Century Rain

THIRTY-SIX

“I appreciate that circumstances might be better,” said the man in the white captain’s uniform, resplendent with epaulettes and sleeve braids, “but I still want you to feel at home on this ship.”

Tunguska offered Floyd a cigar from a little wooden humidor. Floyd declined the cigar, but accepted a shot of whisky. They sat in upholstered armchairs in the luxuriously appointed parlour room of what was either an ocean liner, airship or transatlantic flying boat. Through the square windows, only a rain-washed darkness was visible, and the droning hum of engines was sufficiently nondescript that any of the possibilities could have applied. Ceiling fans stirred the air above them, rotating with laboured slowness.

Floyd drank half his whiskey. It wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but it still took the edge off his day. “What’s the news on Auger?” he asked.

“She’s stable,” Tunguska said. “The physical injury from the malfunctioning weapon was easily attended to, and ordinarily wouldn’t have caused any difficulties.”

“But on this occasion?”

“She went into shock. It’s quite possible that she would have died without intervention from Cassie’s machines. As it is, the machines have consolidated their hold on her. It’s like a coma.”

“How long is she going to be like that?”

“No telling, I’m afraid. Even when one of us willingly accepts to become the host to someone else’s machines, it’s still a process fraught with pitfalls. The kind of field transfer that Cassandra achieved down in Paris…” The captain jogged his cigar sideways, by way of illustration. “It would have been difficult even if Auger had been another Slasher, with years of preparation and the requisite structures already present in her head, ready to accept the new patterns. But Auger is only human. To compound matters, she was injured shortly after the takeover.”

“If Cassandra hadn’t taken her over, we’d both have died down there, wouldn’t we?”

“More than likely.” Tunguska helped himself to another cigar, snipping off the end with a clever little silver guillotine. He hadn’t smoked the first, or even appeared to grasp its basic function other than as a social accessory. “By the same token, Cassandra would have died without Auger as a host.”

“I don’t think she exactly volunteered for that job.”

“Trust me,” Tunguska said, “there would have been a degree of negotiation, no matter how fleeting. It isn’t etiquette to storm someone else’s head, no matter what the crisis.”

“What are Cassandra’s chances now?”

“Better than they would have been without a host. Her machines would have survived, but her personality would have begun to break up without the anchoring effect of a physical mind.”

“And now?”

“She has a fighting chance.” He stabbed the cigar forwards for emphasis. “Thanks to Auger.”

“I think Auger misjudged you,” Floyd said.

“She misjudged some of us. Concerning the others, she was—I regret to say—entirely correct in her opinion.”

Floyd had already told Tunguska all he could of the Slasher conspiracy. Doubtless he had some of the details wrong, and was vague about other things that Auger would have understood better. But Tunguska had nodded encouragingly, and had asked what seemed like more or less the right questions in the right order.

“What will happen now?” Floyd asked.

“With Auger? We’ll keep her under observation until we can identify a suitable new host for Cassandra’s machines. It’s not entirely clear what they’re doing to Auger, but I think we’d best leave them to their own devices for the time being.”

“But will she be all right?”

“Yes. Whether she will ever be quite the same, however… well, that’s a different question.”

Floyd cradled his drink and nodded. There was no point shooting the messenger, when Tunguska was doing the best he could. “Before we left Paris,” he said, “Cassandra said she’d given orders to intercept the escape vessel.”

“We received them,” Tunguska said.

“I was just wondering what the deal with that was. Did you boys make your kill?”

Tunguska glanced sideways, as if checking that no one else was in earshot. “Not exactly. It would seem that one of the interceptor ships was compromised. The one that had the best chance of catching the escape craft just… let it slip through the net.” He spread his fingers wide. “Unfortunate.”

“You can’t let that thing escape.”

“We did what we could, but there was another, faster ship waiting in translunar space, within one of our temporary sensor shadows. Very clever.”

“And this faster ship—how big is she?”

“Big enough to carry the antimatter device from the Twentieth Century Limited, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. “We can’t be certain that it’s the same craft that was involved in the hijacking, but given all the other factors… well, it seems more than likely. Incidentally, we’ve connected that ship to Niagara.”

“You have to stop him.”

“Tricky, unfortunately. His ship’s already on a high-burn trajectory, heading towards the Sedna portal.”

“So shut it down,” Floyd said.

“We’ve already tried that. It would appear that Niagara’s allies have control of the portal. We’ll have a military presence there within the day—enough to oust the aggressors—but not before that ship makes it through to the hyperweb.”

“And then we’ll have lost her,” Floyd said heavily.

Tunguska shifted in his seat, the leather groaning as he resettled himself. “Not necessarily. We at least know that the ship’s headed to the Sedna portal, and we know where that portal comes out. There’s a triad of portals at the far end—Niagara will have to take one of them. If we can keep sufficiently hard on his tail, we may be able to read the signatures of portal activation and determine which rabbit hole he’s bolted down. At that point we’ll risk entering the hyperweb link while another ship is still in transit. This is an unorthodox procedure even for Polity ships, and we’ll have to override safety controls on the portals to attempt it at all. But at the very least we’ll be able to follow Niagara part of the way, if nothing else.”

“Much good that’ll do.”

“It’s better than turning away now. Niagara’s craft is a big ship, fast in a straight-line dash, but it won’t be able to make portal-to-portal transitions as fast as we can. That’s about our only advantage.”

“And you’ve still no idea what corner of space Niagara’s headed to?”

“None at all,” Tunguska said. “That, unfortunately, is the bit we haven’t figured out yet. I don’t suppose you’ve had any bright ideas?”

“If you want bright ideas,” Floyd said, “you’ve definitely come to the wrong guy.”

When they had finished their drinks, Tunguska led Floyd through a warren of panelled companionways to his quarters. “It’s not much,” the Slasher said, opening the door to a bedroom Howard Hughes could have used for landing practice.

“I’ll manage,” Floyd said, fingering the teak inlay of the door. “Is all of this real?”

“Perfectly so,” Tunguska said. “Ours is a large ship and we can afford to reallocate some resources for your comfort. If we need those resources back again, I’ll do my best to give you fair warning.”

“Thanks… I think,” Floyd said. “About Auger?”

“You’ll be notified as soon as anything happens.”

“I’d like to see her.”

“Now?”

“Perhaps in a little while.”

“She still won’t be able to talk to you,” Tunguska warned.

“I know,” Floyd said, “but I want her to know that someone cares.”

“I understand,” Tunguska replied, guiding him into the room. “You’ve made quite some sacrifice by coming here, haven’t you, Mister Floyd?”

“I’ve made worse.”

“But you must appreciate that there is no guarantee of your ever returning home.”

“I didn’t know that when I helped Auger escape.”

“Perhaps not. But would that knowledge have made any difference to your actions?”

Floyd thought about that for a moment, trying to answer truthfully. “Maybe not.”

“I doubt that it would have. I may not be an excellent judge of human character, but I suspect you would have made exactly the same choices even if you’d had full knowledge of the consequences.” Tunguska patted him gently on the back. “And I find that rather admirable. You would have thrown away everything—the world and the people you love—for the sake of another human life.”

“Well, don’t elevate me to sainthood just yet,” Floyd said. “I had an idea that it was a good idea to help Auger get home. That was a kind of selfishness. And there’s still a chance for me to make the return journey.”

Tunguska studied him intently for a few moments, one finger gently stroking the heavy undercurve of his chin. “If we pinpoint the location of the ALS, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s true enough. But there’s still the small matter of breaking inside. The aggressors will attempt to deploy their antimatter device, which may or may not be sufficient to crack open the ALS. We, on the other hand, will do all we can to prevent them from doing that. If we can detonate the antimatter device prematurely, that is what we will do.”

Floyd hadn’t thought things through to that level of detail. Tunguska didn’t need to spell it out any more clearly that this could well turn into a suicide mission, if that was the only way to prevent Silver Rain from reaching E2.

“I’m sorry,” Tunguska added, when he saw Floyd’s reaction.

“And there’s no other way inside for me, is there?”

“None that we know of. Of course, if the ALS is ever in our possession, we’ll have all the time in the world to find a way inside… but that’s the one thing you don’t have.”

“You must do whatever it takes to stop Silver Rain,” Floyd said. “That’s what Auger and I risked our necks for. It’s what Susan White, Blanchard and Cassandra died for, and all the other innocent people that got involved in this.”

“We can still hope for a satisfactory outcome,” Tunguska said, forcing a strained note of optimism into his voice. “I’m just saying that we ought to be prepared for the worst.”

Tunguska left Floyd alone in his quarters, while the ship raced across the system towards the compromised portal. Floyd roamed around the enormous room, exploring its parameters like a laboratory hamster. It was comfortable enough, and it was obvious that his hosts had gone to quite a lot of trouble to make him feel at home. But he had a nagging suspicion that he would have been happier with the naked reality of the ship, as it presented itself to its usual occupants. Up close, the décor and furnishings of the room had the same sketchy quality as the parlour room. It was like walking through someone else’s vague daydream. Rather than relaxing him, it put him on edge.

There was a huge old upright wireless set by the writing desk, with a sunrise motif cut into the wood around the speaker grille. He turned it on, fiddled with the tuning dial. There was only ever one channel broadcasting. On it, a man delivered updates about the state of play in the system, with particular emphasis on the events in and around the portal towards which they were headed. The wireless announcer spoke with the speeded-up drawl of a horse-racing commentator, punctuating his monotone dialogue with little bells, whistles and xylophone jingles. It wasn’t a real news report—Floyd figured that much out for himself in very short order. It would have sounded dated and phoney in 1939. It was a digest of the real situation, packaged in a way that was meant to be soothing and reassuring for him.

He listened to the wireless for an hour or so, which was about as much as he could take. Niagara’s ship had reached the portal and made a successful insertion. Fears that the aggressors might attempt to collapse the portal after making their insertion turned out to be unfounded, at least for now. One theory was that the technical staff left behind had refused to follow the orders to collapse the throat. Another was that the throat collapse would be delayed until the last minute before moderates regained control of the portal, so that the collapse wave didn’t have time to catch up with and damage Niagara’s ship. A third possibility was that the aggressors had chosen to keep the portal open, despite the risk of pursuit. Closing it would have endangered the possibility of future access to the ALS, making their entire scheme senseless. They wanted to sterilise E2, and then bring everyone else around to the idea that this had been the right and proper thing to do. And then, presumably, they wanted to talk real estate.

Floyd turned off the wireless and thought about Auger again. It was less than a week since she had walked into his life. And yet he couldn’t imagine spending one moment of the rest of his life without her. Every other concern seemed thin and trivial when set against the necessity of her survival.

Presently, Tunguska came back to see him. “Good news, Floyd—Auger is making progress.”

“You’ve found another host?”

“Not yet, no. Cassandra’s machines seem quite keen to entrench themselves, for now at least. It may be that they’ve decided to stay inside Auger until this crisis is resolved.”

Floyd stood up. “Can I see her?”

“I said she was making progress,” Tunguska said, with a sympathetic smile. “I didn’t say she was lucid.”

“How long before she’s properly conscious?” he asked, slumping down on the bed again.

“We’ll be well inside the portal by the time she’s ready for visitors.” Tunguska held a box in his hands, jammed full of what Floyd at first took to be papers. “I’ll have to ask for your patience until then.”

Floyd accepted this information with as much grace as he could muster. “All right. I guess there’s no point in arguing.”

“None at all, I’m afraid. We have Auger’s best interests at heart, but we’re just as concerned for Cassandra’s wellbeing.” He walked over to the bed on which Floyd was sitting and placed the box at his feet. “In the meantime, I thought this might make your stay here a little more tolerable.”

Floyd looked down. The box was full of records: labels and sleeves he half-recognised. “Where did you get those from?” he asked incredulously.

“The cargo you brought back from E2,” Tunguska said, looking pleased with himself.

“But I thought we lost it.”

“We did. These are copies, reconstructed from scans of the original cargo. You can thank Cassandra for that particular piece of foresight.”

Floyd extracted one of the records. Seventy-eight r.p.m.: Louis Armstrong, with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, playing “Chimes Blues.” The original, on the Gennett label, was worth a ton of money in mint condition. Floyd had a scratched copy that was worth a bit less. All the same, he’d still played it a thousand times, trying to get his head around Bill Johnson’s bass moves.

This was a newer copy, on a reissue label, but still not one that Floyd had seen before. The sleeve was made of an odd, slippery material that felt like wet glass. “You made these?” he asked, rubbing the strange paper between his fingers.

“It was simple enough, given the available information.”

Floyd tipped the sleeve, letting the disc roll out into his hands. It was very light, as if pressed from cuttlefish bone. It felt as if it ought to snap into a thousand pieces at the slightest touch.

“I wasn’t even sure you people still listened to music. Auger didn’t seem very keen on it. Nor did Susan White.”

“Did Auger talk about that at all?”

“I kept meaning to ask her, but events got in the way. What’s the deal, Tunguska? Is music seen as a primitive art form here, like cave painting or bone carving?”

“Not exactly,” Tunguska said. “We still listen to music in the Polities, although it’s a rather different sort of music than any you’re likely to have experienced. But Auger and her compatriots simply don’t have the option of listening to music at all. It was all our fault, you see. We stole music from them.”

“How can you steal music, Tunguska?”

“You engineer a viral weapon. It can’t have escaped your attention what a central role music plays in the morale of a nation at war. Now imagine taking that away, in a single stroke. We’d already designed a viral weapon that could have killed them all, had it been allowed to infect a sufficient number of hosts. But we didn’t want to kill them: we wanted to turn them to our own ideology, so that our own numbers could be strengthened. Besides, a lethal virus is rather difficult to deploy across a wide sphere of battle. As soon as people start dying, quarantines are enforced. Brutal measures are taken to curtail its spread. So our thinkers went away and re-honed their weapon to attack the part of the mind associated with language, thinking that such a virus would have a better chance of spreading before its effects were noticed.”

“Nasty,” Floyd said.

“But still not satisfactory,” Tunguska continued, his voice as measured and untroubled as ever. “Our forecasts showed that the end result would still be tens of millions of deaths, as their habitat-based society unravelled due to lack of communication between key workers. So again our thinkers reworked the weapon. What they came up with was Amusica: a virus keyed to certain areas of the right brain hemisphere, analogous to those left-brain foci associated with the perception and generation of language. It worked beautifully. Victims of Amusica lose all sense of music. They can’t make it, can’t sing it, can’t whistle it, can’t play it. They can’t even listen to it, either. It means nothing to them any more: just a cacophony of sounds. To some it’s actively painful.”

“Then Auger… and Susan White?”

“Amusica spread through Thresher society very rapidly. By the time anyone had noticed what was happening, it was far too late to do anything about it. Even now there are mutant strains of the virus in circulation. And because of the way the weapon was designed, once you have it, you pass it on to your children… and your children’s children. That’s the future, Floyd: a world without music, for most of them.”

“Most of them?”

“It didn’t touch them all. One in a thousand escaped its effects, although we still don’t know why. They consider themselves very fortunate. They’re hated and envied in equal measure.”

“But if you can take music away… can’t you put it back?”

Tunguska smiled tolerantly. “We’ve tried, in a spirit of bridge-mending. But volunteers are naturally reluctant to submit to even more neural intervention. Most Threshers wouldn’t trust us to set a broken leg, let alone rewire their minds. And the few that do volunteer… well, the results haven’t been startlingly successful. If they remember what music once sounded like, they complain that it now sounds pale and unemotional. They might be right.”

“Or they might just be feeling the way we all do,” Floyd said. “No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.”

“I confess that was also my suspicion. But given the harm we’ve done, the least we can do is give these people the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there is something missing after all.”

“What about your people? If this virus is everywhere, shouldn’t you have caught it by now?”

“We would have, except the machines swarming through our bodies and minds keep the virus at bay.” Tunguska hesitated. “Now that the subject has been broached, Floyd, I should warn you that, since you lack these machines yourself—”

“That virus could hop aboard any time it likes.”

“You’re probably safe at the moment,” Tunguska said. “You’d need to be exposed to more than one carrier before the virus has a chance of establishing itself. But if you were to remain in the system—moving freely in Thresher society—then the virus would eventually find you.”

Floyd looked at the disc, his own reflection gleaming back at him. “Then I’d lose music, just the way Auger did?”

“Unless you had the good fortune to be the one in a thousand who can resist the virus… then yes, I’d say it was more or less guaranteed.”

“Thanks,” Floyd said. “I’m glad you told me.”

Tunguska looked a little taken aback. “Thanks wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting. Hatred and condemnation, perhaps, but not gratitude.”

“Bit late for condemnation, wouldn’t you say? What’s done is done. I don’t get the impression you’re particularly proud of what you did.”

“No,” Tunguska said, sounding genuinely relieved. “We’re most certainly not proud. And if there was anything we could do to make amends—”

“Maybe once you get this small matter of a war out the way,” Floyd suggested, “then you can think about rebuilding some of those bridges again. But first we have to stop Niagara.”

“There was something in the cargo he needed,” Tunguska said. “But he knew what he was looking for. We don’t. It would be difficult enough trying to find it even if we still had the cargo, or if Cassandra had had enough time to scan the contents at a higher level of resolution.”

“Wait,” Floyd said, turning the record over again. “If she didn’t have time to examine the cargo in detail, where did this copy come from?”

“Cassandra did the best she could, which means that the books and magazines and other journals haven’t been subjected to the kind of scrutiny she might have wished. But the recordings? It was actually a rather simple matter to make a holographic scan of the groove. A lot easier than scanning a paper document at microscopic resolution, looking for some hidden message.”

Floyd tilted the sleeve this way and that. “But if there was a hidden message here, you’d have missed it as well.”

“A hidden message like the co-ordinates of the ALS? Yes. But you already know that it would only take a tiny amount of data to specify that position. A few digits… easily hidden anywhere.”

“Then it’s useless.”

“I just thought the recordings might help the time pass. Given how much you like music—”

“Yes,” Floyd said. “Very much so. And the gesture’s appreciated. But without something to play these on…”

“Come, now,” Tunguska said, with a playful gleam in his eye. “You don’t think I’d have forgotten that, do you?”

He was looking at something behind Floyd, on the bedside table next to the sunrise wireless. Floyd turned around. There stood a phonograph set, a good one, where there had definitely not been one a minute ago.

“That’s a pretty good trick, Tunguska,” he said, smiling.

“Enjoy the music, Floyd. I’ll return when I have some news.”

After he had gone, Floyd slipped the disc on to the phonograph turntable and lowered the diamond-tipped needle into the groove. It crunched on to its track and then became quiet, except for the occasional click of static. Then the music began, Armstrong’s trumpet filling the room effortlessly, Lil Hardin’s piano bright and clear and cool, like rain on a hot day. Floyd smiled—it was always good to hear Satchmo, no matter the time or place—but there was something about the music that couldn’t rescue his spirits. Perhaps he was too worried about Auger and the rest of it to let the music have its intended effect. But even his scratched old Gennett copy had a life to it that was missing from this version. Somewhere between Paris and Cassandra’s ship, some essential spark had been bled from the music. Floyd pulled the platter off the turntable and returned it to its sleeve. He leafed through the box, finding the other jazz recordings and trying some of them, before abandoning the exercise. Maybe it wasn’t the recordings so much as the player, or the acoustics of the room, but something was wrong. It was like listening to someone almost whistle a tune.

Nice try, Tunguska, he thought.

Floyd leaned back on the bed, hands crossed behind his head. He turned on the wireless again, but the news was still the same.

“You can speak to her now,” Tunguska said. “But please—take things easily. She’s been through a great deal in the last couple of days.”

“I’ll treat her with kid gloves.”

“Of course. By the way, Floyd—how are you getting on with those recordings?”

“They’re a real nice thought,” Floyd said.

“As in—‘it’s the thought that counts?’ ”

“I’m sorry, Tunguska, but there’s something off about them. Maybe that phonograph needs a new needle. Or maybe it’s just me.”

“I just wanted you to feel at home.”

“And I appreciate the gesture. But don’t worry about me, all right? I’ll cope.”

“You put a brave face on things, Floyd. I admire that.”

Tunguska led him into the bright white chamber of the recovery room.

“I’ll leave you alone with her,” Tunguska said. “The machines will let me know if she experiences any difficulties.”

He stepped back through the white wall, which sealed itself tightly behind him, like blancmange.

Auger was in a state of drowsy wakefulness, sitting up in bed with a fog of silver machines twinkling around her head and upper body. She saw him walking towards the bed and—despite her evident weariness—managed a smile.

“Floyd! I thought they were never going to let you see me. I began to wonder if you were really all right.”

“I’m fine,” he said, sitting on a toadstool-shaped pedestal next to the bed. He took one of her hands and stroked the fingers. He expected her to pull away, but instead she tightened her grip on him, as if she needed this moment of human contact. “Tunguska wanted you to have some peace and quiet while you got your head together.”

“It feels as if I’ve been here for a hundred years, with my head ringing all the while.”

“Is is better now?”

“A bit. It still feels as if there’s a small debating society holding their annual meeting in my skull, though.”

“Cassandra’s machines, I suppose. You remember what happened, don’t you?”

“Not everything.” She pushed a strand of sweat-damp hair from her eyes. “I remember Cassandra dying… but not much else.”

“Do you remember her machines asking permission to set up camp in your head?”

“I remember feeling very frightened about something, but knowing I had to say ‘yes,’ and that I didn’t have long to think it over.”

“You did a very brave thing,” Floyd said. “I’m proud of you.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

“It was. For the time being, anyway. Do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” she said. “At least, as soon as I realise there’s something I don’t know, the information seems to pop into my head. We’re back on Cassandra’s ship, except that Tunguska’s running the show now.”

“You think we can trust him?”

“Yes, absolutely,” she said firmly, as if that should have been obvious. Then she frowned, just as suddenly less sure of herself. “No. Wait. How could I know him that well? That must be one of Cassandra’s memories…” Auger shook her head, as if she’d just taken a bite from a lemon. “This is strange. I’m not sure I like it.”

“Tunguska said that Cassandra’s machines seem to have taken a shine to you,” Floyd said.

“Don’t tell me I’m stuck like this for ever.” She said it in an off-hand way, but not quite convincingly enough.

“Probably just until the crisis is over,” Floyd said, doing his best to sound reassuring. “Do you remember that escape craft Cassandra was confident they were going to shoot down?”

“Yes,” Auger said, after a moment.

“Well, it got away. Made rendezvous with a bigger, faster ship. According to Tunguska, the evidence trail points to Niagara.”

This, at last, seemed to push Auger towards full alertness. She sat up straight in the bed, pushing her hair back. “We have to stop that ship before it reaches a portal. Nothing else matters.”

“We tried,” Floyd said.

“And?”

“No one could catch up with Niagara. And he’d already taken control of the portal.”

“I thought you said we were still chasing him.”

“We are. Tunguska sent reinforcements to regain control of the portal. His boys kept it open for us. We’re in the hyperweb at this very moment.”

She looked around, perhaps doubting his words. Floyd, too, had found it difficult to believe that a portal transition could be this smooth, this unexciting. It was like a ride in a well-oiled hearse.

“So where is Niagara right now?” she asked.

“Somewhere ahead of us, further along the pipe.”

“I didn’t think they ever put two ships in at the same time,” Auger said, frowning.

“I don’t think it’s exactly routine.”

“Does Tunguska think we’ll catch up with Niagara’s ship, or maybe get close enough to shoot it down?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s more worried about what will happen when Niagara pops out the other end. There’s a danger we’ll lose the trail.”

“That can’t be allowed to happen,” Auger said. “If we lose the trail, then we lose everything. Your whole world, Floyd—everyone you know, everyone you ever loved—will die in an instant.”

“I’ll tell Tunguska to throw a few more chairs in the furnace.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sinking back into the hollow of her pillow, as if drained of energy. “I don’t know why I’m making this any more difficult for you than it already is. Tunguska’s bound to be doing all he can.” Then she looked at Floyd sharply, some random dislodged memory slotting back into place. “The ALS co-ordinates,” she said. “Did you figure them out?”

“No. Tunguska’s still chewing on that one. He says we may never find them.”

“We’re missing something here, Floyd. Something so damned obvious it’s staring us in the face.”

Tunguska came to see her a little later. He was a huge man, but he moved and spoke with such unhurried calm that Auger couldn’t help but relax in his presence. His mere existence seemed to assure her that nothing bad would happen.

“Have you come to let me out of bed?” she asked. “I feel as if I’m missing all the excitement.”

“In my experience,” Tunguska said, making himself a temporary seat, “excitement is always better when it happens to other people. But that’s not why I came. I have a message for you. We intercepted it shortly before entering the portal.”

“What kind of message?”

“It’s from Peter Auger. Would you like to see it?”

“You really should have told me sooner.”

“Peter specifically asked that you not be disturbed until you were feeling better. Anyway, there was no possibility of replying. We told Peter that you would be unconscious until we were already in the hyperweb.”

“Then he knows I’m safe?”

“He does now. But why don’t I just play the message?” Without waiting for an answer, Tunguska cast a hand towards one wall and conjured a screen into being. It filled with a flat, static image of Peter, looking a bit more harried and rough around the edges than usual.

“I’ll leave you to view the message in private,” Tunguska said, standing and gesturing for his seat to dissolve into the floor.

The image came to life as soon as Tunguska left the room.

“Hello, Verity,” Peter said. “I hope that this reaches you safe and sound. Before you start worrying, I want you to know that the kids are all right. We’re in the protection of Polity moderates—friends of Cassandra’s—and they’re taking very good care of us. Tunguska will make sure we’re all reunited once this madness is over.”

“Good,” Auger mouthed.

“Now let’s talk about you,” Peter continued. “I still don’t have all the facts—and I don’t expect to get them until we’re face to face—but I’ve heard enough to know that you’re basically intact and that you’re in excellent hands. I’m sorry about what happened to Caliskan and Cassandra. I know you’ve been through quite an ordeal since you returned from E2, never mind what actually happened at the other end of the link. All I can say is—and I know this is going to sound strange coming from me—but I’m proud to know you. We would have been satisfied if all you’d done was complete the mission that was assigned to you. But you did so much more than that. You lived up to the memory of Susan White. You made sure her death was not in vain.” Peter paused and held up a flat display screen upon which a complex three-dimensional form—like a metallic snowflake or starfish—twisted and tumbled. “You probably won’t recognise this. It’s a single replicating element of Silver Rain—the same strain that Cassandra’s people think Niagara has got his hands on.”

He was right: she shouldn’t have recognised it. But she had felt a glimmer of familiarity when she first saw the rotating form. Cassandra’s machines recognised it, even if Auger didn’t.

“Officially, it never should have been possible,” Peter went on. “All stocks were supposed to have been incinerated twenty years ago. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. In blatant violation of the treaty, the Polities held on to a strategic reserve. They even dedicated a small team to making improvements in the weapon.”

“Bastards,” Auger said.

“But don’t be too harsh on them,” Peter said with a glint in his eye, as always knowing exactly what her response would be. “We did just the same. The only difference is that our research teams weren’t quite so inventive. Or, perhaps, clever.” He tilted the display screen so that he was able to look at it for himself. “Really, what the Polity scientists did was very simple. The original Silver Rain was a broad-spectrum anti-biological agent. It couldn’t discriminate between people and plants, or any kind of micro-organism. It infiltrated itself into all living organisms and killed them all at the same preprogrammed moment: that’s why we still have the Scoured Zone on Mars. Very good for destroying an entire ecology… not so good for surgically removing one element of it. But the new strain is able to do just that—it’s human-specific. When it’s done its work, there will be nobody left alive anywhere on E2. In a few weeks there won’t even be corpses. Yet in every other respect the ecosystem will remain untouched. To the rest of nature, it will feel like a brief, bad fever has just ended. A million-year fever called Homo sapiens. The cities will crumble and decay. The dams will crack and collapse. The wilderness will reclaim what was rightfully its own. The animals probably won’t even notice the difference, except that the air will taste a little cleaner to the birds, and the oceans will sound a little quieter to the whales. There won’t even be any nuclear power stations or ships to run out of control, poisoning the world when their masters depart.”

Peter cleared the panel with a flex of his wrist and placed it aside. “Why am I telling you all this, when Niagara already has the weapon? Simply because you are our only hope of stopping this from happening. If that weapon is released into the atmosphere of E2, understand that it will work. There is no realistic probability of failure. No antidote we can release later, and hope that it mops up the replicators before they trigger. The only way to stop this happening is to intercept Niagara before he reaches Earth. If he isn’t intercepted, the murder of three billion souls in E2 will be bad enough. But that’s not the end of it. If the aggressors fail, then I believe we have a hope of ending this insane war before it escalates any further. We may have lost the Earth, but we don’t have to lose the entire system. But if Silver Rain reaches E2, the hardliners on our side will never consent to any ceasefire, even with the moderates. It will go all the way. It will be the end of everything.” He shrugged. “We’ll lose, of course. I just felt you needed to be absolutely clear about that, so that you know what’s at stake.”

“I know,” Auger said. “You didn’t have—”

“I know, I know,” Peter said, nodding. “After all that you’ve gone through, all that you’ve done for us, to have to ask this much more of you… it’s neither fair nor reasonable. But we simply have no alternative. I know you have the strength, Verity. More than that, I know you have the courage. Just do what you can. And then come home to us. You have more friends than you know, and we’re all waiting for you.”

Later, she had another visitor. The dark-haired girl walked into the room without invitation, then stood demurely at the foot of her bed with her hands clasped behind her back, as if awaiting some mild reprimand for late homework.

“I could make myself transparent, if you thought that might help,” Cassandra said.

“Don’t bother. I know you’re not real.”

“I felt it best to appear in person. You don’t mind, do you? Compared to what I’ve already done to you, altering your perceptual feeds seems rather tame.”

“What is this about, Cassandra?”

“It’s about you and me. It’s about what happened to us, and what we do about it.”

“I’m under no illusions,” Auger said. “You hijacked my body to save us in Paris.”

“I also saved myself in the process. I can’t deny that there was a degree of self-interest involved.”

“Why? I’m sure those machines of yours could have hidden themselves out of harm’s way until the danger was over.”

“They could have, but I wouldn’t have survived very long without a host mind. A personality is a fragile thing at the best of times.”

Auger felt some chill sense of what Cassandra had endured. “How much of you…” But she couldn’t find it in herself to finish the question.

“How much of me survived? More than I could have hoped for. A lot less than I would have liked. Mentally, I had time to write a message in a bottle. You’re talking to that message.”

“And your memories?”

“In principle, the machines would only ever have been able to encode and transfer a tiny fraction. My memories feel complete… but thin, like a sketch for a life rather than the thing itself. There’s no texture to them, no sense that I actually lived through those events. I feel as if my life is something that happened to someone else, something I only heard about at second-hand.” She composed herself, looking down at her shoes. “But perhaps that’s what life always feels like. The trouble is, I can’t remember if there was a difference before I died.”

“I’m sorry, Cassandra.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong—it’s better than being dead. And when we sort out this mess, there’ll always be a chance that I can reintegrate backed-up memories from the Polity mnemonic archives. If they survive.”

“I hope they do.”

“We’ll see. The main thing is that I’ve made it this far. I have you to thank for that, Auger. You could have refused me.”

“I don’t remember a discussion taking place.”

Cassandra gave a half-smile. “Well, it didn’t take very long, I’ll admit. And in the process of me storming your brain, you probably lost the last few seconds of your short-term memory. But I assure you I had your permission to do what needed to be done.”

“You saved us,” Auger said. “And when I was injured, when Floyd came back to rescue me, you stayed with me.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“You could have fled my body… abandoned me in Paris. I’m sure your machines would have coped until they found another host. You could have made do with Floyd, after all.”

“You have the wrong idea about us,” Cassandra said. “I would never have abandoned you. I would rather have died than live with that.”

“Then I’m grateful.”

“You saved me as well. After all that has gone between us, it was nothing I counted on. You have my thanks, Auger. I just hope that in some way this has taught both of us a lesson.”

“I was the one who needed the lesson,” Auger said. “I hated you because you told the truth about me.”

“Then I’ll make a small confession. Even as I was preparing to testify against you, I admired your dedication. You had the fire in your belly.”

“It nearly burnt me.”

“But at least you cared. At least you were ready to do something.”

“This little mess,” Auger said, “is all because of people who were ready to do something. People like me, who always know when they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Maybe what we need is a few less of us.”

“Or the right kind,” Cassandra said, shrugging. She shifted awkwardly. “Look, I’ll come to the point. I meant everything that I just said, but the reason I came to talk to you is very simple: it’s your choice now.”

“What’s my choice?”

“What you do with me. You’re healed. You no longer need me in your head to keep you alive.”

“Then you’ve identified a new host?”

“Not exactly. Tunguska would take me if he had spare capacity… which he doesn’t, not with all the extra tactical processing he’s having to do. The same goes for the rest of the crew. But there are techniques. They can hold my machines in suspension until we return to the Polities and find a host.”

“Answer me truthfully: how stable would that suspension be, compared to you remaining where you are?”

“The suspension procedure is more than capable—”

“Truthfully,” Auger said.

“There’d be some additional losses. Impossible to quantify, but almost inevitable.”

“Then you’re staying put. No ifs, no buts.”

Cassandra flicked aside her lick of black hair. “I don’t know what to say. I never expected this kindness.”

“From me?”

“From any Thresher.”

“Then I suppose we both had things wrong. Let’s just hope we aren’t the only ones who can find some common ground.”

“There’ll be others,” Cassandra said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t play our part. When we’ve dealt with Niagara, when we’ve returned to Sedna, there’ll be some very raw wounds that need healing.”

“If anyone’s left alive.”

“We’ll just have to hope things haven’t gone to the brink. If they haven’t… if the progressive Threshers and the moderate Slashers can put their differences aside… then there may be hope for all of us. Whatever the case, an example of co-operation could make all the difference.”

“An example like us, you mean?”

The little girl with the dark hair nodded. “I’m not saying I should stay in your head for ever. But when the peace is being negotiated, someone who could be trusted by both parties might be a very important player indeed.”

“Or they might choose not to trust us at all.”

“That’s a risk,” Cassandra conceded. “But one I’d be prepared to take.” Then something seemed to amuse her. “And you never know, Auger.”

“Never know what?”

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

After much insistence, Tunguska finally caved in and permitted Auger to walk around the ship. She was washed and alert, the voices in her head no longer quite so insistent. A sheet of intelligent bedclothing hugged her every move, preserving her modesty and—whenever she caught a glimpse of herself in some polished surface or actual mirror—quietly flattering her as well, she noticed. A little while ago, she would have been appalled at the thought of allowing Slasher machinery to become so intimate with her. Now, whenever she tried to summon the appropriate reflex disgust, it just wasn’t there. In spite of her little tête à tête with Cassandra, she wondered whether this was because the machines were surreptitiously doctoring her thoughts, or whether the events of the last few days had finally forced her to realise that not everything about the Slashers was automatically repugnant. At the same time, she wondered if she really needed an answer. The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.

Tunguska and Floyd sat on one side of an extruded table, watching patterns play across the wall opposite them. As Auger approached the table, a chair bulged up from the floor in anticipation.

“You’re quite sure you feel well enough for this?” Tunguska asked.

“I’m fine. Cassandra and I have come to an… accommodation.”

Tunguska offered her the newly formed seat. She took it, sitting between the two men. Tunguska was dressed in a simple two-piece outfit of white flannel, slashed low across his broad, hairless chest, while Floyd wore a clean white shirt, with black trousers supported by striped elastic braces. Those were definitely not the clothes that Floyd had been wearing when they left Paris, so Tunguska must have conjured them up for him. She wondered if he had dug them out of some obscure memory, or followed Floyd’s specifications.

“We have an echo from Niagara’s ship,” Tunguska said, gesturing towards one of the image panels on the wall. Gold-threaded lines formed a flowing contour map reminiscent of the navigational display in the transport, but with a great deal more complexity. Cryptic symbols hovered in boxes around the edge of the diagram, connected by thin lines back to knotty features in the contour plot. As the features shifted and merged, the symbols altered from one perplexing configuration to another.

“We’re sending acoustic signals up the line,” Tunguska continued, “using the same high-speed propagation layer you employ for your navigation and communications channel.”

“I thought you’d have come up with something more sophisticated than that by now,” Auger said.

“We’ve tried various things, but the acoustic technique is still the only reliable method open to us. As you probably know, it’s difficult to push a signal through when a ship is in transit. The ship acts as a mirror, bouncing the signal back to us with a high reflection efficiency.”

“And you’re getting a signal from Niagara?”

“A faint one,” Tunguska said, “but definitely there. With a smaller craft, there’d be various things he could try to damp the return bounce. But that’s a big, fat ship, and it doesn’t leave him with a lot of scope for stealth.”

“All right,” Auger said. “If you can bounce a signal off him, can you tell how far ahead he is?”

“Yes. Of course, spatial distance is a rather slippery concept in hyperweb transit—”

“Just give me your best guess.”

“His ship must be about two hundred kilometres ahead of us. Assuming the usual propagation speed, he’ll exit about an hour before we do.”

“Two hundred kilometres,” Auger said. “That doesn’t sound all that far.”

“It isn’t,” Tunguska agreed.

“Then haven’t you got something you can fire ahead of us, something that will cover the distance before his ship exits the tunnel?”

“Yes,” Tunguska said, “but I wanted to discuss it with you before I acted.”

“If you have something,” Auger said, “then damn well use it.”

“I have beam weapons,” Tunguska told her. “But they don’t work well in the hyperweb for the same reason that EM pulses are ineffective—due to scattering off the tunnel lining. That leaves missiles. We have six warhead-tipped devices with bleed-drive propulsion.”

“So use them.”

“It’s not that simple. Objects under thrust behave unpredictably in the hyperweb: that’s why we surf the throat wave, rather than flying through under our own power.”

“It’s still worth a try.”

Tunguska kept his voice level, but his face was beginning to show concern. “Understand the risk. With a beam weapon, we’d have a degree of surgical control if we could get close enough to avoid the scattering effect. We could disable his ship sufficiently to prevent him from making it to the next portal.”

“I’m not interested in disabling him. I’m not interested in interrogation, or whatever it is you’d do to Niagara if you got your hands on him. I want a clean kill.”

“Don’t underestimate the value of interrogation,” Tunguska said quietly, with the gently reproving note of a kindly schoolmaster. “This conspiracy is almost certainly wider than one man. If we lose Niagara, we lose any hope of catching his associates. And what they have attempted once, they may attempt again.”

“But you just said you can’t disable him.”

“Not in the hyperweb,” he said, raising a finger. “But if we can catch his ship in open space, between portals… then we might have a chance.”

Auger shook her head. “Too much risk of him getting away.”

“We’ll still have the missiles,” Tunguska said. “But the one thing they’re not is surgical.”

She imagined a school of swift, dolphinlike missiles skewering Niagara’s ship, blowing it apart in a soundless orgy of light. “I’m not going to shed any tears over that.”

“Or over your own death, which would doubtless ensue in the process? It would be suicide, Auger. His ship is carrying the Molotov device. That’s enough antimatter to crack open a moon, and it’s only two hundred kilometres away.”

Tunguska was right. It would have occurred to her sooner or later, but she was so fixated on killing Niagara that she had not really considered what his execution would actually entail.

“Even so,” she said, forcing out the words one by one, “we still have to do it.”

Tunguska’s expression was grave but approving. “I thought you’d say that. I just had to be sure.”

“What about Floyd?” she asked, her voice quavering as the realisation of what she had just decided slowly sunk in.

“Floyd and I have discussed the matter already,” Tunguska said. “For what it’s worth, we arrived at the same conclusion.”

She turned to Floyd. “Is that true?”

Floyd shrugged. “If that’s what it takes.”

Still looking into Floyd’s eyes, she said, “Then launch your missiles, Tunguska. And quickly, before any of us changes our minds.”

The faintest of shudders ran through the floor.

“It’s done,” Tunguska said. “They’re launched and running.”