Century Rain

THIRTY-ONE

There was nothing more that could be done to slow the ship’s tumbling motion. Auger kept the shutter open, and periodically one of them would climb up and examine the view, but the safest and easiest thing was to stay strapped into their seats. Damaged as it was, the transport did not actually seem to be getting any worse: no more systems had broken down since their emergence around Mars, and the cabin pressure had stabilised at just under one-third of an atmosphere. It was too thin to sustain life, so they kept the masks on, but at least they did not have the chill of vacuum to contend with. With the battery-powered heaters still running, the ambient temperature was low, but not unbearably so.

“We’re safe, for now,” Auger said. “All we have to do is sit tight until someone figures out where we are.”

“And someone will manage that?”

“Count on it. They’ll be scouring every centimetre of space looking for us right now. Even if there isn’t a working transponder on this thing, they’ll find us with their own sensors. It will only be a matter of time.”

Her confidence had a thin, brittle edge to it, like ice that might break at any moment.

“I take it from this that you have a theory about how we survived?” Floyd asked.

“Aveling’s people must have taken the decision to destroy Phobos,” she said. “That smudge of dust and gas is all that’s left of the moon. We must have hit a little debris coming through it, but not enough to do us any harm.”

“They blew up a whole moon? Isn’t that rather drastic?”

“It was the only way to save us,” she said. “They must have picked up our bow-shock distortion and realised that we were coming in much too fast to decelerate into the recovery bubble. But the bubble’s only function was to maintain vacuum at the wormhole throat. If they got rid of the pressurised chamber—and Phobos with it—then they wouldn’t need the bubble. We’d have been emerging into vacuum anyway.”

“But you said they wouldn’t have much warning of our imminent arrival,” Floyd said.

“They must have had a procedure in place for just this contingency,” she said. “Emergency evacuation measures to get everyone off the moon in a couple of minutes. Nuclear demolition charges sewn throughout the whole thing, ready to take it apart at the press of a button, giving us a clear route to space.”

“All that, in a couple of minutes?”

“There’s no other explanation, Floyd.”

“Well, I can think of one off the top of my head: somebody else blew up that moon, and our arrival didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

“No, Floyd,” she said patiently, as if lecturing a child on some arcane matter of the adult world. “Nobody else blew up that moon. That’s not the way we do things around here. We may be in a state of crisis, but no one in their right mind…” Then she froze, and made a small clicking noise in the back of her throat.

“Auger?”

“Fuck. I think you might actually be right.”

“And there was me kind of hoping I’d be wrong.”

“There were explosions in that debris cloud,” she said, remembering the staccato flashes of light, “as if something was still going on there. As if they were still fighting.”

“Who could have blown up that moon?”

“If it wasn’t deliberate, if it wasn’t set off by demolition charges, then only the Slashers could have done it.” She followed the slow, fatigued churning of her exhausted mental processes. She was too tired to think clearly, or else she would never have considered the possibility that Phobos might have been blown up for her benefit. “That last flash,” she said. “The really bright one?”

“Yes?”

“I think that was the wormhole dying. We were surfing the collapsing end of it all the way home. We popped out, then the collapsing end of the pipe hit its own throat. It was like a stretched rubber band snapping back on itself. I think the blast took out all the combatants left near the debris cloud.”

“And my way back home?”

“It’s gone. The link is finished.”

“I figured as much.”

“I’m sorry, Floyd,” she said.

“You don’t have anything to apologise for. I got myself into this every step of the way.”

“No, that isn’t true. I have to take some of the blame. I should never have let you cross the censor, and I definitely shouldn’t have let you get aboard this ship.”

“Face it, kid: you’d never have got home without me.”

She had no answer for that. He was right: without Floyd’s help, she would have died somewhere along the now-collapsed thread of the hyperweb, dashed to pieces in an unwitnessed fireworks display.

“That still doesn’t make it right,” she said. “I’ve ripped you away from everything and everyone you ever knew.”

“You had no choice.”

She touched her wound. It was hot and tender again, as if the inflammation had begun to return. The UR she had taken was not the kind that stayed inside the body for ever. The little machines had probably dismantled themselves by now, donating their essence into the chemical reservoir of her body. She had assumed that she would be getting expert medical attention as soon as the ship popped into the recovery bubble.

“Are you all right?” Floyd asked.

“Just a bit crisp around the edges. I’ll handle it.”

“You need medical attention.”

“And I’ll get it just as soon as they pull us out of this can.”

“If they’re looking for us,” Floyd said.

“They will be. Skellsgard will have told Caliskan that we’re on our way back and also that we have important information.”

“You ready to tell me a little more about why this matters so much? I mean, now that we’re here…”

“Take a look out of the window again, Floyd. Take a look at Mars.”

Auger told him about Mars. She told him about Silver Rain, and what it had done to that world.

Silver Rain was a weapon, cultivated during the last conflict between the Slashers and the Threshers from samples of the original rogue nanotechnological spore that had ended life on Earth. With deft, snide brilliance, the military scientists of the USNE—aided by defectors from the Polities, who supplied the necessary expertise in nanotech manipulation—had taken the excessively crude bludgeon of the original spore and honed it into something sharp and rather lovely, like a Samurai sword. Then they had seeded it into the thickening atmosphere of the partially terraformed Mars, the spore encased in myriad ceramic-jacketed ablative pellets, and it had sunk down to the surface, spreading across a vast footprint.

The Polities had never assumed that their enemy would use nanotechnology against them. It was the one thing that the Threshers abhorred above all else.

It therefore made an ideal weapon of surprise.

Silver Rain was very difficult to detect. The Polity specialists on Mars were expecting something much cruder, and consequently their nanotech filters were tuned to ignore something so fine, so cunning, so deadly. It infiltrated organisms quietly, initially doing no harm. Not just people and animals, but every living thing that the colonists had persuaded to survive on Mars. It slipped through seals and airlocks; through skin and cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier. Even the droves of nanotechnological mechanisms that the Slashers carried within their own bodies failed to recognise the intruder. It was that good; that precise.

And for days it did nothing except insinuate itself more thoroughly into the colonists’ world. It seeped into the irrigation system and used the canals to travel beyond the original infection footprint. It transmitted itself by means of physical contact between people and animals. It used the weather, riding the winds. It replicated itself, efficiently and systematically, but never consuming resources that would have drawn it to anyone’s attention. People began to report that they were feeling a little under the weather, as if about to come down with a mild cold.

But no one in the Polities had come down with a cold in living memory…

The USNE battle planners had programmed Silver Rain to trigger on 28 July 2243. It was a coincidence that the day and the month happened to be shared with the events of the Nanocaust: the timing of the Silver Rain deployment had been dictated by strategic considerations elsewhere in the war. But once that coincidence became apparent, the generals saw no need to alter their plans. It would send a signal—subtle or otherwise—to the Polities. This is payback, it said. This is the price you pay for the harm your ideological ancestors did to Earth.

When the trigger was operated, every infected organism died in the same convulsive instant as the machines erupted, little time bombs crammed inside every living cell. Recording systems showed people stopping in mid-stride, mid-sentence, mid-thought. They fell to the ground, every biological event in their bodies aborted like a rogue computer process. They didn’t bleed. They didn’t even undergo any of the medically recognised phases of putrefaction. They just became a kind of dust, loosely organised into the shapes of corpses. When the cities and settlements began to fail, pressure-containment systems breaking down through lack of human maintenance, the corpses simply blew away like so many piles of ash.

It had never been the intention of the USNE to destroy all life on the planet: they had too many Martian interests of their own to go that far. Had Silver Rain slipped from their control (it had never been tested on such a scale before, and its effects were not entirely predictable), they would have deployed a counter-spore designed to neutralise the original weapon before it did excessive harm. But there was no need for that. The Silver Rain had worked exactly as advertised.

In the aftermath, the Slasher forces were paralysed by the scale of the atrocity. Sixty thousand people had died on Mars—more than the total number of casualties sustained in the conflict up to that point. But just when the Slashers were ready to launch a devastating counter-offensive against Tanglewood, using weapons that they had kept in reserve until then, there was an equally shocking turn of events amongst the Threshers. Senior officials denounced the actions of the battle planners who had developed and deployed Silver Rain. A moderately bloody coup followed, and those responsible for the crime against Mars were tried and executed. The punishments seemed to sate the Slashers. Within weeks, ceasefire terms had been agreed, with hostilities ending by late August. Mars returned to nominal Thresher control in 2244, but with significant concessions to the Slashers. While it was not exactly true to say that Mars had recovered from its assault, it had begun the healing process. The terraforming programme soldiered on, never getting any closer to its goal, but it was something to live for, regardless. Ambitious new settlements appeared in the Solis Planum and Terra Cimmeria regions, and the refurbishment of the high-orbit port, abandoned and mothballed during the war, brought a healthy dose of commerce.

But even now, after twenty-three years, the Scoured Zone was still lifeless. By accident or design, the gene-tweaked crops never took root there again. None of the settlements inside the Silver Rain footprint were ever reinhabited. They stood there now, half-buried in Martian dust: bone-white ghost towns, left exactly as they had been at the time of the atrocity.

Auger remembered her dream of Paris: the drummer boy on the Champs-Elysées.

“That was twenty-three years ago,” she concluded. “Officially, the weapon doesn’t exist anymore. Even the blueprints were supposed to have been destroyed. But Susan White didn’t write those words on a postcard for nothing. Someone’s got hold of it again. Maybe even improved it. And the next target isn’t a few tens of thousands of Martian colonists. It’s three billion people—the entire population of your version of Earth.”

“But why?”

“To erase what should never have been. To wipe out those three billion lives as if they were rogue programs in some vast computer simulation. To turn back the clock to the moment of the quantum snapshot and obtain a pristine copy of the Earth, unencumbered by anything as messy as living, breathing inhabitants.”

“It’s monstrous,” Floyd said, horrified.

“From one point of view. From another, it’s simply a question of tidying up—like airbrushing a photograph. Remember what that war baby said in Berlin? All you really are to them is three billion dots.”

“We have to stop this.”

“And we’re trying to. But we may be too late. If they already know the physical co-ordinates of the ALS, all they need to do now is to get there and deliver the Silver Rain—”

“Then we have to get there ahead of them.”

“Nice in theory, Floyd. But we don’t know where the ALS is. There’s an awful lot of galaxy out there.”

“Then we need to find out those co-ordinates as well. They must have smuggled them out, right?”

“Floyd, we’re talking about three numbers. They don’t even have to be big ones. No one needs to specify the position of the ALS to within a centimetre. It’s like looking for an island in the Pacific Ocean. All you need is a grid reference accurate enough to rule out any other possibilities.”

“Then we look for a grid reference.”

“It could be anywhere, hidden in any form. It could be a telephone number, or something even less obvious.”

“But those numbers must be somewhere. Could they have been hidden in the things Susan White was sending back home?”

“She was on our side, Floyd.”

“I’m not saying that she knew what she was carrying, just that she might have been acting as a courier for the bad guys without ever realising it.”

“It’s still hopeless. Even if we knew for a fact that the numbers were in those papers… where would we start? The co-ordinates could be stored in the tiniest microdot, or in one telephone number amongst the thousands in the classified adverts.”

“All I’m saying is that we have to do something.”

“I agree,” she said, “but maybe our first priority ought to be getting rescued.”

Something distracted her: a slight change in the quality of light flooding the cabin. They were still tumbling, the Sun still flashing through the window once a rotation, but now there was a pinkish glow that stayed with them all the time, as if the transport was enveloped in its own little cloud of glowing light.

“You still think someone’s going to pick us up?” Floyd asked.

“They’re looking for us,” Auger said.

“Even if the blowing up of that moon wasn’t part of the plan?”

“Someone will still want to know what happened to us.” But even as she said it, she felt her certainty draining away. By its nature, the hyperweb portal was ultra-secret. Most of the people who knew anything about it would have been inside Phobos when the attack took it apart.

“Auger?”

“I think we may be in more trouble than I first thought. Aveling and Barton are dead. Apart from Niagara and Caliskan, I don’t know who’s left out there to look for us.”

“Niagara and Caliskan?”

“Niagara’s our Slasher mole, the man who fed us the know-how to make the Phobos link operational in the first place. Caliskan is the man who sent me to recover Susan’s belongings. Niagara may have been inside Phobos when it was destroyed, but Caliskan’s probably still in Tanglewood.”

“Then we’d better hope he hasn’t forgotten about you.”

“Floyd, there’s something not right about this.” She closed her eyes, silencing a moan as the discomfort in her shoulder took on a sharper, nastier edge. “The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that none of this was an accident.”

“None of what?”

“The collapse of the wormhole. Granted, the whole thing was becoming increasingly unstable, but the snake robot should have been able to compensate for that. It should have been able to manage a safe contraction of the throat.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I think the robot was sent there to destroy the link.”

“But the robot helped you.”

“Yes,” she said. “And it probably meant to save my life. I don’t think it had any idea that it had been tampered with. The sabotage order could have been buried deep beneath its surface programming.”

The pink glow had intensified: fingers of light now licked around the armoured aperture of the window. It still bothered Auger, but she wasn’t sure why.

“Why would anyone want to sabotage the link, if that’s the only way back to Paris?” Floyd asked.

“That’s what worries me. Not just because it implies that someone within the organisation set out to collapse the link, but also because it must mean that the Slashers no longer need it themselves.”

“Why would they throw away something like that?”

“They wouldn’t,” Auger said. “Not unless they already had another way of reaching Paris.”

“You mean they already have the co-ordinates of the ALS?”

“Either that, or they’re very close to finding them out.”

The thing that had been bothering Auger about that pink glow finally pushed its way to the front of her pain-fogged mind. She felt herself go quite cold, even the stab of the wound no longer her most immediate concern. “Floyd, do something for me, will you? Climb up and take another look through the window.”

“Why? You think someone else is out there?”

“Just do it.” She watched him intently as he did as he was told.

“Now tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“Tell me if Mars looks any bigger than the last time you saw it.”

Floyd took a look and then stared back at her, light and shadow slipping over his face with clockwork regularity. His expression told her everything she needed to know. “This isn’t good, is it?” Floyd asked.

“Get back in your seat. Fast.”

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that we’re not in orbit around Mars. If that planet looks bigger, it’s because it’s closer. We’re falling towards it. I think we’re already skimming the upper atmosphere.”

Floyd returned to his seat and lost no time in buckling up. “How do you know?”

“I didn’t, for a while. I just had a bad feeling that it might turn out this way. Phobos was in orbit around Mars, moving at exactly the right speed for its altitude. But we came out of the portal with our own velocity relative to the moon—hundreds of metres per second, at least. Whatever trajectory that put us in, it wasn’t going to be the same one as Phobos. There’s a chance we might have lucked out and had a boost in the right direction, away from Mars—”

“But today isn’t our day for lucking out.”

“No,” she said. “Doesn’t look as if it is. We came out at the wrong angle, at the wrong speed. We’re hitting the atmosphere.”

“And that’s as bad as it sounds, right?”

“Ever wish upon a falling star, Floyd? Well, now’s your big chance. You’ll even get to be the star.”

“What will happen?”

“What will happen is that we’ll burn up and die. If we’re lucky, we’ll have been crushed unconscious by the G-force before that happens.”

“That’s an interesting view of luck.”

“This thing isn’t made for atmospheric re-entry,” Auger said. “No matter what angle we come in at.”

“This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen, Auger. Not like this. Not after we made it all this way.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “We can’t steer this thing. We can’t slow it down or speed it up. We can’t even stop it tumbling.” The glow, faint at first, had now intensified, flickering through shades of blue and pink like a quilt of pastel light wrapped around the ship. It was mesmerising and rather lovely. Under other circumstances, it might have been a thing of wonder. “Maybe if the hull wasn’t already shot to shit,” she said, leaving Floyd to draw his own conclusions.

“But it is.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all my fault.”

The glow flared to a hard white light, and in the same instant the transport shuddered violently. The tumbling motion became haphazard and all around her, Auger heard shrieks and groans of protesting metal as the aerodynamic and thermal stresses of Mars’s atmosphere began to toy with the fabric of the ship. G-force built up with surprising speed. It was nothing at all like the smooth insertions she remembered from her trips to Earth. One moment, all that was pushing her into her seat was the gentle and steady pressure of the unchecked rotation, and the next she was being pushed and pulled in random directions, yanked against the bruising restraints of the harness. She jammed her head into the shaped restraint at the back of the seat, trying to protect her neck from the whiplashing dead weight of her skull. The ride became even more turbulent, the noise deafening. She was beginning to find it difficult to breathe as the G-load worked against her lungs. She felt light-headed, consciousness beginning to break up into discrete, interrupted episodes.

“Floyd…” she managed to say. “Floyd, can you hear me?”

When he answered, she could barely hear him over the scream of the dying transport.

“You did good, Auger.”

How he managed it, she would never know, but somehow Floyd found the strength to reach out and close his hand around hers. She felt his fingers tighten, anchoring her to this place in space and time, even as everything else in her universe came apart in light and fury.