Century Rain

THIRTY-SEVEN

Two hundred kilometres up the pipe, she thought. It was nothing in spatial terms. The missiles should have leapt across that distance in an eyeblink. But the hyperweb appeared to actively stifle attempts to pass through it more rapidly than the normal speed of a collapse wave. The missiles—according to Tunguska’s telemetry—were streaking ahead of his ship, following the expected acceleration curves for their mass and thrust, just as if they had been deployed in external space. For a little while it was even possible to bounce an electromagnetic pulse off them, or read the acoustic signal induced by their exhaust as it washed in a widening cone against the tunnel sides. But then something began to happen to them. They slowed, their acceleration curves levelling out, as if they had flown into spatial treacle. The faint, dwindling whisper of data from each missile reported no anomalies… but they were no longer travelling ahead with sufficient speed to intercept Niagara’s ship.

Tunguska stared at the spread of tactical displays—which were more for their benefit than his, Auger suspected—with obvious dissatisfaction. “This is what I feared,” he said. “There’s no telling whether any of them will reach Niagara in time.”

“Will we know when it happens?” she asked.

“Would you like to know?”

“I’d like to know that we’d succeeded, before…” Hervoice trailed off. There was no need for her to state the obvious.

“I’m afraid you probably won’t have that luxury. It’s anyone’s guess how the matter-antimatter fireball will travel back down the pipe, but it’s likely to be swift. There’ll be no time to reflect on victory. Equally, your deaths will be mercifully swift.”

Auger didn’t need reminding that she had effectively signed her own death warrant if one of the missiles got through. She was trying to push that knowledge to one side, but it kept squirming back to the forefront of her thoughts.

“Will you sense anything?” Floyd asked Tunguska.

“I’ll have an inkling,” he said. “When the fireball hits the skin of my ship, the information from the hull sensors should reach my skull an instant ahead of the destructive wave itself.”

“Giving you enough time to form a thought?” Auger asked, lacing her hand tightly with Floyd’s. “Enough time to extract a crumb of comfort that your sacrifice will have been worth it?”

“Perhaps.” Tunguska smiled at them. “It doesn’t have to be a very complicated thought, after all.”

“I’m not sure I envy you,” Auger said.

“And perhaps you’re right not to, but there it is. I could disable the connection between my neural machines and the hull sensors, but I don’t think I have the nerve.” He looked back at one of the wall images, studying it with suddenly alarmed eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Auger asked.

“Nothing that I didn’t expect, I suppose. The telemetry feeds from all the missiles are now silent.”

“Does that mean the missiles are dead?” Floyd asked.

“No—not necessarily, just that the data they’re trying to send back to us can’t find its way home. The missiles probably can’t hear our signals to them, either. They’ll have switched to autonomous flight mode.”

“Somehow I preferred it when we knew for certain that they were still out there,” Floyd said.

“Me, too,” Tunguska said. Then he reached out and placed his own hand over theirs, and the three of them sat in silence, waiting for something to happen, or for everything to stop happening.

Silence was the one thing Auger didn’t want. It left a vacuum in her head into which certain thoughts were too easily able to slip. She wanted the easy cadences of normal human conversation, the gossip and the small talk. She wanted to be able to think about anything other than that killing wall of furious light, the explosion that might even now be rushing towards them, faster than any advance information of its arrival could possibly travel. Faster than any possible news of success. How long had it been since the missiles had streaked away? She had lost all sense of time; it could have been minutes or hours. But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

She looked at the other two—Floyd and the Slasher both—and knew that in their own way they were working through exactly the same thought process. As if in some silent acknowledgement of this, all three of them chose that moment to tighten their hands together.

Suddenly, a convulsive change occurred in the displays on the wall. Auger had an instant to register this, and another instant to let the implications unravel in her head. One of the missiles must have found its mark, and now the ship had detected the approaching hellfire…

But the voices in her head, quiet of late, told her no, that was not what was happening.

It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.

In another instant—another tick of the clockwork grind of consciousness—the ship began to execute some drastic evasive manoeuvre. Auger had just enough time to feel her weight shifting dangerously to one side when her gown stiffened into a protective cocoon and the furniture, floors and walls reshaped themselves into a protective matrix.

Then came the awful moment when the ship forced its breathing apparatus down her throat.

She experienced a momentary blissed-out sense that, in truth, being smothered into helplessness was actually quite pleasant…

Two or three missing frames of consciousness.

Information trickled into her skull, via Cassandra’s machines. They were talking to Tunguska and the rest of the ship.

One of their own missiles had just locked on to them. The peculiar spatial properties of the hyperweb tunnel had confused its navigation system, while the echoing babble of chaotic EM signals had caused it to disregard the message that Tunguska’s ship was friend, rather than foe. There was no time to aim and fire the beam weapons. The ship had flexed itself, bending its hull to let the missile slip by at the last instant, like a supple combatant avoiding a lethal stab. Once the missile had streaked past into the portion of the tunnel behind the ship, an emergency detonation command had gnawed into its tiny, murderous mind and made it self-trigger.

The explosion had caused a local alteration in the geometry of the tunnel cladding, sending propagation shocks haring away in all directions; meanwhile, re-radiated energies bounced around in a storm of short-wavelength photons, chewing through the protective armour of Tunguska’s ship and into the soft living tissues of the passengers within.

Sensing further danger, the ship kept its occupants locked within the gee-load cushioning while it strained ahead with every sensor that could claw some scrap of information about the forward state of the tunnel. The reverberations from the missile blast had blinded the acoustics, for now at least. Frantically, the ship switched to backup systems it would never have relied upon during normal flight. Neutrino lasers and wide-spectrum EM pulses peered into the bright, swallowing mouth.

Another two missiles were haring back towards them, groping for a target.

Premature-detonation signals were transmitted at maximum signal strength. Beam weapons, deployed and ready now, locked on and prepared to fire if the missiles did not self-destruct.

One of the pair ripped apart in a controlled explosion, dampeners limiting the blast radius. The other missile shrugged off the kill order and increased its acceleration rate, sprinting for final interception. The ship swerved and contorted itself, pushing its structural limits beyond all conceivable safety margins. Shrill reports of irreparable damage hit Auger’s brain. The ship could still tolerate more damage—but not much more.

The beam weapons swung hard and locked on to the third stray missile. They fired, impacting at a range of only two kilometres up the tunnel from the ship. With its dampening systems not engaged, this missile’s explosion was the most violent of the three.

They raced into the fireball. The ship screamed, writhing in cybernetic agony.

Then it was through.

Faster than language, a thought made its way into Auger’s head.

“We deployed six missiles,” Tunguska told her. “Three have come back. Three more must still be out there.”

At lightning speed, the cloud of machines in her head wove a response. Had Auger answered, or was it Cassandra framing the question? She didn’t know. “How many more close hits can we take?”

“None,” Tunguska said.

Over the next five minutes, two more missiles came back. The first was limping, damaged by glancing encounters with the tunnel lining. The beam weapons engaged and killed it with swift efficiency, destroying it at a range of sixty-five kilometres, the very limit of detection.

The other missile surrendered itself to the kill-order, puffing apart in a damped blast that inflicted only minor damage.

“One’s still out there,” Tunguska said.

“Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it?” Auger observed wryly.

“It was the only one we had,” Tunguska replied phlegmatically.

During the next ten agonising minutes, a sixth missile did arrive, coasting on a high-speed intercept trajectory. It showed no inclination to obey the destruct commands, even when it was very close. Tunguska’s beam weapons gored it open, but the warhead refused to detonate. The missile veered in a hairpin turn, then speared itself at a right angle into the tunnel cladding. Half-blind as they were, the acoustic sensors could still track its progress as it bored through the stressed laminate of artificial space-time. Somewhere deep inside the cladding it finally blew up, and the entire wall bulged outward.

“That was number six,” Auger said. “All six are down. We’re home and dry.”

“No,” Tunguska said. “At least, we can’t be sure. That last one… it wasn’t one of ours.”

“But you sent six—”

“And five returned. That last one was a gift from Niagara. It means he knows we’re here.”

By the time Tunguska’s ship emerged from the portal, automatic damage repair had taken care of the worst of the wounds the ship had sustained in the tunnel. There were some things that could not be put right without specialist attention, but they would have to wait until the vessel returned to Polity space. For now, it was still capable of continuing the chase, albeit at reduced effectiveness, while the bleed-drive was nursed back to full health.

“If only we could be sure of the route Niagara took,” Tunguska said.

Auger leaned forward, resting her elbows on the soft padding of the extruded table. The ship had released its grip on its occupants. They had all been dosed with UR, the tiny machines now swimming through their bodies on a mad errand to correct the genetic damage caused by the radiation from the undamped missile blasts. “I thought you were hoping to catch him between portals.”

“I was,” the Slasher said. “And there was always a chance of that. Unfortunately, Niagara was just a little too fast. He may have cut some safety margins now that he knows we’re chasing him.”

“That missile attack really backfired on us,” Floyd said.

“On the other hand, it may have helped us,” Tunguska said. “Niagara may believe that his return strike destroyed us. With all the acoustic noise, there’s no way he could have bounced an echo off us.”

“So it could go either way,” Auger said. “That’s the top and bottom of it, right?”

“I confess that there are a number of unknowns.”

“It would help if we knew which door he’d taken,” Auger observed.

The hyperweb transition had thrown them thousands of light-years across the galaxy. Auger didn’t need to know the details. There was still at least one transition ahead of them; maybe several. Given the knotted topology of the hyperweb links, they could end up almost anywhere, if they ever succeeded in following Niagara’s trail to the ALS.

“Even if Niagara made his next throat insertion before our emergence,” Tunguska said, “I was still hoping for an unambiguous sign of which portal he used.”

“And?” Auger asked impatiently, tapping a fingernail against the table.

Tunguska had already called up a display of the immediate volume of space around the four neighbouring portals. They were all anchored to anonymous rocks orbiting a compact, dark binary where major planetary formation had never taken place. It was a bleak, hellish place, sizzling with high-energy particles chewed up and spat out again by the twisted Siamese magnetosphere of the binary stars.

“At maximum thrust, with all safety margins disengaged, he could have reached any one of the three outgoing portals a shade before our emergence,” Tunguska said. “He must have been confident that the Molotov device could tolerate that kind of acceleration without its own containment mechanisms failing… but then again, perhaps that was a risk he was prepared to take.”

“Can you see a thrust trail?” Auger said.

“No. Too much ambient radiation around for us to be able to sniff out the ionisation products.”

“What about the portals?” she asked. “Didn’t the staff see which one he used?”

“There are no staff,” Tunguska said. “Apart from routine visits for maintenance, these portals here take care of themselves.”

“Then the machines—”

“All three tell the same story,” Tunguska said, one step ahead of her questions. “They were all activated, geared up for throat insertion and controlled collapse. Niagara sent activation signals to all three—like a man opening all the doors in the corridor in order to mask the one he really stepped through.”

“Clever guy,” Floyd said. “You have to give him that.”

Auger buried her head in her hands. She felt a tremendous, welling frustration with Tunguska. Despite all his technology, all his cool, calm Slasher wisdom, he was still powerless against a single agile adversary. It was unfair, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. In the presence of a wizard, she wanted miracles, not excuses.

“This is not good,” she said. “Don’t you have any clues? He only had one ship. Only one of those portals was really used.”

“That’s our only straw,” Tunguska said. “As it is, one of the portals shows a slightly different collapse signature compared to the other two he might have used. If I had to put money on it, I’d say that’s the one that really had a ship squeezed through it.”

“How much money?” she asked, smiling.

“You’d rather not know.”

“OK,” Auger said. “If that’s our only option… we have to take it. Once we’re inside, will we be able to bounce an echo off him?”

“Perhaps,” Tunguska said, “but the absence of an echo won’t necessarily prove that we chose the wrong door. He could be just too far ahead of us for it to reach him.”

“Do we have any other options?”

“No. That’s why I’ve already committed us to the portal with the odd signature. As soon as drive repair is complete, we’ll ramp up to maximum pursuit thrust.”

“Good,” Auger said. “I’d rather be chasing a shadow than sitting around here talking about it.”

“Unfortunately, chasing shadows may be all we end up doing. Even if that signature is real, it’s at the limit of readability. If Niagara had shaved just an additional hour off his arrival time, we’d never have seen it.”

“Then we’d better not waste a minute.”

“That’s the problem.” Tunguska replaced the schematic image of the quadruple-portal system with the fractured-glass map of the galactic hyperweb network. He zoomed in on one little area, highlighting a conjunction of four filaments. “This is where we are now,” he said. “And this—given our best guess—is where Niagara will emerge, after an eight-hour transit.”

He directed their attention to another part of the map, further around the great clockface of the galaxy.

“Another cluster of portals,” Auger said.

“Six, all told, including the one we’ll enter through. There’s no ALS there, so it can’t be his final destination. He’ll be taking another portal.”

“We’ll just have to hope that the same trick works twice.”

“It won’t, I’m afraid,” Tunguska said. “The time differential between his departure and our arrival will be too great. There’ll be no detectable difference between the portals, regardless of the fact that only one of them will have had a ship fly through it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that unless he has spectacular bad luck between here and there—we’ll have lost him.”

“We can’t lose him,” Auger said. “That’s simply not an acceptable outcome.”

“We may have to live with it. He knows the way to the ALS. We don’t. It’s that simple.”

“Cassandra should have looked at those documents in more detail,” Auger said, with an odd feeling of self-criticism, as if she was reproaching herself for some unacceptable omission or failing.

“She did the best she could,” Tunguska said. “At the time, she had only a vague idea that they might be of strategic importance. It’s lucky we got what we did.”

“Lucky?” Auger snapped. “The cargo told us nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” Tunguska said. “If there was anything I could do… We’ll continue the chase, of course, and hope for good luck.”

“That’s the best you can offer?”

“I’m afraid so.”

No one said anything, until Floyd raised his hand and spoke. “Anyone mind if I make a small contribution?”