Century Rain

THIRTY-TWO

When she awoke, it was to the shining cool whiteness she had always imagined Heaven would be like. She would have happily stayed in that serene white limbo for the rest of eternity, void of any care or anxiety. But the whiteness held nagging suggestions of structure: pale shadows and highlights that sharpened themselves into the details of a room and its white-clad occupants.

One of these occupants took on the form of a very beautiful girl, surrounded by a mirage of twinkling lights.

“One lying little shit to the rescue,” Cassandra said.

Auger forced her way through layers of groggy recall, pushing memories back into place as she surfaced. “You,” was all she managed to say.

Cassandra nodded sagely. “Yes. Me. I’m glad you remember. It would have made things a lot more difficult if there was deep amnesia.”

Auger became aware that she was lying on a bed, at a slight angle, with various twinkling machines hovering around her. Some were so tiny that at first glance they might have been mistaken for dust motes. Others were as large as dragonflies or hummingbirds, shimmering with the moiré patterns of intense microscopic detail. Dimly it occurred to her that—despite the absence of any lumbering items of bedside monitoring equipment—this was some kind of sick bay or recuperative ward.

“We were falling—”

“And we were tracking you, trying to intercept your transport before it hit the atmosphere. As you may have gathered, we only just got to you in time. Our medical science can work wonders, but it can’t work miracles.”

Sweet relief that she had survived welled up inside her. Then she remembered that she had not been alone.

“Is Floyd all right?”

“The other occupant of the shuttle is fine. He’s under observation in another room, but he didn’t merit the immediate attention you did.”

“And the transport?”

“The transport is gone. We jettisoned its remains as a decoy. But don’t worry: we emptied the cargo first.”

“Cargo?”

“The archival items. A most interesting collection, I must say.”

“I didn’t load any cargo. It was the last thing on my mind before we left E2.” Then she remembered the snake robot. Even as part of it was busy sabotaging the link, another part would have been diligently loading the transport with Susan White’s accumulated possessions.

It took a machine to be that stupid, Auger thought. “OK. Now tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”

“Other than saving your life? Oh, I thought that was obvious. I’m a spy, Auger. Ever since we picked up rumours and hints that you Threshers had reopened the Phobos portal, I’ve been trying to worm my way into Caliskan’s confidence in order to find out what’s going on. And it worked, too, didn’t it? That little trip to Earth was most invigorating.”

“I always said you couldn’t be trusted.”

“Ah, but the point is that you have no one else to trust. I’m your last, best hope.”

“I think I’ll take my chances with Niagara,” Auger said.

“Oh, yes. Dear, dependable Niagara. Shall I break the bad news now or later? Niagara was also a spy. The difference is that he was working for the really nasty people.”

The white walls were curved, merging seamlessly with floor and ceiling. Fine gold threads wove themselves through the white in calligraphic swirls that oozed and flowed in a way that seemed to calm Auger on some utterly primal level.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, snapping her attention back to Cassandra. “Niagara showed us how to make the link work. Why would he have done that if he was working against us?”

“Because he needed the link up and running, you silly-billy.” Cassandra sighed, planting one hand on her hip. “Look, I’ll spell it out for you: you were all duped. Niagara was a plant, working for a particularly vicious splinter faction of the aggressors. He wasn’t a moderate sympathiser at all, but your worst enemy.”

“Nice of you to let us know.”

“And nice of your government to let us know it had found the Phobos portal in the first place,” she countered. “If your people hadn’t been so keen to keep that from us, we might have learned about Niagara’s activities sooner than we did.”

“Or you’d have made sure you controlled Niagara.”

“Are you going to keep this up for ever, Auger? Or would it kill you to trust me?”

“I can’t trust you, Cassandra. You lied to me on Earth, posing as someone you weren’t.”

“At the behest of your government, not mine. It wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest if you’d known I was a Polity citizen. It was Caliskan who insisted on that particular charade.”

“That still doesn’t excuse the fact that you were prepared to testify against me in the tribunal.”

“Testify as in ‘tell the truth,’ you mean? Well, I can’t argue with that.”

“They’d have hung me out to dry.”

“And you’d have deserved it. Nothing was worth risking a human life the way you did, Auger. Especially not some useless paper relic from two hundred years ago.”

“Is this the reason you rescued me? To rub my nose in it?”

“Do I detect a note of contrition?”

“Detect what you like. You still haven’t explained what you were doing around Mars, if you’re so friendly.”

“We were doing what we could to limit the damage,” Cassandra said. “It can’t have escaped your attention that there is civil war in the Federation of Polities. That disagreement has now spread to the inner system.”

“With Phobos one of the first casualties. I hope you’re proud of that.”

“Oh, very proud. Especially as fifty-four of my moderate friends died trying to defend your precious little moon. You can’t imagine how proud that makes me feel.”

“I’m sorry,” Auger said, chastened.

“It doesn’t matter. They were just Slashers, after all,” she said bitterly.

“I never realised—”

“The aggressors had been taking a particular interest in Phobos for some time,” Cassandra said, ignoring her. “We had been shadowing their movements, trying to infiltrate their circles, but we didn’t know what it was about Phobos that had them so excited.”

“Now you do.”

“You were in hyperweb transit when the moon was destroyed, weren’t you?”

“Is there anything about us you don’t know?”

“A great deal,” Cassandra said. “I haven’t read your minds. We have no firm idea where the portal led to, or what you were doing at the other end. We don’t know exactly what Niagara wanted with it, except that Silver Rain plays a role in his plans. But we have learned something puzzling about the man.”

“Floyd?”

“You shouldn’t have brought him with you.”

“I had no damned choice.” Auger forced herself to sit higher in the bed. As she moved, the bed effortlessly readjusted itself to support her. Beneath the silky white sheet she was wearing some kind of hospital smock. She reached up and touched the area of her shoulder where she had been shot.

No pain. No inflammation. She pushed her hand under the collar of the smock and traced the region of skin where the wound had been. It was baby smooth, revealing its healed newness only with the faintest tingle.

“We dug out the bullet,” Cassandra said. “You were very lucky.”

“Where are we?”

“Aboard our ship—the one that pulled your transport out of Mars’s atmosphere. We call the ship—” And her syrinx played one of its little ditties, although Auger heard none of the music in it. “I don’t think there would be a lot of point in attempting a translation into flat language.”

“Where is the ship now? Are we still near Mars?”

“No. We’re on our way to near-Earth space. There are, however, complications.”

“I need to talk to Caliskan.”

“He’s expecting you. It was a message from Caliskan that warned us to keep an eye out for you. It was a moving transmission, probably sent from a ship. We’re still tracking the message’s point of origin. Once we’re closer, we can open a tight-beam channel.”

“Can I see Floyd in the meantime?”

Cassandra made a precise mimelike gesture, signalling the machines hovering about her bed. A number of the smaller ones moved into Cassandra’s own cloud, becoming part of its twinkling whole. She breathed in and the cloud contracted to about half its previous volume.

“I think you’re allowed to move now,” Cassandra said, after digesting whatever information the machines had imparted. “But do take things carefully.”

Auger started to force herself up from the bed. As soon as she moved, more hummingbirds and dragonflies appeared from nowhere and assisted her, exerting gentle pressure where she needed it. Her feet barely touched the floor. Once she was free of the bed, the sheet levitated, wrapped itself around her and formed a kind of loose, billowing gown.

“This way,” Cassandra said.

The golden threads running through the walls oozed to form the outline of a doorway, which had a slightly Persian look to it. The door puckered wide, admitting them into a throatlike corridor with no recognisable floor or ceiling. The corridor curved up and around, bringing them to a blank part of wall that obliged them with a doorway when they were close enough to touch it.

They stepped through. Inside was a smaller recovery room than the one Auger had been in containing a single bed with a single occupant. Floyd was asleep, lying flat on his back, a twinkle of machines around his head. The Slashers had dressed him in a similar smock to the one Auger was wearing. His face was completely blank and masklike, with no sign of his head injury.

“He looks dead,” Auger said.

“He isn’t. Just unconscious. We’re holding him that way for the time being.”

“Why?”

“We didn’t want to alarm him.” Cassandra’s cloud commingled with the machines around Floyd, some brief information exchange taking place. “When we healed his head wound, we naturally examined his DNA. It turned out to be very peculiar. He doesn’t have any of the chromosomal markers that would identify him as a descendent of someone who lived through the GM excursions of the early twenty-first century.”

“He wouldn’t,” Auger said.

“It would take extensive rescripting to remove those markers. Why would anyone go to so much trouble?”

“They wouldn’t.”

“That’s what we thought.” Cassandra touched a finger to her lower lip. “It’s almost as if he’s a man from the past, from before the twenty-first century.”

“Good guess. What else did you figure out?”

“He must have come through the hyperweb, from the other end of the link. What did you find there, Auger?”

“If I don’t tell you, you’ll just take it from my memory, won’t you?”

“If I decided you were withholding something of strategic importance, I’m afraid I’d have little choice. Regrettably, this is war.”

He surfaced to the sound of Auger’s voice. She came into focus, looking down on him against a background of spotless cinematic white.

“Floyd. Wake up. You’re OK.”

His mind was as clean and clear as the dawn sky. He was vaguely affronted by this on some level, feeling that he should have been allowed a grace period of disorientation and grogginess. Even his memories felt bright and sparkling, as if they had been taken out for a quick spit and polish.

He ran his tongue around the inside surface of his teeth. None of them were broken. They felt like church gargoyles that had been taken down and sandblasted clean.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We were rescued,” Auger said. She was standing over his bed, wearing a kind of satin toga. It moved around her in strange, unsettling ways, flowing like one of those very flat fish that skim the seabed. “We’re all right, at least for now.”

He sat up and touched his scalp. There was no sign of the injury, although his hair had been shaved almost to his scalp where the cut had been. “Where is this place?”

“We’re aboard a ship.”

“A space ship?”

“Yes. You can cope with that, can’t you? I mean, after what’s happened to us, a spaceship is not the strangest thing imaginable, is it?”

“I’ll cope,” Floyd said. “Who’s running this jalopy, and are they the good guys?”

“I know the woman who seems to be in charge. She’s a moderate Slasher by the name of Cassandra. I’ve already had dealings with her on Earth. In theory that makes her more trustworthy than the aggressors.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“They’ve taken care of us. It doesn’t mean they have my automatic gratitude. Not until I know what’s going on, and where exactly they’re taking us.”

“Haven’t they told you?”

“They’re supposed to be homing in on the location of some kind of transmission from Caliskan. That’s all I know.”

Floyd rubbed a hand across his face. They had even shaved him. It was, by some distance, the best shave he had ever had. “You don’t like them much, do you?”

“I like them even less after…” But she stopped and shook her head. “If she wants to know everything, she can damn well work for it. The only person I want to talk to is Caliskan.”

Floyd pushed himself upright. He was on the point of asking Auger if she knew where he might get a drink when the dryness in his throat was suddenly gone, as if he had been imagining it all along.

“What did you tell Cassandra?” he asked.

“I told her everything. If she’d suspected I was holding anything back, she’d have read my mind anyway.”

“How’d she take… me?”

“I’m not sure she thought your being here was a great idea.”

“That makes two of us,” Floyd said. “I also know there isn’t much point in complaining about it.”

“I’m sorry about all this.”

“Auger—do me a favour and stop apologising, will you? No regrets. Never.”

She smiled. “I don’t believe you for a second. But I’m still glad you made it, Floyd.”

“I’m glad we both made it. Now how about a kiss, before they come to put me in the monkey house?”

At first, Auger thought that Cassandra had somehow lost her way and led them into the wrong part of the ship: some kind of waiting room or chill-out den, perhaps, but definitely not a tactical room. It was another white chamber, brightly lit where she had expected subdued, vision-enhancing reds. Instead of urgent, cycling displays, the walls were the usual gold-threaded white. There was a toadstool-shaped table in the middle of the room, rising seamlessly from the floor, and around this stood half a dozen toadstool-shaped chairs. The chairs had a spongy, haphazard look to them, like the furniture of a gingerbread house. Six Slashers occupied them, facing each other across the equally spongy table. None of them were in what Auger would have called a tense or particularly agitated posture. One of them rested an elbow on the table, hand supporting his chin. Another woman (although she could have passed for a child) pressed her steepled fingers to her brow, as if in meditation. The other four Slashers had their hands tucked limply in their laps, as if they were waiting their turns in a slow, dull parlour game. No one was saying anything and their eyes were either closed or heavy-lidded. There was, however, a dense cloud of twinkling machines hovering above the middle of the table, and the extremities of this cloud encompassed all six participants, its boundary shifting from moment to moment.

“Tunguska,” Cassandra said. “Can you spare enough of yourself to talk to us?”

The one with his elbow on the table turned his head minutely in their direction. He was a large man, black-skinned and round of face, with sad, heavily lidded eyes and long silver-black hair tied back in a pony-tail.

“I can always make time for you, Cassie,” he said in a very slow, very deep voice.

“Tunguska is my battle manager,” Cassandra said. “He’s also my friend and ally. Tunguska and I go back a long way.”

“I didn’t know an outmoded concept like friendship was tolerated in the Polities,” Auger said.

“Then you know even less about us than you think.” Cassandra nodded at Tunguska. “Our guests are curious. Can you show them the state of play?”

“Let me see what I can do.”

Tunguska turned to the wall and with brisk hand gestures somehow made an area of it become black. Circles and spheres dropped into place: a view of the solar system, looking down on the plane of the ecliptic. The view zoomed in on the inner system, as far out as the orbit of Mars. Mars itself was indicated by a red sphere, very much out of scale, accompanied by one intact moon and the glowing smudge that had recently been Phobos.

“The collapse of the quasi-wormhole knocked out all forces within a few dozen kilometres of the moon,” Tunguska said, his voice as slow and measured as if he was reciting a sermon. “But that still leaves a large concentration of ships within the immediate volume of space around Mars. We’re tracking at least two hundred distinct thrust signatures.”

“Who do those ships belong to?” Auger asked.

“Everyone who has a stake in controlling the inner system. Various Polity factions account for about seventy per cent of active combatants. Twenty per cent are USNE, with the remainder made up of non-aligned parties: lunar breakaway groups and suchlike.” As Tunguska spoke, icons dropped into place, forming a bustling crowd of flags and emblems around Mars. It was quite impossible to make any sense of it.

“Did anyone make it out of Phobos alive?” Auger asked.

“We’re tracking a number of slow-moving spacecraft that seem to have left Phobos before the main attack commenced.”

“Why?” asked Cassandra. “Were you thinking of anyone in particular?”

“I had a friend…” Auger said, faltering. “I didn’t really know her very well, but I want to believe she got away in time.”

“I’m afraid I can’t offer any guarantees,” Cassandra said. Perhaps reading something in her face, she continued, “However, it seems at least plausible that some people—”

“There’s a good chance she made it,” Tunguska said.

“Never mind,” Auger said. The last thing she needed right now was empty reassurance. She would just have to hope that Skellsgard had been on one of those early ships. “Just give me a straight answer to my next question. Who’s winning?”

“If you don’t mind,” Tunguska said, addressing Cassandra, “I really need to focus on the task in hand, or the answer to her question is not going to be one we’d all wish for.” He nodded at Floyd and Auger. “It was nice to meet you. I hope you both make it home safely.”

He turned his head back to face the table and closed his eyes.

“I’ll answer your question,” Cassandra said. “There is no clear outcome in sight. If it was a straight contest between Polity and Thresher assets, there’d be little doubt of victory for the Polities, at least around Mars. But the moderates are siding with the Threshers. So far, that’s evening things out.”

“Then let’s hope things reach a stalemate,” Auger said.

Floyd, standing beside her, had said nothing so far. But he still nodded, evidently sharing her concern.

Cassandra shook her head. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. The moderates have deployed all their assets into the inner system, but the aggressors still have forces in reserve. They’re on high-burn approaches even as we speak.”

“But this is insane,” Auger said. “They might have the military strength to take Mars from us, and they might even have the means to capture Tanglewood and the rest of the inner system. But the moderates won’t let them do that without a fight, and they still have that little scorched-earth problem to worry about.”

“What scorched-earth problem?” Floyd asked.

“My side ringed Earth with bombs,” Auger said. “Insurance against the Slashers trying to take it out of our hands again.”

“You mean you’d blow up the planet rather than let someone else have it?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“I hate to tell you this, Auger, but you’re all as crazy as each other.”

“Bet you’re sorry you signed up for this now, aren’t you, Floyd?” Not waiting for his answer, Auger turned back to Cassandra. “Where are we in this sorry little mess?”

“Oh, we’re nowhere near Mars now,” the girl said. “We’ve been on our own high-burn trajectory ever since we snatched you out of the atmosphere.”

Another icon dropped into the image, about halfway between Mars and Earth, which were both situated on the same side of the Sun.

“That’s us?”

“That’s us,” Cassandra confirmed. “Maintaining a high-burn trajectory, with a second ship just behind us.”

“A high-burn trajectory?” Auger shook her head. “It doesn’t even feel as if we’re moving.”

“Trust me, we’re moving. We’re also executing some rather violent evasive patterns.”

Something wasn’t right. Auger had heard many things about the Slashers’ advanced technology, but she had never heard that they had developed the means to nullify acceleration. Perhaps they were even further ahead of the USNE than intelligence had ever suggested.

“What do you know about this second ship?” she asked.

“We think it might be one of Niagara’s allies, or possibly the man himself. It’s a Polity design, part of the original concentration of aggressor elements. It may be responding to Caliskan’s signal from Tanglewood.”

“We have to get to him first,” Auger said.

“That’s more or less the idea,” Cassandra replied laconically. “We’d be there in eight hours under optimum conditions. Unfortunately, the ship behind us is doing its best to make life difficult. These violent evasive manoeuvres are costing us time and engine fatigue.”

“Maybe I’m missing something,” Auger said, “but I don’t feel any violent evasive manoeuvres.”

“Mm.” Cassandra said thoughtfully. “There’s something you need to see, I think.”

“What?”

Cassandra led them across the chamber and opened a door into another corridor. A little way along, she stopped at a smooth expanse of convex walling and created an observation window. “I may as well show you something else on the way. Apart from the two of you, there are eighteen other casualties on this ship.”

Auger brightened, remembering Skellsgard. Perhaps she was safe after all, despite Cassandra’s doubts. “Refugees from Phobos?”

“Not directly, no. I’m sorry—I know you want good news about your friend, and I would give it to you if I could.”

The observation window overlooked a large interior chamber. Cassandra made the lights come on, revealing the stubby, streamlined form of a Thresher-manufactured spacecraft: the kind that could skim in and out of an atmosphere and land on a planetary surface, such as Mars or Titan, or on one of the high-altitude landing towers on Venus. It was about twenty metres in length, just small enough to fit into the bay. The shuttle had bulky thrust nacelles and bulging insectile undercarriage pods; against the scorched white skin, Auger could make out a green flying horse logo near the black heat-absorbent panelling of the nose.

“That’s a Pegasus Intersolar ship,” she said.

“Yes,” Cassandra said. “As a matter of fact, it’s a transatmospheric shuttle from the liner Twentieth Century Limited.”

The ship was braced into the chamber on enormous shock-absorbing pistons, gripping it from all angles. Even as Auger watched, the ship lurched one way and then another, as if subject to immense lateral forces. “I took the Twentieth to Phobos,” she said, feeling slightly seasick. “What’s one of its shuttles doing here?”

“The liner was hijacked. Hostile ships made rendezvous and hard docking beyond reach of systemwide law enforcement.”

“Slasher forces?”

“Not obviously so. According to eyewitnesses, they behaved just like your run-of-the-mill extralegal agents. Pirates, in other words. Luckily, the liner was running at nowhere near maximum capacity. There was room for most of the passengers and crew to escape on shuttles.”

“And the pirates just let them go?” Auger asked incredulously.

“They had nothing to gain by butchering those on board. There wasn’t enough room for everyone on the shuttles, and some of the crew elected to remain aboard. They were allowed into a secure compartment with life-support capability and provisions. That’s where the ones who stayed aboard were all found, when the Twentieth drifted within reach of Thresher police.”

Auger thought she had misheard her. “Drifted?”

“She had been gutted,” Cassandra said. “Stripped of her entire drive assembly.”

“That’s insane.”

“Oh, there was some attempt to dress up the piracy as being for the usual reasons,” she said, “but it was all cover, really. The main thing they were after was the drive core.”

“But why would anyone want the drive core of an old junkheap like the Twentieth? The Slashers will happily sell anyone a more efficient engine, provided they stump up the costs.”

“That’s precisely what bothered me,” Cassandra said. “The entire operation to steal the Twentieth’s engine must have been quite expensive in its own right. Several ships had to make that rendezvous, including one large enough to contain the entire drive assembly. It’s not the sort of thing you dismantle.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Auger said.

“But you sense a connection none the less. Why steal an antimatter engine when we can offer something infinitely safer, and just as powerful? The only practical use for such a thing would be—”

“As a bomb,” Auger said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Think about it, Cassandra. It has to be a bomb. That’s the only thing that drive can give the Slashers that you don’t already have. Your bleed-drive engines suck energy from the vacuum in tiny, controlled doses. I know. I’ve seen the sales brochures.”

“They’re very safe,” Cassandra said defensively. “The vacuum potential reaction is self-limiting: if the energy density exceeds a critical limit, it shuts off.”

“In other words, very useful for making a safe drive, but not much use as a Molotov cocktail.”

Beside her, Floyd smiled. “I almost thought I was going to get through a whole conversation without understanding a single word. Now you’ve gone and spoiled it.”

“I confess I have no idea what a Molotov cocktail is,” Cassandra said. “Is it some kind of weapon system?”

“You could say that,” Floyd said.

“I still don’t understand,” Cassandra said. “You’re implying that someone wanted the antimatter engine to use as a bomb. But what use is such a thing? A ship large enough to contain the stolen drive assembly could never approach close enough to a planet or habitat to do serious damage. It would be intercepted and destroyed in interplanetary space, light-seconds from any target. As soon as we issue a systemwide alert—”

“Go ahead and issue your alert,” Auger said, “but I don’t think it will make any difference. I think you’ll find it a lot more difficult to track those ships than you’re expecting. I also don’t think they intend to use that antimatter against anything in this system.”

“You’re making me most anxious to have a peek inside your skull,” Cassandra said ominously. “I thought we had an agreement.”

“And you said you had something else to show me.”

“It concerns the evacuees,” she said. “And, in a way, you.”

She made the window vanish, then led them a little further along the corridor and opened another gilded doorway.

The room beyond was a kind of dormitory. Inside, ranked against the two long, incurving walls, were twenty or so coffinlike containers. Again, they had the spongy, vegetative look of recently extruded hardware, their bases merging into the floor. Pulpy, rootlike tendrils connected the pods to each other and the walls.

“This is where we’re keeping the eighteen passengers and crew from the shuttle,” Cassandra said, inviting Auger to take a closer look at one of the pods. The upper part of it consisted of a curved, glossy lid, veined like a leaf, through which the head and upper body of one of the evacuees could just be discerned. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, encased in what looked like a thick turquoise-blue support matrix of some kind. Auger even thought she recognised her as one of the other passengers she’d seen on the Twentieth.

“Is she ill?” Auger asked.

“No,” Cassandra said. “See that bluish gel she’s floating in? Pure machinery. It’s invaded her completely, right down to the cellular level.”

“Who gave you permission to do that?” Auger asked, outraged. “These people are Threshers. Most of them would never consent to having machines pumped into their bodies.”

“I’m afraid they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” Cassandra said. “It was either that or die. We can quibble over consent later.”

“Die of what? You just said that none of them were ill.”

“It’s the evasive pattern, you see. We’re sustaining ten gees, which would be bad enough in its own right, but our random manoeuvres superimpose one or two hundred gee transients on top of that background load. It’s quite intolerable for an unmodified person. Without the buffering from those machines, they’d be dead.”

“Then why aren’t we?” Auger asked.

“I’ll show you.”

Cassandra waved them through to the back of the dormitory. “I mentioned eighteen evacuees from the Twentieth,” she said, “but you’ll notice that there are twenty caskets in this room. We wouldn’t have bothered creating the extras without good reason.” She gestured to the last two, set against the far wall. “You and your companion are in those two.”

“Wait…” Auger began.

“There’s no reason for alarm,” Cassandra said. “Come closer and look inside. You’ll see that you’re perfectly unharmed.”

Auger looked through the transparent cover of the first casket. There, suspended in the same blue gel as the woman, lay the sleeping form of Floyd, his eyes closed, his face an unmoving mask of serenity. She stepped aside to let him see, then viewed her own body in the other casket.

“Why does this feel as if everything’s just turned into a bad dream?” Floyd asked.

“It’s all right,” Auger said, reaching out to squeeze his hand in an attempt to give reassurance that she didn’t really feel herself. No matter how much this bothered her, she could not begin to imagine what Floyd was feeling. “Isn’t it, Cassandra?”

“I didn’t want to alarm you immediately,” the Slasher said, “knowing how Threshers tend to feel about our machines—”

“She’s telling the truth,” Auger said to Floyd. “We are on a spaceship and we were rescued from Mars. I’m pretty certain that much is true. But we still haven’t been woken up.”

“I feel pretty awake for someone who hasn’t been woken up.”

“You’re fully conscious,” she said. “It’s just that the machines are fooling your brain into thinking that you’re walking around. Everything that you see or feel is bogus. You’re really still in that tank.”

“It’s the only way we can keep you alive,” Cassandra said, with evident concern. “The acceleration would have killed all of us by now.”

“So you’re…?” Floyd began, not really knowing how to frame the question.

“In another casket, as are all my colleagues, somewhere else in the ship. I’m sorry that a small white lie was necessary, but everything else I’ve told you was the truth.”

“Everything?” asked Auger.

Cassandra cleared a portion of the wall and created a three-dimensional grid, into which she dropped the tiny form of their ship. It veered and swerved, the ship’s lithe, flexible hull bending and twisting with each change of direction. “This is our real-time trajectory,” Cassandra said. “You saw a hint of it when I showed you the captive shuttle. I could have doctored the view—it would have been trivial—but I chose not to. You’d have guessed sooner or later.”

“Are we really all right?” Auger said.

“Absolutely,” Cassandra said, “although the healing processes are still taking place. You’ll both be good as new by the time we arrive at Tanglewood.”

“If we ever get there,” she said.

Cassandra smiled. “Let’s err on the side of optimism, shall we? In my experience there’s very little point worrying about something you can’t control.”

“Even death?”

“Most especially death.”