Century Rain

TWO

Verity Auger surveyed the underground scene from the safety of her environment suit, standing a dozen metres from the crippled wreckage of the crawler. The tarantula-like machine lay tilted to one side, two of its legs broken and another three jammed uselessly against the low ceiling of carved ice. The crawler was going nowhere—it couldn’t even be dragged back to the surface; but at least its life-support bubble was still intact. Cassandra, the girl student, was still sitting inside the cabin, arms folded, watching the proceedings with a kind of haughty detachment. Sebastian, the boy, was lying about five metres from the crawler, his suit damaged but still capable of keeping him alive until the rescue squad arrived.

“Hang in there,” Auger told him on the suit-to-suit. “They’re breaking through. We’ll be home and dry any moment now.”

The crackle and static accompanying the boy’s response made him seem a million light-years away. “I don’t feel too good, miss.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Headache.”

“Just stay still. Those suit seals will do their job if you don’t move.”

Auger stepped back as rescue crawlers from the Antiquities Board emerged from above, forcing ice aside with piston-driven claws and picks.

“That you, Auger?” came a voice in her helmet.

“Of course it’s me. What took you so long? Thought you guys were never coming.”

“We came as fast as we could.” She recognised the voice of Mancuso, one of the recovery people she had dealt with in the past. “Had trouble getting a fix on you this far down. The clouds seemed to be having some kind of argument tonight, lots of electromagnetic crap to see through. What exactly were you doing this deep?”

“My job,” she said tersely.

“The kid hurt?”

“His suit took a hit.” On her own faceplate monitor she could still see the diagnostic summary for Sebastian’s suit, hatched with pulsing red hazard indicators near the right elbow joint. “But it’s nothing serious. I told him to lie down and keep still until rescue arrived.”

The lead crawler was already disgorging two members of the rescue squad, clad in the faintly comical suits of the extreme-hazards section. They moved like sumo warriors, in squatting strides.

Auger moved to Sebastian, kneeling down next to him. “They’re here. All you have to do is keep still and you’ll be safe and sound.”

Sebastian made an unintelligible gurgle in reply. Auger raised a hand, signalling the nearer of the two suits to approach her. “This is the boy, Mancuso. I think you should deal with him first.”

“That’s already the plan,” another voice squawked in her helmet. “Stand back, Auger.”

“Careful with him,” she warned. “He’s got a bad rip near the right—”

Mancuso’s suit towered over the little boy. “Easy, son,” she heard. “Gonna have you fixed up in no time. You all right in there?”

“Hurt,” she heard Sebastian gasp.

“Think we need to move fast on this one,” Mancuso said, beckoning the second rescuer to him with a flick of one overmuscled arm. “Can’t risk moving him, not with the particle density as high as it is.”

“Recover in situ?” the second rescuer asked.

“Let’s do it.”

Mancuso pointed his left arm at the boy. A hatch slid open in the armour and a spray nozzle popped out. Silvery-white matter gushed from the nozzle, solidifying instantly on impact. In a matter of seconds, Sebastian became a human-shaped cocoon wrapped in hard spittlelike strands.

“Careful with him,” Auger repeated.

A second team then set to work, cutting into the block of ice immediately underneath Sebastian with lasers. Steam blasted into the air from the cutting point. They paused now and again, signalling each other with tiny hand gestures before resuming. The first team returned with a wheeled, stretcherlike harness, pushing it between them. Thin metal claws lowered from the cradle, slipping into the ice around Sebastian. The cradle slowly hoisted the entire cocooned mass—including its foundation of ice—away from the ground. Auger watched them wheel Sebastian away and load him into the first recovery machine.

“It was just a scratch,” Auger said, when Mancuso returned to check on her. “You don’t have to act as if it’s an emergency, scaring the kid to death.”

“It’ll be an experience for him.”

“He’s already had enough experience for one day.”

“Well, can’t be too careful. Down here all accidents are emergencies. Thought you’d have known that by now, Auger.”

“You should check on the girl,” she said, indicating the crawler.

“She hurt?”

“No.”

“Then she isn’t a priority. Let’s see what you risked these kids’ lives for, shall we?”

Mancuso meant the newspaper.

“It’s in the crawler’s storage shelf,” Auger said, leading him over to the crippled machine. At the front of the crawler, tucked beneath sets of manipulator arms and tools, were a netting pouch and a hatch containing a compartmented storage tray. Auger released the manual catch and slid out the tray. “Look,” she said, taking the newspaper out of its slot with great care.

“Whew!” Mancuso whistled, grudgingly impressed. “Where’d you find it?”

She pointed to a sunken area just ahead of the wrecked machine. “We found a car down there.”

“Anyone inside?”

“Empty. We smashed the sunroof and used the crawler’s manipulators to extract the paper from the rear seat. We had to brace the crawler against the ceiling to prevent it from toppling over. Unfortunately, the ceiling wasn’t structurally sound.”

“That’s because this cavern hasn’t been cleared for human operations yet,” Mancuso told her.

Auger chose her words carefully, mindful that anything she said now might be on the record. “No harm was done. We lost a crawler, but the recovery of a newspaper easily outweighs that.”

“What happened to the boy?”

“He was helping me stabilise the crawler when he ripped his suit. I told him to lie still and wait for the cavalry.”

She put the newspaper back into the tray. The newsprint was still as sharp and legible as when she had retrieved it from the car. The act of picking up the paper—flexing it slightly—had even caused one of the animated adverts to come to life: a girl on a beach throwing a ball towards the camera.

“Pretty good, Auger. Looks like you lucked out this time.”

“Help me remove the tray,” she said, guessing that there was going to be no attempt to recover the entire crawler.

They extracted the sample tray, carried it to the nearest rescue crawler and slid it into a vacant slot.

“Now the film reels,” Mancuso said.

Auger walked around the leaning vehicle, throwing latches and sliding out the heavy black cartridges, clipping them together as she went for ease of transport. Once all twelve of them had been assembled, including those from the cabin monitors, she handed the bulky package to Mancuso. “I want these shot straight to the lab,” she said.

“That’s the lot?” he asked.

“That’s the lot,” Auger replied. “Now can we deal with Cassandra?”

But when she looked back into the glow of the cabin, she saw no sign of the girl. “Cassandra?” she called, hoping that the channel to the crawler was still functioning.

“It’s OK,” the girl said. “I’m right behind you.”

Auger turned around to see Cassandra standing on the ice in the other child-sized environment suit.

“I told you to stay inside,” Auger said.

“It was time to leave,” Cassandra replied. She had, as far as Auger could tell, made an efficient and thorough job of donning her suit. Auger was impressed: it was difficult enough for an adult to put on an environment suit without assistance, let alone a child.

“Did you make sure—” Auger began.

“The suit is fine. I think it’s time we were leaving, don’t you? All this activity may have alerted the furies. We don’t want to be here when they arrive.”

Mancuso touched Auger’s shoulder with a power-amplified glove that could have crushed her in an eyeblink. “Girl’s right. Let’s get the hell out of Paris. Place always gives me the jitters.”

Auger peered through the ceiling porthole of the rescue crawler, willing the red and green lights of the dropship to burn through the clouds and hoping that the clouds themselves would not become even more agitated. There was something wrong with the clouds tonight. Their talk was normally a slow and serene form of communication, revealed by changes in their shape, colour and texturing. Vast circuitlike structures of hard-edged blue-grey would take form over many minutes; these forms would gradually stabilise and then slowly fade. Tens of minutes later, new patterns would begin to emerge from the doughy grey of unstructured cloud. Such movements were merely the basic units of an exchange that might take hours or days to complete.

But right now the clouds were bickering. The patterns formed and decayed at an accelerated rate, with lightning a kind of emphatic punctuation to the dialogue. The clouds fissioned and merged, as if renegotiating age-old treaties and alliances.

“They do this sometimes,” Cassandra said.

“I know,” Auger replied, “but not on my watch, and not right over the city I happen to be investigating.”

“Maybe it’s not just happening over Paris,” Cassandra mused.

“I hoped so, too. Unfortunately, I checked. There’s a major argument in the weather system centred right over northern France, and it started thickening up at about the time we arrived.”

“Coincidence.”

“Or not.”

Lightning illuminated the scene outside, picking out a linear obstacle course of blocks, ramps and deep, smooth-sided trenches, all cut from pale-blue ice with laser-precision. On either side of the Champs-Elysées, the collapsed forms of buildings were glazed with thin traceries of the same pastel ice, neatly stepped and edged where the Antiquities Board’s remote-controlled excavators had halted when they sensed fragile masonry, steel and glass. Auger thought about the controllers who directed those machines from orbit and felt a growing desire to be up there with them, away from the hazards of the ground.

“Hurry up,” she said, sotto voce. “This stopped being fun hours ago.”

“Was it really worth it, for a single newspaper?” Cassandra asked.

“Of course it was worth it. You know it was. Newspapers are amongst the most valuable Void Century artefacts we can ever hope to find. Especially late editions, updated in the last few hours before it all ended. You wouldn’t believe how few of those survived.”

Cassandra pushed aside the curtain of black hair that had a habit of falling over her left eye. “What does it matter if there are some details you still don’t know, if you can still make out the bigger picture?”

Movement caught Auger’s attention: through the ceiling porthole she saw a squadron of dropships lowering down through the clouds on spikes of thrust.

“It means we stand a chance of not making the same mistakes over again,” Auger said.

“Such as?” Cassandra asked.

“Screwing up the Earth, for instance. Thinking we can fix one technological mess by throwing yet more technology at it, when every attempt to do that already has just made things even worse.”

“Only a kind of superstitious fatalism would say that we shouldn’t keep trying,” Cassandra said, folding her arms across her chest. “Anyway, how could things possibly be any worse than they are now?”

“Use your imagination, kid,” Auger said. She felt the rescue crawler tremble as the thrust from the nearest dropship washed over it. Bright light played over the cabin, followed by a lurch as the recovery cradle grabbed hold of the rescue crawler. Then they were airborne, pulled into the sky as the dropship gained altitude. Through the side windows, Auger saw the Champs-Elysées fall away, the slumped buildings on either side soon hiding it from view. She made out the surrounding streets, unable to turn off the part of her brain that insisted on identifying them. Haussmann to the north, Marceau and Montaigne to the south.

“How could we make it worse?” Cassandra said. “People can’t live down there. Nothing can, not even bacteria. Surely that’s as bad as it gets.”

“We scored today,” Auger said. “We came back with a piece of the past—a window into history. But there’s a lot more down there we haven’t found yet. Gaps in our knowledge waiting to be filled. There’s so much we forgot, so many things we’ll never know unless we find the truth down there, preserved under the ice.”

“The Polity plans don’t threaten any of that.”

“Not on paper, no, but we all know that the plans are only a prelude. Clean up the furies and stabilise the climate, then we can begin the real work: terraforming.” She said the last word with exquisite distaste.

As the clouds thickened around the rescue crawler, Auger caught a brief glimpse of the sinuous track of the Seine, a flawless ribbon of white ice dotted here and there with cordoned dig sites. Further away, picked out in darkling glints from hovering airships, she made out the lower two-thirds of the Eiffel Tower, bent to one side like a man struggling against a gale.

“Is it such a crime to want to make the Earth liveable again?” Cassandra asked.

“In my book it is, because we can’t do it without erasing everything down there, severing every single thread back to the past. It’s like whitewashing the Mona Lisa when there’s a blank canvas next door.”

“So you advocate the terraforming of Venus instead?”

Auger felt close to tearing out her hair. “No, I don’t advocate that, either. It’s just that if I’m forced into making a choice…” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you, of all people!”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because you’re one of us, Cassandra—a good little Thresher, a good little citizen of the USNE. You’re even studying to work under Antiquities. I shouldn’t have to explain any of this stuff to you.”

Cassandra gave a girlish little shrug, accompanied by a half-pout. “I thought debate was supposed to be healthy,” she countered.

“It is,” Auger replied, “so long as you don’t disagree with me.”

Tanglewood wrapped the Earth in light, like a glimmering funeral wreath. The dropship moved cautiously, veering this way and that as it navigated between moving threads, each of which was an enormous chain of interconnected habitats. In every direction there were more and more loops, threads and knots of light receding into a faint, luminous scribble of headache-inducing complexity, each centre of mass following its own private orbit around Earth.

Hundreds of thousands of habitats, each a small city in its own right; hundreds of millions of people, Auger knew, all with lives as complex and problematic and hope-filled as her own. Traffic was constantly coming and going from different parts of Tanglewood, sparks of light slipping from one thread to another in all directions. The concatenated threads of linked habitats were in a constant process of severance and reunion, like DNA strands in some thriving Petri dish.

Her mood brightened when she felt the dropship braking for its final approach. Immediately ahead, strung together hub to hub, were the six counter-rotating wheels of the Antiquities Board. Already, she was certain, the news of her discovery would be filtering through the usual academic channels, and the pressure would soon be mounting for her to publish a preliminary summary of the newspaper’s contents. She would be very lucky if she got any sleep in the next twenty-four hours. It would, however, be the kind of work she enjoyed—tiring but simultaneously exhilarating, leaving her in a state of exhausted euphoria at the end of it. And that would only be the beginning of the much longer process of detailed study, when she would see whether her initial hunches and guesses stood the test of time.

The squadron of dropships docked with the first wheel, coming to rest in a large low-gravity reception bay filled with ships and equipment. With a prickle of disquiet, Auger noticed that one of the parked spacecraft was a Slasher vessel. It was ostentatiously sleek: long and lean like a fast-swimming squid, with something of the same translucent elegance. Mechanisms and markings twinkled through the cobalt-blue lustre of its outer hull. Surrounded by the robust but clumsy artefacts of her own government, the Slasher craft looked insultingly futuristic. Which, in a way, it was.

Auger couldn’t quite pinpoint the reason for her unease. It was unusual to see a Slasher ship in Tanglewood, especially with the heightened tension of recent months. But it did still happen now and then, and whenever there were diplomatic exchanges it was generally more efficient to use Slasher transport.

But in Antiquities? That, she had to admit, was a little unusual.

She pushed the unease from her mind, concentrating on the matter at hand. While various aggressive sterilisation procedures took place—the ships scrubbed for any latent traces of Parisian contamination—Auger scoured the rescue crawler until she found a pen and a pad of standard-issue Antiquities reporting paper and set about writing her statement regarding what had happened underground. As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more flexible than others.

She had pretty much finished the report by the time the sterilisation procedures were completed. An airlock bridge was attached to the rescue craft and the lights around the outer door flicked to green, signalling that it was safe to disembark. The recovery crew were the first out, anxious to get off-shift to trade drinks and tall tales with their comrades.

“Come on,” she said, gesturing for Cassandra to exit ahead of her.

“After you,” the girl replied.

Something in her tone was still off, but Auger continued to put it down to her own nerves, amplified by the sighting of the Slasher vessel. She pulled herself to the airlock and, with well-rehearsed movements, drifted along the connecting umbilical.

At the far end, she was met by a pair of officials, both of whom wore pinstriped grey suits. She recognised one of the men as a high-level manager called August Da Silva. He was a small individual with a smooth, cherubic face and hair that was always impeccably combed and held in place with perfumed oils. Their paths had crossed before, over research budgets and minor procedural transgressions.

Da Silva made a show of separating Auger from the girl. “This way for you,” he said.

“I need to look after Cassandra,” Auger said.

With a gentle push, Da Silva coaxed her into a small, windowless waiting room. The door was immediately closed and locked behind her, leaving her alone with only the padded walls for company. Auger thumped on the door, but no one came back or gave any explanation as to what was going on. Half an hour passed, then an hour. Auger began to stew in her own indignation, rehearsing the things she would say and the people she would lash out at when she was finally allowed to leave. Nothing like this had ever happened before; there were sometimes delays due to glitches in the sterilisation procedure, but the authorities were always careful to keep her informed in such circumstances.

After another half-hour, the door opened and Da Silva poked his perfumed head through the gap. “Time to move, Auger. They’re waiting for you.”

She managed a defiant sneer. “Who the hell are they? Don’t you realise I’ve got work to do?”

“Your work will have to wait a while.”

Grumpily, she followed Da Silva out of the waiting room. He smelled of lavender and cinnamon. “I need to collect the newspaper and the film reels so that I can begin documenting the discovery. This is major—there are thousands of people waiting to hear what that newspaper will tell us. They’ll already be wondering why I haven’t made a preliminary statement.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you have the film reels,” Da Silva said. “They’ve already been sent away for secure processing.”

“What are you talking about? That’s my damned data!”

“It isn’t data anymore,” the man said. “It’s evidence in a criminal investigation. The boy died.”

The force of it hit her like a stomach punch. “No!” she breathed, as if denying it might make any difference.

“I’m afraid it’s true.”

Her voice sounded ghostly and distant. “What happened?”

“There was a rip in his suit. Furies got to him.”

Auger remembered Sebastian complaining of a headache. That would have been the tiny machines storming through his brain, replicating and demolishing as they went.

The thought made her sick.

“But we checked the fury count,” she said. “It was zero.”

“Your detectors weren’t sensitive to the latest microscopic strain. You’d have known that if you bothered to keep up with the technical bulletins. You should have allowed for that factor in deciding whether to go outside.”

“But he can’t be dead.”

“He died during the ascent.” Da Silva looked back at her, perhaps wondering how much he was allowed to say. “Complete brainstem death.”

“Oh, God.” She took a deep breath, trying not to lose it. “Has anyone told—”

“His family? They’ve been informed that an incident took place. They’re on their way over as we speak. The hope is that the boy can be brought back to some state of consciousness by the time they arrive.”

Da Silva was playing with her. “You told me he died.”

“He did. Thankfully, they were able to bring him back.”

“With a head full of furies?”

“They pumped him full of UR, flushed out the furies with some of that magic Slasher medicine. Right now, the boy’s still in a coma. He may have irreversible damage to major brain structures, but we won’t know for a few days.”

“This can’t be happening,” Auger said. She felt like a spectator to her own conversation. “It was just a field trip. No one was supposed to die.”

“Easy to say now.” He leaned in closer, so that she could smell his breath. “Do you honestly think we can keep a lid on this kind of thing? We’ve already got the Transgressions Board breathing down our necks. There’ve been a lot of screw-ups down on Earth lately, and word is they feel it’s about time they made an example of someone, before something really stupid happens.”

“I’m sorry about the boy,” she said.

“Is that an admission of culpability, Auger? If so, it’s going to make things a lot easier all round.”

“No,” she said, her voice faltering, “it’s not an admission of anything. I’m just saying that I’m sorry. Look, can I speak to the parents?”

“Right now, Auger, I’d think you are about the last person in the solar system they’ll want to talk to.”

“I just want them to know I care.”

“The time to care,” Da Silva said, “was before you risked everything for a single useless artefact.”

“The artefact isn’t useless,” she snapped. “No matter what happened down there, it was still a risk worth taking. You talk to anyone in Antiquities and they’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Shall I show you the newspaper, Auger? Would you like that?”

Da Silva had it stuffed into his jacket. He pulled it out and handed it to her. She took it with trembling fingers, feeling all her hopes vanish in one instant of crushing disappointment. Like the boy, the newspaper had died as well. The newsprint had blurred, lines of text running into each other like icing patterns melting on a cake. It was already completely illegible. The illustrations and advertisements had become static, their colours bleeding together until they looked like splodges of abstract art. The tiny motor that supplied power to the smart paper must have been down to its last trickle of energy when she pulled it from the car.

She handed him back the useless, mocking thing.

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”