“Come,” Cassandra said. “I’ll bring you up to speed. We’re very near Earth.”
They returned to the tactical room, which was almost as Auger remembered it except for the absence of any Slashers. “They’re still in their acceleration caskets,” Cassandra explained. “If we need to make a sudden movement, they’ll be better able to manage the tactical situation.”
“Are we still being chased by Niagara?”
“Niagara—or whoever was in that ship—isn’t a problem anymore. It ran into one of our missiles just before we reached the outer cordon of Tanglewood defences.”
“You mean he’s dead?”
“Someone’s dead. It may or may not be Niagara. If it isn’t, we’ll find him sooner or later.”
“You better had.”
“Perhaps if you told me exactly why it was so important to reach Caliskan, I might be able to do a little more to help you.”
“I’ve told you as much as you need to know,” Auger said firmly.
“You only told me half of the story.”
“And I’m not quite ready to trust you with the rest of it. Maybe when I’ve spoken to Caliskan… Are you close enough to send a tight-beam message to him?”
“There’ll always be a slight risk of interception… but yes, we’re close enough now.” With a flourish of her fingers—a gesture that Auger suspected was as much theatrical as anything else—Cassandra assigned part of the wall as a flat screen. For a moment it was blank, awaiting a response. “You may speak,” she said, prompting Auger with a nod of her head.
“What’s my location?” she asked.
Cassandra told her.
“Caliskan,” she said. “This is Verity Auger. I believe you wanted to hear from me. I’m alive and well, within half a light-second of Tanglewood. I’m aboard a Slasher spacecraft, so you’ll have to pull some strings to let me get any closer without all hell breaking loose.”
A second or two later, the assigned panel lit up with swathes of blocky primary colours, which quickly sharpened into a flickering, low-time-resolution pixel image.
“That’s Caliskan?” Floyd said, when the face of the white-haired man had assumed a recognisable shape.
“The man who sent me to Paris, and the only one who has a hope of sorting out this mess,” Auger said.
“Face looks familiar. It’s almost as if I know him,” Floyd said, peering more closely at the image.
“You can’t possibly know him,” she said. “You’ve never met him.”
Floyd touched the side of his head, as if in salute. “Whatever you say, Chief.”
Caliskan’s glasses flared light back at the camera. “Auger… you’re alive. You can’t imagine how much this pleases me. Please pass my thanks on to Cassandra. I didn’t dare believe you’d made it out of the Phobos catastrophe.”
“We made it, sir. Both of us did.”
She waited for the response. The one-second delay was just long enough to impose a certain stiltedness on the conversation, as if both of them were speaking a language neither felt comfortable with.
“Both of you, Auger? But Skellsgard said that the war babies had killed Aveling and Barton before you helped her escape.”
“And so they did, sir. I’m with a man called Floyd, who was born on E2.”
Behind Caliskan, she could make out the ribs, spars and instruments of a spacecraft cabin interior: a modern Thresher ship, but something much less advanced than the Slasher vessel she had woken up inside.
“That’s a serious development,” he said.
“There’s more we need to talk about,” Auger said. “Can you clear our approach with the Tanglewood authorities?”
“Check the news, Auger: there are no authorities. The Tanglewood administration’s made a run for the hills. I’m already having a hard time evading the pirates and looters, and I have a fast shuttle.”
“My children are in Tanglewood.”
“No,” he said. “Peter took them away a couple of days ago. As soon as Skellsgard came through, we began to fear that something bad was imminent. Your children are safe.”
“Where are they?”
“Peter thought it best not to tell anyone. He said he’d make contact with you as soon as the situation calms down.”
Auger closed her eyes and said a small, silent prayer of thanks.
“Sir,” Auger said after a moment, “I have important news. There’s something I really need to tell you. I know what Susan White was on to, and it’s big. You have to act now… use all your contacts to pull in assistance before it’s too late.”
“It’s all right,” Caliskan said. “We figured out most of the details from Skellsgard. It was remarkably brave of you to send her back the way you did.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine. Safe and sound.”
That was another debt to add to the pile. Her children were safe and so was her small, scowling friend from Phobos.
“I still need to talk to you,” she said. “Can you suggest a suitable rendezvous point?”
“I already have a place in mind. It’s somewhere the pirates and looters won’t dare follow us. I suspect even the Slashers will have second thoughts.”
She knew exactly where he meant, and it scared her. “You’re not serious, Caliskan.”
“I’m more than serious. Does that ship you’re in have transatmospheric capability?”
She turned to Cassandra. “Well?”
“We can fly in. But there’s more to a trip to Earth than just flying in. A Thresher ship may be sufficiently robust for the furies not to pose an immediate risk, but we are rather more… susceptible.”
“I thought the Slashers had protection against furies now. Isn’t that why you’re so keen to get your hands on Earth?”
“Experimental countermeasures,” Cassandra said. “Which—I regret to inform you—this ship doesn’t happen to be carrying.”
Auger turned back to Caliskan. “No dice. She says the ship isn’t equipped to fend off furies. We’ll have to pick another RV point.”
“Tell her not to worry,” Caliskan said. “The fury count near my designated RV is low. I know because I have direct feeds from Antiquities monitoring stations in the vicinity. Our enemies won’t have this information, which is why they won’t be so keen to come charging in.”
Auger glanced at Cassandra. “Does that sound reasonable to you?”
“He spoke of a low count, not a zero one,” Cassandra said. “I can’t risk taking my ship deep into the atmosphere, especially with eighteen evacuees in my care.”
“This is very important.”
“In which case,” Cassandra said, “we’ll have to consider an alternative means of transportation.”
“You mean the Twentieth’s shuttle?”
“There isn’t much fuel left aboard, but it should still be capable of making the round trip.”
“Can it fly itself?”
“It doesn’t have to,” Cassandra said. “I can take care of that.”
Auger returned her attention to the screen. “We’re following you in, but we’ll need a few minutes to get our act together. Don’t get too far ahead of us.”
“Make it as quick as you can,” Caliskan said. “And if you have any cargo from Paris, now might not be a bad time to hand it over to me. Given what’s happened around Mars, it may be the last consignment we ever see.”
“There isn’t much,” Auger said. “Just a few boxes that the snake robot put on the transport before it sabotaged the link.”
“You’re still working for Antiquities. Bring what there is. Then follow my trajectory precisely, no matter how inefficient it looks.”
“Where are you taking us, sir?”
“For a dinner engagement,” Caliskan said. “We’re dining with the ghost of Guy de Maupassant. I just hope he doesn’t mind the company.”
THIRTY-FOUR
They hit atmosphere. It was a rougher ride than Auger had been expecting—the Slasher shi
p’s aerodynamic effectiveness had been badly compromised. By Cassandra’s reckoning, the ship had lost thirty per cent of its mass during the chase, discarding parts of itself to act as chaff and decoys while the main section executed increasingly desperate hairpin reversals, sidesteps and swerves.
“Did Caliskan make it through?” Auger asked.
“We’re still tracking his ship. He’s about twenty kilometres ahead of us, slowing down to supersonic speed. He seems to be headed for the northern part of Europe, specifically—”
“Paris,” Auger said. “It would have to be Paris.”
“You seem very certain of this.”
“I am.”
“What was that business about having dinner with Guy de Maupassant, anyway? Is he another colleague of yours?”
“Not exactly,” Auger said. “But we’ll worry about that when we get there.”
“Mind if I add a contribution?” Floyd asked.
“Go ahead.”
“I really do know Caliskan. I told you his face was familiar—I think I’ve placed him.”
“I know this is going to sound mean,” Auger said, trying to soften her words with a smile, “but you’re really not qualified to have an opinion on Caliskan.”
“Maybe not, but I still know that face. He’s someone I’ve met, I’m pretty sure, someone I’ve had dealings with.”
“You can’t have met him. He’s been in E1 space the whole time. There’s no way he could have slipped through the portal without everyone knowing about it.”
Cassandra leaned forward in her seat. “Perhaps Floyd has a point, if he feels so certain of his observation.”
“Don’t encourage him.”
“But if Caliskan had knowledge of the Phobos link, isn’t it conceivable that he might have made a trip through it?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Skellsgard would have told me, even if no one else did.”
“Unless Skellsgard was given specific orders not to tell you,” Cassandra said.
“I trusted her.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know what was going on either.”
“But if that’s the case, then we can’t even be sure that we can trust Caliskan any more. In which case, who the hell do we trust?”
“I still trust Caliskan,” Cassandra said. “My intelligence contacts have never pointed to him having an ulterior motive.”
“They could be wrong.”
“Or Floyd could be mistaken.” Cassandra consulted with her machines for a moment, then said, “There is another possible explanation.”
They both looked at the dark-haired girl.
“Well?” Auger asked.
“According to the biographical file we have on Caliskan, he had a brother.”
“Yes,” Auger said slowly. “He told me about him.”
“And?”
“Caliskan reckoned I had a grudge against Slashers. He didn’t think it was justified. He said that if anyone had a right to hold a grudge it was him, because of what happened to his brother.”
“The biographical file says that his brother died in the final stages of the Phobos reoccupation, when the Slashers were ousted,” Cassandra said.
“Yes,” Auger confirmed. “That’s what he told me.”
“Maybe he believed it, too. But what if his brother didn’t die?”
“She could be right,” Floyd said. “You know the link was open just before the reoccupation. It’s the only way those children could have come through.”
“But Caliskan’s brother wasn’t fighting on the side of the Slashers,” Auger said.
“Maybe they got to him,” Floyd said. “Maybe they took him prisoner and got to him later. Maybe he sneaked through at the same time.”
“And you just happened to bump into this man in E2?”
“I’m just telling you what I’ve seen.”
“You told me nothing about any children,” Cassandra said.
“They weren’t children,” Floyd said. “They were like you…” He paused. “Only uglier.”
Auger sighed. Now that Floyd had let the cat out of the bag, nothing would satisfy Cassandra until she had an explanation. “Neotenic Infantry. War babies, we called them. They must have opened the link to the ALS during the Phobos occupation twenty-three years ago.”
“And they’ve been there ever since?”
“They’re not exactly a pretty sight by now.”
“Most of them would have already died,” Cassandra said. “Those first-line neotenics were never designed for longevity. Any survivors must be near the ends of their lives.”
“They look like it. They smell like it,” Auger said with disgust.
“Why don’t you just tell me what they were doing there? As I said, I can always suck it out of your brain if you don’t. I’d rather not, but—”
“All I have is guesswork,” Auger said. “They were making something, some kind of machine—a gravity-wave sensor, I think—for establishing the physical location of the ALS. The trick was that they had to construct it using local technology.”
Cassandra mulled that over and nodded primly. “And the purpose of this data, once they obtained it?”
“To enable them to reach the shell from the outside.”
The ship rocked, hitting turbulence. The floor quivered, as if about to spring up and around them in a protective embrace.
“What do they want with the ALS?” Cassandra wondered, frowning.
“They want to depopulate it. They want to seed the atmosphere of the duplicate Earth with Silver Rain.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Genocide generally is. Especially on this scale.”
“All right,” Cassandra said, still frowning as she assimilated the new information. “Why not deliver Silver Rain via the link itself?”
“They can’t. There’s a barrier that prevents anything like that from entering Floyd’s world. The only way in is to sneak around the back.”
“But there’s still the small matter of breaking through the shell,” Cassandra said. “Ah—wait a minute. We’ve covered that already, haven’t we?”
“The theft of the antimatter drive from the Twentieth,” Auger said.
“That’s their—what did you call it? Molotov device?”
“So it would seem.”
“The neotenics couldn’t have put this together by themselves,” Cassandra said. “They’re resourceful and clever, but they were never engineered to think strategically, especially not for twenty-three years. There must have been others privy to the same plan.”
“We already know about Niagara.”
“But Niagara had no easy means of communicating with the neotenics. Those children needed leadership and co-ordination, someone to give them orders. Adult-phase Slashers, perhaps,” Cassandra suggested.
“No,” Auger said. “Not unless they were prepared to live without their machines. It was all right for the war babies: they’re purely biological, with no implants. But no one like you could have followed them through the censor device with all that nanotech running around inside them.”
“Then an unaugmented person: a normal human being—like Caliskan’s brother.”
“Possibly, if he decided to turn traitor.”
“And if there was one such, there might well have been more,” Cassandra said. “A lot of people died or went missing during the reoccupation.”
“They could all still be alive,” Auger said, “living in the ALS, meddling with the course of history.”
“But why would they meddle?” Cassandra asked.
“To hold things back. To stop Floyd’s people developing the technology and science that might actually have made them a threat to their grand plan, as soon as they realised their true situation.”
“Given time and the accumulation of random changes, the two timelines would be bound to diverge eventually,” Cassandra said. “How can you be sure there was conscious intervention?”
“Because it’s all too deliberate. In Flo
yd’s timeline there was never a Second World War. Whoever went through the link twenty-three years ago knew just enough about the actual course of events in nineteen forty to change them. All they had to do was get the right intelligence to the right people. The fulcrum was the German invasion through the Ardennes. It came close to failure in our timeline, but the allies never knew how vulnerable the advancing forces were. No one acted. But in Floyd’s timeline they did. They got bombers into the air and pounded those tanks into the mud. The German invasion of France collapsed.”
“So there was never a second global war. I presume millions of lives were spared because of that.”
“At the very least.”
“Doesn’t that make it rather a good thing?”
“No,” Auger said, “because those lives were only spared so that billions could be extinguished now. It was a purely clinical intervention. Saving lives had nothing to do with it. The only motivation was to keep those people in the dark.”
“Then a crime has already been committed. The children will soon be dead. But their leader—or leaders—must be found and brought to justice.”
“Then you need to find the ALS as well,” Auger said, “before one crime becomes another.”
“Niagara’s allies must indeed be close to acting,” Cassandra said. “They wouldn’t have moved on the liner unless they were ready to attack the ALS. This is very grave.”
“You said it, kid,” Floyd commented.
“The more I think about it,” Cassandra said, “the more I wonder if this entire attack against Tanglewood and Earth isn’t a diversionary tactic. They never really wanted our ruined Earth back, did they? They always had their sights set on a bigger prize.”
“We have to stop them,” Auger said.
“Agreed,” Cassandra said. “But do you think Caliskan will be able to help? Do you think he can even be trusted, if his brother is indeed a traitor?”
“He thinks his brother died,” Auger said. “I’m inclined to take him at his word. Anyway, we can’t afford not to trust him. He has contacts, including allies in the Polities.”
“So do I,” Cassandra said.
“But Caliskan has political clout. At the very least he can publicise the Slasher plan and maybe shame them into not acting.”
Century Rain Page 55
