely, the ride became even smoother. The clouds began to thin out; the savage electrical activity became little more than a constant distant strobing on either side of them. There was a horrible sense of unreality about it.
‘Air pressure’s dropping,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘I think there must be a low-pressure wake behind the tube. It’s slicing through the atmosphere super-sonically, so that the air can’t immediately rush around and close the gap. We’re inside the Mach cone of the tube, as if we were flying right behind a supersonic aircraft.’
‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about — for an Inquisitor, anyway.’
‘I’ve had to learn, Thorn. And I’ve had a good teacher.’
Trina?‘ he asked, amusedly.
‘We make a pretty good team. But it wasn’t always the case.’ Then she looked ahead and pointed. ‘Look. I can see something, I think. Let’s try some magnification and then get the hell back out into space.’ On the main console display appeared an image of the tube. It plunged down into the atmosphere from above them, angled to the horizontal by forty or forty-five degrees. Against the slate background of the atmosphere it was a line of shining silver, like the funnel of a twister. They could see perhaps eighty kilometres of its length; above and below it vanished into haze or roiling clouds. There was no sense of motion along the tube, even though it was flowing into the depths at a rate of a kilometre every four seconds. It appeared to be suspended, even unmoving.
‘No sign of anything else,’ Thorn said. ‘I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but I thought there’d be something else. Deeper, maybe. Can you take us forwards?’
‘We’ll have to pass through the transonic boundary. It’ll be a lot rougher than anything we’ve gone through so far.’
‘Can we handle it?’
‘We can try.’ Vuilleumier grimaced and worked the controls again. The air in front of the tube was perfectly steady and calm, utterly unaware of the shock wave that was racing towards it. Even the last passage of the tube on the previous swing-round of the moon had been thousands of kilometres to one side of its present trajectory. Air immediately in front of the tube was compressed into a fluid layer only centimetres thick, forming a v-shaped shock wave at each point along the tube’s length. There was no way to get ahead of the tube without passing through that wing of savagely compressed and heated air; not unless Vuilleumier accepted a detour of many thousands of kilometres.
They passed to one side of the tube. It shone cherry-red along the leading edge, evidence of the frictional energies dissipated in its passage. But there was no sign of any harm being done to the alien machinery.
‘It’s being fed downwards,’ Thorn said. ‘But there isn’t anything down there. Just a lot of gas.’
‘Not all the way down,’ said Vuilleumier. ‘The gas turns into liquid hydrogen a few hundred kilometres down. Below that, there’s pure metallic hydrogen. And somewhere below that there’s a rocky core.’
‘Ana, if they wanted to take apart a planet like this to get at that rocky matter, have you any idea how they might go about it?’
I don’t know. Maybe we’re about to find out.‘
They hit the transonic boundary. For a moment Thorn thought the ship would break up; that they had finally asked too much of it. The hull had creaked before; now — for an instant — he heard it actively scream. The console flared red and flickered out. For a horrible moment all was silent. Then they were through, ghosting in still air. The console stuttered back into life and a chorus of warning voices began to shriek out of the walls.
‘We’re through,’ Vuilleumier said. Tn one piece, I think. But let’s not push our luck, Thorn…‘
I agree. But now that we’ve come all this way… well, it would be silly not to look a little deeper, wouldn’t it?‘
‘No.’
‘If you want me to help you, I want to know what I’m getting myself into.’
‘The ship can’t take it.’
Thorn smiled. ‘It just took more crap than you said it would ever be able to take. Stop being such a pessimist.’
The Demarchist representative entered the white holding room and looked at him. Behind her stood three Ferrisville police, the ones he had surrendered to in the departure terminal, and four Demarchist soldiers. The latter had surrendered their firearms but still managed to look foreboding in their fiery red power-armour. Clavain felt old and fragile, knowing that he was completely at the mercy of his new hosts.
I am Sandra Voi,‘ the woman said. ’You must be Nevil Clavain. Why did you have me come here, Clavain?‘
‘I’m in the process of defecting.’
That’s not what I mean. I mean why me in particular? According to the Convention officials you specifically asked for me.‘
I thought you’d give me a fair hearing, Sandra. I used to know one of your relatives, you see. Who would she have been, your great-grandmother? I can never get the hang of generations these days.‘
The woman pulled up the other white chair and stationed herself in it, opposite Clavain. Demarchists pretended that their political system made rank an outmoded concept. Instead of captains they had shipmasters; instead of generals they had strategic planning specialists. Naturally, such specialisations required visual signifiers, but Voi would have frowned at any suggestion that the many bars and bands of colour across the breast of her tunic indicated anything as outmoded as military status.
‘There hasn’t been another Sandra Voi for four hundred years,’ she said.
I know. The last one died on Mars, during an attempt to negotiate peace with the Conjoiners.‘
‘You’re talking ancient history now.’
‘Which doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Voi and I were part of the same peacekeeping mission. I defected to the Conjoiners shortly after she died, and I’ve been on their s
ide ever since.’
The eyes of the younger Sandra Voi momentarily glazed over. Clavain’s implants sensed the scurry of data traffic in and out of her skull. He was impressed. Since the plague few Demarchists carried very much in the way of neural augmentation.
‘Our records don’t agree.’
Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘They don’t?’
‘No. Our intelligence indicates that Clavain did not live for more than a century and a half after his defection. You can’t possibly be him.’
I left human space on an interstellar expedition and only returned recently. That’s why there hasn’t been much record of me lately. Does it matter, though? The Convention’s already verified that I’m a Conjoiner.‘
‘You could be a trap. Why would you wish to defect?’
Again, she had surprised him. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Maybe you’ve been reading too many of our newspapers. If you have, I’ve got some real news for you: your side is about to win this war. A single spider defection won’t make any difference now.’
I never thought it would,‘ Clavain said.
‘And?’
‘That’s not why I’d like to defect.’
Down, down they went, always remaining ahead of the transonic shock wave of the Inhibitor machinery. The smudge on the passive radar display — the thing that shadowed them at a distance of thirty thousand kilometres — remained present, fading in and out of clarity but never leaving them completely. The daylight grew steadily darker, until the sky overhead was only fractionally lighter than the unmoving black depths below. Ana Khouri turned off the spacecraft’s cabin illumination, hoping that it would make the exterior brighter, but the improvement was marginal. The only real source of light was the cherry-red slash of the tube’s leading edge, and even that was duller than it had been before. The tube moved at only twenty-five kilometres per second now, relative to the atmosphere: it had steepened its descent, too, plunging nearly vertically towards the transition zones where the atmosphere thickened to liquid hydrogen.
She winced as another pressure warning sounded. ‘We can’t go much deeper. I’m serious now. We’ll crush. It’s already fifty atmospheres outside, and that thing is still sitting on our tail.’
‘Just a little closer, Ana. Can we reach the transition zone?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not in this ship. She’s an airbreather. She’ll stall in liquid hydrogen, and then we’ll fall and be crushed by hull implosion. It’s not a nice way to go, Thorn.’
‘The tube doesn’t seem bothered by the pressure, does it? I think it probably goes a lot deeper. How much do you think they’ve laid already? One kilometre every four seconds, isn’t it? That’s not far off a thousand kilometres in an hour. By now there must be enough to loop around the planet quite a few times.’
‘We don’t know that that’s what’s happening.’
‘No, but we can make an educated guess. Do you know what I keep thinking of, Ana?’
‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘Windings. Like in an electric motor. I could be wrong, of course.’ Thorn smiled at her.
He moved suddenly. She was not expecting it and for a moment — for all her soldier training — she was frozen in surprise. He was out of his seat, pushing himself towards her across the cabin. He had some weight, since they were moving at much less than orbital speed, but he still swung across with ease, his movements fluid and pre-planned. Gently, he pulled her out of the pilot’s position. She fought back, but Thorn was much stronger and knew enough to parry her defensive moves. It was not that she had forgotten her soldiering, but there was only so much advantage that technique could give, especially against an equally skilled opponent.
‘Easy, Ana, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.’
Before she knew what was happening, Thorn had her in the passenger seat. He forced her to sit on her hands, then tugged the crash webbing tight across her chest. He asked her if she could breathe, then tugged it tighter. She wriggled, but the webbing contracted snugly, holding her in place.
‘Thorn…’ she said.
Thorn eased himself into the pilot’s seat. ‘Now. How shall we play this? Are you going to tell me everything I want to know, or do I have to supply some additional persuasion?’
He worked the controls. The ship lurched; alarms sounded.
‘Thorn…’
‘Sorry. It looked easy enough when I watched you do it. Maybe there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, eh?’
‘You can’t fly this thing.’
‘I’m having a damned good go, aren’t I? Now… what does this do? Let’s see…’ There was another violent reaction from the ship. More alarms sounded. But, sluggishly, the ship had begun to answer his commands. Khouri saw the artificial horizon indicator tilt. They were banking. Thorn was executing a hard turn to starboard.
‘Eighty degrees…’ he read off. ‘Ninety… one hundred…’
‘Thorn, no. You’re taking us straight back towards the shock wave.’
‘That’s pretty much the idea. Do you think the hull will cope? You seemed to think it was already a little on the stressed side. Well, I suppose we’re about to find out, aren’t we?’
‘Thorn, whatever you’re planning—’
‘I’m not planning anything, Ana. I’m just trying to put us in a position of real and imminent danger. Isn’t that abundantly clear?’
She had another go at wriggling free, but it was futile. Thorn had been very clever. No wonder the bastard had eluded the government for so long. She had to admire him for that, even if her admiration was grudging. ‘We won’t make it,’ she said.
‘No, perhaps we won’t. And my flying won’t help matters, I think. Which makes it all the easier, then. Answers, that’s what I want.’
‘I’ve told you everything…’
‘You’ve told me precisely nothing. I want to know who you are. Do you know when I started having suspicions?’
‘No,’ she said, realising that he would do nothing until she answered.
‘It was Irina’s voice. I was certain I’d heard it before, you know. Well, finally I remembered. It was Ilia Volyova’s address to Resurgam, shortly before she started blasting colonies off the surface. It was a long time ago, but old wounds take a long time to heal. More than a family resemblance there, I’d say.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Thorn.’
‘Have I? Then are you going to enlighten me?’
More alarms sounded. Thorn had pulled their speed down, but they were still moving at several kilometres per second towards the shock wave. She hoped it was her imagination, but she thought she could see that slash of cherry-red coming at them through the blackness.
‘Ana… ?’ he asked again, his voice all sweetness and light.
‘Damn you, Thorn.’
‘Ah. Sounds like progress to me.’
‘Pull up. Turn us around.’
‘In a moment. Just as soon as I hear the magic words from you. A confession, that’s all I’m looking for.’
She breathed in deeply. Here it was, then. The ruination of all their slow and measured plans. They had bet on Thorn and Thorn had been cleverer than them. They should have seen it coming, really they should. And Volyova, damn her too, had been right. It had been a mistake ever allowing him anywhere near Nostalgia for Infinity. They should have found another way to convince him. Volyova should have ignored Khouri’s protests…
‘Say the words, Ana.’
‘All right. All right, God damn it. She is the Triumvir. We told you a pack of fucking lies from word one. Happy now?’
Thorn did not answer immediately. To her gratitude, he took the time to swing the ship around. Acceleration pressed her even further into the couch as he applied thrust to outrun the shock wave. And from the blackness it came hurtling towards them, a livid line of red, like the bloody edge of an executioner’s sword. She watched it swell until the rear view was a wall of scarlet as bright as mol
ten metal. The collision alarms whooped and the multilingual warning voices merged into a single agitated chorus. Then a background of sky started to close in on either side of the red line, like two iron-grey curtains. The thread began to diminish in width, falling behind them.
‘I think we made it,’ Thorn said.
‘Actually, I think we didn’t.’
‘What?’
She nodded at the radar display. There was now no sign of the smudge that had been behind them ever since they had entered Roc’s atmosphere, but a host of radar signatures were crowding in on all sides. There were at least a dozen new objects, and they lacked the transient quality of the earlier echo. They were closing at kilometres per second, clearly converging on Khouri’s ship.
‘I think we just provoked a response,’ she said, her own voice sounding much calmer than she had expected. ‘Looks like there is a threshold after all, and we just crossed it.’
‘I’ll get us up and out as quickly as possible.’
‘You think it’ll make any damned difference? They’re going to be here in about ten seconds. Guess you got the proof you wanted, Thorn. Either that or you’re about to get it. Enjoy the moment, because it might not last very long.’
He looked at her with what she thought was quiet admiration. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’
‘Here, Thorn?’
‘On the point of death. It doesn’t mean much to you.’
‘I’d rather be somewhere else, don’t get me wrong.’
The converging forms had transgressed the final concentric circle on the display. They were now within a few kilometres of the ship, slowing as they neared it. Khouri knew there was no longer any harm in directing the active sensors at the approaching things. Their position was already betrayed, and they would lose nothing by taking a closer look at the converging objects. They were approaching from all sides, and although there were still large gaps between them, it would have been utterly futile to attempt to run away. A minute ago the things had not been there at all; clearly, they were able to slip through the atmosphere as if it hardly existed. Thorn had put them into a steep climb, and while she would have done exactly the same thing, she knew it was not going to make any difference. They had come too close to the heart of things, and now they were going to pay for their curiosity, just as Sylveste had all those years ago.
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