Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  It had never been the intention of the USNE to destroy all life on the planet: they had too many Martian interests of their own to go that far. Had Silver Rain slipped from their control (it had never been tested on such a scale before, and its effects were not entirely predictable), they would have deployed a counter-spore designed to neutralise the original weapon before it did excessive harm. But there was no need for that. The Silver Rain had worked exactly as advertised.

  In the aftermath, the Slasher forces were paralysed by the scale of the atrocity. Sixty thousand people had died on Mars—more than the total number of casualties sustained in the conflict up to that point. But just when the Slashers were ready to launch a devastating counter-offensive against Tanglewood, using weapons that they had kept in reserve until then, there was an equally shocking turn of events amongst the Threshers. Senior officials denounced the actions of the battle planners who had developed and deployed Silver Rain. A moderately bloody coup followed, and those responsible for the crime against Mars were tried and executed. The punishments seemed to sate the Slashers. Within weeks, ceasefire terms had been agreed, with hostilities ending by late August. Mars returned to nominal Thresher control in 2244, but with significant concessions to the Slashers. While it was not exactly true to say that Mars had recovered from its assault, it had begun the healing process. The terraforming programme soldiered on, never getting any closer to its goal, but it was something to live for, regardless. Ambitious new settlements appeared in the Solis Planum and Terra Cimmeria regions, and the refurbishment of the high-orbit port, abandoned and mothballed during the war, brought a healthy dose of commerce.

  But even now, after twenty-three years, the Scoured Zone was still lifeless. By accident or design, the gene-tweaked crops never took root there again. None of the settlements inside the Silver Rain footprint were ever reinhabited. They stood there now, half-buried in Martian dust: bone-white ghost towns, left exactly as they had been at the time of the atrocity.

  Auger remembered her dream of Paris: the drummer boy on the Champs-Elysées.

  “That was twenty-three years ago,” she concluded. “Officially, the weapon doesn’t exist anymore. Even the blueprints were supposed to have been destroyed. But Susan White didn’t write those words on a postcard for nothing. Someone’s got hold of it again. Maybe even improved it. And the next target isn’t a few tens of thousands of Martian colonists. It’s three billion people—the entire population of your version of Earth.”

  “But why?”

  “To erase what should never have been. To wipe out those three billion lives as if they were rogue programs in some vast computer simulation. To turn back the clock to the moment of the quantum snapshot and obtain a pristine copy of the Earth, unencumbered by anything as messy as living, breathing inhabitants.”

  “It’s monstrous,” Floyd said, horrified.

  “From one point of view. From another, it’s simply a question of tidying up—like airbrushing a photograph. Remember what that war baby said in Berlin? All you really are to them is three billion dots.”

  “We have to stop this.”

  “And we’re trying to. But we may be too late. If they already know the physical co-ordinates of the ALS, all they need to do now is to get there and deliver the Silver Rain—”

  “Then we have to get there ahead of them.”

  “Nice in theory, Floyd. But we don’t know where the ALS is. There’s an awful lot of galaxy out there.”

  “Then we need to find out those co-ordinates as well. They must have smuggled them out, right?”

  “Floyd, we’re talking about three numbers. They don’t even have to be big ones. No one needs to specify the position of the ALS to within a centimetre. It’s like looking for an island in the Pacific Ocean. All you need is a grid reference accurate enough to rule out any other possibilities.”

  “Then we look for a grid reference.”

  “It could be anywhere, hidden in any form. It could be a telephone number, or something even less obvious.”

  “But those numbers must be somewhere. Could they have been hidden in the things Susan White was sending back home?”

  “She was on our side, Floyd.”

  “I’m not saying that she knew what she was carrying, just that she might have been acting as a courier for the bad guys without ever realising it.”

  “It’s still hopeless. Even if we knew for a fact that the numbers were in those papers… where would we start? The co-ordinates could be stored in the tiniest microdot, or in one telephone number amongst the thousands in the classified adverts.”

  “All I’m saying is that we have to do something.”

  “I agree,” she said, “but maybe our first priority ought to be getting rescued.”

  Something distracted her: a slight change in the quality of light flooding the cabin. They were still tumbling, the Sun still flashing through the window once a rotation, but now there was a pinkish glow that stayed with them all the time, as if the transport was enveloped in its own little cloud of glowing light.

  “You still think someone’s going to pick us up?” Floyd asked.

  “They’re looking for us,” Auger said.

  “Even if the blowing up of that moon wasn’t part of the plan?”

  “Someone will still want to know what happened to us.” But even as she said it, she felt her certainty draining away. By its nature, the hyperweb portal was ultra-secret. Most of the people who knew anything about it would have been inside Phobos when the attack took it apart.

  “Auger?”

  “I think we may be in more trouble than I first thought. Aveling and Barton are dead. Apart from Niagara and Caliskan, I don’t know who’s left out there to look for us.”

  “Niagara and Caliskan?”

  “Niagara’s our Slasher mole, the man who fed us the know-how to make the Phobos link operational in the first place. Caliskan is the man who sent me to recover Susan’s belongings. Niagara may have been inside Phobos when it was destroyed, but Caliskan’s probably still in Tanglewood.”

  “Then we’d better hope he hasn’t forgotten about you.”

  “Floyd, there’s something not right about this.” She closed her eyes, silencing a moan as the discomfort in her shoulder took on a sharper, nastier edge. “The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that none of this was an accident.”

  “None of what?”

  “The collapse of the wormhole. Granted, the whole thing was becoming increasingly unstable, but the snake robot should have been able to compensate for that. It should have been able to manage a safe contraction of the throat.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I think the robot was sent there to destroy the link.”

  “But the robot helped you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And it probably meant to save my life. I don’t think it had any idea that it had been tampered with. The sabotage order could have been buried deep beneath its surface programming.”

  The pink glow had intensified: fingers of light now licked around the armoured aperture of the window. It still bothered Auger, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “Why would anyone want to sabotage the link, if that’s the only way back to Paris?” Floyd asked.

  “That’s what worries me. Not just because it implies that someone within the organisation set out to collapse the link, but also because it must mean that the Slashers no longer need it themselves.”

  “Why would they throw away something like that?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Auger said. “Not unless they already had another way of reaching Paris.”

  “You mean they already have the co-ordinates of the ALS?”

  “Either that, or they’re very close to finding them out.”

  The thing that had been bothering Auger about that pink glow finally pushed its way to the front of her pain-fogged mind. She felt herself go quite cold, even the stab of the wound no longer her most immediate concern. “Floyd, d
o something for me, will you? Climb up and take another look through the window.”

  “Why? You think someone else is out there?”

  “Just do it.” She watched him intently as he did as he was told.

  “Now tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “Tell me if Mars looks any bigger than the last time you saw it.”

  Floyd took a look and then stared back at her, light and shadow slipping over his face with clockwork regularity. His expression told her everything she needed to know. “This isn’t good, is it?” Floyd asked.

  “Get back in your seat. Fast.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong is that we’re not in orbit around Mars. If that planet looks bigger, it’s because it’s closer. We’re falling towards it. I think we’re already skimming the upper atmosphere.”

  Floyd returned to his seat and lost no time in buckling up. “How do you know?”

  “I didn’t, for a while. I just had a bad feeling that it might turn out this way. Phobos was in orbit around Mars, moving at exactly the right speed for its altitude. But we came out of the portal with our own velocity relative to the moon—hundreds of metres per second, at least. Whatever trajectory that put us in, it wasn’t going to be the same one as Phobos. There’s a chance we might have lucked out and had a boost in the right direction, away from Mars—”

  “But today isn’t our day for lucking out.”

  “No,” she said. “Doesn’t look as if it is. We came out at the wrong angle, at the wrong speed. We’re hitting the atmosphere.”

  “And that’s as bad as it sounds, right?”

  “Ever wish upon a falling star, Floyd? Well, now’s your big chance. You’ll even get to be the star.”

  “What will happen?”

  “What will happen is that we’ll burn up and die. If we’re lucky, we’ll have been crushed unconscious by the G-force before that happens.”

  “That’s an interesting view of luck.”

  “This thing isn’t made for atmospheric re-entry,” Auger said. “No matter what angle we come in at.”

  “This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen, Auger. Not like this. Not after we made it all this way.”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “We can’t steer this thing. We can’t slow it down or speed it up. We can’t even stop it tumbling.” The glow, faint at first, had now intensified, flickering through shades of blue and pink like a quilt of pastel light wrapped around the ship. It was mesmerising and rather lovely. Under other circumstances, it might have been a thing of wonder. “Maybe if the hull wasn’t already shot to shit,” she said, leaving Floyd to draw his own conclusions.

  “But it is.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all my fault.”

  The glow flared to a hard white light, and in the same instant the transport shuddered violently. The tumbling motion became haphazard and all around her, Auger heard shrieks and groans of protesting metal as the aerodynamic and thermal stresses of Mars’s atmosphere began to toy with the fabric of the ship. G-force built up with surprising speed. It was nothing at all like the smooth insertions she remembered from her trips to Earth. One moment, all that was pushing her into her seat was the gentle and steady pressure of the unchecked rotation, and the next she was being pushed and pulled in random directions, yanked against the bruising restraints of the harness. She jammed her head into the shaped restraint at the back of the seat, trying to protect her neck from the whiplashing dead weight of her skull. The ride became even more turbulent, the noise deafening. She was beginning to find it difficult to breathe as the G-load worked against her lungs. She felt light-headed, consciousness beginning to break up into discrete, interrupted episodes.

  “Floyd…” she managed to say. “Floyd, can you hear me?”

  When he answered, she could barely hear him over the scream of the dying transport.

  “You did good, Auger.”

  How he managed it, she would never know, but somehow Floyd found the strength to reach out and close his hand around hers. She felt his fingers tighten, anchoring her to this place in space and time, even as everything else in her universe came apart in light and fury.

  THIRTY-TWO

  When she awoke, it was to the shining cool whiteness she had always imagined Heaven would be like. She would have happily stayed in that serene white limbo for the rest of eternity, void of any care or anxiety. But the whiteness held nagging suggestions of structure: pale shadows and highlights that sharpened themselves into the details of a room and its white-clad occupants.

  One of these occupants took on the form of a very beautiful girl, surrounded by a mirage of twinkling lights.

  “One lying little shit to the rescue,” Cassandra said.

  Auger forced her way through layers of groggy recall, pushing memories back into place as she surfaced. “You,” was all she managed to say.

  Cassandra nodded sagely. “Yes. Me. I’m glad you remember. It would have made things a lot more difficult if there was deep amnesia.”

  Auger became aware that she was lying on a bed, at a slight angle, with various twinkling machines hovering around her. Some were so tiny that at first glance they might have been mistaken for dust motes. Others were as large as dragonflies or hummingbirds, shimmering with the moiré patterns of intense microscopic detail. Dimly it occurred to her that—despite the absence of any lumbering items of bedside monitoring equipment—this was some kind of sick bay or recuperative ward.

  “We were falling—”

  “And we were tracking you, trying to intercept your transport before it hit the atmosphere. As you may have gathered, we only just got to you in time. Our medical science can work wonders, but it can’t work miracles.”

  Sweet relief that she had survived welled up inside her. Then she remembered that she had not been alone.

  “Is Floyd all right?”

  “The other occupant of the shuttle is fine. He’s under observation in another room, but he didn’t merit the immediate attention you did.”

  “And the transport?”

  “The transport is gone. We jettisoned its remains as a decoy. But don’t worry: we emptied the cargo first.”

  “Cargo?”

  “The archival items. A most interesting collection, I must say.”

  “I didn’t load any cargo. It was the last thing on my mind before we left E2.” Then she remembered the snake robot. Even as part of it was busy sabotaging the link, another part would have been diligently loading the transport with Susan White’s accumulated possessions.

  It took a machine to be that stupid, Auger thought. “OK. Now tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”

  “Other than saving your life? Oh, I thought that was obvious. I’m a spy, Auger. Ever since we picked up rumours and hints that you Threshers had reopened the Phobos portal, I’ve been trying to worm my way into Caliskan’s confidence in order to find out what’s going on. And it worked, too, didn’t it? That little trip to Earth was most invigorating.”

  “I always said you couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Ah, but the point is that you have no one else to trust. I’m your last, best hope.”

  “I think I’ll take my chances with Niagara,” Auger said.

  “Oh, yes. Dear, dependable Niagara. Shall I break the bad news now or later? Niagara was also a spy. The difference is that he was working for the really nasty people.”

  The white walls were curved, merging seamlessly with floor and ceiling. Fine gold threads wove themselves through the white in calligraphic swirls that oozed and flowed in a way that seemed to calm Auger on some utterly primal level.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, snapping her attention back to Cassandra. “Niagara showed us how to make the link work. Why would he have done that if he was working against us?”

  “Because he needed the link up and running, you silly-billy.” Cassandra sighed, planting one hand on her hip. “Look, I’ll spe
ll it out for you: you were all duped. Niagara was a plant, working for a particularly vicious splinter faction of the aggressors. He wasn’t a moderate sympathiser at all, but your worst enemy.”

  “Nice of you to let us know.”

  “And nice of your government to let us know it had found the Phobos portal in the first place,” she countered. “If your people hadn’t been so keen to keep that from us, we might have learned about Niagara’s activities sooner than we did.”

  “Or you’d have made sure you controlled Niagara.”

  “Are you going to keep this up for ever, Auger? Or would it kill you to trust me?”

  “I can’t trust you, Cassandra. You lied to me on Earth, posing as someone you weren’t.”

  “At the behest of your government, not mine. It wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest if you’d known I was a Polity citizen. It was Caliskan who insisted on that particular charade.”

  “That still doesn’t excuse the fact that you were prepared to testify against me in the tribunal.”

  “Testify as in ‘tell the truth,’ you mean? Well, I can’t argue with that.”

  “They’d have hung me out to dry.”

  “And you’d have deserved it. Nothing was worth risking a human life the way you did, Auger. Especially not some useless paper relic from two hundred years ago.”

  “Is this the reason you rescued me? To rub my nose in it?”

  “Do I detect a note of contrition?”

  “Detect what you like. You still haven’t explained what you were doing around Mars, if you’re so friendly.”