Century Rain

SIX

Auger found it uncomfortable to be alone in the same room as Thomas Caliskan, as if she had wandered into an obscene and sticky trap. He was a very thin man with a neatly groomed sweep of collar-length silver hair brushed back from an aristocratic forehead. He favoured costumes of silk and crushed velvet with long-tailed jackets, elaborate and carefully anachronistic. He wore owlish spectacles of blue-tinted glass. He often closed his eyes while speaking, as if attending to some very distant, very quiet melody, and when he moved his body, his head seemed momentarily reluctant to follow, as if anchored to a particular point in space and time.

“Do you mind if I continue playing for a moment? I find a little finger exercise focuses the mind wonderfully.”

“They say the same thing about execution.”

“Have a seat, Verity.”

Auger sat down. The chair was a chaise longue upholstered in dimpled green velvet. She suspected it was exactly as authentic and valuable as it appeared.

In front of the chaise longue was a small coffee table, upon which rested a flat, square object with an elaborate printed design on it. While Caliskan resumed his playing, Auger picked up the object, recognising it as the cardboard—processed wood pulp—sleeve for a gramophone recording. There was something inside it. She tilted the sleeve, letting the recording slip into her fingers. It was a thin black disc made of a heavy plastic-like material, engraved on both sides with a complex spiral pattern.

The disc was typical of millions that had been manufactured between the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was pressed from shellac, which she recalled was some kind of insect-derived resin. The spiral grooves contained encoded sounds designed to be read by a diamond-tipped stylus as the disc was spun at a few dozen rotations per minute. The playback caused a steady deterioration in the quality of the recording, as the stylus wore away the grooves and embedded tiny particles of grit in the disc itself. Even the original recording had been captured by a chain of analogue processes, each of which introduced random structure into the sound.

But it was also a true analogue artefact, and therefore of immense historical value. A recording stored in the volatile memory array of a computer system could be erased or doctored in an eyeblink, and the evidence trail artfully concealed. A recording like the shellac disc could be destroyed, but it could not easily be altered. Forgery was equally difficult, due to the complex chemical make-up of the disc and its packaging. When such items survived to the present day, therefore, they were regarded as extremely reliable windows on the historical past, pre-Nanocaust, pre-Forgetting.

Auger examined the label, reading that the disc contained music by the composer Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Auger knew very little about composers in general, and even less about Mahler in particular. All that she remembered was that he had died well before the beginning of her period of interest.

Caliskan stopped playing and returned the viola and bow to their stand. He watched her studying the disc and asked, “Intrigued?”

Auger put the delicate black disc back in its sleeve, and returned the sleeve to the table. “Is that what you were playing?”

“No. That was a little Bach. The Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, for what it’s worth. Unlike the Mahler, neither the score nor the original recording were ever lost.”

“This is an original recording,” Auger said, fingering the record sleeve. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes, but until very recently none were known to have survived. Now that we have that recording, someone somewhere is trying to reverse engineer Mahler’s original score. A hopeless enterprise, of course. We’ve more chance of unearthing an intact one.”

She still had that prickly sense of being tested or led into a trap. “Wait. I’m missing something. You’re telling me that this piece of music was completely lost?”

“Yes.”

“And now you’ve found an intact recording?”

“Exactly so. It’s a cause for great celebration. The record you just examined was recovered from Paris only a matter of weeks ago.”

“I don’t see how that can be,” Auger said, careful not to accuse him outright of lying. “Nothing bigger than a pinhead comes out of Paris without my knowing about it. I’d definitely have heard if something as significant as that had been unearthed. In fact, I’d probably be the one who found it.”

“This is something you missed. Shall I tell you something else very interesting?”

“Oh, why not.”

“This is the original, not a copy. This is the actual artefact, exactly as it was recovered. No restorative work has taken place.”

“That’s also highly unlikely. The disc might have survived three or four hundred years with relatively little damage, but not the packaging.”

Caliskan had returned to his monstrously large desk. Sitting behind it, he looked like a little boy visiting his father’s office. He steepled his fingers, peering over them owlishly. “Go on. I’m listening.”

“Paper doesn’t last, especially not the wood-pulp paper they were using in that era. Ironically, the cotton-pulp paper from much earlier lasts a lot better. Not as easy to bleach, but the alum they used in the wood-pulp process undergoes hydrolysis and produces sulphuric acid.”

“Not good.”

“That’s not all. There are metal tannins in the inks that also lead to deterioration. Not to mention airborne contaminants. Then the glues dry up. The labels come off and the sleeve begins to come apart at the seams. The dyes fade. Lacquer on the card turns brown and cracks off.” Auger picked up the sleeve and examined it again, certain she must have missed something. “With the right methods, you can correct a lot of that damage. But the resultant artefacts are still incredibly fragile—far too valuable to be handled like this. And this one definitely hasn’t been restored.”

“As I just told you.”

“All right. Then it must have spent three-hundred-odd years in a vacuum chamber, or some other preserving agent. Someone must have taken deliberate steps to keep it intact.”

“No special measures were taken,” Caliskan insisted. “As I said, it’s exactly as we found it. Here’s another question: if you suspected the recording was a fake, how would you prove it?”

“A recent fake?” Auger shrugged. “There are a lot of things I could try. Chemical analysis of the shellac, for one thing, but of course I wouldn’t want to touch it until we’d laser-scanned the grooves and got the whole thing on magnetic tape.”

“Very sound methodology. What else?”

“I’d run a radiocarbon analysis on the cellulose fibres in the paper.”

Caliskan rubbed his nose speculatively. “Tricky, for an object suspected to be only three or four hundred years old.”

“But doable. We’ve made some refinements in the calibration curves lately. And I wouldn’t be trying to date it exactly, just establish that it wasn’t recent.”

“And your anticipated conclusions?”

“I try not to anticipate conclusions, but I’d put good money on that artefact being a clever hoax, no matter how watertight its provenance.”

“Well, you’d be right,” Caliskan said. “If you ran the usual tests, you’d conclude that the artefact must have been manufactured very recently.”

Auger felt a curious sense of deflation, as if she had been excited about something without quite realising it. “Is there a point to this, sir?”

“The point is, it still sounds like Mahler to me.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Auger said.

“Do you miss music?”

“You can’t miss what you’ve never known, sir.”

“You’ve never known rain, either. Not real rain, falling from a real sky.”

“That’s different,” she said, needled that he knew so much about her. “Sir, do you mind if I ask what this is all about? What are you doing here, so far from Antiquities? What business do you have dragging me halfway across Tanglewood?”

“Careful, Verity.”

“I have a right to know.”

“You have no right to know anything. However, since I’m feeling generous… I take it you were told about the Contingencies Board?”

“Yes. I also know there’s no such thing.”

“There is,” Caliskan said. “And I should know—I happen to run it.”

“No, sir,” she said. “You run Antiquities.”

“That, too. But my sideways promotion into Antiquities was only ever a matter of expediency. Two years ago, something dropped into our laps. A find…” He paused before correcting himself. “Two finds, if you like—both of staggering strategic value. A pair of linked discoveries that have the potential to change our entire relationship with the Polities. Discoveries that could, in fact, alter our entire relationship with reality.”

“I don’t like Slashers,” Auger said. “Especially after what happened in Paris.”

“Don’t you think we should let bygones be bygones?”

“Easy for you to say, sir. You weren’t touched by Amusica. You didn’t have that taken from you.”

“No,” Caliskan said. “The Amusica virus didn’t touch me, just as it didn’t touch one person in a thousand. But I lost something rather dearer to me than the mere perception of music.”

“If you say so.”

“I lost a brother to Slashers,” he said, “in the final stages of the Phobos offensive, when we were trying to retake the Moon. If anyone has a right to hate them, I do.”

She didn’t know that Caliskan had even had a brother, let alone that he had died in the last war. “Do you hate them, sir?”

“No. I treat them as what they are: a commodity to be exploited, as and when it suits us. But hatred? No.”

She decided it might be time to listen. “And the connection with Antiquities?”

“A very profound one. As the nature of the second discovery became clear, we realised that we needed to work with Antiquities on a more fundamental level. The simplest solution was to replace DeForrest with myself, so that I had an absolute overview of all Earth-based activities.”

“I always said it was a political appointment.”

“But not in the way you meant it.” His tinted spectacles caught the light, like two little windows into clear blue sky. “Now I want to ask you about the maps.”

She prickled, realising that she had been under surveillance all along. She should have known they would keep their eye on her. “Were you responsible for sending them? Were the maps some pointless test, like the Mahler recording?”

This seemed to amuse him. “They warned me about you.”

“And what did they say?”

“That you’d speak your mind. I already knew from personal experience that you have little respect for authority.” His tone softened. “They also told me you have a good eye for detail. Now tell me what you made of the maps.”

A small inner voice told her that more depended on her answers than was immediately apparent. She felt her voice catching in her throat, her usual fluency deserting her. “I only looked at one, and there was something about it that didn’t make sense.”

“Continue,” Caliskan said.

“According to the copyright information, the map was printed over a century before the Nanocaust, yet it was in excellent condition—just like the Mahler recording.”

“Did the period of the map strike you as significant in any way?”

“No,” she said. “Only in so far as it just about falls within my frame of interest.”

“Only just?”

Auger nodded. “Yes. I’m pretty good on Paris in the Void Century, up to twenty seventy-seven. Things get a bit foggier if you go back to nineteen fifty-nine. It’s not that I don’t know anything about that period, just that I’m much less familiar with it than I am with the later decades.”

Caliskan pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Let’s say I wanted to talk to someone who was an avowed expert on precisely that period. Given your network of academic contacts, who would you suggest?”

Auger thought for a moment. “White,” she said. “Susan White. I’m sure you’re familiar with her work. She authored that report on the EuroDisney excavation last year.”

“Know her well, do you?”

“Not especially,” Auger said. “We’ve exchanged a few messages and had the odd conversation at academic conferences. I may have refereed one of her papers; she may have refereed one of mine.”

“You consider her a rival, don’t you?”

“We’re both fighting for the same research budget. It doesn’t mean I’d scratch her eyes out.” Sensing that her usefulness to Caliskan was coming to an end, she said, “Look, I’m sure I could put you in touch with her.”

“Actually, we’ve already contacted her.”

Auger shrugged, her point made. “Well, then, what do you need me for?”

“There’s a problem with White. That’s why we’ve come to you.”

“What kind of problem?”

“I can’t tell you, I’m afraid.” He clapped his hands together and showed her the palms. “That’s a matter for the other candidate. Don’t feel bad about it, Auger: you were always our second choice, but as a second choice you came very highly recommended.” Caliskan dipped his head towards his desk, picked up a massive black pen and began to make an entry of some kind in a journal, the nib scratching against high-quality paper.

“And that’s it?”

He looked up momentarily from his writing. “Were you expecting something else?”

“I thought…” Auger stopped.

“You thought what?”

“I failed, didn’t I? I didn’t get whatever it was you wanted me to get.”

Caliskan’s pen halted its scratching. “I’m sorry?”

“There was something in the map I was supposed to see.” Committed now, she felt a heady rush of certainty as the elusive detail she’d been missing clicked into place. “Well, I did see it. I just didn’t know what to make of it.”

Caliskan returned the pen to its inkwell. “Continue.”

“The map doesn’t make any sense, even for one printed in nineteen fifty-nine. It’s more like a map of Paris from the twenties or thirties, masquerading as one from thirty years later.”

“In what way?”

“The street names. There’s no Roosevelt; no Charles de Gaulle; no Churchill. It’s as if the Second World War never took place.”

Caliskan closed his journal and slid it to one side. “I’m very glad to hear you say that,” he said. “I was beginning to think that perhaps you weren’t the right woman for the job after all.”

“What job?” Auger asked.

From a desk drawer Caliskan produced a ticket, embossed with the Art Deco flying horse of Pegasus Intersolar. “I need you to go to Mars for me,” he said. “Some property has fallen into the wrong hands and we’d rather like to have it back.”

The name of the ship was the Twentieth Century Limited. Auger glimpsed bits of it—never the whole thing—as she was being processed aboard, led from one pressurised embarkation point to the next. It was a huge vessel by Thresher standards, six or seven hundred metres long, but the liner was making its run to Mars at much less than normal capacity. With the increase in tensions across the system, people had cut back on unnecessary travel. So far the hostilities had been confined to dissenting elements amongst the Slashers, but two USNE ships had already been caught in the crossfire, resulting in the loss of civilian lives. Inessential outposts had been mothballed and a number of intersolar transit concerns had declared bankruptcy.

When she had finished her drink in the observation lounge—watching Earth and Tanglewood recede—she checked the local time and made her way back to her cabin. She had opened the door and was moving to flick on the light when she realised that the light was already on and the cabin occupied. Auger flinched—for a moment she thought she had opened the wrong door—but then recognised her luggage and coat on the end of the bed.

It was her room, and the two people sitting on the edge of the bed were Ringsted and Molinella, the Securities Board agents she had already met in Tanglewood.

“Verity Auger?” Ringsted asked.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Of course it’s me.”

“Check her out,” Ringsted said.

Molinella stood up and pulled out something that looked like a pen. Before Auger could react, he had expertly pinned her against the door and was holding one of her eyes open and aiming the end of the pen into it. Intense blue-green light zapped her retina and sparked painfully across her brain.

“It’s her,” Molinella confirmed, releasing his hold.

“You know it’s me,” Auger said, shaking her head to clear her vision of afterimages. “We’ve already met. Don’t you remember?”

“Sit down,” Molinella ordered. “We have a lot to get through.”

“Give me a break,” Auger snapped. “We’ve only just left port. We have another five days until we get to Mars.”

“Five days would barely cover it even if we had the luxury of that much time.” Molinella fixed her with the blank expression of a tailor’s dummy. As before, both agents wore suits, but this time the cut was not quite as formal. They could, Auger supposed, just about pass for a pair of slightly straitlaced Thresher newlyweds.

“But we don’t have five days,” Ringsted said. “For security reasons, we must complete your briefing today.”

“Are you not staying on this ship until we reach Mars?” Auger asked.

“Yes,” Ringsted said. “As Caliskan doubtless explained, the Slashers will have this ship under observation, just as they monitor all long-range Thresher traffic. We couldn’t get a person on or off the Twentieth in mid-voyage without attracting far too much attention, and attention is the one thing we don’t want right now.”

“Well, then. What’s the hurry?”

“Is that door shut?” Ringsted asked, looking over Auger’s shoulder. “Good. Now pull up a chair. We have a lot to discuss.”

“First of all, I need to show you something,” Molinella said. He reached into his jacket pocket—the same place he kept the pen—and removed a matt-black cylinder like a cigar holder. He unscrewed the top and slid out a hypodermic, dense with bright-green fluid.

“While you were waiting for the ship,” Ringsted said, “you were fed and watered in Caliskan’s section of Contigencies.”

“I know,” Auger said.

“What you don’t know is that there were harmless chemical tracers in your food. They’ve worked their way into your body and tagged themselves on to every new memory you’ve laid down since you became Caliskan’s guest.”

Molinella took up the narrative. “The agent in this syringe reacts with those tagged neural structures, dismantling them. Again, the effects won’t be fatal, but you’ll remember nothing that Caliskan told you, and nothing that we’re about to tell you. In fact, you won’t retain a single memory from this entire period. Of course, we’ll only use it on you if we absolutely have to.”

“So if I screw up, or even get on your nerves, I’ll wake up with a large hole in my memory.”

“Which won’t be much help on the eve of a tribunal,” Molinella added. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, shall we?”

“Let’s,” Auger agreed, with exaggerated pleasantness. “But you still haven’t told me why I need to learn all this now.”

“The reason,” Molinella said patiently, “is that a day from now there will only be one person on this ship who knows anything about the contents of this briefing. And no, that doesn’t mean that Agent Ringsted and I are going anywhere.” He returned the syringe to its container and the container to his pocket, patting it gently. “If you see us outside this room once this briefing is over, treat us like any other pair of passengers. There’ll be no point in asking us further questions. We literally won’t remember you.”

“We’ll begin with the essentials,” Ringsted said. “The lights, please, Agent Molinella.”

Molinella stood up and dimmed the cabin lights.

“This is very cosy,” Auger began, but she had barely opened her mouth when patterns of light appeared on one blank wall of the cabin. She traced the rays back to a ruby-stoned ring on Molinella’s finger.

The patterns of light resolved into what she presumed was the seal of the Contingencies Board, accompanied by a warning that the ensuing information was covered by a level of security so chillingly high that Auger had never even heard of it.

“Aren’t I supposed to have signed something by now?” she asked.

Ringsted and Molinella looked at each other and laughed. “Just watch,” the woman said. “And save your questions for later.”

The security seal vanished, replaced by a picture of what Auger assumed to be the Milky Way galaxy, seen from above.

And then a man appeared, superimposed over the image of the galaxy. He wore a mid-grey suit with red cuffs and looked very athletic, his muscles straining against the seams of the fabric. He was very handsome and self-assured and Auger recognised him with a jolt.

It was Peter.

“Hello, Verity,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of apology and mild embarrassment. “I suspect this probably comes as something of a surprise. All I can do is apologise for the secrecy, and hope that you’ll forgive me—all of us, in fact—for the necessary subterfuge.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but Peter raised one palm and flashed a knowing smile. “No, don’t say anything. You’ll just have to listen to what I have to say and fill in the gaps yourself. I’ll do my best not to leave out anything critical.”

“Peter,” she said, unable to stop herself. “What are…”

Oblivious of her interruption, the recording continued. “Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, shall we? Everything you think you know about me is correct. I am in the diplomatic service, and I have just returned from an extended tour of the Polities, culminating with a trip into the hyperweb. That’s the public story, and it’s all true. But there’s more to it than that. I was also functioning as an undercover agent, gathering intelligence while playing the role of a sweet-talking airhead diplomat.” He smiled again, anticipating his ex-wife’s reaction to this news. “At, I should add, considerable risk to both myself and my friends amongst the Slashers. Things are getting very serious out there now, and spies aren’t looked upon too favourably. As it is, I’ve probably exhausted my usefulness. A pity, as I rather enjoyed being a spook.” Peter’s measured, actorly voice seemed to come from somewhere in the cabin, rather than the projector ring.

“I suppose I should get to the point, though. And the point, rather predictably, is the hyperweb itself.” Peter turned around and spread a hand across the face of the Milky Way, like a farmer casting seed. A bright web of lines appeared, transecting the spiral, and then the entire ensemble rotated to reveal a three-dimensional structure. “This is our best guess as to the extent of the hyperweb network as mapped by Slasher explorers,” he said. “It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a rendering like this. When explorers pop out of the far end of a given portal, unless they’ve exited near some unique, immediately recognisable landmark, like a supernova remnant or a super-massive outgassing star, there’s no way for them to calculate exactly where they are in the galaxy. All they can do is fix their position using reference points, for which purpose pulsars turn out to be rather more suitable than stars.”

“Who made it?” Auger muttered under her breath. “That’s all we really care about.”

Something twinkled in Peter’s eye as he turned back to the camera. How well he knew her, she thought, even now. “The one thing we don’t know is who built it. Neither do our friends in the Polities. Of course, there’s a great deal of guesswork, some of it rather compelling. The system is clearly of alien origin, but whoever built it—and presumably used it—doesn’t seem to be around any more.” Peter, Auger could tell, was rather enjoying this. From airhead, vain diplomat to airhead, vain spy: it really wasn’t much of a leap. Then she rebuked herself for her snideness, conjecturing that Peter would almost certainly have been executed (or something worse) had his duplicity become known to his Slasher hosts.

She felt a flicker of admiration: quite unlike her, and most especially so where her ex-husband was concerned.

“What we suspect is this,” Peter continued. “The system is old. It’s been here for hundreds of millions of years, at the very least. It may be nearly as old as the solar system. Most of the portals that the explorers have found are anchored to solid bodies: terrestrial planets, moons, large planetoids. The Sedna portal is a classic example, and as far as the Slashers know it’s the only active portal in our system.”

Something made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It was the way he said “as far as the Slashers know.”

Peter tuned back to the representation of the Milky Way, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “We still have no idea how the damned thing functions. Even the Slashers are in the dark on that one, despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise. They have some theories about metric engineering—triple-bounded hypervacuum solutions to the Krasnikov equations, that kind of thing. But really, if we’re all honest with ourselves, they’re pissing in the wind.” He tapped a finger against his upper lip. “But let’s give them credit where it’s due. They found a way to use it. They grafted some of their technology on to the portal mechanisms, found a way to manipulate the throat geometry so they could squeeze a ship through in more or less one piece. You have to admire them for that. Like it or not, they’re way ahead of us.”

Peter laced his hands behind his back, standing with his legs spaced slightly apart. “Now let’s talk hard numbers. How far have they reached? What have they actually found out there?”

Auger sat forward, sensing that some kind of climax was imminent.

“We still don’t know exactly when they found the Sedna portal,” Peter said. “Our best guess is that it was somewhere around fifty years ago, between twenty-two ten and twenty-two fifteen. Since then they’ve surveyed—or at least visited—somewhere in the region of fifty to sixty thousand solar systems. Pretty impressive, by anyone’s measure. There’s just one nagging little problem: they haven’t actually found anything to justify all this effort.”

Auger nodded to herself. She paid scant attention to rumours about the hyperweb, but even so, one thing kept shining through: the whole affair was a bitter disappointment.

“Or at least,” Peter continued, “nothing they want us to know about. It’s tricky for them, really. They want access to Earth, and the only thing they can really offer us—apart from a drip-feed of UR and other dangerous little toys—is permission to use the hyperweb as paying passengers. So they try to dress up the brutal truth of what they have found out there, which is an endless catalogue of dead, uninhabitable rocks and crushing cold giants.” Peter unlaced his hands from behind his back and leaned conspiratorially toward the camera. “The funny thing is, though, that even if they had found something out there, they probably wouldn’t tell us that either.”

“Please get on with it,” Auger said, as if it would make any difference.

“The illusion,” Peter said, “that the hyperweb has turned up nothing of value is maintained even in Slasher circles, at surprisingly high levels of security. That’s why it’s been such a tough old nut to crack.”

Now the picture behind him changed again. It zoomed in on one specific arm of the galaxy, the scene behind him punctuated by stars. Something loomed out of the darkness between them: a blue-grey world of unnatural smoothness, one crescent picked out in orange-red by an off-stage sun or cluster of suns. The other limb was a frigid blue, like the colour of moonlight on snow. The view zoomed towards the sphere, until it was much larger than Peter. At this extreme magnification, it was possible to make out some detail on the surface of the sphere. It was nothing at all like the texturing and weathering of a planetary surface.

The sphere was made up of countless neatly interlocked platelets, arranged in a pattern of mind-numbing regularity. It looked less like a planet than some crystalline molecule or virus.

“Let’s bring in some scale here,” Peter said.

A box surrounded the sphere. Numbers popped up on the axes, indicating that the diameter of the sphere was around nine or ten of whatever units of measurement were in force.

“What…” Auger began.

“These numbers are units of one light-second,” Peter said. “The sphere is nearly ten light-seconds in diameter. To put that into context, you could fit the sun into that structure and still have plenty of elbow room. You couldn’t fit in the Earth as well, since the Earth’s orbit around the sun is eight light-minutes wide, or about fifty times too big to fit into the sphere. But if you put the Earth in the middle, you’d have more than enough room to include Earth’s moon.”

“Excuse me,” Auger interrupted, “but was it me, or did he just call that thing a structure?” The agents ignored her, and she grudgingly returned her attention to the recording.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that we’ve actually found something unambiguously alien,” Peter said. “After all, we always knew they were out there somewhere. The hyperweb is all the evidence we need of that. But to find something this huge… well, I don’t think anyone was expecting that. The first big question, of course, is what the hell is it? And the second big question, what can it do for us?”

The sphere shrank, receding to a dot and finally to nothing. Now the view of the galaxy returned, with the intricate ratlines of the hyperweb superimposed as glowing vectors. “Now for surprise number two: the Slashers have found more than one of these things. In fact, they’ve found around twenty of them, spread throughout the galaxy.” Peter clicked his fingers and blue-grey spheres the size of golf balls dropped into place on the map. “You can’t see it on this scale, so you’ll have to take my word for it that none of these objects show up in any significant location, other than always being within easy reach of a portal. The Slashers call them ‘ALS objects,’ ALS standing for ‘anomalous large structure.’ Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? And if they’ve found twenty in such a short period of time—and since we know that the hyperweb is much more extensive than the mapped connections would imply—we can be sure that there must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these things out there. Sitting between stars, brooding like eggs.” Peter waited a beat. “Or time bombs.”

The image changed again, focusing once more on a single blue-grey ALS sphere. The view had a pared-down, schematic quality to it. The spherical shading faded, leaving only a ring of very thin material.

“This is the cross section,” Peter said. “The Slashers mapped the interior using neutrino tomography. They put a fifty kilowatt neutrino laser on one ship and flew it to one side of the ALS. Another ship carried a corresponding neutrino detector—an array of ultra-stiff sapphire crystals primed to undergo lattice vibration on the arrival of a single neutrino. The transmitting ship varied the path of its beam through the ALS, while the receiver ship kept track along the predicted beam, measuring the rise and fall in neutrino flux as the beam passed through the ALS at different angles. What they found indicated a hard, thin shell of unknown composition about one kilometre thick. They also detected a significant concentration of mass at the core, forming an inner sphere a few thousand kilometres in radius. In other words planet-sized, and with exactly the density profile you’d expect for a typical large terrestrial like Venus or Earth. The rest of the sphere seems to be hard vacuum, to the limit of the neutrino sweeps.”

Auger turned to Ringsted and Molinella. “This is amazing, no question. It scares me that you’re even telling me this stuff. But I still don’t understand what any of it has to do with me or my tribunal.”

“You’ll see,” the woman said.

Peter was still speaking, oblivious of her interruption. “Based on these clues, the Slashers concluded that the ALS objects were physical shells wrapped around planets. Sometimes the planets even seem to be enclosed complete with moons. It is evidence of a very advanced technology—comparable even with the hyperweb itself. But why do this? Why imprison an entire world inside a dark sphere, isolating it from the rest of the universe? Well, maybe they aren’t dark inside. No one knows that for sure. And maybe they only look like prisons from the outside. The state of matter inside that shell could be something very odd indeed. Are these planets that have been quarantined because of some awful crime or biological cataclysm? Are they antimatter worlds that have somehow drifted into our galaxy, and must be shielded from outside contact on their way through? Are they something worse? According to our intelligence, the Slashers have no idea in spite of all their research. Just a lot of guesswork.”

Peter stared into the camera, his eyes gleaming, and he permitted himself the tiniest of self-satisfied smiles, the merest crinkle lifting the corners of his mouth.

“Well, we think we know. You see, we’ve found a way into one of the spheres that the Slashers know nothing about. And you, Verity, are going to take a little trip inside.”