Century Rain

EIGHT

Auger’s shuttle hauled away from the Twentieth Century Limited and aimed itself in the general direction of Mars. She pressed her face against the glass of a porthole, feeling the vibration in her bones as the shuttle stammered its steering jets in rapid, chugging sequence. Though she had little idea of where she was being taken—or how her task fitted into the story Peter had told her—she was still glad to leave the clapped-out old space liner. After five days, its charms had worn perilously thin, with even a guided tour into the ship’s bowels to view the last working antimatter engine in the solar system providing little more than an hour’s mildly diverting (and frankly terrifying) entertainment. Mars at least was ripe was possibility, and she felt a tingling sense of anticipation as the planet’s butterscotch face loomed larger. It wasn’t just lack of funds that had kept her from visiting Mars before. She reckoned there was something ghoulish about the tourists who did make the trip; some morbid craving to revel in the horror of what had happened to the planet. But now that she had been sent here on someone else’s orders, it was difficult not to want to see it for herself.

The Scoured Zone began south of the Hellas Planitia and reached as far north as Cydonia, encompassing all of the crater-pocked uplands of the Arabia Terra. Between the poles, the rest of Mars was dusted in shades of brittle blue-green: vast prairies of hardy, gene-tweaked vegetation laid down over a hundred years earlier. Canals, etched across the surface with laser precision, were twinkling back ribbons of reflected sunlight. At the hubs and junctions of the irrigation system, Auger made out the off-white sprawl of cities and townships, the tentative scratches of roads and the lines of tethered dirigibles. There were even a few wispy streaks of cloud and a handful of hexagonal lakes, clustered together like cells in a beehive.

But between Hellas Planitia and Cydonia nothing grew, nothing endured, nothing lived or moved. Even the mindless clouds exhibited a wary disregard for that whole area. It had been that way for twenty-three years, since the last days of the brief but bitter war that had erupted between the Slashers and the Threshers over rights of access to Earth.

Auger barely remembered the war. As a child, she had been cosseted from the worst of the news. But it really hadn’t been all that long ago, and there was still a sense that certain scores had yet to be settled. She thought of Caliskan, losing a brother to the Slashers in the battle to reclaim Phobos. The war must have seemed like yesterday to him. How could he accept Slasher involvement in Earth so readily, after what they had taken from him? How could he be so cold, so political?

Another series of manoeuvres followed, smoother this time, and then—quite without warning—Auger found her view of the Scoured Zone obstructed by the illuminated, machine-lined walls of a docking bay sliding slowly past. Beyond the bay, glimpsed for an instant, was a curving, airless horizon of very dark rock.

She had been misinformed about Mars. It had never been her destination.

The welcoming party on the other side of the airlock consisted of eight men and women in USNE military uniform, accompanied by two snake robots.

“I’m Aveling,” said the tallest, thinnest man in the group, observing Auger with pale aluminium-grey eyes. He had a ruined voice: a slow, parched rasp that she had to strain to understand. “You’ll be taking orders and instructions from me for the duration of your mission. If that’s a problem, get over it now.”

“And if I don’t get over it?” she asked.

“We’ll put you on the first ship back to Tanglewood and that unpleasant little tribunal you should be facing.”

“Only with half my memory missing,” she said.

“Correct.”

“If it’s all right with you, I’ll try the taking orders thing for now, see how that works out.”

“Fine,” Aveling said.

He had the look of a serious hard bastard, the kind who was even more intimidating because he appeared intelligent and cultured, while also giving off the unavoidable impression that he could kill anyone in the room before they’d taken their next breath. She had been told nothing about him, but she knew instantly that he was a veteran of the war and that he had probably killed more Slashers than she had met in her life, and that he had probably never missed a night’s sleep because of it.

“I’d still really like someone to tell me what I’m doing on Phobos,” Auger said as Aveling’s party led her away from the shuttle, with two snake robots slithering along behind.

“What do you know about Phobos?” Aveling asked. He sounded as if his voice box had been stitched back together from tatters, reconstructed like a shredded document.

“I know to keep away. Other than that, not much. Mars is basically civilian, but you military boys have the moons sewn up pretty tight.”

“The moons offer the perfect strategic platform for defending the planet against Slasher incursions. Given the existing security measures already in place, they’re also a perfect venue for conducting any sensitive business that might come our way.”

“Do I count as sensitive business?”

“No, Auger. You count as a pain in the ass. If there’s one thing I hate more than civilians, it’s having to be nice to them.”

“You mean this is you being nice?”

They led Auger to a small, windowless chamber with a couple of closed doors leading away into other rooms. The room contained three seats, a low table and a flagon of water accompanied by two glasses. A grey cabinet occupied one wall, crammed with magnetic tapes in white plastic spools, with a p-mail hopper set next to it.

They left her alone. Auger poured herself a glass of water and sipped at it experimentally. She had finished half the glass when one of the other doors whisked open and a short, tough-looking woman entered. She had an efficient, low-maintenance bob of straw-coloured hair, framing a face that might have been pretty except for the scowl that seemed moulded into it. She wore coveralls with many pockets and loops, the top zipped low enough to reveal a grubby white T-shirt beneath. Quick, intelligent eyes appraised Auger. The woman took the stub of a cigarette from her lips and flicked it into one corner of the room.

“Verity, right?”

“Yes,” she said cautiously.

The woman leaned down, rubbed one hand against her thigh and then offered it to Auger. “Maurya Skellsgard. Have those pricks been treating you all right?”

“Well…” Auger began, suddenly lost for words.

Skellsgard sat down on one of the other seats and helped herself to some water. “What you have to understand about those people—and believe me, it took me a while to arrive at this conclusion—is that you’re better with them than without them. Aveling is a cold-hearted son of a bitch, but he’s our cold-hearted son of a bitch.”

“Are you military?” Auger asked.

Skellsgard downed her glass of water in one gulp, then poured another. “Hell no—I’m just a snotty-nosed academic. Until a year ago I was happily minding my own business trying to come up with a mathematical treatment of pathological matter.” Anticipating Auger’s question she continued, “The normal mathematics of wormhole mechanics says you need something called exotic matter to enlarge and stabilise a wormhole throat. That’s matter with negative energy density—already seriously weird stuff. But as soon as we got our hands on a few crumbs of intelligence about the hyperweb, it became clear that this wasn’t really a wormhole in the classical sense. Pretty soon we realised we needed something several degrees weirder than exotic matter to make it hang together. Hence… pathological matter.” She shrugged. “We’re physicists. You have to allow us our little jokes, no matter how piss-poor they are.”

“It’s all right,” Auger said. “You should hear some of the jokes archaeologists think are funny.”

“I guess we’re both in the same boat, then: a pair of pain-in-the-ass civilian experts Aveling has no choice but to work with.”

Auger smiled. “That guy just loves civilians, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yes, can’t get enough of ’em.” Skellsgard emptied her glass a second time. Her knuckles were barked and grazed, dark crescents of grime caked under her very short fingernails. “I heard about the tribunal. Sounds as if they’ve got you by the short and curlies.”

“I deserve it. I nearly killed a boy.”

Skellsgard waved that away. “They’ll fix him, if his family’s as rich and influential as I heard they are.”

“Well, I hope they do fix him. He wasn’t a bad kid.”

“What about you? I heard that you’re married to Peter Auger.”

“Was married to him,” Auger corrected.

“Hmm. Please don’t tell me Mr. Perfect is really a pig behind closed doors. I don’t think I could stand having my illusions shattered.”

“No,” Auger said, wearily. “Peter’s a decent enough man. Not perfect… but not bad, either. I was the problem, not him. I let my work take over.”

“I hope it was worth it. What else? Any kids?”

“A boy and a girl I love very much, but who I don’t make enough time for.”

Skellsgard looked sympathetic. “I guess that must have simplified things when it came to Caliskan’s nice little offer.”

“They’d have thrown away the key,” Auger said, “put me somewhere like Venus Deep. By the time I got to see my kids again they’d have barely recognised me. At least this way I have a chance of coming through this with my life at least vaguely intact.” She shifted in her seat, uneasy about discussing her private life. “Of course, it might help if I knew what the hell it is I’m supposed to do.”

Skellsgard regarded her shrewdly. “What have they told you so far?”

“They told me about the Slasher intelligence on the ALS objects,” Auger replied.

“Good. That’s a start, at least.”

“They said they’d found a way into one. They also told me I was supposed to go inside. I guess Phobos has something to do with that.”

“More than a little. About two years ago, the USNE found an inactive portal right here, buried under a couple of kilometres of Phobos topsoil. That was when I was drafted on to the team. I’m the closest thing to an expert on hyperweb travel outside of the Polities. Which, I hasten to add, isn’t saying much. But at least now we have a real one to play with.”

“And you’ve made it work?”

“As long as you don’t mind a bumpy ride.”

“And the Slashers still know nothing about it? How come they didn’t find it when they were running Phobos?”

“They didn’t look deep enough. We only stumbled on it by accident, when we were excavating a new living chamber.”

Auger suddenly felt very awake and very alert. “I want to see it.”

“Good. That was sort of the idea of bringing you here in the first place.” Skellsgard hitched up a frayed sleeve to glance at her watch. “We’d better get a move on. There’s an incoming transport due any minute.”

“I still don’t know what Paris has to do with all this.”

“We’ll come to that,” Skellsgard said.

The chamber was large and very nearly spherical, the incurving walls gouged and blasted from coal-dark Phobos core material and then sprayed with some kind of plastic on to which platforms, lighting rigs and catwalks had been bolted or glued. Occupying much of the interior was a glass sphere about half as wide as the chamber, supported in a complex cradle of bee-striped struts and shock-absorbing pistons. Catwalks, caged ladders, pipes and conduits wrapped the sphere in a gristle of metal and plastic. White-clad technicians perched at various locations around the sphere, tapping equipment into open access ports. With their headphones, goggles and gloves they looked like safecrackers engaged in some spectacular heist.

“We’re just in time,” Skellsgard said, consulting an instrument-crammed panel bolted to one bar of the viewing cage in which they stood. “Transport hasn’t come through yet, but we’re already picking up bow-shock distortion ahead of it.” On the panel, the needles on numerous analogue dials were twitching into the red. “Looks like it was a rough ride. Hope they packed their barf bags.”

The technicians had cleared out of the area around the recovery bubble. Machines moved into different positions. Auger even noticed three snake robots in defensive/offensive postures, poised like spitting cobras.

“They expecting something nasty?” she asked.

“Just a precaution,” Skellsgard said. “Once that ship’s in the pipe, we can’t communicate with it or the remote portal at E2. That’s a thirty-hour communications blackout. It makes us twitchy.”

“And why is that?”

“Theory says there’s no way that the Slashers could tap into this leg of the hyperweb even if they knew it existed. But theory might be wrong. Also, we’re defending against the possibility that the E2 portal might have been compromised by what the military boys are calling ‘indigenous E2 hostiles.’ ”

The needles on the analogue dials jammed hard into the red. From somewhere beyond the bubble—shining through it with X-ray intensity—came a cruel blue light, brighter than the sun. Auger turned away, holding a hand over her eyes. She could make out the sketchy, anatomical shadows of her finger bones. As quickly as it had arrived the light was gone, leaving only a tracery of pink afterimages on her retinas. Through pained eyes, Auger squinted at the bubble just in time to see a blur of motion as the incoming transport arrived. The ship rammed into the cradle like a piston. The cradle lurched, cushioning the deceleration. This happened in absolute silence. Then the cradle reached the limit of its motion and the entire glass bubble bulged visibly, compressing its huge pneumatic supports with an enormous steely groan, followed by a slow, sighing relaxation back to its original position.

“You keep mentioning E2,” Auger said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Earth Two,” Skellsgard said, without batting an eyelid.

Somewhere, the vacuum integrity of the bubble had been breeched. Air shrieked into it, the breeze already tugging at Auger’s hair. Klaxons and warning lights went berserk. Auger renewed her grip on the cage’s support railing. The white-suited technicians were already scurrying back to their posts.

“That looked rough,” Auger remarked.

“They’ll live,” Skellsgard replied.

“Has anyone not lived?”

“Once, back when we were still ironing out glitches in the system. It wasn’t pretty, but we’ve learned a few things since then.”

The transport began to descend, passing into some kind of enclosed structure nestling in the base of the bubble. Doors sealed it from view.

“C’mon,” Skellsgard said. “Let’s take a closer look.”

Auger followed her through a network of caged ladders down to the lower level. The glass bulb of the bubble loomed over them. It had been patched and sealed in many areas, with fresh star-shaped flaws marked and dated in luminous paint.

“All this was built in a year?”

“It’s been two years since they found the portal,” Skellsgard said. “Hey, give the military guys some credit—they did make some progress before I came on the team. Even if most of it consisted of poking the portal with a series of increasingly large sticks.”

“All the same… I’m still pretty impressed.”

“Well, don’t be. We’ve been as clever as we can be, but we couldn’t have achieved any of this without a healthy dose of Slasher know-how. And I don’t just mean the kind of intelligence we got from Peter.”

“What other kind is there?”

“Technical assistance,” Skellsgard said. “Contraband technology. Not just the obvious stuff like the robots, but control gear—cybernetics, nanotech, all the stuff we need to interface with the pathological-matter mechanisms of the original portal.”

“How did you steal that kind of thing?”

“We didn’t. We asked nicely and we got it.”

Beneath the bubble, the newly arrived transport emerged from the airlock structure, lowering on a piston-driven platform. The cylindrical craft was shaped like an artillery shell, its skin a rococo crawl of complex pewter-coloured machinery. There was evidence of damage. Hinged banks of machinery packed around the cylinder were either mangled or missing entirely, sheared off leaving patches of bright metal. Various panels and ports had been ripped free, exposing scorched, frayed viscera of wiring and fuel lines. The whole thing still smelled faintly of burning oil.

“Told you it was a rough crossing,” Skellsgard said. “But she should be good for another round-trip, once we get her patched up again.”

“How many trips did it take for her to get into that state?”

“One. But it’s not usually that bad.”

The ship slid sideways on its platform. Two of the three snake robots slinked over to it, weapons and sensors popping out of their head spheres. A gang of white-clad technicians were already fussing over the transport, plugging bits of equipment into it and making cautious hand gestures to each other. One of them shone a torch into the dark patch that was one of the cabin windows. Meanwhile, one of four intact transports slid over from a storage rack, guided by other technicians. Auger watched as it moved up into the airlock, disappearing and then re-appearing inside the recovery bubble, with its nose aimed towards the far wall. The pressure leak had already been fixed and most of the klaxons had now fallen silent. Odd as it seemed, it all had the feeling of business as usual.

“What’ll happen now?” Auger asked.

“They’ll run some pre-flight checks, some tests on the ship and the weather conditions in the link. If everything behaves itself, we’ll be looking at an insertion in about six hours.”

“Insertion,” Auger repeated thoughtfully, looking at the blunt machine and the narrowing shaft it was aimed at. “It’s all very phallic, isn’t it?”

“I know,” Skellsgard said confidingly, “but what can you do? The boys must have their toys.”

She opened a cabinet and pulled out two white smocks. She passed one to Auger and donned the other one, closing the Velcro seams tightly. “Let’s see how they’re doing, shall we?”

With the snake robots still monitoring events, the technicians used a variety of heavy-duty tools to open the ship’s airlock. It finally gave way with a gasp of equalising air pressure, then swung open and aside on complex hinges. Warm red light spilled from the interior of the transport. One of the technicians climbed aboard, then re-emerged a minute or two later accompanied by a cropped-haired woman dressed in what looked like the interior layer of an environment suit. The woman supported one arm with the other, as if she had fractured or broken a bone. A man emerged behind her, his face pale and drawn, etched with what looked like years of fatigue. Skellsgard pushed through the retinue of technicians and spoke briefly to the two passengers before giving them both a reassuring hug. A medical team had appeared from somewhere and began fussing over the two arrivals as soon as Skellsgard had finished with them.

“They had it pretty rough,” she told Auger. “Hit some bad throat turbulence during the insertion at the other end. But they’ll live, which is what matters.”

“I thought hyperweb travel was supposed to be routine.”

“It is—if you have the experience that the Slashers do. But we’ve only been doing this for a year. They can squeeze a liner through their portals and not touch the sides. For us, it’s a major headache just to get one of these dinky little ships through in one piece.”

“What were you saying about Slasher technology just now? How can there be Slasher involvement with this if you say they don’t even know about this place?”

“We have our share of sympathisers amongst moderate Slashers, people who think the aggressive expansionism needs a moderating influence.”

“Defectors and traitors,” Auger said scornfully.

“Defectors and traitors like me,” said a man’s voice from behind them.

Auger turned to face a slender, sleekly muscled individual of uncertain age. He moved within a silver cloud of attendant machines, twinkling at the limit of vision. Auger stepped back, but the man raised a reassuring hand and closed his eyes. The cloud of machines diminished, sucked back into his pores like a time-lapse explosion in reverse.

Standing before her now, he looked almost human.

The latest generation of Slashers—as Auger had forgotten to her cost with Cassandra—were often indistinguishable from children. This neotenous trend was a matter of efficient resource utilisation: smaller people not only used fewer consumables but were also easier to move around—an important factor even given the near-limitless power of the Slasher bleed-drive. But this Slasher man looked fully adult, albeit youthful. Either he predated the neotenics (and their unstable prototypes, the war babies) or he belonged to one of the factions that retained some nostalgic bond with old-style humanity.

He had flawless, unlined skin the colour of honey, and liquid brown and slightly sad-looking eyes that none the less glittered with an easy enthusiasm. Despite the chamber being too cold for Auger’s tastes, the man wore only a single layer of clothing: simple white trousers and a white shirt loosely cinched across his chest.

“This is Niagara,” said Skellsgard. “As you might have gathered, he’s a citizen of the Federation of Polities.”

“It’s all right,” Niagara said. “I won’t be the least bit offended if you call me a Slasher. You probably regard the term as an insult.”

“Isn’t it?” Auger asked, surprised.

“Only if you want it to be.” Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. “A slash and a dot,” he said. “I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century. It’s less a stigma than a mark of community.”

“And do you care about that community?” Auger asked.

“In a broad sense, yes. But I’m not above betraying it if I think its longer term interests are best served that way. How much do you know about the current tensions in the Polities?”

“Enough.”

“Well, let me refresh your memory on the basics. There are now two opposing factions within the Federation: the aggressors and the moderates. Both parties broadly support the same goal of repairing the Earth. Where they differ is in their approach to the USNE. The moderates are happy to negotiate access to Earth via reciprocal deals: access to the hyperweb, licensed use of bleed-drive and UR technologies, that sort of thing.”

“Eve was only tempted by one apple,” Auger said. “The USNE still remembers what your brilliant machines did to our planet.”

“None the less, the offer is on the table. As you’ll have gathered from your dealings with Cassandra, the moderates are serious about this proposal.”

“And the aggressors?”

“The aggressors take the view that the USNE will never sign a deal with the moderates—that there are too many people who think like you, Verity. So why wait for something that will never happen? Why not just take Earth now, by force?”

“They wouldn’t.”

“They can and they will. The only thing stopping them has been a certain trepidation: the fear that the Threshers would destroy Earth rather than let it fall into Slasher hands. A ‘scorched-earth’ policy in the most literal sense. Tanglewood is more than just an orbital community. It’s also a repository for enough targeted megatonnage to turn the Earth into a glowing cinder.”

“So what’s changed?”

“Everything,” Nigara said. “For one thing, the battle planners think they may be able to take Tanglewood quickly enough to prevent those warheads from being deployed en masse. Even if they can’t, the new models for repairing the Earth suggest that the warhead strike could be… tolerated. We can brush radioactivity under the carpet using continental subduction zones. And when we restock the planet, the re-introduced organisms will be modified to tolerate an enhanced level of background radiation.”

Auger shuddered, imagining what that kind of tectonic reorganisation implied for her beloved cities. “So an invasion is inevitable?”

“I’m saying it is rather more likely now than it was six months ago. That’s why some of us—moderates—have long advocated a strengthening of the Thresher position. Call it a deterrent.”

“And it’s that simple? You help us make this alien junk work just so that we will have a chance of standing up to your own people when the shit comes down?”

“Would it help if I made it sound more complicated than it really is?”

“Excuse me if I don’t take you at your word, Niagara, but I’ve only met two Slashers in my life and one of them was a lying little shit.”

“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “Cassandra is one of the staunchest moderates in the entire movement. If you ever needed a friend in the Polities, she’s it.”

Skellsgard interposed herself between Auger and the Slasher, holding up her hands as if blocking a fight. “I know this comes as a shock,” she said to Auger, “but they really aren’t all villains who’d sooner see us wiped out of existence.”

“Believe me, I sympathise with your position,” Niagara said to Auger. “I know that terraforming Earth would erase your life’s work. I’m simply of the opinion that the end would justify the means.”

“Do you believe that, Niagara: that the end always justifies the means?” Auger asked.

“Mostly,” he said. “And some would say that—judging by your own track record—you share something of the same philosophy.”

“Over your dead body.”

“Or the dead body of a boy?” He shook his head. “Sorry. That was uncalled for. But the point remains: you’ve always had a certain unflinching instinct for what needs to be done to achieve a particular outcome. I admire that, Verity. I think you have every chance of completing this mission.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said. “How much do you know about all this?”

“I know that sensitive property has gone missing at the other end of that hyperweb connection, and that you are excellently equipped to recover it.”

“Why can’t you recover it?”

“Because I don’t know the territory like you do. Nor does Skellsgard, or Aveling, or anyone else in this organisation. The only person who did know it well enough was Susan White, and she’s dead.”

“That’s a detail Caliskan didn’t quite get around to telling me.”

“Would it have made a difference to your decision?”

“It might.”

“Then he was right not to mention it. But there’s more to my answer than you might be aware of. It’s not just that I don’t know the territory. I can’t even enter it—I would die if I tried.”

“And me?”

“You won’t find it a problem.” Niagara turned to face the transport that had just been loaded into the bubble. Technicians were still attending to various details around the outside, but everything about their actions suggested that all was going according to plan.

“You want me to get in that thing, don’t you? Without a clue as to what’s at the other end.”

“It’s a thirty-hour journey,” Niagara said. “There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on the way.”

“Can I back out?”

“It’s a little late for that now, don’t you think?” Without waiting for an answer from Auger, he turned his attention to Skellsgard. “Is she ready for her language lesson?”

“Aveling said to do it now. That way she’ll have time for it to bed in before she reaches E2.”

“What language lesson?” Auger asked.

Niagara raised a hand. A mist of twinkling silver machines erupted from his palm and crossed the space to Auger’s head. She felt the onset of a bright shining migraine, as if her skull was a fortress being stormed by an army in flashing chrome armour, and then she felt nothing at all.

She came round to a headache, a falling sensation and a voice in her ears speaking a language she should not be able to understand.

“Wie heisst Du?”

“Ich heisse Auger… Verity Auger.” The words slipped out of her mouth with ridiculous ease.

“Good” the voice continued, in English this time. “Excellent, in fact. That’s taken very nicely.” It was Maurya Skellsgard speaking, sitting to her left in the confined space of what she guessed must be the hyperweb transport. On Auger’s other side, in the third of the three seats, was Aveling.

They were in free fall.

“What’s happening?” Auger asked.

“What’s happening,” Aveling said, “is that you were speaking German. Niagara’s little machines rewired your language centre.”

“You have French as well,” Skellsgard added.

“I already had French,” Auger replied huffily.

“You had an academic understanding of written French skewed to towards the later years of the Void Century,” Skellsgard corrected. “But now you can really speak it.”

Auger’s headache intensified, as if someone had just tapped a very small tuning fork against her skull and made it ring. “I wouldn’t have agreed to have this…” She wanted to say “shit,” but the word stalled somewhere between her brain and her voice box. “This horrid stuff in me.” Where the hell had “horrid” come from, she wondered?

“It was either have it or forfeit the mission,” Aveling said. “In thirty hours you’ll be in Paris, acting alone, with only your wits to help you. No weapons, no comms, no AI assistance. The only help we can give you is language.”

“I don’t want machines in my head.”

“In which case,” Skellsgard said, “it’s your lucky day. They’ve already been flushed out, leaving only the neural structures they created. The downside is that those structures won’t last for ever—two, maybe three days once you get to Paris. Then they’ll start eroding.”

Curiosity got the better of Auger. “Why not leave the machines in, if it makes so much difference?”

“Same reason Niagara can’t come with us,” Skellsgard replied. “The censor wouldn’t let them through.”

“The censor?”

“You’ll see it soon enough,” Aveling said, “so don’t worry your pretty little head about it. That’s our job.”

Auger felt the buzzing, slightly brittle alertness that came with too much coffee and too much intense study. Once, about fifteen years earlier, she had studied mathematics so furiously that after an evening manipulating complex bracketed equations, simplifying forms and extracting common terms, her brain had actually started to apply the same rules to spoken language, as if a sentence could be bracketed and simplified like some quadratic formula for radioisotope decay. That was how she felt now. She only had to look at a colour or shape and her new language structures would gleefully shriek the corresponding word into her skull, in a mixed cacophony of German, French and English.

“I could get very angry about this—”

“Or you could just get over it and accept that it had to be done,” Skellsgard said bluntly. “I promise you there’ll be no side effects.”

Auger knew that it was senseless to protest any further. The machines had already come in and done their worst. The simple fact was that had this ever been presented to her as a rational choice, she would still have chosen it over the tribunal.

If that made her a hypocrite, ready to accept Slasher science when it suited her, so be it.

“I’m sorry if all this seems abrupt,” Skellsgard said sympathetically. “It’s just that we really didn’t have time to sit around and debate things. We need that lost property back in safe hands as soon as possible.”

Auger forced a sort of calm upon herself. “I take it we’re on our way?”

“It was a successful insertion,” Aveling said.

They were sitting three abreast, surrounded by instruments, controls and fold-down panels. The technology was a curious mixture of the very robust and the very fragile-looking modern, including some equipment that had obviously come straight from Slasher sources. Holding things together were bolts, nylon tie-lines and spitlike swabs of heavy-duty epoxy. Aveling had one hand on a joystick mounted on a fold-down panel in front of him. Above the panel was a flat screen displaying a series of irregular concentric lines, like a drunkenly fashioned cobweb, with the lines slowly oozing out towards the edge of the screen. Some kind of navigation system, Auger guessed, representing their flight through the hyperweb. Of the outside view nothing could be seen, since the ship’s armoured shutters were locked tight.

It was about as exciting as a ride in an elevator.

“Well, now that we’re all in this together,” she said, “I presume you can tell me what it’s all about.”

“What we generally find,” Skellsgard said, “is that it’s easier if we show you. That way we skip the whole ‘you can’t expect me to believe this shit’ stage.”

“What if I promise not to doubt a word that you say? After all, I’ve already seen the artefacts in Caliskan’s office. I’m pretty sure they weren’t faked.”

“No, they were all real.”

“Which means they must have originated somewhere. Caliskan said they hadn’t been preserved, and yet they appeared to come from somewhere around nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Which would tend to imply…” Skellsgard prompted.

“That you’ve found a way back to nineteen fifty-nine.” She paused, choosing her next words with care. “Or at least something that looks a lot like nineteen fifty-nine, even if it isn’t exactly right in all the details. Is that far from the mark?”

“No, it’s pretty close, actually.”

“And this version of nineteen fifty-nine is inside the ALS object that Peter talked about. The one he said you’d found a way into.”

“They told us you were good,” Skellsgard said.

“So where does Paris come into it?”

“At the end of this hyperweb is something very like Paris. You’ll enter it and make contact with an individual named Blanchard.”

Auger kept her voice calm, taking this one step at a time. “Someone else from the team, like White?”

“No,” Skellsgard said, glancing at Aveling. “Blanchard’s E2 indigenous.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he grew up inside it. Meaning he has no idea he isn’t living in the real Paris, on the real Earth, in the real twentieth century.”

Something like ice passed through Auger. “How many are there like him?”

“About three billion. But don’t let that put you off.”

“All you have to do,” Aveling said, “is find Blanchard and recover the item that Susan White passed to him for safekeeping. It won’t be difficult. We’ll give you an address, which will be within easy reach of your point of entry. Blanchard will be expecting you.”

“I thought you said—”

Aveling cut her off. “You’ll pose as Susan White’s sister. She’ll already have told him to hand over the goods to you if you show up. Aside from anything else, that’s why we needed a woman.”

Auger thought for a moment, trying to assimilate all this new and puzzling information. Her mind was full of questions, but she quickly decided that as much as she wanted to know every detail of the task, she had best begin with the basics.

“And the nature of this lost property?”

“Just some papers in a tin,” Aveling said. “They’ll mean nothing to Blanchard, but everything to us. You persuade Blanchard to give you the tin. You make sure the papers are inside. Then you return to us—with the papers—and we put you on the first transport home.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It is.”

“Then why do I have the nagging suspicion that there must be a catch?”

“Because there is,” Skellsgard said. “We don’t know for sure what happened to Susan, but we do know that she felt threatened, and that she gave those papers to Blanchard for safekeeping. There’s a chance she was murdered.”

Aveling withdrew his attention from the oozing lines of the navigational display and sent Skellsgard an irritated look. “She didn’t need to know it was murder,” he said. “If it was murder.”

“I felt she did,” Skellsgard replied, shrugging.

“Well,” Auger said, “was it murder or not?”

“She fell,” Aveling said. “That’s all we know.”

“Or was pushed,” Skellsgard said darkly.

“I’d really like to know which it was,” Auger insisted.

“It doesn’t matter,” Aveling said. “All you need to know is that E2 is hostile territory—which is something White forgot. She was careful to begin with: they always are. Then she exceeded the remit of her mission, took risks and ended up dead.”

“What kind of risks?”

Before Aveling could get a word in edgeways, Skellsgard said, “Susan felt she was on to something—something big, something significant. Because she wouldn’t return to the portal, all we got from her were cryptic messages, things scribbled on postcards. If she’d at least taken the time to build a radio sender, or return to the base station, she could have told us something more concrete. But she was too busy chasing leads, and in the end it got her killed.”

“Supposition,” Aveling said.

“If we don’t think she was on to something,” Skellsgard said, “why are we in such a hurry to get those papers back? It’s because we think there might be something in them, isn’t it?”

“It’s because we can’t risk cultural contamination,” Aveling corrected. “Analysed with the right mindset, the papers might reveal White’s origin. We don’t know how indiscreet she was. Until we get the papers, we’re in the dark.”

Skellsgard looked at Auger. “I guess all I’m saying is… take care out there, OK? Just get in and do the job. We want you back in one piece.”

“Really?” Auger asked.

“Oh, sure. Can you imagine what the return trip would be like if I only had Aveling for company?”