“But why… oh, wait. Now I see. You rig up this thing and start looking for known gravity-wave sources. Bright high-period derivative binaries: double degenerates on the death spiral, that kind of thing.”
“Yes,” Auger said. “You pick up their resonant frequencies—which are as unique as fingerprints. You measure how strong they are and with three spheres you can calculate which direction they’re coming from. You put the pieces together, crunch some data, and you have—”
“The physical co-ordinates of the ALS,” breathed Skellsgard.
“They may already have them by now,” Auger said.
“But why? Why would anyone go to all that trouble?”
“Because they want to find it very badly,” Auger said. “From the outside.”
“Jesus,” Skellsgard said. “What are they actually thinking of doing with that information?”
“That’s the bit that worries me. Look, maybe it’s nothing, but for some reason Susan wrote ‘Silver Rain’ in one of the letters she intended to send to Caliskan.”
Skellsgard said nothing for several seconds. “Jesus squared. Are you sure?”
“I think they might be trying to inject it into the ALS. It’s a nano-weapon, so it can’t come through the censor. That only leaves them one option: find the ALS and drill a hole in it.”
Skellsgard blew air out through pursed lips. She had no more expletives, no more profanities. “Who do you want me to tell? You reckoned Susan had some doubts about who she could trust.”
“I think she was right to. I’m taking a risk even talking to you, of course. Now I’m going to take another risk and suggest you get this information to Caliskan as soon as possible.”
“I’ll do what I can. Like I said, it’s not exactly business as usual at this end of the pipe.”
“I hear you—just do your best. In the meantime, see if you can check the feasibility of my little theory. Maybe there’s a snag; maybe it can’t be a gravity-wave antenna at all.”
“I’m on the case,” Skellsgard said. “Gives me something to take my mind off the bad news, at least.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“You take care of yourself, Auger. I still owe you one.”
Thirty minutes later, they had the ship prepped—as Auger put it—and ready for departure. The cradle had rotated the entire craft through 180 degrees, so that the view through the forward-looking cabin windows showed the glassy shaft that ran from the main bubble into the wall of the chamber. Beyond the shaft, the walls became mirrored, converging not to infinity but to a kind of iris. The robot had disembarked, slinking away with maggotlike undulations of its pearl-necklace body. Floyd could not see it at all now, but Auger assured him that it would be attending to the details of their departure, managing several desks at once.
“Skellsgard?” Auger said, from her chair on the left side of the cabin. “You still on the line?”
“Still here…” Momentarily, her voice broke up into staccato shards, as if they were hearing pieces of her message out of sequence. “…but you might want to cast off sooner rather than later. Conditions are getting seriously sub-optimal.”
“Shouldn’t we wait things out?” Auger asked.
“You’ll be relatively safe once you clear the throat.”
“Why does she not fill me with confidence?” Floyd asked.
“Never mind,” Auger said. “Robot: you got that injection sequence ready?”
The piping voice of the machine assured her that all was ready. “Throat stability is locally optimal,” it said, whatever that meant.
“You buckled in, Floyd?”
“I’m ready.”
“There’ll be quite a kick. Be prepared.” Then she raised her voice. “OK, robot, inject us whenever you want.”
“Injection in five seconds,” the machine said.
Ahead, the iris cranked open. Floyd narrowed his eyes against the intense, roiling glare that spilled between the opening blades. The light flowed in strange, sicklelike patterns down the mirrored shaft. From somewhere behind the ship, the mechanical sounds intensified, and he heard a sequence of thuds and clunks like some enormous clock gearing itself up to chime.
“Three seconds,” the robot said. “Two. One. Injecting.”
Floyd’s bruised spine yelled a protestation into his brain. He felt as if a family of gorillas was practising xylophone exercises on his vertebrae. He started to say something, some useless moan of animal discomfort, and then found that he did not have the strength to speak; even his lungs felt as if they were being squeezed like bellows. His head and neck mashed back into the seat restraints and he felt a mouthful of drool spill down his chin. His vision darkened around a central core of brightness.
They were moving.
They were moving so quickly that they were not even in the chamber any more. They had already traversed the glass shaft and the mirror-lined part of the tunnel and were speeding through the heart of the opening iris, into the unimaginable fury of the light beyond.
That was when it got really bumpy.
The pressure forcing him into the back of the seat had abated and in its place was a dreamy lightness-of-stomach feeling, as if they were falling, but the ship was now lurching from side to side, each violent movement accompanied by a tooth-grinding rattle of ravaged metal. This, Floyd thought, was how it felt to grind past an iceberg in an ocean liner. He imagined scabs of the ship’s hull breaking off into the bright inferno of whatever it was they were flying through.
He didn’t think it very likely that it was a tunnel under Paris any more. Or even a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean.
“I’m closing the shields now,” Auger said. “The view doesn’t help much. Especially not after ten hours of it.”
She touched a control above her head, using her good arm, and iron eyelids snicked down over the windows. Interior lights came on, bathing everything in a low-key glow. Floyd watched the grid pattern, his hand ready to close around the joystick.
“I’ll look after it for now,” Auger said, taking hold of a similar control on her side of the cabin. “You can watch and learn.”
“There are a couple of questions I really need to ask,” Floyd said.
“OK,” Auger said. “I guess you’ve earned them.”
“Where is this tunnel taking us?”
“It’s taking us to Mars,” Auger said. “Specifically to Phobos, one of Mars’s two natural moons.”
“So it wasn’t a codeword after all.”
“No,” she said.
“I figured that part out, for what it’s worth. I also decided that I don’t think you’re a Martian.”
“No, I’m not.”
“But you’re not from Dakota, either.”
“No, Dakota was a lie. But I am from the United States.” She offered him a nervous smile. “Just not the one you were thinking of, although I suppose you could call them distant political relatives.”
“And your name?”
“That bit was true. My name’s Verity Auger, and I am a citizen of the United States of Near Earth. I’m a researcher for the Antiquities Board. I was born in the orbital community of Tanglewood in the year twenty-two thirty-one. I’m thirty-five and divorced, with two kids I don’t see as often as I should.”
“The odd thing is,” Floyd said, “I don’t doubt you for a moment. I mean, what other explanation could there be?”
“You seem very relaxed about it,” she said.
“Given all that I’ve seen, the only possible explanation is that you’re a time traveller.”
“Ah,” Auger said. “That’s the problem, you see. I mean, time travel is definitely involved here, but not in quite the way you’re thinking.”