Century Rain

SEVENTEEN

At the Métro station on rue Cardinal Lemoine, Auger bought a one-way ticket and entered the midday crush of passengers. People took lunch seriously in Paris, and thought nothing of crossing half the city to meet with a colleague, partner or lover in some well-regarded brasserie or restaurant. Auger could not be certain whether or not she had been tailed from the hotel on Emile Zola, but she took every advantage of the flood of travellers to make herself difficult to follow, jostling her way through the crowds and racing up and down stairs and escalators in an effort to shake off any pursuer. Even so, when she reached the underground platform, she slowed her progress and let the waiting train whisk away without her. The platform was not quite deserted once the train had left, but that would be too much to hope for. There were always people who seemed to have nothing better to do than loiter in Métro stations, oblivious to the passage of the trains and the urgent schedules of the other commuters. A young man in a checked jacket and flat cap was reading the racing news, a cigarette balanced on the edge of his lower lip. A plump but pretty young woman was attending to her make-up with the aid of a little brass mirror, her expression a pout of absolute concentration.

Auger looked at her watch again, anxious to get the next part over with. But it was still a couple of minutes to noon, and the electricity in the rails would not yet have been turned off. She pressed her handbag closer to her, observing the slow drift of new passengers on to the platform. She had moved to the very limit of the platform, where the rails disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. At one minute to noon, she saw the lights of another train pick out the rails snaking out of the tunnel at the other end of the platform, and then the train arrived in a commotion of brakes and wheels. She looked at her watch again, willing the train to depart. The last thing she needed was for the train to get stuck in the tunnel between the station and her entry point.

The train moved off. It was very nearly noon. A few more people arrived on the platform, and then the hand on her watch said it was time to go. There was no visible change in the condition of the rails, but she had no intention of touching them to test Aveling’s attentiveness. She would know soon enough if he had done his job.

Auger made her move as quickly as she dared. In one fluid movement, she knelt on the edge of the platform, swung her legs over and then lowered herself on to the grimy concrete upon which the rails were laid. Her hands were already filthy with soot and oil, and doubtless her rump was covered in the same black dirt. It didn’t matter: if all went according to plan, she would never emerge from this tunnel again, and there would be no one to wonder why a smartly dressed young woman had allowed herself to get into such a state.

Someone cried out. She looked back in time to see the man with the racing paper raise a hand towards her, the cigarette dropping from his lip, while the plump girl lowered her mirror to see what all the fuss was about. But by then Auger had slipped into the concealing darkness of the tunnel, keeping the wall to her left and the closest rail to her right. Once she had gone more than a few metres into the tunnel, she knew that no one would be able to see her. Unfortunately, she could also see very little ahead of her, and this time she didn’t have the brightness of the station to guide her. Moving as quickly as she could, Auger kept her back to the wall for support and walked crab-fashion into the blackness, trying not to think about the mice and rats that were undoubtedly scurrying near her feet, or the lethal voltage that might still be coursing through the rails. She had about a hundred metres to cover, and rather less than two minutes in which to do it.

Something shone in the darkness ahead of her: a blood-red light, very dim, but moving. For a horrifying moment, she thought it was a train approaching her through the tunnel, even though any trains should have arrived from behind, not ahead of her. Then her sense of perspective shifted and she realised that the light was a torch being shone in her direction by someone further down the tunnel.

“Hurry, Auger,” she heard a voice call out. “The juice has to come on again in thirty seconds, and the trains will be moving not long after that!”

“Aveling?”

“Keep moving,” he said in reply. “We really don’t have much time.”

“I think a man saw me go into the tunnel.”

“Don’t worry about him.”

As she moved forward, the red light gradually grew brighter. Very faintly, she began to make out the dark outline of a figure crouched close to the wall. It seemed much further away than she had been expecting: voices carried very well down the tunnel.

“Move, Auger,” he hissed.

“I’m doing my best.”

“Good. Don’t trip now, because the rails are electrified.”

“You didn’t have to tell me that. If anything it’s even more likely to make me trip.”

“You have the goods?”

“Yes,” she said, clenching her teeth. “I have the goods.”

As she picked her way forward, the figure with the torch gradually became clearer and, now that her eyes were becoming better adapted to the dark, she could make out a gap in the wall immediately next to him.

“Hurry now. We’re picking up a current draw on the line.”

“Meaning what?”

“That trains are already running again. They won’t waste much time after an intermittent fault, not during the midday rush.”

At last, Auger could see the outline of Aveling’s features. She sped up for the final dozen metres, grasping for the sanctuary of that dark gap in the wall.

“I think I see a train entering Cardinal Lemoine,” Aveling warned.

“I’m nearly there.”

“Train’s moving again. Hurry up, Auger. I’m not standing here for much longer.”

With little attempt to preserve her dignity, he pushed Auger through the crack in the wall, into the darkness beyond. The squeal of the approaching train grew louder, reverberating off the tunnel walls. “Help me with this door,” Aveling said. “We have to get it back into place.”

He guided her hands on to the old wooden door and she felt it shift under the pressure they were applying. The door crunched back into place at the last moment, with the lights of the train shining through the narrowing gap.

“That was close,” Aveling said.

“Do you think anyone on the train saw us?”

“No.”

“What about the man on the platform?” She described him briefly.

“Like I said, don’t worry about him. He’s a confidence trickster, spends all his days on that station snooping for victims. He won’t be reporting anything to the authorities.” He turned off the red torch, then immediately switched on a much brighter white one. Auger squinted against the sudden glare, recognising the cramped and filthy gullet of the access tunnel.

“I repeat: you have the goods?”

“Yes,” she said, wearily. “Like I already told you.”

“Good. I was beginning to worry that you weren’t going to complete your mission. I’m glad to see you’ve decided to act sensibly. Give me the papers.”

“They’re safe with me.”

“I said give them to me, Auger.” Before she could argue, he snatched her bag and flashed the torch on the bundle of documents within. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? Not for all the trouble you’ve gone to.” He pulled the papers out and returned the bag to her.

She thought about Susan White’s likely suspicion that there was someone on the team who couldn’t be trusted. Maybe it was Aveling, maybe it wasn’t, but as long as Auger kept the papers in sight, she reckoned that no immediate harm could come to them. All she had to do was ensure that they made it back to Caliskan.

“I don’t know what any of this is about, Aveling. Right now I’m not even sure I want to know. Can we just get this over with?”

“You won’t be able to return just yet,” he said. “We’re still having some difficulties with the link.”

Another train rumbled through the nearby tunnel, the vibration of its passage dislodging dust from the ceiling of the access shaft.

“Due to the temporary problem you said would be fixed by now?”

“It’s proving to be a little less temporary than we were hoping.” Aveling stopped and shone the torch ahead of them, aiming the beam along the gentle curve of the shaft.

Auger saw his frown. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I just thought I heard something.”

“Probably one of your own people at the portal end,” Auger suggested.

Aveling unzipped his jacket and slid the papers snugly inside. “Come on. Let’s move on.”

Auger couldn’t help noticing that he had slipped an automatic out of his jacket at the same time as he hid the papers. The locally made weapon gleamed an oily blue in the torchlight.

“I saw something move,” Auger said suddenly, dropping her voice to a whisper.

The torch beam skittered ahead of them like a nervous animal. “Where?”

“Down the tunnel. Looked like a person, crouching against the wall.” She caught her breath, then added, “It almost looked like a child.”

“A child? Don’t be silly.”

“A child could easily have found their way down here.”

Aveling shook his head, but she could see that he was rattled. She didn’t blame him. She had not enjoyed her previous journey along this tunnel, and she certainly wasn’t enjoying this one.

“Is anyone there?” Aveling called. “Anyone from the portal? Barton—is that you?”

“It wasn’t Barton,” Auger said. “Or Skellsgard, either.”

Aveling fired off a warning shot. The muzzle of the automatic spat orange flame into darkness, the bullet crunching through rock a dozen metres ahead of them. After the report of the gun had faded, echoes marching up and down the shaft for a few tense moments, there was only silence and their own breathing.

“Damn,” Aveling said.

“You saw something?”

“I think I saw something. But maybe it was just you planting the suggestion in my head.”

“You heard something before I saw the child,” Auger pointed out.

“I thought I saw something as well,” Aveling said, sounding a good deal less sure of himself.

“Something like a child?”

“It wasn’t a child. If it was a child, then there was something badly…” But he left the remark uncompleted.

“Something’s not right here,” Auger said. She pressed him against the wall, silencing him with a hiss. “You know it.”

“We’re just seeing shadows.”

“Or something’s gone wrong. I know what I saw. I wasn’t imagining it, even if you think you were.”

He answered her with a hiss of his own, all the while aiming the muzzle of the automatic along the shaft. She noticed that his hand was shaking badly.

“So what are you saying?” he snapped.

“I’m saying we should get out of here before we walk any further into trouble.”

“Look,” Aveling said as the torchlight suddenly came to rest on something on the floor, ten or twelve metres further down the tunnel. “That’s a body.”

It was too big to be a child. “I think that might be Barton,” Auger said, with a kind of hopeless inevitability. “I think that might be Barton, and I think he might be dead.”

“Not possible,” Aveling said.

He pulled free from her grip and moved further ahead, taking the torch with him. The light bobbed down the tunnel until Aveling reached the body. He knelt and inspected the dead man, the gun still shaking in his grip.

“This is bad,” he muttered.

Auger forced herself to join him by the body. Up close, there was no doubt that it was Barton. Aveling played the torch over the corpse, lingering over a cluster of bullet holes in the man’s chest. There must have been twenty individual wounds, overlapping like lunar craters. They were tightly spaced, as if they had been fired in rapid succession at close range. His fingers were still curled lightly around the grip of another automatic. Auger pulled the gun free. Barton’s hand was still warm.

“Now let’s get out of here,” she said.

Aveling’s arm jerked as he squeezed off another two shots into the darkness. In the muzzle flash, Auger thought she saw something as well: a small doll-like figure scurrying along close to the rough-hewn tunnel wall. The child-sized figure wore a red dress, but the face she had seen in the instant of the flash had not been that of a child at all, but something wizened and feral: half-hag, half-ghoul, with a vile grin full of sharp, blackened teeth. The automatic felt heavy in her hands as she pointed it into the darkness and tried to aim at the spot where she thought the scurrying figure would be by now. She clicked the trigger, but nothing happened. Cursing her stupidity, she fumbled for the safety catch and tried again, but Barton must have already emptied the clip.

“We’re in a lot of trouble,” Aveling said. He stood up, keeping his knees bent in a crouch, and began to back away from the body.

“I definitely saw something that time,” Auger said, still holding the gun. “It looked like a child… but when I saw the face—”

“It wasn’t a child,” Aveling said.

“You were expecting something, weren’t you?”

“Go to the top of the class.”

Useless as it was, she couldn’t help but press the muzzle of the empty automatic against him. “Start talking to me, you pig.” That was not the word she’d had in mind, but “pig” was the worst she could bring herself to utter, even under these stressful circumstances. “The child’s from E1, isn’t she?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because whatever it is doesn’t belong here. Now tell me what you know.”

“It’s an NI infiltration unit,” Aveling said heavily. He danced the torch beam around the walls, but there was no sign of the child.

“A what?”

“Oh, come on, Auger. Surely you remember that nasty little war we don’t like to talk about nowadays? Against our friends in the Federation of Polities?”

“What about it?”

“They sent their children against us. The Neotenic Infantry: genetically engineered, cloned, psychologically programmed killing machines, packaged to look like children.”

Despite herself, she couldn’t help but be moved by the horror she heard in his voice. Anything that left that kind of a scar on a man like Aveling, she thought, had to be bad news.

“Did you fight against them?” she asked.

“I engaged them. It’s not always the same thing. Those vicious little creatures could crawl into spaces we thought were secure and hide for weeks, somehow surviving on zero rations… silent, waiting like coiled snakes, almost in a coma… until they emerged.” His breathing was becoming ragged as he slipped deeper into memories. “They were difficult to kill. Fast, strong, wound-tolerant… pain threshold off the scale. Highly attuned sense of self-preservation… and yet perfectly willing to die to serve a mission objective. And even when we knew what they were, even when we had a clear line of sight… it was almost impossible to turn our weapons on them. They looked like children. We were fighting four billion years of evolution telling us we shouldn’t squeeze that trigger.”

“War babies,” Auger said. “That was what we called them, wasn’t it?”

“So you do remember your history.” His mocking tone did nothing to disguise his fear.

She thought back to Cassandra, the Slasher representative who had passed as an adolescent on the mission that had got her into this mess in the first place. The Neotenic Infantry had been a step towards the emergence of entire factions of child-sized Slashers. But it had also been a step that no one liked to talk about now, least of all the Slashers.

“I remember that they were a genetic dead end. They didn’t work out well. They were mentally unstable and they wore out fast.”

“They were weapons,” Aveling said, “designed with a specific shelf life.”

“But no one’s seen any war babies for twenty, thirty years, Aveling. Please tell me what one is doing in a tunnel under Paris in E2.”

“Figure it out for yourself, Auger. The Slashers are here. They already have a presence in E2.”

Suddenly she felt very cold and very scared, and very far from home. “We have to get back to the surface.”

“No,” Aveling said, regaining some of his nerve. “We must get to the portal. The portal absolutely cannot be compromised.”

“It must already be compromised if they’re here. How else did they arrive?”

Aveling started to say something, but seemed to have trouble getting his words out. He made a phlegmy choking sound and fell heavily against Auger, torch and gun dropping to the floor. Auger drew breath in to scream: it was a natural human reaction, given that the person next to her had just been killed. But somehow she held it in. Shaking, concentrating on acting rather than thinking, she reached for the torch and replaced Barton’s useless automatic with the one Aveling had been carrying.

Keeping low, she shone the torch down the shaft and by some accident managed to pin the child to the wall with the fat circle of the beam. The light paralysed the child for a moment. It looked at her with its, horrid, shrivelled travesty of a face, wrinkled and bloodless lips framing a devilish, broken-toothed grin.

They wore out fast.

A dry, black tongue moved between the lips. In its tiny claw of a hand it held what she assumed was a gun, which it raised towards Auger. She fired first, aiming the automatic in the general direction of the child. The weapon kicked violently back against her palm as it discharged. Auger let out a small, anguished yelp of pain and surprise as the child creased in the middle and fell out of the spotlight cast by the torch. Its weapon clattered to the ground and the child let out a vile, draining shriek, like steam escaping from a boiling kettle.

Every instinct told Auger to run back the way she had come, back to daylight. She knew that there might be more of these creatures in the tunnel. But she had to see what she had killed or maimed.

She walked up to it, the gun still heavy in her hand, trusting that there was at least one more bullet in the magazine but preferring not to know for sure. The child’s shrieking was dying away, becoming a faint, almost rhythmic moan.

She kicked the child’s weapon away and knelt down next to the body. The mop of black hair on top of the creature’s head had slipped to one side, exposing a wrinkled, age-spotted skull, pale and hairless. Up close, in the unforgiving light of the torch, the child’s face was all sagging folds and bruised welts. It looked like perished rubber beneath a cracking layer of smudged make-up. The eyes were a rheumy shade of yellow. The teeth were rotten black stubs behind which the swollen black mass of a diseased tongue moved like some imprisoned monster, attempting to form coherent sounds between each wheezing moan. The child had a disgusting smell about it, like the recesses of an institutional kitchen.

“What are you doing here?” Auger asked.

In rasps, the child answered, “You don’t need to know.”

“I know what you are. You’re a military abomination, something that should have been wiped out decades ago. The question is, why weren’t you?”

Mouthfuls of fluid spilled through the broken portcullis of the child’s teeth. “We got lucky,” the child said, gurgling with what was either a slow choking death or mocking laughter.

“You call this lucky?” Auger asked, nodding towards the wound she had put in the child’s stomach.

“I’ve done what I was put here to do,” the child said. “I call that lucky.”

Then it died, its head lolling back suddenly and its eyes freezing in their sockets. Auger reached out in the darkness, feeling here and there until her hand closed around the weapon that the child had carried. She was expecting another automatic—another E2 artefact, at the very least—but the shape of the thing felt unfamiliar and alien. Standing up, she slipped the child’s gun into her handbag and stepped away from the corpse.

She heard sounds behind her: frantic scraping and rustling noises. She whipped the torch around, expecting to see rats. Instead, she picked out a boy and a girl crouched near Aveling’s body. They were rummaging in his clothes. As the light fell on them, they looked at her and hissed in anger.

“Get away from him,” she said, pointing the automatic. “I’ve already killed one of you and I’ll kill the rest of you if I have to.”

The boy flashed his teeth at her, pulling the wad of papers from Aveling’s jacket. He was completely bald, like a miniaturised version of an old man. “Thank you,” he said nastily. “We can’t have this falling into the wrong hands, can we?”

“Drop the papers,” Auger ordered.

The girl snarled something at the boy. She had something in one hand as well, glinting silver. She pointed it in Auger’s direction, but Auger fired first, the automatic dancing in her hand as she discharged three rounds. The boy hissed and dropped the papers. The girl made another angry sound and snatched the papers from the ground, but as the torchlight played over her, Auger saw that she had hit the girl as well—more by luck than skill, certainly.

“Drop the papers,” she said again.

The girl pulled away from the circle of torchlight. The boy moaned, pawing at a star-shaped wound in his thigh. There was something horrible and doglike about his movements, as if he did not quite grasp the significance of his injury. He tried to stand, but his injured leg buckled under him in a way legs were never meant to buckle. The boy let out a high-pitched shriek of anger and pain. He reached into his little schoolboy blazer and began to pull out something metallic. Auger shot him again, this time putting a bullet through his chest.

He stopped moving.

She waved the torchlight down the tunnel, but there was no sign of the girl. Shocked and breathless, Auger stumbled after her until she saw something fluttering on the ground. She picked it up, recognising one of the documents she had just given to Aveling. There was no sign that the girl had dropped anything else. Auger jammed the paper inside her own coat, making a mental note to examine it later—if she survived that long. She returned to the boy, made sure that he was dead and then did the same for Aveling, shining the torch into his face until she was certain that there would be no reaction.

She heard movement further down the shaft: a dragging sound. Crouching low, she held the automatic at arm’s length and tried to locate the source of the sound with the torch.

“Auger?” The female voice was weak and hoarse.

“Who is it?”

“Skellsgard. Thank God you’re still alive.”

A short figure emerged from the darkness, using the wall of the tunnel for support. One leg was a stiff, bloodied mass, flesh the texture of raw hamburger visible through the ribbons of her trousers. Seeing the state Skellsgard was in, Auger caught her breath. She lowered the muzzle of the automatic, but didn’t put it away.

“You’re in a bad way,” Auger said.

“I’m lucky,” Skellsgard said, with a defiant scowl. “They thought I was dead. If they’d had any doubts, they’d have finished the job properly.”

“Stay where you are. We have to get you back to the portal.”

“Portal isn’t safe.”

“It’s got to be safer than this tunnel.” Auger pushed herself to her full height, then quickly covered the distance to the injured woman. “Oh gosh, look at you,” she said.

“Like I said, I’m the lucky one.” Her voice was like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other. She had ripped one of her sleeves off and used it as a makeshift tourniquet around her upper thigh, just below the groin. “I was bleeding badly, but I don’t think they hit anything vital.”

“You need help—and not the kind you’re going to get on E2.” Auger looked around, suddenly disorientated. “Do you think they’ve all gone?”

“There were three of them.”

“I killed two. The third must have got away.” Auger thumbed the automatic’s safety catch on and slipped the gun into her waistband. It jabbed painfully into her side, but she wanted it where she could get hold of it quickly if she needed to. “Here, lean against me. How far is it to the censor?”

“About fifty metres back that way.” She gestured vaguely behind her with a toss of her head.

“Can you make it?”

Skellsgard transferred her weight to Auger. “I can try.”

“Tell me what happened. I need to know everything.”

“I can only tell you what I know.”

“That’ll do for now.”

“What did you get from Aveling?”

“Not very much,” Auger said. They were making slow progress, with Skellsgard’s movements restricted to small, agonised hops. Auger didn’t want to think about the pain she must be experiencing from her shredded leg. “Aveling knew more than I did, obviously. I got the distinct impression that he knew there were Slasher elements already here. What I don’t know is whether or not he knew how they’d got here.”

“We had suspicions,” Skellsgard said, “but this is the first clear look we’ve had at them.”

“You want to hazard a guess as to how they got here?”

“There’s only one way into E2,” Skellsgard said. “We’re sure of that. It’s our portal, and it’s been under our absolute control since we opened it. Anything foreign in E2 has to have come through the portal, and it has to have passed through the censor.”

“So I was told,” Auger said, “but that didn’t stop these… things.”

“War babies are biotechnological weapons, sure, but there’s nothing mechanical about them—nothing that the censor should have rejected. I can believe they got through, somehow or other.”

“Recently?”

“No,” Skellsgard said. “There’s no way those children came through while we’ve been running the portal. Slasher agents might have penetrated our security, might even have passed themselves off as Threshers. But children? I think we’d have noticed.”

“They got here somehow. If the portal’s the only way in, that’s how they must have arrived.”

“Then there’s only one explanation,” Skellsgard said. “Do you mind if I stop for a moment? I need to rest.”

“Be my guest.”

Skellsgard paused for a minute before speaking again, keeping her eyes closed for much of that time. “They can’t have come through the portal while we’ve been running it. Which leaves only one possibility: they must have come through before that.” She screwed up her face, her eyes watering. Auger guessed that shock must be setting in.

“Do you have any idea when?” she asked gently.

“Mars has been under our control for around twenty-three years, ever since the armistice. We didn’t discover the portal until two years ago, but that doesn’t mean anyone else could have been secretly using it during all those years. We’d have noticed something going on. Just the power drain required to keep the portal open—”

“But clearly someone did use it.”

“In which case it must have happened more than twenty-three years ago. Just before the armistice, there was a period when Mars and its moons were under Slasher authority. It didn’t last very long—about eighteen months, give or take.”

“You’re saying those war babies have been in Paris for twenty-three years?”

“It’s the only explanation I can think of. Any Slasher agents on E2 would have been stranded here once Mars was handed back to us. Actually, that would explain a lot. War babies were infertile, and they were never meant to grow old.”

“Aveling said something about a shelf life.”

“They were supposed to be ‘decommissioned’ before senescence set in. Gotta love those Slasher euphemisms. But these war babies have been left to grow old on their own. That’s why they look the way they do.”

“So what have they been doing all this time?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“Can you move again?” Auger asked. “I think we need to be on our way.”

Skellsgard grunted in agreement and resumed her hopping progress. “We lost control of Susan White,” she said, between ragged breaths. “One explanation is that she was working for the enemy. Having known Susan, I don’t think that’s very likely.”

“I don’t think it’s very likely either.”

“I’m more inclined to believe that she figured out part of what was going on here—that there was already a Slasher presence on E2.”

“Did she report this back to Caliskan?”

Skellsgard shook her head. “No. I think she must have been worried about blowing her own cover. She may not have been working for the enemy, but she might have had her doubts about someone else on the team.”

“I sort of arrived at the same conclusion,” Auger said cautiously.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Auger said. “Why bring me into the operation, unless she was unwilling to trust an insider to get the job done?”

“I think you could be right.”

“It means I have to make a decision about who to trust. With Aveling and Barton it’s not exactly an issue any more. That leaves you, Maurya.”

“And?”

“I don’t know what Susan thought about you. For better or for worse, I don’t think I have much choice but to trust you.”

“Well, that’s a resounding vote of confidence.”

“Sorry—I meant it to sound a bit more positive than that. Not that it makes much difference now that the papers are gone.”

“But you looked at them, right?”

“Glanced through them,” Auger said.

“Better than nothing. At least you have some idea about what was worth killing for. If we can get that news back to Caliskan, maybe he can put the pieces together.”

“And if Caliskan is the problem?”

“All Susan’s letters were addressed to him,” Skellsgard said. “Right until the end. That suggests she still trusted him, even if she had her doubts about everyone else.”

“Maybe.”

“We have to start somewhere.”

“Agreed, I suppose. But can we get a message through to him? Aveling told me there were problems with the link.”

“There are always problems,” Skellsgard replied. “It’s just got a lot worse since you arrived. Did you hear about the shit-storm brewing back home?”

“Aveling said that the Polities are stirring up trouble.”

“It’s worse than that. We’ve got a full-scale civil war in Polity space, between the moderates and the aggressors. No one’s putting any money on who’s going to win that particular catfight. Meanwhile, the aggressors are moving their assets deep into the inner system, into USNE space.”

“Doesn’t that constitute a declaration of war?”

“It would if the USNE wasn’t so afraid of fighting back. At the moment, our politicians are just making a lot of exasperated noises and hoping the moderates will rein in the aggressors.”

“And?”

“Be nice if it happens.”

“I’m worried about my kids, Maurya. I need to be back there, taking care of them. If the aggressors move on Tanglewood—”

“It’s all right. We heard from your ex just before the link went tits-up. He wanted you to know that he’ll make sure your kids are safe.”

“He’d better,” Auger replied.

“Jesus, kid, he’s only trying to reassure you. Cut the guy some slack.”

Auger ignored her. “Tell me about the link. What, exactly, is the problem?”

“Problem is our friends from the Polities are a little too close to Mars for comfort. They know about link technology, of course. They already have the sensors to detect and localise active portals. If they even have a whisper of intelligence about there being a link around Mars, they’ll be looking for it. Consequently we’re having to run the link as quietly as we can, and that’s why it keeps going down.”

“They must know about it already. How else could the children have got here?”

“But when we took Phobos off them, there was no sign that they’d ever discovered the portal.”

“Maybe,” Auger said, “that was just what they wanted you to think.”

They had reached the heavy iron door that led to the censor chamber. It was ajar, a bright, septic yellow light spilling through from beyond.

“It’s as I left it,” Skellsgard observed.

“Best not to take anything for granted, all the same. Wait here a moment.” Auger propped Skellsgard up against the wall and pulled the automatic from her waistband, praying that there was still at least one bullet inside it. She stepped over the metal lip of the door, squeezing through the gap into the room beyond, and whipped the gun from corner to corner as fast as she could.

No children: at least, none that she could see.

She helped Skellsgard into the room, then heaved shut the iron door. Together they spun the heavy-duty lock. The door could only be unlocked from the inside.

“How are you doing?” Auger asked.

“Not too good. I think I need to loosen this tourniquet.”

“Let’s get you through the censor first.”

The bright-yellow barrier of the censor was the only source of light in the room. It flickered in Auger’s peripheral vision, but when she looked at it directly, it remained completely unwavering. Fused into the rock around it, the framework machinery looked intact, as thoroughly ancient and alien as the last time she had seen it.

“I’m going to go ahead first and check,” Auger said. “I’ll be back in a few seconds.”

“Or not,” Skellsgard said.

“If I don’t come back—if there’s something waiting for me on the other side—then you’ll have to take your chances on E2.”

Skellsgard shivered. “I’d sooner take my chances in the Stone Age.”

“They’re not that bad. They do have anaesthetic, plus some rudimentary knowledge of sterilisation. If you can get yourself taken to a hospital, you’ll have a pretty good chance of being looked after.”

“And then? When they start asking awkward questions?”

“Then you’re on your own,” Auger said.

“I’d rather risk the censor. Let me go first, will you? I’m already hurt, and there’s no point two of us taking an unnecessary risk. If things are OK, I’ll poke my head back through to let you know.”

“Take this,” Auger said, offering her the automatic.

“You fired this thing?”

“Yes, and I can’t promise that there are any bullets left in it.”

She helped Skellsgard to the censor, then stood back as the injured woman supported her weight from the overhead rail and—with a grunt of effort and discomfort—succeeded in picking up sufficient momentum to swing herself over the threshold. The bright-yellow surface puckered inward, darkening to a bruised shade of golden brown, then swallowed her completely before twanging back to its intact state.

Auger waited, delving into her handbag for the weapon she had taken from the war baby. It was designed for a smaller hand than hers, but she could still grip it, even if it felt uncomfortable. It was made of metal and was very light compared with the automatic. But it was still a gun. There was a trigger and a trigger guard, and a sliding button that she figured was the safety catch. There was a perforated barrel with a hole in the end and a complex hinged loading mechanism that swung out from one side. The gun was machined from curved, sleekly interlocking parts, and she suspected that it could also be reconfigured for throwing or stabbing if circumstances demanded. It didn’t look like something she would have expected to find in an E2 gunsmith’s workshop, but neither was it twenty-third-century condensed-energy technology from the Slasher armament works in E1 space. As foreign as it looked, it was something that could conceivably have been made in E2 Paris, using local technology.

Something was pushing through the yellow surface: Skellsgard’s face emerged with a pop of breaking surface tension. “It’s safe,” she said.

Auger disabled the weapon’s safety catch and followed the other woman through the tingling barrier of the censor. Just before it swallowed her, she had time to remember Skellsgard’s story of the endless yellow limbo she had once experienced during the passage through the censor; that sense of being scrutinised by minds as ancient and huge as mountains. Auger braced herself, some part of her wanting that experience, another fearing it with every atom of her existence. But the moment of transition was as brief as the first time. As before, she felt a mild elastic resistance that suddenly abated, as if she had burst through the skin of a drum. There had been no audience with God, or whatever godlike entities had created the censor and the duplicate Earth. Nor had any part of her been refused passage. Her clothes and the gun she carried were still with her when she entered the portal chamber. The censor’s implacable logic had decided to allow those simple things through. Or perhaps it was much less concerned with artefacts escaping E2 than entering it.

“No one’s come through,” Skellsgard said. She was leaning against a console, her face a pallid mask of exhaustion and shock.

“No sign of any children?”

“I don’t think they made it this far. Fucking lucky that they didn’t, or they might have done something irreversible to the link, or turned the far end into a temporary white hole. Adios, Phobos, and anything near it.”

“Let’s take a look at your leg.”

“I’ve adjusted the tourniquet. It’ll be OK for a while.”

Auger snapped a first-aid kit from its wall mounting. She fumbled the plastic catches open and rummaged through the contents until she found a morphine jab. “Can you do this yourself?” she asked, passing the syringe to Skellsgard. “I’m not too good with needles.”

“I’ll manage.” Skellsgard bit the sterile wrapper from the syringe, then jammed the needle into her thigh, just above the wound but below the tourniquet. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do,” she said. “Guess I’ll find out sooner or later.”

“We have to get the link up and running,” Auger said. “Can we do it together?”

“Give me a moment.” She nodded at one of the desks down on the machine floor. “In the meantime, go down to that console and throw all the switches on the top bank to their red settings. Then see if any of the dials stay in the green.”

“It’s that simple?”

“One step at a time, sister. We’re not cooking with gas here. We’re dealing with major alterations to the local space-time metric.”

“My will’s already up to date,” Auger said. She removed her shoes and made her way down the spiral access ladder as quickly as she could. She had never been down to the machine floor before, and the scale of the equipment looming around and over her was dauntingly impressive. Fortunately, it all looked intact. The transit craft was suspended overhead in the vacuum-filled recovery bubble, clutched in the bee-striped cradle, its blunt, stress-battered nose still aimed away from the mirror-lined shaft of the portal tunnel.

Once they’d turned it around, all they needed was a moment of stability from the link.

She made her way to the console Skellsgard had indicated and flipped the heavy-duty toggle switches one by one. The dials quivered, but although one or two needles continued to hover in the red for a few moments, they eventually sank back into the green.

“We’re looking good,” Auger said.

Skellsgard had dragged herself to the railed edge of the upper catwalk and was looking down on Auger. “All right. That’s better than I expected. Now see that second bank of switches, under the hinged plastic hood?”

“Got it.”

“Lift the hood and start flipping them as well, and keep an eye on the dials. If more than two of them twitch into the red and stay there, stop flipping.”

“Why do I have the impression that this is the tricky bit?”

“It’s all tricky,” Skellsgard said.

Auger began to flip the second set of toggles: slower this time, letting the dial above each switch twitch and settle before advancing to the next. Around her, with each switch that she threw, the machinery notched up its humming presence. Red and green status lights began to blink on items of equipment halfway across the floor, and even in the recovery bubble itself.

“I’m halfway there,” Auger said. “So far so good. Will the ship fly itself?”

“One step at a time. We’ll prep the ship once we’ve established throat curvature. Getting goose pimples yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You should be.”

Auger threw another switch. “Whoah, wait,” she said. “We’re holding in the red on the fifth dial.”

“That’s what I was worried about. All right. Reverse the last switch you flicked, see if that helps.”

Auger did as she was told. “Back in the green,” she said after a few seconds.

“Try it again.”

“Still in the red. Reversing and trying again.” Auger waited, biting her tongue. “Sorry. No joy. What does that mean?”

“It means we have a problem. All right. Leave that be and move to the second console, the one with the toolkit next to it.”

“Got it.”

“Throw the red switch on the right-hand side of the monitor and tell me what kind of numbers come up in the third column of the read-out.”

Auger scraped dust from the glass. “Fifteen point one seven three, thirteen point zero four—”

“Roughly, Auger. I don’t need decimal precision here.”

“They’re all between ten and twenty.”

“Shit. That’s not good. Stability’s still compromised.”

“Can we get home?”

“Not easily.”

Auger turned from the console and looked up at Skellsgard. “What if we wait? Will things get better?”

“They might do. Then again, they might get worse. And there’s no telling how long this instability will last. Could be hours. Could be tens of hours or even days.”

“We can’t wait that long, not when more of those kids might show up at any moment. When you say ‘not easily,’ what does that mean? That there is a way?”

“There’s a way,” Skellsgard said. “For one of us.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We’ll need to stabilise the throat geometry at this end, and that’s going to cost us more power than we can supply in the long term.”

Auger shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the link folds once we’re out of here.”

Skellsgard shook her head. “Not that simple. Look, I don’t want to give you a lecture on hypervacuum theory—”

“Suits me fine.”

Skellsgard smiled. “The essential point is that the local throat has to stay open until we reach the far end. Things will get messy if it snaps shut, and they’ll get really, really messy if it snaps shut violently. We’ll run the risk of losing the link, for a start. And while the closure might be a relatively low-energy event as seen from the Paris end, all the energy released by the tunnel collapse will find its way to the Phobos end. It’s like stretching a big elastic band between your hands and then letting go of one end—you get the picture? And even if the collapse isn’t violent enough to bring down the link, we’d still be surfing a major stress wave in the transport. We’d have a soliton chasing us all the way home.”

“What’s a soliton?”

“Like a ruck in a carpet, only with a seriously pissed-off attitude.”

“That’s all I need to know. Now tell me what we can do about it. Can we stop the throat snapping shut?”

“Yes,” Skellsgard said. “Once the ship’s cleared the throat, the power can be ramped down to a level the generators can sustain until the ship gets home.”

“Doesn’t sound too complicated to me.”

“It isn’t. The problem is that it isn’t a procedure we ever got around to automating. It was always assumed that we’d have a team here, or that we could hang around indefinitely until stability improved.”

“I see,” Auger said quietly. “Well, you’d better show me what to do.”

“No way,” Skellsgard said. “No disrespect, Auger, but this isn’t exactly the kind of thing they teach you in history school. You’re getting in the ship. I’ll handle the throat.”

“What about the children?”

“They didn’t get in here before. I’m pretty sure I’ll be safe until a rescue party gets through.”

“But that will take days,” Auger said.

“About sixty hours if they can do an immediate turnaround on the ship, and if stability conditions are optimal. Longer if they’re not.”

“I’m not leaving you here.”

“I can hold out,” Skellsgard said. “You’re the one with the critical information, not me.”

“I lost almost all that information in the tunnel.”

“But you saw it. That has to be worth something.”

Auger left the console and sprinted back up the ladder to Skellsgard. “What exactly is involved in controlling the throat?”

“It’s a very technically demanding procedure.”

“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.”