The USNE battle planners had programmed Silver Rain to trigger on 28 July 2243. It was a coincidence that the day and the month happened to be shared with the events of the Nanocaust: the timing of the Silver Rain deployment had been dictated by strategic considerations elsewhere in the war. But once that coincidence became apparent, the generals saw no need to alter their plans. It would send a signal—subtle or otherwise—to the Polities. This is payback, it said. This is the price you pay for the harm your ideological ancestors did to Earth.
When the trigger was operated, every infected organism died in the same convulsive instant as the machines erupted, little time bombs crammed inside every living cell. Recording systems showed people stopping in mid-stride, mid-sentence, mid-thought. They fell to the ground, every biological event in their bodies aborted like a rogue computer process. They didn’t bleed. They didn’t even undergo any of the medically recognised phases of putrefaction. They just became a kind of dust, loosely organised into the shapes of corpses. When the cities and settlements began to fail, pressure-containment systems breaking down through lack of human maintenance, the corpses simply blew away like so many piles of ash.
It had never been the intention of the USNE to destroy all life on the planet: they had too many Martian interests of their own to go that far. Had Silver Rain slipped from their control (it had never been tested on such a scale before, and its effects were not entirely predictable), they would have deployed a counter-spore designed to neutralise the original weapon before it did excessive harm. But there was no need for that. The Silver Rain had worked exactly as advertised.
In the aftermath, the Slasher forces were paralysed by the scale of the atrocity. Sixty thousand people had died on Mars—more than the total number of casualties sustained in the conflict up to that point. But just when the Slashers were ready to launch a devastating counter-offensive against Tanglewood, using weapons that they had kept in reserve until then, there was an equally shocking turn of events amongst the Threshers. Senior officials denounced the actions of the battle planners who had developed and deployed Silver Rain. A moderately bloody coup followed, and those responsible for the crime against Mars were tried and executed. The punishments seemed to sate the Slashers. Within weeks, ceasefire terms had been agreed, with hostilities ending by late August. Mars returned to nominal Thresher control in 2244, but with significant concessions to the Slashers. While it was not exactly true to say that Mars had recovered from its assault, it had begun the healing process. The terraforming programme soldiered on, never getting any closer to its goal, but it was something to live for, regardless. Ambitious new settlements appeared in the Solis Planum and Terra Cimmeria regions, and the refurbishment of the high-orbit port, abandoned and mothballed during the war, brought a healthy dose of commerce.
But even now, after twenty-three years, the Scoured Zone was still lifeless. By accident or design, the gene-tweaked crops never took root there again. None of the settlements inside the Silver Rain footprint were ever reinhabited. They stood there now, half-buried in Martian dust: bone-white ghost towns, left exactly as they had been at the time of the atrocity.
Auger remembered her dream of Paris: the drummer boy on the Champs-Elysées.
“That was twenty-three years ago,” she concluded. “Officially, the weapon doesn’t exist anymore. Even the blueprints were supposed to have been destroyed. But Susan White didn’t write those words on a postcard for nothing. Someone’s got hold of it again. Maybe even improved it. And the next target isn’t a few tens of thousands of Martian colonists. It’s three billion people—the entire population of your version of Earth.”
“But why?”
“To erase what should never have been. To wipe out those three billion lives as if they were rogue programs in some vast computer simulation. To turn back the clock to the moment of the quantum snapshot and obtain a pristine copy of the Earth, unencumbered by anything as messy as living, breathing inhabitants.”
“It’s monstrous,” Floyd said, horrified.
“From one point of view. From another, it’s simply a question of tidying up—like airbrushing a photograph. Remember what that war baby said in Berlin? All you really are to them is three billion dots.”
“We have to stop this.”
“And we’re trying to. But we may be too late. If they already know the physical co-ordinates of the ALS, all they need to do now is to get there and deliver the Silver Rain—”
“Then we have to get there ahead of them.”
“Nice in theory, Floyd. But we don’t know where the ALS is. There’s an awful lot of galaxy out there.”
“Then we need to find out those co-ordinates as well. They must have smuggled them out, right?”
“Floyd, we’re talking about three numbers. They don’t even have to be big ones. No one needs to specify the position of the ALS to within a centimetre. It’s like looking for an island in the Pacific Ocean. All you need is a grid reference accurate enough to rule out any other possibilities.”
“Then we look for a grid reference.”
“It could be anywhere, hidden in any form. It could be a telephone number, or something even less obvious.”
“But those numbers must be somewhere. Could they have been hidden in the things Susan White was sending back home?”
“She was on our side, Floyd.”
“I’m not saying that she knew what she was carrying, just that she might have been acting as a courier for the bad guys without ever realising it.”
“It’s still hopeless. Even if we knew for a fact that the numbers were in those papers… where would we start? The co-ordinates could be stored in the tiniest microdot, or in one telephone number amongst the thousands in the classified adverts.”
“All I’m saying is that we have to do something.”
“I agree,” she said, “but maybe our first priority ought to be getting rescued.”
Something distracted her: a slight change in the quality of light flooding the cabin. They were still tumbling, the Sun still flashing through the window once a rotation, but now there was a pinkish glow that stayed with them all the time, as if the transport was enveloped in its own little cloud of glowing light.
“You still think someone’s going to pick us up?” Floyd asked.
“They’re looking for us,” Auger said.
“Even if the blowing up of that moon wasn’t part of the plan?”
“Someone will still want to know what happened to us.” But even as she said it, she felt her certainty draining away. By its nature, the hyperweb portal was ultra-secret. Most of the people who knew anything about it would have been inside Phobos when the attack took it apart.
“Auger?”
“I think we may be in more trouble than I first thought. Aveling and Barton are dead. Apart from Niagara and Caliskan, I don’t know who’s left out there to look for us.”
“Niagara and Caliskan?”
“Niagara’s our Slasher mole, the man who fed us the know-how to make the Phobos link operational in the first place. Caliskan is the man who sent me to recover Susan’s belongings. Niagara may have been inside Phobos when it was destroyed, but Caliskan’s probably still in Tanglewood.”
“Then we’d better hope he hasn’t forgotten about you.”
“Floyd, there’s something not right about this.” She closed her eyes, silencing a moan as the discomfort in her shoulder took on a sharper, nastier edge. “The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that none of this was an accident.”
“None of what?”
“The collapse of the wormhole. Granted, the whole thing was becoming increasingly unstable, but the snake robot should have been able to compensate for that. It should have been able to manage a safe contraction of the throat.”