“We were doing what we could to limit the damage,” Cassandra said. “It can’t have escaped your attention that there is civil war in the Federation of Polities. That disagreement has now spread to the inner system.”
“With Phobos one of the first casualties. I hope you’re proud of that.”
“Oh, very proud. Especially as fifty-four of my moderate friends died trying to defend your precious little moon. You can’t imagine how proud that makes me feel.”
“I’m sorry,” Auger said, chastened.
“It doesn’t matter. They were just Slashers, after all,” she said bitterly.
“I never realised—”
“The aggressors had been taking a particular interest in Phobos for some time,” Cassandra said, ignoring her. “We had been shadowing their movements, trying to infiltrate their circles, but we didn’t know what it was about Phobos that had them so excited.”
“Now you do.”
“You were in hyperweb transit when the moon was destroyed, weren’t you?”
“Is there anything about us you don’t know?”
“A great deal,” Cassandra said. “I haven’t read your minds. We have no firm idea where the portal led to, or what you were doing at the other end. We don’t know exactly what Niagara wanted with it, except that Silver Rain plays a role in his plans. But we have learned something puzzling about the man.”
“Floyd?”
“You shouldn’t have brought him with you.”
“I had no damned choice.” Auger forced herself to sit higher in the bed. As she moved, the bed effortlessly readjusted itself to support her. Beneath the silky white sheet she was wearing some kind of hospital smock. She reached up and touched the area of her shoulder where she had been shot.
No pain. No inflammation. She pushed her hand under the collar of the smock and traced the region of skin where the wound had been. It was baby smooth, revealing its healed newness only with the faintest tingle.
“We dug out the bullet,” Cassandra said. “You were very lucky.”
“Where are we?”
“Aboard our ship—the one that pulled your transport out of Mars’s atmosphere. We call the ship—” And her syrinx played one of its little ditties, although Auger heard none of the music in it. “I don’t think there would be a lot of point in attempting a translation into flat language.”
“Where is the ship now? Are we still near Mars?”
“No. We’re on our way to near-Earth space. There are, however, complications.”
“I need to talk to Caliskan.”
“He’s expecting you. It was a message from Caliskan that warned us to keep an eye out for you. It was a moving transmission, probably sent from a ship. We’re still tracking the message’s point of origin. Once we’re closer, we can open a tight-beam channel.”
“Can I see Floyd in the meantime?”
Cassandra made a precise mimelike gesture, signalling the machines hovering about her bed. A number of the smaller ones moved into Cassandra’s own cloud, becoming part of its twinkling whole. She breathed in and the cloud contracted to about half its previous volume.
“I think you’re allowed to move now,” Cassandra said, after digesting whatever information the machines had imparted. “But do take things carefully.”
Auger started to force herself up from the bed. As soon as she moved, more hummingbirds and dragonflies appeared from nowhere and assisted her, exerting gentle pressure where she needed it. Her feet barely touched the floor. Once she was free of the bed, the sheet levitated, wrapped itself around her and formed a kind of loose, billowing gown.
“This way,” Cassandra said.
The golden threads running through the walls oozed to form the outline of a doorway, which had a slightly Persian look to it. The door puckered wide, admitting them into a throatlike corridor with no recognisable floor or ceiling. The corridor curved up and around, bringing them to a blank part of wall that obliged them with a doorway when they were close enough to touch it.
They stepped through. Inside was a smaller recovery room than the one Auger had been in containing a single bed with a single occupant. Floyd was asleep, lying flat on his back, a twinkle of machines around his head. The Slashers had dressed him in a similar smock to the one Auger was wearing. His face was completely blank and masklike, with no sign of his head injury.
“He looks dead,” Auger said.
“He isn’t. Just unconscious. We’re holding him that way for the time being.”
“Why?”
“We didn’t want to alarm him.” Cassandra’s cloud commingled with the machines around Floyd, some brief information exchange taking place. “When we healed his head wound, we naturally examined his DNA. It turned out to be very peculiar. He doesn’t have any of the chromosomal markers that would identify him as a descendent of someone who lived through the GM excursions of the early twenty-first century.”
“He wouldn’t,” Auger said.
“It would take extensive rescripting to remove those markers. Why would anyone go to so much trouble?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“That’s what we thought.” Cassandra touched a finger to her lower lip. “It’s almost as if he’s a man from the past, from before the twenty-first century.”
“Good guess. What else did you figure out?”
“He must have come through the hyperweb, from the other end of the link. What did you find there, Auger?”
“If I don’t tell you, you’ll just take it from my memory, won’t you?”
“If I decided you were withholding something of strategic importance, I’m afraid I’d have little choice. Regrettably, this is war.”
He surfaced to the sound of Auger’s voice. She came into focus, looking down on him against a background of spotless cinematic white.
“Floyd. Wake up. You’re OK.”
His mind was as clean and clear as the dawn sky. He was vaguely affronted by this on some level, feeling that he should have been allowed a grace period of disorientation and grogginess. Even his memories felt bright and sparkling, as if they had been taken out for a quick spit and polish.
He ran his tongue around the inside surface of his teeth. None of them were broken. They felt like church gargoyles that had been taken down and sandblasted clean.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were rescued,” Auger said. She was standing over his bed, wearing a kind of satin toga. It moved around her in strange, unsettling ways, flowing like one of those very flat fish that skim the seabed. “We’re all right, at least for now.”
He sat up and touched his scalp. There was no sign of the injury, although his hair had been shaved almost to his scalp where the cut had been. “Where is this place?”
“We’re aboard a ship.”
“A space ship?”
“Yes. You can cope with that, can’t you? I mean, after what’s happened to us, a spaceship is not the strangest thing imaginable, is it?”
“I’ll cope,” Floyd said. “Who’s running this jalopy, and are they the good guys?”
“I know the woman who seems to be in charge. She’s a moderate Slasher by the name of Cassandra. I’ve already had dealings with her on Earth. In theory that makes her more trustworthy than the aggressors.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“They’ve taken care of us. It doesn’t mean they have my automatic gratitude. Not until I know what’s going on, and where exactly they’re taking us.”
“Haven’t they told you?”
“They’re supposed to be homing in on the location of some kind of transmission from Caliskan. That’s all I know.”
Floyd rubbed a hand across his face. They had even shaved him. It was, by some distance, the best shave he had ever had. “You don’t like them much, do you?”
“I like them even less after…” But she stopped and shook her head. “If she wants to know everything, she can damn well work for it. The only person I want to tal
k to is Caliskan.”
Floyd pushed himself upright. He was on the point of asking Auger if she knew where he might get a drink when the dryness in his throat was suddenly gone, as if he had been imagining it all along.
“What did you tell Cassandra?” he asked.
“I told her everything. If she’d suspected I was holding anything back, she’d have read my mind anyway.”
“How’d she take… me?”
“I’m not sure she thought your being here was a great idea.”
“That makes two of us,” Floyd said. “I also know there isn’t much point in complaining about it.”
“I’m sorry about all this.”
“Auger—do me a favour and stop apologising, will you? No regrets. Never.”
She smiled. “I don’t believe you for a second. But I’m still glad you made it, Floyd.”
“I’m glad we both made it. Now how about a kiss, before they come to put me in the monkey house?”
At first, Auger thought that Cassandra had somehow lost her way and led them into the wrong part of the ship: some kind of waiting room or chill-out den, perhaps, but definitely not a tactical room. It was another white chamber, brightly lit where she had expected subdued, vision-enhancing reds. Instead of urgent, cycling displays, the walls were the usual gold-threaded white. There was a toadstool-shaped table in the middle of the room, rising seamlessly from the floor, and around this stood half a dozen toadstool-shaped chairs. The chairs had a spongy, haphazard look to them, like the furniture of a gingerbread house. Six Slashers occupied them, facing each other across the equally spongy table. None of them were in what Auger would have called a tense or particularly agitated posture. One of them rested an elbow on the table, hand supporting his chin. Another woman (although she could have passed for a child) pressed her steepled fingers to her brow, as if in meditation. The other four Slashers had their hands tucked limply in their laps, as if they were waiting their turns in a slow, dull parlour game. No one was saying anything and their eyes were either closed or heavy-lidded. There was, however, a dense cloud of twinkling machines hovering above the middle of the table, and the extremities of this cloud encompassed all six participants, its boundary shifting from moment to moment.
“Tunguska,” Cassandra said. “Can you spare enough of yourself to talk to us?”
The one with his elbow on the table turned his head minutely in their direction. He was a large man, black-skinned and round of face, with sad, heavily lidded eyes and long silver-black hair tied back in a pony-tail.
“I can always make time for you, Cassie,” he said in a very slow, very deep voice.
“Tunguska is my battle manager,” Cassandra said. “He’s also my friend and ally. Tunguska and I go back a long way.”
“I didn’t know an outmoded concept like friendship was tolerated in the Polities,” Auger said.
“Then you know even less about us than you think.” Cassandra nodded at Tunguska. “Our guests are curious. Can you show them the state of play?”
“Let me see what I can do.”
Tunguska turned to the wall and with brisk hand gestures somehow made an area of it become black. Circles and spheres dropped into place: a view of the solar system, looking down on the plane of the ecliptic. The view zoomed in on the inner system, as far out as the orbit of Mars. Mars itself was indicated by a red sphere, very much out of scale, accompanied by one intact moon and the glowing smudge that had recently been Phobos.
“The collapse of the quasi-wormhole knocked out all forces within a few dozen kilometres of the moon,” Tunguska said, his voice as slow and measured as if he was reciting a sermon. “But that still leaves a large concentration of ships within the immediate volume of space around Mars. We’re tracking at least two hundred distinct thrust signatures.”
“Who do those ships belong to?” Auger asked.
“Everyone who has a stake in controlling the inner system. Various Polity factions account for about seventy per cent of active combatants. Twenty per cent are USNE, with the remainder made up of non-aligned parties: lunar breakaway groups and suchlike.” As Tunguska spoke, icons dropped into place, forming a bustling crowd of flags and emblems around Mars. It was quite impossible to make any sense of it.
“Did anyone make it out of Phobos alive?” Auger asked.
“We’re tracking a number of slow-moving spacecraft that seem to have left Phobos before the main attack commenced.”
“Why?” asked Cassandra. “Were you thinking of anyone in particular?”
“I had a friend…” Auger said, faltering. “I didn’t really know her very well, but I want to believe she got away in time.”
“I’m afraid I can’t offer any guarantees,” Cassandra said. Perhaps reading something in her face, she continued, “However, it seems at least plausible that some people—”
“There’s a good chance she made it,” Tunguska said.
“Never mind,” Auger said. The last thing she needed right now was empty reassurance. She would just have to hope that Skellsgard had been on one of those early ships. “Just give me a straight answer to my next question. Who’s winning?”
“If you don’t mind,” Tunguska said, addressing Cassandra, “I really need to focus on the task in hand, or the answer to her question is not going to be one we’d all wish for.” He nodded at Floyd and Auger. “It was nice to meet you. I hope you both make it home safely.”
He turned his head back to face the table and closed his eyes.
“I’ll answer your question,” Cassandra said. “There is no clear outcome in sight. If it was a straight contest between Polity and Thresher assets, there’d be little doubt of victory for the Polities, at least around Mars. But the moderates are siding with the Threshers. So far, that’s evening things out.”
“Then let’s hope things reach a stalemate,” Auger said.
Floyd, standing beside her, had said nothing so far. But he still nodded, evidently sharing her concern.
Cassandra shook her head. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. The moderates have deployed all their assets into the inner system, but the aggressors still have forces in reserve. They’re on high-burn approaches even as we speak.”
“But this is insane,” Auger said. “They might have the military strength to take Mars from us, and they might even have the means to capture Tanglewood and the rest of the inner system. But the moderates won’t let them do that without a fight, and they still have that little scorched-earth problem to worry about.”
“What scorched-earth problem?” Floyd asked.
“My side ringed Earth with bombs,” Auger said. “Insurance against the Slashers trying to take it out of our hands again.”
“You mean you’d blow up the planet rather than let someone else have it?”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“I hate to tell you this, Auger, but you’re all as crazy as each other.”
“Bet you’re sorry you signed up for this now, aren’t you, Floyd?” Not waiting for his answer, Auger turned back to Cassandra. “Where are we in this sorry little mess?”
“Oh, we’re nowhere near Mars now,” the girl said. “We’ve been on our own high-burn trajectory ever since we snatched you out of the atmosphere.”
Another icon dropped into the image, about halfway between Mars and Earth, which were both situated on the same side of the Sun.
“That’s us?”
“That’s us,” Cassandra confirmed. “Maintaining a high-burn trajectory, with a second ship just behind us.”
“A high-burn trajectory?” Auger shook her head. “It doesn’t even feel as if we’re moving.”
“Trust me, we’re moving. We’re also executing some rather violent evasive patterns.”
Something wasn’t right. Auger had heard many things about the Slashers’ advanced technology, but she had never heard that they had developed the means to nullify acceleration. Perhaps they were even further ahead of the USNE than intelligence had ever suggested.
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“What do you know about this second ship?” she asked.
“We think it might be one of Niagara’s allies, or possibly the man himself. It’s a Polity design, part of the original concentration of aggressor elements. It may be responding to Caliskan’s signal from Tanglewood.”
“We have to get to him first,” Auger said.
“That’s more or less the idea,” Cassandra replied laconically. “We’d be there in eight hours under optimum conditions. Unfortunately, the ship behind us is doing its best to make life difficult. These violent evasive manoeuvres are costing us time and engine fatigue.”
“Maybe I’m missing something,” Auger said, “but I don’t feel any violent evasive manoeuvres.”
“Mm.” Cassandra said thoughtfully. “There’s something you need to see, I think.”
“What?”
Cassandra led them across the chamber and opened a door into another corridor. A little way along, she stopped at a smooth expanse of convex walling and created an observation window. “I may as well show you something else on the way. Apart from the two of you, there are eighteen other casualties on this ship.”
Auger brightened, remembering Skellsgard. Perhaps she was safe after all, despite Cassandra’s doubts. “Refugees from Phobos?”
“Not directly, no. I’m sorry—I know you want good news about your friend, and I would give it to you if I could.”
The observation window overlooked a large interior chamber. Cassandra made the lights come on, revealing the stubby, streamlined form of a Thresher-manufactured spacecraft: the kind that could skim in and out of an atmosphere and land on a planetary surface, such as Mars or Titan, or on one of the high-altitude landing towers on Venus. It was about twenty metres in length, just small enough to fit into the bay. The shuttle had bulky thrust nacelles and bulging insectile undercarriage pods; against the scorched white skin, Auger could make out a green flying horse logo near the black heat-absorbent panelling of the nose.
“That’s a Pegasus Intersolar ship,” she said.
“Yes,” Cassandra said. “As a matter of fact, it’s a transatmospheric shuttle from the liner Twentieth Century Limited.”
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