Century Rain Part 17

"Of course they do," Custine said. "Nevertheless, there should be a manageable number of permutations. If I haven't got anywhere by the end of this afternoon, I doubt that more time will make any difference." Custine waited a moment. "Floyd? Did you hear a word of what I just said?"

Floyd turned from the window. "I'm sorry."

"You're thinking about Greta again, aren't you?"

"Actually," Floyd said, "I was thinking about that little girl standing across the street."

"I didn't notice any girl when we arrived."

"That's because she wasn't there. But now it looks as if she's watching this room."

He let the curtain slip back into the place. He'd had enough of a look at the little girl to make him doubt that she was the same one they had seen coming out of Blanchard's apartment the evening before. But there was still something about the way light fell on her face that made him want to look elsewhere.

"You don't seriously think a child has something to do with this murder, do you?" Custine asked.

"Of course not," Floyd said.

They took the stairs down to the Mathis. By the time they reached the car, the watcher was gone.

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 gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 antic.i.p.ation as the planet's b.u.t.terscotch 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 h.e.l.las Planitia and reached as far north as Cydonia, encompa.s.sing 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. Ca.n.a.ls, 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, cl.u.s.tered together like cells in a beehive.

But between h.e.l.las 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 st.i.tched back together from tatters, reconstructed like a shredded doc.u.ment.

"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 a.s.s. 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 gla.s.ses. 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 gla.s.s of water and sipped at it experimentally. She had finished half the gla.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.ks 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 b.i.t.c.h, but he's our coldhearted son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Are you military?" Auger asked.

Skellsgard downed her gla.s.s of water in one gulp, then poured another. "h.e.l.l no-I'm just a snottynosed academic. Until a year ago I was happily minding my own business trying to come up with a mathematical treatment of pathological matter." Antic.i.p.ating 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 cla.s.sical 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 p.i.s.s-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-a.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.u.mpy 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 gla.s.s 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 a.n.a.logue 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 a.n.a.logue 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 gla.s.s 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?"