Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 9

Hannah shook her head and lifted Nandi's hand up, pressing it against the featureless rock wall above the counter. It felt cold, and there was a grainy texture to its surface that was not visible to the eye. Then it started to itch, as if she was pressing her palm against a hundred small needles. An image formed on the rock wall in front of Nandi as she felt the p.r.i.c.kles warm her skin, a large black oblong filled with scrolling yellow words and shuffling icons on the right. Nandi noticed Hannah smile at her surprise.

'There are quite a few advantages to using electricity rather than steam to power your transaction engines. The guild's stone screens will show you whatever you've requested from the archives.'

It took a little getting used to, but Nandi was soon able to settle down to her studies when she realized she could just treat the cold silicate surface like a more sophisticated version of the spinning abacus-like squares on a Rutledge Rotator back home. It was strange to think that once, if the ancient legends were to be believed, the world's temper had been stable enough for the power electric to be tamed by every nation, not just on Jago. A reliable source of power for lamps and the unknowable half-petrified machines that archaeologists dug out when they burrowed far enough down into the rock's strata.

As the day progressed excavating deeper and deeper into the annals of Jago Nandi got some inkling of why the man in whose footsteps she was following, Dr Conquest, had been so effective when paired up with a mathematician of his wife's calibre. The traits that made for a good archaeologist were rarely married to the mathematical prowess needed to code transaction-engine queries one reason why Nandi still preferred the physical library at Saint Vine's to the steaming heat of their college's ancient transaction-engine room. But with Nandi's archaeologist's instinct paired with Hannah's diamond-sharp mathematical clarity, she could drill through the mountains of irrelevant material, stripping away the layers of dross to mine the seams of gold hidden inside the archive. Each record Nandi found contained a hundred links to related information some direct, some inferred. Hannah's fingers were a blur across the punch card writer, the clack of keys a tattoo of symbolic search patterns and algorithmic re-indexing. There was a brief sucking noise as each finished punch card was drawn away down the tube in the wall like a miniature atmospheric carriage, then information began to crawl across the stone screen as the request was absorbed, processed and the matching records displayed.

The history of Jago could be read by Nandi in the shifting patterns of the world's climate: the short flourishing of trade after the island was first settled written in a thousand bills of exchange for wire, grain, dyes, spices; then the dwindling of commerce as the age of ice turned crueller, glaciers extending further south, and the Chimecan Empire rising like a vampire out of the world's ruins, devouring all the kingdoms struggling to survive. At last there was only the desperate struggle to remain alive, Jago standing alone, huddling in the warmth of its subterranean cities as the organized cannibalism of the Chimecans saw the peoples of Jago's old trading partners farmed for food. This was the period Nandi focused on, opening links to as many layers of the archives as she could, trying to gather up as much of the period as was possible within her grasp. Everything she came across had been erased from the other libraries of the world books tossed onto fires by desperate freezing citizens living wild and trying to escape the tribute in living flesh demanded by the empire. She almost felt like one of them, an ancient Jackelian serf scrabbling around the forest floor for branches to burn, one eye on the darks between the trees in case she needed to flee. There had always been an edge of sn.o.bbery to how the students from families wealthy enough to pay for their studies regarded Nandi and the scholarship undergraduates from the wards of the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors. Bra.s.s spoons Bra.s.s spoons, that was their nickname in the halls and quads of the college unable to afford a silver one, the obvious unkind inference. Nandi could hardly believe she was here, that the college had paid the guild's access fees and it was she she who had been allowed to come. There were moments when this all seemed like a dream, about to disappear around her at any moment. who had been allowed to come. There were moments when this all seemed like a dream, about to disappear around her at any moment.

Nandi moved onto the work of sifting through the material, each new record, doc.u.ment and scroll opening up as many avenues as reading them closed. Finally, she struck pay dirt. A doc.u.ment where the annotation layers had actually been filled in by Hannah's father. There was a quick flurry of activity as Hannah designed a punch-card query for them to cross-reference the other records edited by the same access code, then the trail followed by Dr George Conquest opened up before Nandi. Six months of painstaking work by the Conquests laid out for her edification. Hannah gave a yelp of excitement, saving Nandi the job of giving voice to identical feelings.

Nandi plunged into the doc.u.ments, earnestly at first, but then with an increasing sense of unease at what she was reading. By the time she had finished, her elation had evaporated to such an extent that even the commodore had noticed the change in her mood.

'What have you found in there, la.s.s, to steal the wind from your sails so?'

Nandi tapped the screen on the black wall of stone in front of her. 'It seems that there was indeed an undertaking by the early church to create a weapon capable of undermining the Chimecan Empire's dark G.o.ds.' She looked across at Hannah. 'Your father pieced the story together from thousands of records. It seems a single female priest, Bel Bessant, conceived the idea. She must have been a prodigy, even by the standards of those who've mastered synthetic morality.'

'Why so blessed glum them?' asked the commodore. 'You have the beginnings of the history you sought to tease out from this dark place.'

'The beginnings and the end of it, both,' said Nandi. 'The undertaking never amounted to anything. Here's one of the final findings Hannah's father made, the record of a criminal prosecution carried out by the stained senate's judiciary. Bel Bessant was murdered. It gives her murderer's name as that of her lover, a priest known as William of Flamewall.'

'A Circlist priest killing another priest?' said Hannah, clearly shocked by the notion.

'A mortal priest's heart is as p.r.o.ne to the pa.s.sions of love's malady as any other,' said the commodore. 'The curse of love can make the best of us forget our minds.'

Hannah got up from behind the card puncher. 'What did this William of Flamewall say when they caught him?'

'They never did,' said Nandi. 'Read the bottom of the doc.u.ment. He was tried in absentia.'

'There's nothing else?' said Hannah, clearly not believing what she was reading. 'No transcripts from witnesses as to why he might have killed her?'

'Not in your father's records. We could try to find them ourselves, but your father spent six months here researching the archives. If he and your mother couldn't find them...' Nandi sighed. 'All this way for nothing. Read your father's notes in the annotation layer. His final conclusion was that the rumours were just a bluff. Bel Bessant had developed enough of a sketch of the possibilities of a G.o.d-slaying weapon that the Jagonese only had to leak their plans to the empire's agents for the Chimecans to forget all about bringing the island under the heel of imperial rule. All this way out to Jago, for what? For nothing.'

'Let me see, please,' said Hannah, swapping places with the young academic on the granite bench and scrolling the pages of retrieved doc.u.ments down the stone screen. 'This doc.u.ment was annotated the day before my father left Jago to return to Jackals.'

'So it seems,' agreed Nandi.

'But that doesn't make sense,' said Hannah. 'The church told me I was left in their care on Jago because my parents were going back to the college to secure extra funding for continued access to the archives and they didn't want to expose me to the dangers of an additional return trip through the Fire Sea. If this was as far as their research went, if they were really finished here, then why leave me behind on the island?'

Nandi leant over Hannah's shoulder to stare at the screen. The words of wisdom once given to Nandi by her mentor at Saint Vine's echoed back at her. 'If it's too neat, if it's wrapped in a box and left for you to find like a gift, then keep your eye open for a trapdoor and a long drop down to some sharp sticks.' 'If it's too neat, if it's wrapped in a box and left for you to find like a gift, then keep your eye open for a trapdoor and a long drop down to some sharp sticks.'

But why in the world would either of the doctors Conquest have wanted to make people think their work here was finished, when it wasn't? One reason leapt suddenly to mind. If the pair from the college had enemies sniffing around their heels and had been laying a false trail, would they perhaps have hidden some clues for friends from Saint Vine's to follow in their footsteps?

'Hannah,' said Nandi. 'These comments are all from your father. If your mother had left any notes behind, where would they be?'

'In the search strata,' said Hannah. 'You can write comments on how you arrived at a particular record there; that's where you store reminders of the search algorithms you used in case you need to repeat them.'

'See if there's anything accompanying this chain of doc.u.ments, made on or around the same date as your father's last access.'

Hannah went back to her card puncher and rattled out a query to peel back the underlying layer of her parent's findings. There was a sucking noise as the tube carried the product of her labours away into the injection system, then the stone screen started to flash and the image on the cold silicate surface reformed as a green block covered in mathematical sigils. Nandi couldn't even begin to scratch the surface of understanding this, but Hannah craned her neck out of the heavy guild robes and the wrinkling of the girl's nose and the dance of her eyes across the wall seemed to indicate she could follow the mathematics well enough.

'This,' Hannah tapped a lone stretch of code near the bottom of the image formed on the stone wall, 'this isn't anything to do with how my mother navigated to these files or her bookmark set it's a Joshua Egg.'

Nandi looked blankly at Hannah.

'Ah now,' said the commodore. 'That's a rare piece of cleverness.'

Hannah shot a glance towards the commodore, which seemed to be a mix of surprise and admiration at his knowledge. 'You wouldn't have much occasion to use a Joshua Egg on a u-boat.'

'No la.s.s, but if a lock's secured by a transaction engine and it's well-designed enough, the locksmith will usually throw one inside to encrypt their key for opening the bolts, and if there's one thing old Blacky's got, it's an aversion to being locked up.'

'This is a lock?' Nandi asked their guide.

'A Joshua Egg is transformative maths,' said Hannah. 'Highly recursive. When you solve it, you get another Joshua Egg and a piece of encoded information spat out. It's like a game of pa.s.s the parcel you rip a layer off the package and you find another smaller parcel and maybe a present waiting inside for you. This is about as long as I've seen one, though, so there must be quite a few iterations inside.'

Nandi's eyes narrowed. The commodore was full of surprises, and so, it seemed, was the work of the doctors Conquest. 'Can you solve it?'

'It would take days by hand,' said Hannah. 'Maybe weeks if it's particularly tricky, but-' she waved towards the window and the wall of valves glowing on the other side of the artificial ravine, '-I don't have to do it by hand. With enough raw power I bet I can crack the first iteration in a couple of minutes.'

'Get to it,' said Nandi, trying to keep the hunger or was it desperation out of her voice.

Hannah jumped back on the card writer and transcribed the Joshua Egg and her method for solving it, filling up at least twenty punch cards with a tattoo of holes; the injection tube to the ma.s.sive transaction engines patiently carrying each card away until the suction tube seemed to be hissing angrily back at them like a maltreated cat. Her volley of instructions released, Hannah leant back from the counter and the three of them waited for the girl's cards to find their mark.

The results came suddenly, and not in the form of a new display on the stone screen, but with an angry yelp of surprise from Commodore Black as a fork of static lightning flashed past the balcony behind him, searing the back of his neck. Hannah ran to the study cell's balcony rail, followed by Nandi. Hooded figures were jutting out from balconies on either side of their study cell, staring in disbelief at the sight. Gla.s.s valves on both sides of the ravine were ablaze with light, a nimbus of static electricity cascading down to the forest of valves on the floor. Intense bolts of energy danced between the giant gla.s.s bulbs, ricocheting among the relays.

'What mortal dark gale is this?' shouted the commodore over the roar from outside.

'I think it's a switching storm,' Hannah called back. 'One of the oldest guildsmen described them to me once, but he said we'd never see their like again. The transaction engines are overloading, but we're only handling the capital's needs down here now. There's enough spare processing capacity in the guild's chambers to support eleven abandoned cities. This shouldn't be happening!'

The clash and clack of the jumping lines of energy were joined by a rumbling noise from huge iron pipes running along the ravine's walls, cold water from the frozen wastes above ground being pumped down to cool the overheating machinery.

'This is our doing,' whined the commodore. 'Trying to prise open a nest of wicked secrets that were never intended to be known.'

Hannah shook her head vehemently. 'It's not us. It can't be. It doesn't take that much processing power to solve a Joshua Egg, however complex it is.'

Nandi stared out, fascinated and horrified by the leaping forks of energy. It was as though the valve-minds were G.o.ds whose rest had been disturbed, and this their rage. The study cell door flew open suddenly, diverting Nandi's attention, and a male guild worker sprinted inside waving an ebony-coloured punch card. 'Black card! Everything from vault nine to twenty-two.'

Hannah ran over and s.n.a.t.c.hed the black card, feeding it into their injection tube.

'Why is your hood down?' demanded the guildsman from inside his own cowl. 'In the presence of outsiders. You shame us.'

'Shut up,' replied Hannah, almost casually.

The punch card disappeared inside the wall, bouncing back seconds later, followed by the dimming of the valve-light immediately outside their window.

Grabbing his black punch card back, the guildsman ran frantically out of the room without another comment on Hannah's state of undress.

Nandi saw that the image on the stone screen was freezing in place. 'We're finished for the day then, I take it?'

'They're freezing all non-critical processes in several transaction-engine vaults including this one,' said Hannah. 'They'll have the guild's senior card sharps and engine men down here all day and night, trying to work out why the chamber outside was overloading.'

Nandi looked at the stone screen, the image of a doc.u.ment half-formed on the rock surface. This was something new! The first layer of the Joshua Egg had been packed with a present after all! She ran her fingers across the archaic words on the doc.u.ment, translating them to the modern form. Could it be? Yes. Yes.

'This is part of the church's record of the trial of William of Flamewall,' announced Nandi excitedly to Hannah and the commodore. 'Look! It states that he poisoned Bel Bessant with metal oxides from the dyes he had access to. He was an illuminator of ma.n.u.scripts and a stained-gla.s.s artist. That's how the militia discovered he was the murderer they traced the poison in Bel Bessant's blood back to her lover's own dye mix, but William of Flamewall had already fled the capital by then.'

There was nothing more; the doc.u.ment's image had frozen mid-scroll on the cold stone. What else might they have found if Jago's legendary transaction-engine rooms hadn't failed them in quite so catastrophic and spectacular a fashion?

'An ancient murder,' said the commodore. 'With a good many more in the centuries since to trouble the island's police, no doubt. But it's not the capital we we need to flee, it's these terrible guild vaults with their sick transfiguring energies and fearful storms of energy. If you've finished here, Nandi, let's head back to the safety of our prison of a hotel.' need to flee, it's these terrible guild vaults with their sick transfiguring energies and fearful storms of energy. If you've finished here, Nandi, let's head back to the safety of our prison of a hotel.'

'Finished for the day,' said Nandi.

And the day only. There were still a good few questions Nandi had about the work of the two doctors Conquest.

Standing close to the cascade of water down the iron walls, a robed figure watched Hannah Conquest, the aging u-boat man and Nandi Tibar-Wellking board the transport capsule and waited for it to safely clear the rubber curtain, leaving the guild's atmospheric station. The circuit of the bomb he had placed on board would have been completed now the carriage was under power.

He had followed his orders to the letter. The figure allowed himself a sliver of a smile not that anyone could see it under his hood. He would be boarding a capsule with the other guild workers soon, but he wouldn't be going where those three were heading.

Oblivion's eternal embrace. In about ten minute's time.

Given his two companions' distant evolutionary origins as forest-dwelling primates, it was ironic, Boxiron considered, that it should be his inferior cobbled-together body that experienced the least trouble ascending the air vent to the surface of Hermetica City.

Chalph urs Chalph had the advantage of youth, though, the young ursine climbing the rungs ahead of Jethro without the sweat that was now soaking the ex-parson's face. The three of them were getting near to the cliffs overlooking the Fire Sea, Boxiron steadily pulling his not inconsiderable metal weight up behind Chalph and Jethro. Then the ledge was in sight, giving onto a bare stone pa.s.sage that led to a heavy steel door with a wheel-shaped handle to open it that wouldn't have looked out of place on the commodore's u-boat.

They exited via a concrete bunker topped with rusted iron ventilation grilles, to find themselves on top of a black cliff with a view down to the boiling waters lapping against the sh.o.r.es of Jago far below. Chalph raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the ma.s.sive iron battlements to their right, then indicated that they should proceed through the plain of boulders and concrete air vents towards the garden domes nesting under the towering presence of the Horn of Jago. It wasn't too hard for the three of them to stay hidden from the guard posts dotting the battlements the ravages of a steam storm had recently pa.s.sed, leaving behind a warm mist that cloaked them from the eyes of the Pericurian mercenaries which should be focused on the monsters prowling outside the capital's walls anyway.

Chalph took them to a concrete building standing a little taller than the steamman's own height, wedged in between two air vents. There were three iron circles stamped into the wall around the back of the structure, each the size of a drain hole cover.

'This is it?' asked Jethro, his beak-nosed face swivelling about to make sure they hadn't been spotted by any of the sentries.

Boxiron judged they were safe enough. The nearest of the geodesic domes was one of the abandoned overgrown parks that dotted the outskirts of the capital. There wasn't likely to be anyone inside.

'This is what you asked for,' said Chalph. He lifted a steel tool out of his leather pocket and inserted it into a hole in the centre of one of the covers, levering the tool around until there was a m.u.f.fled clunk and then he heaved the cover out, pulling it away and resting it down on the stony ground.

Jethro looked meaningfully at Boxiron and the steamman lurched forward to check the machinery inside. It was a nest of cables, clicking mechanics and etched steel circuits lit by a bank of flickering valves hanging from the roof like lanterns. It appeared primitive to Boxiron, but no doubt it served its purpose, allowing the guild's transaction engines to control this stretch of the battlement's defences.

'What do you think, old steamer?' asked Jethro. 'Can it be cracked?'

'All in all, I prefer the locks and systems of a Jackelian transaction engine.' But it would do. There was a connection from the guild's vaults to the wall's control system and what was sauce for the goose could easily become sauce for the gander.

There really hadn't been many options open to a desecration like Boxiron after he had burnt down Aumerle House during his brief fit of madness. Shunned by his people, no longer a steamman knight, only a grave-robbed hybrid wandering the rookeries of Middlesteel begging for high-grade c.o.ke and water for his boiler heart. But desecration or no, Boxiron still had the mind of a steamman knight, a mind far superior to the Jackelians' primitive transaction-engine locks. And after the flash mob had found him and enlisted him into their criminal ranks, they had outfitted Boxiron's human-milled sh.e.l.l with many useful extras. There weren't many locks, doors or transaction-engine safeguards physical or artificial that could stand up to his talents.

Boxiron sprung the concealed hatch on his chest and pulled out the highly illegal cables he would need for this piece of work, adjusting the variable heads to match the Jagonese non-standard sockets. Once he had patched in a workaround to bypa.s.s the machinery's obviously hostile protective valves, he pushed the other jack into the transaction engine's diagnostics system. Why Why, this old steamer, officer? He's just checking the jeweller's here for a malfunction on their doorway. Move along now. Nothing to see here. this old steamer, officer? He's just checking the jeweller's here for a malfunction on their doorway. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

Boxiron dialled back the power to his body, trying to limit the spasms of his twitching iron fingers. It was like holding his breath, painful and potentially dangerous if the retained smog from his boiler heart started contaminating the rest of his systems. There There. The connection was made, and Boxiron smashed through the protocols limiting the battlement's diagnostics to reporting only establishing a two-way connection.

'If you can't find anything in ten minutes,' said Jethro, 'you need to return. This mist looks like it could burn off soon.'

'You worry too much, Jethro softbody,' said Boxiron. 'This is what I'm for.'

The one function he could still perform with excellence. No more for him the honour of the battlefield, or whatever mundane tasks his body had performed for Damson Aumerle that had so endeared his frame to her. All that he had left to him was this this.

Boxiron noted Jethro's hand on his gear stick, a gentle yank and a squealing navigation though the rusty slots on his back, before he felt it reach the final groove with all the impact of running into a brick wall. Top gear Top gear.

The light flickering across Boxiron's vision plate pulsed off as his consciousness entered the transaction engine like a bullet, hurtling towards the guild's vaults at the speed of electricity.

He encountered a diagnostics handler at the guild's destination gate, sleepy at first, then outraged that the battlements had malfunctioned so badly they had sent it this. And what was this this? Boxiron sent the diagnostics handler insane while it was still wondering how it could possibly report this oddity, making the handler's corruption look as if it had accidentally fallen into a recursive loop. The guildsman who had programmed the handler so many centuries before had templated portions of the diagnostics' code from the main core, and the lights of shared developer tokens sparkled like open doorways throughout the system as Boxiron traced them across the guild's transaction engines.

Boxiron squeezed himself through one of the more central tokens, just far enough to observe the hundreds of handler functions shuttling back and forth outside, some carrying pieces of data from the archives in response to guildsmen's queries, far more shifting regular data streams between the capital's many systems: air circulation, gas leakage, temperature, the mortars and gunnery telemetry from emplacements around the foot of the Horn of Jago, power fluctuations from the distant, deep turbine halls. Boxiron changed his appearance to mimic one of the handlers, and then carried himself looking for all the world as if he completely belonged there towards the goal of his little foray.

He didn't even need to rip into one of the catalogues of port addresses to find the militia's hub squatting there so similar to Ham Yard back home, bristling with privacy guards and firewalls that spoke more of the self importance of the bureaucrats that maintained its routines than its effectiveness against a steamman mentality. Boxiron circled it. Oh yes, all of this would be fine for stopping a human card sharp bent on creating a little mischief, but how long could it stand against a mind such as his?

Well, longer than it would have if Boxiron didn't need to be un.o.btrusive. A diagnostics handler bent out of shape would just be written off as one of those annoyances sent to plague the Guild of Valvemen's coders. But the central store for the police militia smashed to pieces? That was quite another thing altogether. Boxiron presented himself to the police store like a good little handler, and while the archive was extending itself across to him, he isolated the handshake protocol and extended a virtual environment around it so realistic that the protocol never realized that what it was experiencing was a subsection of Boxiron's own mentality. After it was safely cut off and isolated, it was a matter of simplicity to break the protocol apart and reverse engineer it, then push his own tame copy back towards the police archives. The next bit was where Boxiron was going to get clever he had even agreed with Jethro exactly how it needed to be done. He wasn't actually going to steal all the police records pertaining to the archbishop's murder. He wasn't even going to copy them and try to make off with them in his memory. This was going to be a clean job. So clean, in fact, that the Jagonese civil service were going to do the work for him.

Boxiron found the police militia's case file for Alice Gray's murder and, seizing control of the archiving function, reset the clock on its timing synchronization forward five hundred years of their present date long enough for the facts of the archbishop's murder to naturally decla.s.sify themselves. Then he sent a copy of the open files to the Jagonese public records office, along with instructions that they were to be immediately output onto paper, stamped and sealed inside an envelope as importation paperwork, then set aside for a certain Chalph urs Chalph of the Pericurian trade delegation to collect. Once Boxiron had reset the clock on the archive back to its original date, the record was automatically recla.s.sified and all references to the copy automatically deleted as if they had never existed. Just to be on the safe side, Boxiron traced the physical bank of valves where the militia information had been stored in the guild's transaction-engine vaults and rotated that wall of valves to the top of the physical cleaning rota. The valves would be decharged, cleaned, re-powered up and not even a residual imprint of his crime would be left.

Boxiron was on his way back to the destination gate when he saw it; a rotating green force, half cyclone and half frenzied spinning top. It was throwing itself down one of the major query channels; upending the clearly terrified data handlers and absorbing them into its gyrating ma.s.s before spitting them back out again to shakily resume their transit. By the Steamo Loas, this was something new something sentient and dangerous scouring the transaction engines for an intruder. It could only be one of the valve-minds he had heard about. It must have discovered the breach and realized the collapsed diagnostics handler was not the result of a bug. Boxiron's chameleon-like exterior couldn't withstand the likes of that whirling monstrosity. If it got hold of him it would instantly realize he was an intruder and the chances of his mentality making its way back to his clunking, human-milled body would be minimal.

Throwing caution to the wind, Boxiron selected an alternative query channel and sped towards the destination gate he had originally broken through, moving far faster than any mere data handler could possibly manage. It almost felt good; to be in a realm where the pathetic joke of a body that his steamman head had been joined to was not an enc.u.mbrance. But it would have felt a lot better if the green cyclone hadn't immediately changed course and come roaring after him.

Boxiron increased speed and the valve-mind matched him. The gate was too far away and the distance between the steamman and the valve-mind too slight and growing slighter with each millisecond.

He was never going to outrun this enraged behemoth.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

It was Commodore Black who gave voice to what Nandi was thinking as their capsule started to decelerate. 'This is too blessed early to be stopping. It took us an hour to get out to the guild's vaults, and we haven't even been travelling for six minutes.'

Hannah stood up and checked the panel at the front of the tube-shaped carriage. 'The destination arrival marker is showing here, but you're right. We're a long way from reaching Hermetica City.'

A rattle sounded from outside, the unmistakable noise of clearing a rubber tunnel valve, then they slowed to a complete halt. Commodore Black reached into his jacket and drew out a snub-nosed pistol. He broke it and slipped a crystal charge into its breech, then pushed back the clockwork hammer mechanism. Nandi looked at the old u-boatman, horrified.

'You've a nose for history, la.s.s. I've a nose for ensuring poor old Blacky's bones aren't added to the dirt you and your college friends like to trowel through.' He pointed to the front of the windowless carriage. 'Get down there, ladies, as fast as you like. Trigger the door when I give you the nod.'

Nandi shook her head and reluctantly pulled a small knife out of her boot. Used only for the purposes of excavation, until now.

'I see the professor's taught you a few of her other skills, then,' said the commodore. 'That's fine. But if it cuts up rough, you leave the killing to me.'

Hannah saw the commodore's signal, triggered the release handle and two iron levers pushed the door up and out with a squeal. It was dark outside; pitch black until Hannah switched on the carriage's external lamps. Commodore Black moved through the door, Nandi following close on his heel. They were in a large echoing cavern, freezing air blowing in from above them. The carriage had been shunted next to a dark platform.

'It's an atmospheric platform,' said Hannah from the doorway, her voice probably louder than she intended across the echoing s.p.a.ce.

Nandi stooped down and ran her fingers along the concourse through a layer of dust. 'It hasn't been used in a long time.'