Century Rain

THIRTY-FOUR

They hit atmosphere. It was a rougher ride than Auger had been expecting—the Slasher ship’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 Floyd’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.”

“This could be a trap,” Floyd said.

“I’m trying very hard not to think about that possibility,” Auger replied.

Cassandra’s face became glazed as she absorbed a welter of data concerning their approach to Paris. “Trap or not, we’re in the thick of the clouds now. Slowing to subsonic speed. I think this is about as low as I want to go in this ship. The particulate density is already rather on the high side for my liking.”

“Can we release the Twentieth’s shuttle?”

“Now is as good a time as ever,” Cassandra said. “Follow me.”

They howled through clouds as thick as coal, bellowing with thunder and flickering with lightning in slow, pink-tinged bursts.

“Still tracking Caliskan?” Auger asked.

“With difficulty,” Cassandra said, turning briefly away from the antique control console. “Did you have any more luck with figuring out who that de Maupassant fellow Caliskan mentioned is?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think I know exactly what he meant. It doesn’t matter if we lose his trace—we can still make the RV.”

“Couldn’t he have just told you where to land?” Floyd asked.

“Caliskan likes his little games,” Auger said, smiling thinly. Around them, the hull creaked and groaned like a very old chair.

“Cloud density is lessening,” Cassandra said. “I believe we’re nearly through the worst of it.”

Through the cabin windows, the grey took on a rushing, streamlike quality, evoking great speed. The ship slammed through two or three final scarves of attenuated cloud before entering clear air above the city. This was a true Parisian night, as dark as it ever got except when there was some calamitous failure of ground-side power. The only sources of steady illumination were the artificial lights installed by Antiquities, mounted on buildings and towers or slung from hovering dirigibles and drone platforms. Now and then, lightning flickering above the clouds shone through the circuitlike patterns via which the clouds communicated, etching a negative ghost of those patterns on to the icebound streets and buildings laid out below.

They were about five kilometres up, a high enough elevation for a panoramic view of the entire city, right out to the artificial moat of the Périphérique defences.

“I don’t know whether you’re going to like this,” Auger said to Floyd, “but welcome to Paris. You’ve never been here before.”

Floyd looked down through the small windows set into the lower part of the cabin. “I guess this means you were telling me the truth all along,” he said, struggling to deal with the enormity of that final realisation.

“Did you still have doubts?”

“I still had hopes.”

She directed his attention to the edge of the city, where the tower-top beacons of the perimeter defences flashed red and green in sequence. “That’s the Périphérique,” she said, “a ring of roads encircling Paris. It didn’t exist in your version of the city.”

“What’s the wall?”

“The ice cliff. It’s armoured with metal and concrete, sensors and weapons, to keep the larger furies out, the ones that are big enough to see. Most of the time, it more or less works. But they still get through now and then, and when they do, they come in quickly.”

That was the problem with Paris: the spiderweb of Métro and road tunnels offered numerous swift routes in from the perimeter. It didn’t matter that half of those tunnels were blocked by cave-ins: the hostile machines would always find an alternative route, or burrow their way into the older system of water and sewerage tunnels. The smallest of them could slip through telegraphic conduits, optical-fibre trunk lines and gas pipes. If push came to shove, they could even drill new tunnels of their own. They could be stopped—they could even be destroyed—but not without inflicting unacceptable damage on the very city that the researchers were trying to preserve and study.

“I don’t recognise much,” Floyd said.

“You’re looking at a city frozen more than a hundred years after your time,” Auger said. “Even so, there are still some landmarks you should recognise. It’s just a question of learning to see them, under all the ice.”

“It’s like the face of a friend under a funeral shroud.”

“There’s the curve of the Seine,” Auger said, pointing. “The Pont Neuf. Notre Dame and Ile de la Cité. Do you see it now?”

“Yes,” Floyd said, with a sadness that ripped her open. “Yes, I see it now.”

“Don’t hate us too much for what we did,” she said. “We tried our best.”

Above, the clouds rippled and surged with a strange, oblivious intelligence. The ship pitched and yawed, sinking lower. “Might I trouble you for the landing site?” Cassandra asked.

“Take us south of the river,” Auger said. “Do you see that rectangle of flat ice?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the Champ de Mars. Line us up with it and hold altitude at three hundred metres.”

She felt the ship respond almost before she had finished speaking. Servo-motors made a crunching, grinding sensation under her feet, as flight surfaces were redeployed.

“Is there something significant about this area?” Cassandra asked.

“Yes.”

A bolt of lightning chose that moment to punch through the clouds, landing very close to the mangled, attenuated stump of the Eiffel Tower, at the limit of the Champ de Mars.

“That’s where we’re headed,” Auger said.

“The metal structure?”

“Yes. Bring us down on the upper stage, as best as you can.”

“It’s sloping. I’m not sure if I trust that metal?—”

“It’ll hold,” Auger said. “You’re looking at seven thousand tons of Victorian pig iron. If it survived two hundred years under ice, I think it can take our weight.”

For two centuries, the ice had swallowed the lower third of the three-hundred-metre-high tower. Some forgotten, unwitnessed catastrophe had ripped the upper seventy-five metres into history, leaving no trace of the wreckage within the excavated bowl of Paris. The first two observation decks remained, plus most of the much smaller third stage, which was perched atop a slanted, corkscrewed stump of twisted metal leaning far out towards the frozen Seine.

“I can see a parked spacecraft on the third level,” Cassandra said. “Thrusters are still hot. Size and function matches the type of shuttle Caliskan was using.”

“That’s our meeting point. If he’s being nice, he’ll have left us enough space to park.”

“It’ll be tight,” the Slasher said.

“Do your best. If necessary, you only have to hold station while we disembark, or bring Caliskan aboard.”

“And Mr. de Maupassant?”

“He won’t be joining us. He’s been dead nearly four hundred years.”

“Then I confess—”

“Caliskan’s little joke,” Auger said. “He knew I’d get it. De Maupassant despised that tower. In fact, he hated it so much that he insisted on having lunch in it every day. Said it was the only place in Paris where it didn’t spoil his view.”

The tower thrust up below them, its distorted lean even more apparent now that they were hovering directly above the third stage. From this perspective, the latticed metal shaft curved inward, like an eroded cliff, while the far side was bent so far from its intended angle that the ironwork had begun to curl away in buckled sections, like the hackles of a dog.

Lighting stabbed close again. The play of shadow and light made the entire structure appear to move, wobbling like jelly.

“Bring us in, Cassandra,” Auger said. “The sooner we’re down, the happier I’ll be.”

The third-stage observation deck was an apron of square metal tilted at five or six degrees to the horizontal, pierced by the jagged uprights of severed girders and the shafts that had once carried the elevator cars to the top of the tower. Buckled metal railings were still in place around much of the perimeter. Caliskan’s barb-shaped shuttle was parked in one corner, its tail jutting out into empty space.

“That’s his ship,” Auger said. “Can you land?”

“I can try.” Cassandra threw a bank of levers. “Landing skids are down and locked. We’ll burn fuel in VTOL mode, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

The ship hovered, sliding from side to side as Cassandra feathered the vectored thrust nozzles. They dropped a little, held station, then dropped again. Nearing the platform, the backwash from the thrusters sent loose metal scurrying across the deck, smashing through the railings and over the sides. Then they were down, the landing skids absorbing the impact with a bounce of pneumatics.

Cassandra powered down the engines, conserving every drop of fuel. “We should be all right for the time being,” she said.

“Good job, that,” Auger said. “For your next trick, can you re-open a channel to Caliskan?”

“Just a moment.”

One of the screens flickered, then filled with Caliskan’s features. He pushed unkempt white hair back from a glistening brow. “Are you secured?” he asked.

“Yes,” Auger said, “but I’m not sure there’s enough fuel left in the shuttle for us to make it back into orbit.” She glanced at Cassandra, who made an indecisive face and an equivocal hand gesture.

“How many of you are there aboard?” he asked.

“Three,” she said, “plus the cargo. But Cassandra’s hoping to fly the shuttle back on her own. Only Floyd and I need to come with you.”

“There should be enough room for all three of us, and the cargo. Do you think you can make the crossing?”

“Depends on the fury count,” Auger said.

He glanced away, consulting some concealed read-out. “It’s low enough not to be a problem, provided you wear normal environment gear. No special precautions necessary. Just watch your footing.”

“Why did you bring us here? I mean, I understand why orbit wasn’t the safest place—”

“Precisely because of the fury count, Auger. The big machines never get this high. Monsieur Eiffel’s monstrosity is the safest place in the city.”