Century Rain

THIRTY

Auger woke to intense turbulence, the ship shaking and shimmying as if only an instant away from swift annihilation. Through blurred, gummed eyes, she glanced at the principal instruments, remembering as much as she could of Skellsgard’s technical briefing. The situation was acute: far, far worse than when she had gone to sleep. According to the numbers—and again, a lot depended on her imperfect interpretation of those dancing, tumbling digits—the collapsing end of the tunnel had almost caught up with them. Simultaneously, it had accelerated them even faster. It was as if they were caught in the pressure wave in front of an avalanche: pushed ahead, but with an ever-dwindling lead that would soon see them engulfed.

The ship was showing signs of mortal damage. Many displays were simply dead or showing only static. Some dials were inactive, jammed against their limits. Others were wheeling around like dervishes, spinning like the altimeter in a dive-bomber. The guidance display on her side of the cabin revealed ragged blind spots in the flowing contours of its stress-energy grid. In her mind’s eye, she visualised critical machinery—sensors and guidance mechanisms—ripped clean away from the hull, trailing sizzling hot electrical ganglia with them. Warning lights were flashing, and yet the klaxons were mysteriously silent.

“Floyd,” she said, her mouth sluggish and dry. “How long was I under?”

“A few hours,” he said. He still had his hand on the joystick, and as she watched he made tiny, precise adjustments.

“A few? It feels like—”

“More than a few? It was probably more like six, or maybe even twelve. I don’t know. I guess I lost count.” He looked at her, his face a study in exhaustion. “How do you feel, kid?”

“Better,” she said, rubbing experimentally at the wound. “Groggy… sore… but better. The UR must have eased the inflammation, taken care of the bleeding.”

“Does that mean you’ll hold together until we reach the end of this funfair ride?”

“Should do,” she said.

“But you’ll still need help when we arrive?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about that. If we get there, they’ll take care of me.”

The ship veered violently, then knocked hard against something and slid on a sideways trajectory with an ominous bone-crunching rumble. Floyd grimaced and pulled the joystick hard over. Auger heard the sequenced pop of the steering jets and wondered how much propellant Floyd had already consumed holding them together until now.

“I was out for twelve hours?” she said, his words just sinking in.

“Maybe thirteen. But don’t worry about me. The time simply flew by.”

“You did good getting us this far, Floyd. Seriously, I’m impressed.”

He looked at her with a genuine and rather touching surprise, as if the last thing he had been expecting was praise.

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. Not bad for a man who shouldn’t exist. I just hope the effort will turn out to have been worth it.”

“You’re still worried about what will happen at the other end?”

“We’re going to pop out of this tunnel much faster than the system was ever designed to deal with—like an express train hitting the buffers at full tilt.”

“You have a bunch of people at the other end, right? People like Skellsgard?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how much good they’re going to be able to do. Even if we could warn them… but we can’t even get a message through to them. You can’t bounce signals up the pipe while there’s a ship in it. Not according to the book, anyway.”

“Won’t they have any warning at all?”

“Maybe. Skellsgard has equipment to monitor the condition of the link—but I don’t know if it’s going to be able to tell her that the link itself is collapsing. But she also told me about something called bow-shock distortion. It’s like a ripple we push ahead of ourselves, a change in the geometry of the tunnel propagating ahead of the transport. They have equipment to pick it up, so that they can tell when a ship is about to come through the portal. I think it gives them a few minutes’ warning.” Auger scratched at a crusty residue that had collected in the corner of one eye. It felt dense and geologic, hard and compacted like some mother lode of granite. “But that won’t help us,” she said. “They’ll have even less warning than usual because we’re going so much faster than we should be.”

“There must be something we can do,” Floyd said.

“Yes,” Auger said. “We can pray, and hope that the tunnel doesn’t speed us up any faster than we’re already moving. Right now we might just walk out of this alive. Any faster, and I think we’ve had it.”

“If we get to that point, would you mind not telling me? The coward in me would rather not know.”

“The coward in both of us,” Auger said. “If it’s any consolation, Floyd, it’ll be quick and spectacular.”

She checked out the numbers again. No act of denial could avoid the fact that they were now travelling thirty per cent faster than the ship she’d taken on the inbound leg of the journey. The ETA now had the total trip taking less than twenty-two hours. Of that time, about sixteen hours had already passed. And they were not getting any slower.

“Floyd,” she said, “do you want to take a break? I can fly the ship for a while.”

“In your condition? Thanks, but I think I can keep my eyes open for a few hours more.”

“Trust me: it’s going to take both of us to get this thing home.”

Floyd studied her for a moment and then nodded, relaxed his grip on the joystick and almost immediately slumped back into his couch and into a deep sleep. It was as if he had given himself permission to slip into unconsciousness, after holding it at bay for so long by a sheer act of will. Auger wondered how many hours at sea had honed that particular skill and wished him sweet dreams, assuming that he had the energy to dream. Perhaps unconsciousness would be the kindest state for both of them to be in, when the end approached.

“Find a way out of this,” she said aloud, as if that might help.

The four hours that followed were the longest she could remember. She had taken the last of the UR pills, hoping that this was the right thing to do. For the first hour, she felt a shrill, slightly unnerving clarity of mind. It was like the ringing caused by a finger circling the wet rim of a wine glass. It felt fragile and not quite trustworthy, making her wonder if she was, indeed, making the right decisions, even when they felt absolutely, unquestionably correct. When, at last, that bell-clear intensity began to dull and she started to feel foggy-headed, unable to focus on any particular problem for more than a few seconds, it came as a kind of relief. At least now she had objective evidence that her thought processes were likely to be impaired. She could factor that dullness into her activities, allowing for it wherever possible. It was, she supposed, a measure of her lessening hold on reality that she could even consider this a minor victory.

The ship was moving even faster now: fifty per cent above conventional tunnel speeds, and still accelerating. By now, Auger had enough of a grasp of the numbers to estimate their emergence speed, and the news was not cheering. They would hit the Phobos portal at twice the expected rate, and even that was likely to be an underestimate, since the rate of acceleration was itself beginning to quicken as the geometry of the pinched tunnel underwent convulsive readjustments. The apparatus in the recovery bubble would never be able to cope with that kind of momentum. The transport would smash through the arrestor cradle and the glass sphere of the bubble, then smear itself against the plasticised walls of the chamber a couple of kilometres inside Phobos. It would be a very lucky day if anyone made it out of that mess alive, let alone Auger and Floyd.

Spectacular? Hell, yes.

But the speed hurt them in other ways. The forward-looking sensors had already been damaged by tunnel collisions, but even in those areas that were not affected by blind spots, the sensors could not peer far enough ahead to give ample warning of micro-changes in the tunnel structure. Obstacles and wrinkles that the guidance system could normally have coped with—steering around them with finessed, calibrated, fuel-conserving bursts of steering thrust—now came upon the ship too quickly for it to respond in time. The ship was still managing to dodge the worst of them, but the effort was draining the steering jets at a worrying rate.

But even that was not the main thing on Auger’s mind. For a while, she did not even think about the problem of slowing down, or the bullet in her shoulder, or the Slasher activity in Paris.

She thought about Floyd, and how she was going to explain things to him.

Because with the tunnel unzipping behind them, Floyd was going to find it very difficult to make his way home. There would no longer be a hyperweb connection between Phobos and Paris; no way for him to make that return trip. Even if the two of them somehow survived the next few hours (and she preferred not to think about the odds of that), Floyd would still find himself marooned countless light-years from E2 and—more importantly—three centuries upstream in a future that didn’t even regard him as a genuine human being, rather a very detailed living and breathing copy of one… a copy of a man who had lived and died in a time when the world still had a chance to fix the mess it was in. A man so happily ordinary that he hadn’t left the faintest trace of himself in history.

Around two hours after he had slipped into unconsciousness, Floyd stirred beside her. There was no telling what had woken him: it could have been the increasingly rough ride, or the emergency klaxon that had just come on, accompanied by a recorded female voice calmly informing them that they were about to lose steering control.

“Is that as bad as it sounds?” Floyd asked.

“No,” Auger said. “It’s worse. A lot worse.”

The guidance system had depleted most of the reaction mass in the steering jets. What was left would be good for about ten minutes… at most. Less if their speed kept increasing, which it showed every intention of doing. By Auger’s reckoning, the pinch at the end of the tunnel had nearly caught up with them, and the pinch was still showing definite signs of acceleration. Maybe if she had Skellsgard’s grasp of hyperweb theory, imperfect as it was, she might have been able to explain why that was happening and how it related to the underlying metric structure of the collapsing quasi-wormhole. Not that such knowledge would have been particularly useful in any practical sense, but…

“If we can’t steer,” Floyd said, “won’t we crash into the walls? I mean, more than we’ve already been doing?”

“Yes,” Auger said. “But the system reckons that we’re only one hour from Phobos now—maybe less, depending on how much more we accelerate. There’s a faint chance that the ship might hold together long enough to get us there, even with complete loss of guidance control. Emphasis on the ‘faint.’ ”

“I won’t pencil in anything for next week.”

“It’s going to be bumpy—worse than anything we’ve experienced so far. And we’ll still have the small problem of hitting the portal at two and a half times normal tunnel speed even if we make it that far.”

“Let’s just deal with one thing at a time, shall we? That friend of yours—Skellsgard?”

“Yes,” Auger said.

“She sounded as if she knew what she was doing. She’ll find a way out of this, if we can hold together until the end.”

Poor Floyd, she thought, if only you knew what things are really like. The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, doing her best to sound reassuring. “I’m sure they’ll think of something.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Final warning,” the soothing feminine voice said. “Attitude adjustment control will cease in ten… nine… eight…”

“Brace yourself, Floyd. And if you have any lucky charms, now might be the time to start sweet-talking them.”

“Attitude adjustment control is now off-line,” the voice said, with a kind of cheery resignation.

For a deceptive ten or twenty seconds, the ride became dreamily smooth again. It was as if they had tobogganed off the edge of a cliff into the absolute stillness of midair.

“Hey,” Floyd started to say, “that’s not too—”

Then they hit something, the side of the ship grazing hard against the tunnel wall. It was a bigger jolt than anything they had experienced so far. They felt and heard an awful wrench as something large and metallic was plucked from the hull. Floyd grabbed the joystick and tried to correct their trajectory, but nothing he did had any effect on the oozing contours of the stress-energy display.

“It’s useless,” Auger said, with a stoic calm that even she found surprising. “We’re in uncontrolled flight now.” To emphasise this point, she released her own dead joystick and folded back the control console. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

“You’re going to give up that easily? What if there’s still some fuel left in the tanks?”

“This isn’t a war film, Floyd. When the system says zero, it means it.”

After the first collision, there was another hiatus as the transport rebounded to the other side of the tunnel. Auger still kept an eye on the grid and the cascading numbers. The ship’s nose was beginning to point away from the direction of forward motion. There was going to be another bad jolt when they—

The impact came sooner than she had anticipated. It slammed through her like an electrical shock, snapping her jaw shut. She bit her tongue, tasted blood in her mouth. Warning lights flashed all around the cockpit. One of the surviving klaxons came on, barking a two-tone scream into her skull. Another taped voice—it sounded suspiciously like the same woman—said, “Caution. Safe design limits for outer-hull integrity have now been exceeded. Structural failure is now a high likelihood event.”

“Hey, lady!” Floyd said. “Tell us something we don’t know!”

But Auger had no idea how to turn off the automated voice messages. Almost as soon as the first one had ended, another chimed in, informing them that safe radiation limits for the crew had now been exceeded.

Then they hit again, and rebounded, and hit again, and then the nose of the transport came around through sixty degrees, so that the next kick imparted a sickening roll to their motion, which only became worse with the next collision. With each rotation, Auger was pushed into her seat and then dragged out of it, her entire body straining against the webbing. The wound in her shoulder, numb for hours, now began to reassert its presence. The stress-energy contours were flowing too fast to read, the interpretive system just as confused as Auger. Not that it made a damned bit of difference. When you had lost all control, flying blind was almost a mercy.

Something else was ripped away from the hull with a squeal of tortured metal. She felt a pop in her skull as the air pressure suddenly notched down.

“We just lost—” She did not have time to complete her sentence. Air shrieked out of the cabin, becoming thinner with every breath. Through blurred eyes, she saw Floyd’s panicked expression as his body was buffeted to and fro by the same cartwheeling motion that was shoving her in and out of her seat. She struggled to reach her good arm up, feeling as if she had to push a boulder out of the way. Her hand closed around the striped yellow toggle of the emergency mask hatch. She pulled it down, cursing the system that should have dropped the mask automatically. She pressed the hard plastic of the mask to her face and took a cold and instantly reinvigorating breath.

She motioned for Floyd to do the same and waited impatiently while he located his mask and slipped it on gratefully. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said at last, but his voice sounded thin and distant.

“The blow-out’s stabilised. I think we’re down to about a third of normal operating pressure. We’ll need to keep—”

The words were jolted away from her as the careering, tumbling ship smashed itself against the wall again. She heard more chunks of hull ripping away. Most of the displays were by now either dead or showing nothing comprehensible. Auger tried to focus on the ETA, but even that kept changing, varying by tens of minutes with each rotation as the ship reinterpreted its tunnel speed. Another jolt followed, sending a compression wave up her backbone that whiplashed her skull against the back of the seat.

She blacked out for an instant, drifting back to consciousness through a bloody haze of red-tinged tunnel vision. Her hands seemed impossibly distant and ineffectual, anchored to her body by the thinnest of threads. Her thoughts were foggy, unfocused. She was dreaming this, surely? No, she wasn’t: she was in it. But even the prospect of imminent death had lost some of its edge now. Perhaps blacking out really wasn’t such a bad option after all…

She looked at Floyd and saw his head lolling from one side of the chair to the other as the ship rotated. His mouth was open, as if in a gasp of ecstasy or dread. His eyes were narrow, pink-tinged slits and fresh blood seeped from beneath his bandage.

Floyd was out cold.

The ship kept tumbling; tumbling and crashing and slowly dying. Auger tried to press herself more tightly into her seat, clutching the armrests and stiffening her torso against the padded back. From a distance, as if from another room, a woman’s voice said, “Warning. Final approach to portal in progress. Final approach to portal in progress. Please ensure all systems are stowed and all crew members are braced for deceleration procedure. Failure to comply…”

“Please shut the fuck up,” Auger said, and then prayed for unconsciousness.

The jolting and buffeting reached a climax. There was an instant—it couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds—when it seemed completely impossible that either the ship or its fragile human cargo would survive the next few heartbeats. The rapidity and severity of the collisions were just too severe.

But the end never came.

The tumbling continued, but—with the exception of the occasional thud or bump—the brutal collisions ceased. Even the tumbling settled down, becoming regular and almost tolerable. Once again, it was as if the transport had sailed off the edge of a precipice and was now in a deceptive free fall: a spiteful remission from the damaging impacts that were bound to resume at any moment.

But they didn’t.

“Numbers,” Auger mumbled through a bloodied, swollen tongue.

But the numbers told her nothing. The ship had finally become blind and senseless, unable to assemble any coherent picture of its surroundings. A change in the tunnel geometry, Auger thought—that was the only thing that could explain what had just happened. The collapse process must have somehow caused the end of the tunnel near the throat they were approaching to swell wider, increasing the diameter of the tunnel so that the transport had much further to travel between impacts with the sides.

She could think of no other explanation. They had certainly not undergone the crushing deceleration that would have been necessary to halt them within the recovery bubble. And they were still tumbling. The ship hadn’t been caught or snared or arrested by anything.

But the tunnel would have had to swell ludicrously wide. They hadn’t suffered a serious impact for at least two minutes, just those minor knocks. Had the picture changed so dramatically that those were, in fact, the glancing impacts? Had the tunnel walls become softer somehow, better able to absorb the collisions?

Another thud, and then something even stranger: a drumlike pitter-patter of tinier thuds, like rain.

Then nothing.

Floyd made a groaning noise. “I wish those elephants would stop sitting on my head,” he said.

“Are you all right? What do you remember?”

“I remember thinking I needed a new career.” He touched the side of his head, straining to hold up his hand against the centrifugal effect of their tumbling motion. “Are we dead yet, or is it just me who feels that way?”

“We’re not dead,” she answered. “But I don’t know why not. We haven’t had a major collision for a few minutes, but we’re still spinning.”

“I noticed. You have a theory for this state of affairs?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing that makes any sense.”

It was, she realised, very quiet. The ship made little creaking and groaning sounds, but there were no klaxons blaring, no pre-recorded voices announcing impending disaster. It was exactly as if they were tumbling through…

“Can you make sense of those numbers?” Floyd asked, interrupting her train of thought.

“No,” she said. “The ship hasn’t got a clue where it is. What it’s showing would only make sense if we’d left the portal behind. Which, obviously—”

“Maybe if we opened the window shields, we might have a better idea,” Floyd suggested.

“You open those windows in mid-tunnel, you’ll be wearing dark glasses for the rest of your life.”

“I always thought they suited me. Can’t you crank the blinds open just a crack? It might tell us something.”

She groped for an objection, but found none that she thought likely to convince him. Besides, he was right: at the very least it would tell them something, even if the information had no practical value. But she would still rather know where she was. It was, she supposed, a basic human need.

“I don’t even know if they’ll open,” she said, “after the pounding we took back there.”

“Just try it, Auger.”

She folded down the control console and found the switch that operated the armoured window shutters. Just when she had convinced herself that nothing was going to happen—that the shutters must be buckled tight—a fan of hard light cleaved the cabin in two. One of the shutters was broken, but the other was still operational. She allowed it to open to the width of three fingers, then held it at that position.

She squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes. After more than a day in the subdued lighting of the cabin, the glare was intensely bright. But it was not the murderous electric-blue radiance of the tunnel.

The light blinked out.

The light returned.

“It’s timed with our rotation,” she said after a moment. “It’s as if there’s a light source to one side of us, rather than all around us.”

“Does that make any sense?”

“No. But then neither does the fact that we’re alive.”

Floyd’s seat was positioned too far from the window to let him see through it. “Can you see anything you recognise?” he asked.

“No,” Auger said. She allowed the shutter to open to its fullest extent, but she could still only tell that there was a light source somewhere outside. “I’m going to leave my seat, see if I can get my head closer to—”

“Easy, soldier. That’s not a job for someone in your condition.” Floyd was already trying to extricate himself from his seat harness, his fingers sliding over the complex plastic buckles.

“You can talk.”

The harness released him. The tumbling continued, but because it was now regular and confined to one axis of rotation, Floyd was able to push himself out of the seat without too much difficulty. He used one arm to brace himself against the cabin wall, and another to lever himself closer to the window, keeping one foot hooked around the rest at the base of the seat.

“Careful, Floyd,” Auger said, as he pressed his face to the glass. “Do you see anything out there?”

“There’s a bright light off to one side,” he said. “I can’t see it directly. But there is something else out there.”

“Describe it.”

“It comes into view once every rotation. It’s like…” He adjusted his position, the effort etched in his face. “A bright smudge. Like a cloud, with lights in it. Lights around it, as a matter of fact. Some of them moving, some of them flashing. There are dark things in front of the cloud, moving outwards.”

She tried to visualise whatever it was he was seeing, and drew a comprehensive blank. “That’s it? That’s all you can see?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Well, what colour is it?”

Floyd looked back at her. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly the guy to ask when it comes to colours.”

“You mean you’re colour-blind?” Despite her fears, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Hey, isn’t that a little rude?”

“I’m not laughing at you, Floyd. I’m laughing at us. We make quite a pair, don’t we? The colour-blind detective and the tone-deaf spy.”

“Actually, I meant to ask you about…” But Floyd trailed off. “Auger, you may not want to hear this, but damned if that thing doesn’t seem to be getting smaller.”

Whatever Floyd was seeing, it bore no relationship to anything Auger had been told to expect during her mission briefing. It meant, surely, that something very odd and unanticipated had happened to them.

She felt a prickle of comprehension, like an itch at the back of her head. “Floyd, I think I have an idea—”

“There’s something else out there as well. It’s very big. I can just see the edge of it.”

“Floyd, I think we’ve slipped into a different part of the hyperweb. Skellsgard said there was no way any other tunnel could intersect with the one we were in… but what if she was wrong?” Auger forced herself to calm down and speak more slowly. “What if there was a junction, and we found it by accident when we were bouncing around back there? Or what if we hit the wall so hard we actually punctured it and slipped through into an adjacent part of the network?”

“Are you listening to me, Auger?” Floyd said, staring at her as if she’d gone completely insane. “I’m telling you there’s something really, really big out there.”

“The light source?”

“No. Not the light source. It’s on the other side of the sky. It almost looks like…”

Auger reached out to the console panel again. “Get back in your seat. I’m going to try something hopelessly optimistic.”

“My kind of girl. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see if there’s any juice left in those steering jets.”

“We already tried that,” Floyd said, lowering himself back into his seat and pulling the harness tight. “They died on us.”

“I know. But the system might have been reading empty even when there was a tiny amount of pressure left in the reservoir.”

Floyd gave her an odd look. “You said it didn’t work like that.”

“I lied. I swatted down your suggestion because I was feeling nasty and petulant. Not that it would have done us much good back then, anyway—”

“Of course not.” He sounded hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not dealing with this very well, OK? Believe it or not, this isn’t a situation I find myself in every day.”

“Consider yourself forgiven,” Floyd said.

“Look,” Auger said, “all I need is a couple of squirts of reaction mass, just enough to kill our spin, or even simply to alter it so that we have a different view.”

“You might make things worse.”

“I think we have to risk it.” Her hand closed on the joystick. She flipped up the trigger guard and readied her finger, trying to picture the orientation of the tumbling ship from the outside. Skellsgard had not told her how to recover from a spin of this kind—the briefing had never envisaged that things could go this splendidly, abjectly wrong—but all she had to do was change things slightly, just enough to bring something else into view. Then, in a sudden fit of misery, she wondered what the point of that would be, given that she had already failed to make any sense of Floyd’s initial impressions…

She squeezed the trigger. Instead of the usual sequenced percussion of steering jets, all she heard was a low, dying hiss that faded as soon as it had begun. Earlier, with the emergency systems blaring and the impacts making an unholy din, she would never have heard that feeble whisper of last-ditch thrust.

Would it be enough? She had felt nothing that would indicate a change of course.

But the angle of the light source—the scything fan of light that touched the cabin interior with each rotation—had altered slightly.

“All right,” she said. “My turn to look now.”

Auger released her seat harness, and with great effort and equal discomfort she managed to stand and brace herself so that she had a view through the window. The ship continued to tumble. The light source flared hard into view, making her squint and avert her eyes in reflex. It was an intense white disk with the faintest tinge of yellow. It looked, in fact, a lot like the Sun.

Then Floyd’s smudge came into view. She had to hand it to him: his description was on the mark. It was a ruby-red nebula, like a blow-up from an astronomical photograph, flecked with spangles of light, smears of brighter red and clotted with very dark patches, like dust lanes. Even as she watched, even before the rotation had pulled it out of view, a hard pink light flared within the cloud and died.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Then the rotation brought something else into view. It was a gently curved arc of rust-orange, fringed by a pale wisp of atmosphere. Unlike the smudge, this was something she had definitely seen before. She could even pick out the white scratches of the tethered dirigible lines, and the ribbon-bright channels of the irrigation network.

This was the other thing Floyd had seen.

“It’s Mars,” she said, hardly believing her own words. “The big thing—”

“And the light?”

“The Sun,” she said. “We’ve come out around Mars. We’re in the solar system.”

“But you said…”

She looked at the light-pocked smudge again. Just as Floyd had described, it appeared slightly smaller than the last time she had seen it—even though the smudge itself seemed to be roiling and expanding, like the cloud from an explosion…

And then the brightest light she had ever imagined—brighter even than the radiance of the wormhole throat—rammed through the smudge, like sunlight piercing a stained-glass window, and reached a crescendo like a second sun. Then it faded, dying like the last chip of the setting sun, and when darkness had returned, the smudge was completely dark, undisturbed by any smaller flashes.

“Where’s Phobos?” Auger asked.