“I was expecting to deal with Bella,” Wang said, with no apparent rancour, when Svetlana quizzed him about the passkey.
“Bella’s dead,” she told him, the words themselves tasting sordid in her mouth, like something she needed to spit out.
“Can she be saved?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and for the first time she began to wonder if Parry hadn’t been right after all. “We froze her… did all that Axford would have done. Maybe it’s better than nothing.”
“There were times when you must have wished her dead,” Wang said, and all she could do was nod, for the truth of it was unavoidable. Then he added, “But this isn’t one of those times.”
“No,” she said, softly. “It isn’t.”
They left Crabtree, pulling away from the landing pad, thrusting slowly so as not to damage the delicate-looking passkey before it could be properly cushioned and stowed. Through one of the lander’s armoured portholes, Svetlana watched the settlement fall away and below. From the High Hab to the outlying suburban domes, the lights of Crabtree were still burning, as if there were still people down there. It would have been pointless and time-consuming to power-down the community now, given its likely fate. But to Svetlana there was something wrong, something almost disrespectful, about abandoning Crabtree in this way. After all the years that it had sheltered them, it was as if they had all simply tired of it and decided to leave on a whim, before it noticed their absence. Life-support systems were still running, oblivious to the fact that the city’s human burden was now zero. There should have been some ceremony of closure, with all of the colonists turning back for one last solemn nod of thanks before they fled Janus completely.
Even after all this time, it occurred to Svetlana, Crabtree had only begun to feel like home at the moment of its abandonment.
From Crabtree they flew directly to the hole that the Musk Dogs had made and passed through to the other side of the Iron Sky. They traversed an ocean of curving black Spican material until the remains of the Fountainhead embassy came into view, twenty kilometres over Underhole. Every now and then, the black surface lightened perceptibly. From overhead, in the direction of the endcap, stray emissions were still reaching Janus from the next chamber.
They landed at the embassy, using the sole remaining docking connection into the Fountainhead structure. The pillars buttressing the Iron Sky must have been absorbing some of the quakes from within Janus, but it was still trembling under the ship.
“It’s not getting any quieter down there,” Nick Thale said, after he’d checked the latest read-outs on his old flexy. “If we were still in Junction Box, we’d be pinned down by now. We left just in time.”
But they hadn’t left, not really. They were no safer here than they had been underneath the Iron Sky. Sanctuary was still two and half light-minutes away, in the direction of battle.
“Any news on the other evacuees?” Svetlana asked.
“Three hundred and fifty of them are on their way to the end-cap, according to Jim, some of them inside Fountainhead vehicles, the rest squeezed into Avenger. We should follow them.”
“We’ll wait for Jim,” Svetlana said.
“I’ve been in touch with him. He said to expect him aboard shortly, and to make room for a guest.”
Svetlana went down to the lander’s cargo airlock. Jim Chisholm was arriving as she got there, removing his glasses to rub condensation from the lenses. He wore no suit, only his usual loose-fitting outfit of nondescript pre-Cutoff origin.
“I hear we have a passkey,” he said, like a man who wanted to get down to business.
“I’ll show you. First, though —” But Svetlana could hardly force out the words. “Something happened, Jim. I’m so sorry.”
He seemed to look through her, as if her soul had become a stained-glass window. “Bella,” he said simply.
“She didn’t make it. She died helping the survivors get out of Eddytown.”
“Nick Thale told me she’d gone inside to help them.”
“She died saving people. She got my daughter out of that place. Even after everything that happened between us, she still did that.”
“Nick told me something else.” He pushed the glasses to the bridge of his nose and looked down at her, over them. “That you went back in to find her.”
“You’d have done the same.”
“The difference is I’ve already died once. You, as far as I’m aware, haven’t yet had the pleasure. That took courage as well, Svetlana.”
“I couldn’t leave her there.”
“Of course you couldn’t. You of all people wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“Because I hated her?”
“In all the years of enmity, I doubt that you ever stopped feeling some bond of friendship, whether or not either of you would have admitted such a thing.”
Svetlana looked sceptical. “I don’t think so.”
“Then why else did you insist on going back into that building, knowing you might not make it out either?”
Svetlana looked aside sullenly. “It didn’t matter. We’ve frozen her, run the Frost Angel process… but we all know it’s too late. She was hurt really badly, Jim, and she was dead for a long time before we ran the process.”
“They made me good again. Maybe they can do something for her as well.”
At that moment Svetlana felt a spiteful urge to remind him that the aliens had not remade the former Jim Chisholm, but had instead created a chimera of two dead men, of which Chisholm only formed the larger part. The glioblastoma had taken so much of his brain that the aliens had no option but to fill in the missing pieces of his memory and personality with what they could salvage from Craig Schrope. Bella, when she fell, had lost at least as much.
“We should be leaving,” Svetlana said.
He looked out through the window of the cargo lock. “Didn’t Nick mention the other guest?”
Through the window she saw the rolling approach of a Fountainhead travel sphere, with one of the blue-fronded aliens propelling it from within.
“Is that McKinley?” she asked, remembering the alien that had come down for Mike Takahashi’s homecoming party.
“One and the same.”
“I didn’t expect him to come back with you.”
“The Shaft-Five Nexus arrived while you were engaged in Eddytown,” Chisholm said. “They began to turn the tables on the Uncontained.”
“The battle’s still going on.”
“It’s not over yet, but it now looks unlikely that the Uncontained will prevail. Luckily it wasn’t a large contingent, and they’d suffered some attrition during their journey here. McKinley felt it was safe to return here, for now.”
“Are the other Fountaihheads okay?”
“Yes, although that can’t be said for all the elements of the Nexus.”
“But it’s safe to cross into the next chamber?”
“Let’s just say it’s safer and leave it at that, shall we?”
They let McKinley aboard, squeezing the travel sphere into the last available space in the lander’s already overcrowded cargo bay. Then they pulled away from the embassy, accelerating hard away from the Iron Sky until it became nothing more than a black circle falling away beneath them, back-dropped by the distant orange light of the shaft.
“You must have come here in a Fountainhead ship,” Svetlana said, as she showed Chisholm to the passkey. “Why aren’t we leaving in one? Wouldn’t it be faster?”
“McKinley thought about that and suggested it might be better if the Musk Dogs continued to believe that this was a purely human evacuation vehicle, with no Fountainhead presence.”
“Apart from McKinley, it is.”
“Not quite. When you landed, McKinley attached something to the lander’s hull. It’s small enough that the Musk Dogs won’t see it until much too late, if at all, but it’ll make quite a difference to our ability to overtake them.”
“What did he do?”
“Loosely speaking, he bolted a small frameshift drive onto Star Crusader. It’s a human invention, so don’t feel bad about that. Chromis would have given the technology to Bella sooner or later, I’m sure of it.”
“A frameshift drive.” She remembered that the Musk Dogs had promised her something like that, in return for further negotiations. More teasing lies, she now realised.
“Like I said, it’s only a small one: not enough to go gallivanting around the galaxy, but certainly enough to make a difference to the acceleration this lander can sustain, with its engines cranked to maximum.”
She thought of the Musk Dogs, still somewhere between Janus and the endcap door. “Why do we need to overtake them?”
“Because they’ll be hoping we don’t make it through the door ahead of them.”
“They’ve already lost, if you’ve got the Uncontained under control.”
Chisholm looked pained. “I didn’t say we had them under control, just that things were going more our way than theirs. The arrival of the Musk Dogs — let’s assume that we can regard them as strategic allies of the Uncontained, at least until Janus blows up — would be a complication we could really live without.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“My plan is punishment,” Chisholm said.
They reached the passkey. Chisholm ran his hand over the glass intricacy of the Whisperer instrument, as if luxuriating in the erotic contact between skin and sleekly transparent machinery. Once, his fingers strayed into one of the absences where it appeared more machinery should have been crammed and he withdrew them sharply, as if he had touched live wires or hot water. But the passkey was cool now — cool enough to chill flesh, as if in some arcane way it was self-refrigerating. It had survived transportation from the forge vat to the lander (so far as Svetlana could tell) and was now mounted on a rigid framework of perforated spars, hastily adapted from the kind of cradle that would have held a FAD warhead.
“I can tell you one thing,” Chisholm said, looking back at Svetlana. “It looks real. If it isn’t a functioning key, it’s a damn good imitation.”
“Now tell me it works.”
“We really won’t know whether it works until we see a measurable result at the endcap.”
“How do we operate the thing?”
“Point and click, really. Just like a garage-door opener, only the garage is more than two light-minutes away and the door’s wide enough to drive Madagascar through in one piece. Otherwise… piece of cake.”
“If it works.”
“Yes,” he said, as if the remote possibility of failure had only just occurred to him. “There is that.”
“The Musk Dogs must have their own passkey, right? How else would they hope to close the door after them?”
“The Musk Dogs or the Uncontained.”
“So why haven’t they used it yet? Bella said we’d need to start closing the door before we got there. Doesn’t the same thing apply to the Musk Dogs?”
“They aren’t close enough yet. If they started the closure now, the door would be shut tight before they got there. Not clever, even by their standards.”
“So why not just wait until they’re safe and sound on the other side?”
“That would involve taking too much of a risk of Janus blowing first. They’ll be aiming to time it very tightly indeed.”
“And us?”
“We’ll just have to do better.”
Chisholm took hold of one heavy end of the machinery and applied a firm twist to it. Along lines of separation Svetlana had not even noticed, one part of the passkey rotated against another. Like some cunningly assembled puzzle, the shape of the thing altered out of all proportion to the change in orientation of the two pieces. A lemon-yellow glow spread through the glass whiskers and intestinal coils, edged in blue wherever it met the abrupt disjunctions between different matter phases. The passkey trembled, as if it sought to break free from its cradle.
“It’s working now?” Svetlana asked, astonished.
Chisholm touched a finger to his lips and whispered, “Almost. One more twist and it’ll be active, transmitting the closure command. We’ll have to point the lander in the right direction: it’s putting out a very narrow beam and if it doesn’t touch the endcap receptors, nothing will happen.”
“A very narrow beam of what?”
“I’d love to explain,” Chisholm said, with no hint of condescension, “but unfortunately we don’t have all day.”
Svetlana let him get on with it.
There was nothing elegant or subtle about his intentions for the Musk Dogs. His plan depended solely on guile and misdirection: the hope that the Musk Dogs would pay insufficient attention to an apparently human vehicle making a feeble attempt to reach the next chamber before Janus went up. The only other thing in his favour was the expectation that the Musk Dogs would do nothing overtly hostile, even at this late stage in developments. If they had been pressed on the matter by the other agencies in the Shaft-Five Nexus, the Musk Dogs would have expressed bemused and plausible ignorance about the transformation of Janus into an instrument of escape. Given all that he had learned of the Musk Dogs through McKinley and the other aliens, he knew the parameters of their slyness. They would claim that they had only ever been trying to tap Janus for energy, in accordance with the agreement they had negotiated with the human population. They would claim that they had been as surprised as anyone when their innocent tinkerings appeared to set the moon on a course for violent self-destruction. Of course they were trying to reach safety — what else were they to do? If it had been within their means to help the poor, beleaguered humans…
It was all lies, but the Musk Dogs had scraped through on lies before: it was one of the reasons they were so tricky to deal with. But if they were to keep up the pretence of innocence, they could not afford to take hostile action against Star Crusader while the rest of the Shaft-Five Nexus was watching events.
Which was why Star Crusader was able to slip past the gristleship before the Musk Dogs paid due attention to its unusual rate of acceleration. But by then it was too late.
Jim Chisholm made the final alteration to the passkey. The passkey shone a rich brassy gold and shook so violently that it looked about to shatter into a billion twinkling shards. Somehow, it didn’t. Since there was no means of pointing the delicate instrument within the lander, Chisholm directed Star Crusader to shut down its engines just long enough for the whole lander to be used to aim the passkey’s beam towards the distant target of the endcap receptors.
There was a minute of gnawing anxiety before word came back from the Fountainheads that the door had begun to close. After that, it was just a question of making it through the narrowing gap in time. Svetlana could not find the self-discipline to sit around waiting for that to happen. Instead, she joined McKinley by the suited, frozen form of her old friend and former adversary.
“I did what I could,” she said plaintively. “Perhaps you can undo some of the damage…”
Even though he remained within his travel sphere, McKinley must have had some means of peering inside the suit, into Bella’s damaged, pierced skull. His tone, when he answered Svetlana, offered little consolation. “You did the right thing. It’s always better to try and fail than not to try. But the damage to the orbitofrontal cortex is grave.”
“Too grave for you to fix?”
“You can’t put together a mind with guesswork. You may resurrect someone, but it won’t be the person you used to know.”
“We’ve lost too many people today, McKinley. I don’t want to lose another.”
“You risked yourself to bring her back. Whatever debt you owed her, whatever debt she owed you… I’d hazard that the slate may now be considered clean.”
She peered through the glass shell at the mass of swishing blue-green tendrils inside. “You’re good at this, McKinley.”
“Good at what?”
“Sounding human, making all the right noises. You’ve been learning e
ver since you met us, and you’ve got better at it with every passing day. But sometimes I don’t think you understand what makes us tick at all.”
“I understand that you value existence over non-existence,” McKinley said. “We have that much in common, at the very least. Take it from me: it can’t be said for all the cultures you’ll meet in the Structure.”
“If that’s meant to be reassuring —”
“It isn’t.”
She closed her eyes and drew in a deep, weary breath. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s just… she used to be my friend. A lot happened between us, but not so much that I don’t want her back in the world.”
“I’m sorry,” McKinley said, soothingly. “I wish there was something we could do. But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.”
A little later, Svetlana left Bella and the alien and climbed through the innards of the lander until she reached an inspection porthole, far enough from the other people to allow her a measure of solitude. She stared back along the route they had already flown, trying to make out the distant, dark speck of Janus against the dull orange lining of the shaft. They had overtaken the Musk Dogs now, gunning the pocket frameshift drive to the limit of its capabilities. The Musk Dog ship was just visible several thousand kilometres to stern: a tangle of gristle backlit by the glow of its own arcane propulsion system. The Musk Dogs, too, were pushing their ship to the limit: so much so that entire chunks of the gristleship were falling off, leaving a radar-trackable trail of fatty gobbets and meat-wrapped shards of broken machinery.
That same radar also revealed that the Musk Dogs were losing the race to reach the endcap. The door ahead of Star Crusader was closing with perilous speed, swiftly enough that Svetlana had cause to doubt the accuracy of Chisholm’s timing.
She needn’t have worried.
Just after Star Crusader passed through the narrowing end-cap, Jim Chisholm asked her permission to send a message back to the gristleship.
“Why?” she asked, frowning.
“It’s a matter of form,” he explained. “Doing things by the book is terribly important to the Nexus.”
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