“We’re safe, for now,” Auger said. “All we have to do is sit tight until someone figures out where we are.”
“And someone will manage that?”
“Count on it. They’ll be scouring every centimetre of space looking for us right now. Even if there isn’t a working transponder on this thing, they’ll find us with their own sensors. It will only be a matter of time.”
Her confidence had a thin, brittle edge to it, like ice that might break at any moment.
“I take it from this that you have a theory about how we survived?” Floyd asked.
“Aveling’s people must have taken the decision to destroy Phobos,” she said. “That smudge of dust and gas is all that’s left of the moon. We must have hit a little debris coming through it, but not enough to do us any harm.”
“They blew up a whole moon? Isn’t that rather drastic?”
“It was the only way to save us,” she said. “They must have picked up our bow-shock distortion and realised that we were coming in much too fast to decelerate into the recovery bubble. But the bubble’s only function was to maintain vacuum at the wormhole throat. If they got rid of the pressurised chamber—and Phobos with it—then they wouldn’t need the bubble. We’d have been emerging into vacuum anyway.”
“But you said they wouldn’t have much warning of our imminent arrival,” Floyd said.
“They must have had a procedure in place for just this contingency,” she said. “Emergency evacuation measures to get everyone off the moon in a couple of minutes. Nuclear demolition charges sewn throughout the whole thing, ready to take it apart at the press of a button, giving us a clear route to space.”
“All that, in a couple of minutes?”
“There’s no other explanation, Floyd.”
“Well, I can think of one off the top of my head: somebody else blew up that moon, and our arrival didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”
“No, Floyd,” she said patiently, as if lecturing a child on some arcane matter of the adult world. “Nobody else blew up that moon. That’s not the way we do things around here. We may be in a state of crisis, but no one in their right mind…” Then she froze, and made a small clicking noise in the back of her throat.
“Auger?”
“Fuck. I think you might actually be right.”
“And there was me kind of hoping I’d be wrong.”
“There were explosions in that debris cloud,” she said, remembering the staccato flashes of light, “as if something was still going on there. As if they were still fighting.”
“Who could have blown up that moon?”
“If it wasn’t deliberate, if it wasn’t set off by demolition charges, then only the Slashers could have done it.” She followed the slow, fatigued churning of her exhausted mental processes. She was too tired to think clearly, or else she would never have considered the possibility that Phobos might have been blown up for her benefit. “That last flash,” she said. “The really bright one?”
“Yes?”
“I think that was the wormhole dying. We were surfing the collapsing end of it all the way home. We popped out, then the collapsing end of the pipe hit its own throat. It was like a stretched rubber band snapping back on itself. I think the blast took out all the combatants left near the debris cloud.”
“And my way back home?”
“It’s gone. The link is finished.”
“I figured as much.”
“I’m sorry, Floyd,” she said.
“You don’t have anything to apologise for. I got myself into this every step of the way.”
“No, that isn’t true. I have to take some of the blame. I should never have let you cross the censor, and I definitely shouldn’t have let you get aboard this ship.”
“Face it, kid: you’d never have got home without me.”
She had no answer for that. He was right: without Floyd’s help, she would have died somewhere along the now-collapsed thread of the hyperweb, dashed to pieces in an unwitnessed fireworks display.
“That still doesn’t make it right,” she said. “I’ve ripped you away from everything and everyone you ever knew.”
“You had no choice.”
She touched her wound. It was hot and tender again, as if the inflammation had begun to return. The UR she had taken was not the kind that stayed inside the body for ever. The little machines had probably dismantled themselves by now, donating their essence into the chemical reservoir of her body. She had assumed that she would be getting expert medical attention as soon as the ship popped into the recovery bubble.
“Are you all right?” Floyd asked.
“Just a bit crisp around the edges. I’ll handle it.”
“You need medical attention.”
“And I’ll get it just as soon as they pull us out of this can.”
“If they’re looking for us,” Floyd said.
“They will be. Skellsgard will have told Caliskan that we’re on our way back and also that we have important information.”
“You ready to tell me a little more about why this matters so much? I mean, now that we’re here…”
“Take a look out of the window again, Floyd. Take a look at Mars.”
Auger told him about Mars. She told him about Silver Rain, and what it had done to that world.
Silver Rain was a weapon, cultivated during the last conflict between the Slashers and the Threshers from samples of the original rogue nanotechnological spore that had ended life on Earth. With deft, snide brilliance, the military scientists of the USNE—aided by defectors from the Polities, who supplied the necessary expertise in nanotech manipulation—had taken the excessively crude bludgeon of the original spore and honed it into something sharp and rather lovely, like a Samurai sword. Then they had seeded it into the thickening atmosphere of the partially terraformed Mars, the spore encased in myriad ceramic-jacketed ablative pellets, and it had sunk down to the surface, spreading across a vast footprint.
The Polities had never assumed that their enemy would use nanotechnology against them. It was the one thing that the Threshers abhorred above all else.
It therefore made an ideal weapon of surprise.
Silver Rain was very difficult to detect. The Polity specialists on Mars were expecting something much cruder, and consequently their nanotech filters were tuned to ignore something so fine, so cunning, so deadly. It infiltrated organisms quietly, initially doing no harm. Not just people and animals, but every living thing that the colonists had persuaded to survive on Mars. It slipped through seals and airlocks; through skin and cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier. Even the droves of nanotechnological mechanisms that the Slashers carried within their own bodies failed to recognise the intruder. It was that good; that precise.
And for days it did nothing except insinuate itself more thoroughly into the colonists’ world. It seeped into the irrigation system and used the canals to travel beyond the original infection footprint. It transmitted itself by means of physical contact between people and animals. It used the weather, riding the winds. It replicated itself, efficiently and systematically, but never consuming resources that would have drawn it to anyone’s attention. People began to report that they were feeling a little under the weather, as if about to come down with a mild cold.
But no one in the Polities had come down with a cold in living memory…