“So what are you saying?”
“I think the robot was sent there to destroy the link.”
“But the robot helped you.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it probably meant to save my life. I don’t think it had any idea that it had been tampered with. The sabotage order could have been buried deep beneath its surface programming.”
The pink glow had intensified: fingers of light now licked around the armoured aperture of the window. It still bothered Auger, but she wasn’t sure why.
“Why would anyone want to sabotage the link, if that’s the only way back to Paris?” Floyd asked.
“That’s what worries me. Not just because it implies that someone within the organisation set out to collapse the link, but also because it must mean that the Slashers no longer need it themselves.”
“Why would they throw away something like that?”
“They wouldn’t,” Auger said. “Not unless they already had another way of reaching Paris.”
“You mean they already have the co-ordinates of the ALS?”
“Either that, or they’re very close to finding them out.”
The thing that had been bothering Auger about that pink glow finally pushed its way to the front of her pain-fogged mind. She felt herself go quite cold, even the stab of the wound no longer her most immediate concern. “Floyd, do something for me, will you? Climb up and take another look through the window.”
“Why? You think someone else is out there?”
“Just do it.” She watched him intently as he did as he was told.
“Now tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
“Tell me if Mars looks any bigger than the last time you saw it.”
Floyd took a look and then stared back at her, light and shadow slipping over his face with clockwork regularity. His expression told her everything she needed to know. “This isn’t good, is it?” Floyd asked.
“Get back in your seat. Fast.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is that we’re not in orbit around Mars. If that planet looks bigger, it’s because it’s closer. We’re falling towards it. I think we’re already skimming the upper atmosphere.”
Floyd returned to his seat and lost no time in buckling up. “How do you know?”
“I didn’t, for a while. I just had a bad feeling that it might turn out this way. Phobos was in orbit around Mars, moving at exactly the right speed for its altitude. But we came out of the portal with our own velocity relative to the moon—hundreds of metres per second, at least. Whatever trajectory that put us in, it wasn’t going to be the same one as Phobos. There’s a chance we might have lucked out and had a boost in the right direction, away from Mars—”
“But today isn’t our day for lucking out.”
“No,” she said. “Doesn’t look as if it is. We came out at the wrong angle, at the wrong speed. We’re hitting the atmosphere.”
“And that’s as bad as it sounds, right?”
“Ever wish upon a falling star, Floyd? Well, now’s your big chance. You’ll even get to be the star.”
“What will happen?”
“What will happen is that we’ll burn up and die. If we’re lucky, we’ll have been crushed unconscious by the G-force before that happens.”
“That’s an interesting view of luck.”
“This thing isn’t made for atmospheric re-entry,” Auger said. “No matter what angle we come in at.”
“This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen, Auger. Not like this. Not after we made it all this way.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “We can’t steer this thing. We can’t slow it down or speed it up. We can’t even stop it tumbling.” The glow, faint at first, had now intensified, flickering through shades of blue and pink like a quilt of pastel light wrapped around the ship. It was mesmerising and rather lovely. Under other circumstances, it might have been a thing of wonder. “Maybe if the hull wasn’t already shot to shit,” she said, leaving Floyd to draw his own conclusions.
“But it is.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all my fault.”
The glow flared to a hard white light, and in the same instant the transport shuddered violently. The tumbling motion became haphazard and all around her, Auger heard shrieks and groans of protesting metal as the aerodynamic and thermal stresses of Mars’s atmosphere began to toy with the fabric of the ship. G-force built up with surprising speed. It was nothing at all like the smooth insertions she remembered from her trips to Earth. One moment, all that was pushing her into her seat was the gentle and steady pressure of the unchecked rotation, and the next she was being pushed and pulled in random directions, yanked against the bruising restraints of the harness. She jammed her head into the shaped restraint at the back of the seat, trying to protect her neck from the whiplashing dead weight of her skull. The ride became even more turbulent, the noise deafening. She was beginning to find it difficult to breathe as the G-load worked against her lungs. She felt light-headed, consciousness beginning to break up into discrete, interrupted episodes.
“Floyd…” she managed to say. “Floyd, can you hear me?”
When he answered, she could barely hear him over the scream of the dying transport.
“You did good, Auger.”
How he managed it, she would never know, but somehow Floyd found the strength to reach out and close his hand around hers. She felt his fingers tighten, anchoring her to this place in space and time, even as everything else in her universe came apart in light and fury.
THIRTY-TWO
When she awoke, it was to the shining cool whiteness she had always imagined Heaven would be like. She would have happily stayed in that serene white limbo for the rest of eternity, void of any care or anxiety. But the whiteness held nagging suggestions of structure: pale shadows and highlights that sharpened themselves into the details of a room and its white-clad occupants.
One of these occupants took on the form of a very beautiful girl, surrounded by a mirage of twinkling lights.
“One lying little shit to the rescue,” Cassandra said.
Auger forced her way through layers of groggy recall, pushing memories back into place as she surfaced. “You,” was all she managed to say.
Cassandra nodded sagely. “Yes. Me. I’m glad you remember. It would have made things a lot more difficult if there was deep amnesia.”
Auger became aware that she was lying on a bed, at a slight angle, with various twinkling machines hovering around her. Some were so tiny that at first glance they might have been mistaken for dust motes. Others were as large as dragonflies or hummingbirds, shimmering with the moiré patterns of intense microscopic detail. Dimly it occurred to her that—despite the absence of any lumbering items of bedside monitoring equipment—this was some kind of sick bay or recuperative ward.
“We were falling—”
“And we were tracking you, trying to intercept your transport before it hit the atmosphere. As you may have gathered, we only just got to you in time. Our medical science can work wonders, but it can’t work miracles.”
Sweet relief that she had survived welled up inside her. Then she remembered that she had not been alone.
“Is Floyd all right?”
“The other occupant of the shuttle is fine. He’s under observation in another room, but he didn’t merit the immediate attention you did.”
“And the transport?”
“The transport is gone. We jettisoned its remains as a decoy. But don’t worry: we emptied the cargo first.”
“Cargo?”
“The archival items. A most interesting collection, I must say.”