Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  Another two missiles were haring back towards them, groping for a target.

  Premature-detonation signals were transmitted at maximum signal strength. Beam weapons, deployed and ready now, locked on and prepared to fire if the missiles did not self-destruct.

  One of the pair ripped apart in a controlled explosion, dampeners limiting the blast radius. The other missile shrugged off the kill order and increased its acceleration rate, sprinting for final interception. The ship swerved and contorted itself, pushing its structural limits beyond all conceivable safety margins. Shrill reports of irreparable damage hit Auger’s brain. The ship could still tolerate more damage—but not much more.

  The beam weapons swung hard and locked on to the third stray missile. They fired, impacting at a range of only two kilometres up the tunnel from the ship. With its dampening systems not engaged, this missile’s explosion was the most violent of the three.

  They raced into the fireball. The ship screamed, writhing in cybernetic agony.

  Then it was through.

  Faster than language, a thought made its way into Auger’s head.

  “We deployed six missiles,” Tunguska told her. “Three have come back. Three more must still be out there.”

  At lightning speed, the cloud of machines in her head wove a response. Had Auger answered, or was it Cassandra framing the question? She didn’t know. “How many more close hits can we take?”

  “None,” Tunguska said.

  Over the next five minutes, two more missiles came back. The first was limping, damaged by glancing encounters with the tunnel lining. The beam weapons engaged and killed it with swift efficiency, destroying it at a range of sixty-five kilometres, the very limit of detection.

  The other missile surrendered itself to the kill-order, puffing apart in a damped blast that inflicted only minor damage.

  “One’s still out there,” Tunguska said.

  “Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it?” Auger observed wryly.

  “It was the only one we had,” Tunguska replied phlegmatically.

  During the next ten agonising minutes, a sixth missile did arrive, coasting on a high-speed intercept trajectory. It showed no inclination to obey the destruct commands, even when it was very close. Tunguska’s beam weapons gored it open, but the warhead refused to detonate. The missile veered in a hairpin turn, then speared itself at a right angle into the tunnel cladding. Half-blind as they were, the acoustic sensors could still track its progress as it bored through the stressed laminate of artificial space-time. Somewhere deep inside the cladding it finally blew up, and the entire wall bulged outward.

  “That was number six,” Auger said. “All six are down. We’re home and dry.”

  “No,” Tunguska said. “At least, we can’t be sure. That last one… it wasn’t one of ours.”

  “But you sent six—”

  “And five returned. That last one was a gift from Niagara. It means he knows we’re here.”

  By the time Tunguska’s ship emerged from the portal, automatic damage repair had taken care of the worst of the wounds the ship had sustained in the tunnel. There were some things that could not be put right without specialist attention, but they would have to wait until the vessel returned to Polity space. For now, it was still capable of continuing the chase, albeit at reduced effectiveness, while the bleed-drive was nursed back to full health.

  “If only we could be sure of the route Niagara took,” Tunguska said.

  Auger leaned forward, resting her elbows on the soft padding of the extruded table. The ship had released its grip on its occupants. They had all been dosed with UR, the tiny machines now swimming through their bodies on a mad errand to correct the genetic damage caused by the radiation from the undamped missile blasts. “I thought you were hoping to catch him between portals.”

  “I was,” the Slasher said. “And there was always a chance of that. Unfortunately, Niagara was just a little too fast. He may have cut some safety margins now that he knows we’re chasing him.”

  “That missile attack really backfired on us,” Floyd said.

  “On the other hand, it may have helped us,” Tunguska said. “Niagara may believe that his return strike destroyed us. With all the acoustic noise, there’s no way he could have bounced an echo off us.”

  “So it could go either way,” Auger said. “That’s the top and bottom of it, right?”

  “I confess that there are a number of unknowns.”

  “It would help if we knew which door he’d taken,” Auger observed.

  The hyperweb transition had thrown them thousands of light-years across the galaxy. Auger didn’t need to know the details. There was still at least one transition ahead of them; maybe several. Given the knotted topology of the hyperweb links, they could end up almost anywhere, if they ever succeeded in following Niagara’s trail to the ALS.

  “Even if Niagara made his next throat insertion before our emergence,” Tunguska said, “I was still hoping for an unambiguous sign of which portal he used.”

  “And?” Auger asked impatiently, tapping a fingernail against the table.

  Tunguska had already called up a display of the immediate volume of space around the four neighbouring portals. They were all anchored to anonymous rocks orbiting a compact, dark binary where major planetary formation had never taken place. It was a bleak, hellish place, sizzling with high-energy particles chewed up and spat out again by the twisted Siamese magnetosphere of the binary stars.

  “At maximum thrust, with all safety margins disengaged, he could have reached any one of the three outgoing portals a shade before our emergence,” Tunguska said. “He must have been confident that the Molotov device could tolerate that kind of acceleration without its own containment mechanisms failing… but then again, perhaps that was a risk he was prepared to take.”

  “Can you see a thrust trail?” Auger said.

  “No. Too much ambient radiation around for us to be able to sniff out the ionisation products.”

  “What about the portals?” she asked. “Didn’t the staff see which one he used?”

  “There are no staff,” Tunguska said. “Apart from routine visits for maintenance, these portals here take care of themselves.”

  “Then the machines—”

  “All three tell the same story,” Tunguska said, one step ahead of her questions. “They were all activated, geared up for throat insertion and controlled collapse. Niagara sent activation signals to all three—like a man opening all the doors in the corridor in order to mask the one he really stepped through.”

  “Clever guy,” Floyd said. “You have to give him that.”

  Auger buried her head in her hands. She felt a tremendous, welling frustration with Tunguska. Despite all his technology, all his cool, calm Slasher wisdom, he was still powerless against a single agile adversary. It was unfair, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. In the presence of a wizard, she wanted miracles, not excuses.

  “This is not good,” she said. “Don’t you have any clues? He only had one ship. Only one of those portals was really used.”

  “That’s our only straw,” Tunguska said. “As it is, one of the portals shows a slightly different collapse signature compared to the other two he might have used. If I had to put money on it, I’d say that’s the one that really had a ship squeezed through it.”

  “How much money?” she asked, smiling.

  “You’d rather not know.”

  “OK,” Auger said. “If that’s our only option… we have to take it. Once we’re inside, will we be able to bounce an echo off him?”

  “Perhaps,” Tunguska said, “but the absence of an echo won’t necessarily prove that we chose the wrong door. He could be just too far ahead of us for it to reach him.”

  “Do we have any other options?”

  “No. That’s why I’ve already committed us to the portal with the odd signature. As soon as drive repair is complete, we’ll ramp up to maximum pursuit t
hrust.”

  “Good,” Auger said. “I’d rather be chasing a shadow than sitting around here talking about it.”

  “Unfortunately, chasing shadows may be all we end up doing. Even if that signature is real, it’s at the limit of readability. If Niagara had shaved just an additional hour off his arrival time, we’d never have seen it.”

  “Then we’d better not waste a minute.”

  “That’s the problem.” Tunguska replaced the schematic image of the quadruple-portal system with the fractured-glass map of the galactic hyperweb network. He zoomed in on one little area, highlighting a conjunction of four filaments. “This is where we are now,” he said. “And this—given our best guess—is where Niagara will emerge, after an eight-hour transit.”

  He directed their attention to another part of the map, further around the great clockface of the galaxy.

  “Another cluster of portals,” Auger said.

  “Six, all told, including the one we’ll enter through. There’s no ALS there, so it can’t be his final destination. He’ll be taking another portal.”

  “We’ll just have to hope that the same trick works twice.”

  “It won’t, I’m afraid,” Tunguska said. “The time differential between his departure and our arrival will be too great. There’ll be no detectable difference between the portals, regardless of the fact that only one of them will have had a ship fly through it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that unless he has spectacular bad luck between here and there—we’ll have lost him.”

  “We can’t lose him,” Auger said. “That’s simply not an acceptable outcome.”

  “We may have to live with it. He knows the way to the ALS. We don’t. It’s that simple.”

  “Cassandra should have looked at those documents in more detail,” Auger said, with an odd feeling of self-criticism, as if she was reproaching herself for some unacceptable omission or failing.

  “She did the best she could,” Tunguska said. “At the time, she had only a vague idea that they might be of strategic importance. It’s lucky we got what we did.”

  “Lucky?” Auger snapped. “The cargo told us nothing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tunguska said. “If there was anything I could do… We’ll continue the chase, of course, and hope for good luck.”

  “That’s the best you can offer?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  No one said anything, until Floyd raised his hand and spoke. “Anyone mind if I make a small contribution?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The bleed-drive was still not ready for maximum thrust. While they toiled at a leisurely one gee towards the suspect portal, Floyd led Auger and Tunguska back to his quarters.

  “This had better be worth it,” Auger said.

  “You got any viable alternatives?”

  “I just mean… don’t raise false expectations here, Floyd. I know you’re trying to help, but really.”

  He looked back at her, wounded pride on his face. “ ‘But really’ what?”

  “This is a very technical matter,” she said.

  “What she’s saying,” Tunguska interjected, adopting a conciliatory tone, “is that there are some things you might be reasonably expected to have a useful opinion on… and some things you might be reasonably expected not to have a useful opinion on.”

  “I see,” Floyd said tersely.

  “And I’m afraid the matter of hyperweb navigation falls resoundingly into the latter category,” he went on.

  “At least hear me out, Jack.”

  “Floyd, I know you mean well,” Auger said, “but we really should be preparing for when the bleed-drive is back on-line.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know that you’re headed in the right direction, before you light that torch?”

  He opened the door into the vast enclosure that served as his temporary quarters. The three of them walked towards the bed and its little entourage of attendant furniture.

  “Floyd—give me a clue, will you?”

  “It was something you said yourself, Auger: how the hell did they make sense of the numbers coming out of that antenna thing, if they had to do it in nineteen fifty-nine?”

  “Enlighten me,” Auger said.

  “And me, while you’re at it,” Tunguska said.

  “We were looking for a microdot, or something like it,” Floyd said, “because we thought we were only looking for ten or twelve digits—the map reference of the ALS.”

  “Go on,” Auger said, feeling a little shiver of excitement despite her misgivings.

  “Well, we were dead wrong. I think.”

  “Floyd—don’t drag this out.”

  Floyd sat down on the bed and offered Tunguska and Auger the two remaining chairs. “Face it: it was always hopeless looking for something like that. You said it, Auger—the message could have been buried anywhere, in the tiniest smudge or the tiniest change in the position or weight of some printed characters. You’d have to know exactly what you were looking for in order to find it.”

  “Floyd…” she said warningly.

  “But that still leaves a big question unanswered: how did they come up with those numbers? It was one thing building that antenna, but making sense of what it was telling them—well, even you speculated that it would have been difficult, given the way things are in my nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “Computers don’t exist in Floyd’s world,” Auger explained to Tunguska. “They are even further behind than our fifty-nine, since they never had the Second World War as a spur to drive computing progress.”

  “I see,” Tunguska said, stroking his chin. “In which case, it’s difficult to see how the data from the gravitational wave device could ever have been processed. It would be a tricky little exercise even now.”

  “Not too tricky, I hope,” Floyd said, “because I think you’re going to have to do it.”

  “What have you found?” Tunguska asked.

  Floyd reached into the box at the foot of the bed and pulled out one of the records inside it. Auger saw the label: Louis Armstrong.

  “This,” he said simply.

  “I had the distinct impression that you were a little under-whelmed with those discs,” Tunguska said.

  “You were damned right.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m wondering if that wasn’t the clue we were looking for all along.” Floyd tipped the sleeve so that the grooved disc slid into his hand. “I think the information you’re looking for is here,” he said.

  “In a microdot on the label?” Auger asked, still puzzled.

  “No. Something more complex than that. I think it could be in the music itself. Not just ten or twelve digits, but the actual numbers from the antenna. You were right, Auger: there was no way to interpret the data in nineteen fifty-nine. So they didn’t even try.”

  That shiver of excitement had now become a full-blown tingle, lifting up every hair on the back of Auger’s neck. “So what did they do?” she asked impatiently.

  “They shipped the information back through the portal. Niagara’s boys got their hands on it and did all the clever stuff on the other side.”

  “So there’s something encoded in the music?” Auger asked.

  “Someone’s been flooding Paris with cheap bootlegs,” Floyd said. “It’s been going on for months. Now we know why.”

  “You can’t be sure there’s a connection,” she said.

  “Yes, I can. My old friend Maillol even pointed me to a link between the Blanchard case and his own anti-bootlegging operation. I just couldn’t see how they could possibly be connected at the time.”

  “And now you can,” Auger asked.

  “Custine spoke to one of Blanchard’s tenants—guy by the name of Rivaud—who’d seen one of your nasty little children hanging around the building. When I tried to talk to Rivaud myself, he’d put on a disappearing act. A few days later, Maillol tells me they found his body floating in the flooded cellar of a warehouse
in Montrouge.”

  “Nice,” Auger said, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

  “It gets nicer. Guy had abrasions on his neck, as if one of those children had been encouraging him to keep his head below water.”

  “And the significance of this warehouse?”

  “It was the same place Maillol turned up that counterfeit pressing plant.”

  “Do you think Rivaud was in on the bootlegging scheme?”

  “He might have been,” Floyd said, “but then we’d have to explain the coincidence of him living in the same building where Susan White ended up as a tenant.”

  “Big coincidence.”

  “Too big. More likely, Rivaud caught sight of one of those children again and decided to do some gumshoe work of his own. Tailed the child all the way back to the warehouse. Maybe he was even lured there, if the children thought he’d seen too much already.”

  “Floyd may be on to something,” Tunguska said. “Here. Let me examine that disc.”

  “Is that an original?” Auger asked.

  “No—it’s a facsimile based on the surface scan of the original made by Cassandra,” Tunguska said. “But it should be accurate enough for our needs, if there’s genuinely latent information buried on it.”

  “Take my word for it,” Floyd said, “either that music-killing virus has already found its way into my head or there’s something wrong with that recording.”

  “There could be a high-frequency signal encoded in the groove,” Tunguska said. “Enough to hold a significant chunk of that antenna data. I can verify this very quickly—”

  “How quickly?” Auger asked, her impatience getting the better of her.

  He blinked. “That quickly. It was just a question of examining Cassandra’s holographic data and looking for something anomalous in the structure. It’s always much easier to identify a pattern if you have some idea of what you’re looking for.”