“We didn’t want to alarm him.” Cassandra’s cloud commingled with the machines around Floyd, some brief information exchange taking place. “When we healed his head wound, we naturally examined his DNA. It turned out to be very peculiar. He doesn’t have any of the chromosomal markers that would identify him as a descendent of someone who lived through the GM excursions of the early twenty-first century.”
“He wouldn’t,” Auger said.
“It would take extensive rescripting to remove those markers. Why would anyone go to so much trouble?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“That’s what we thought.” Cassandra touched a finger to her lower lip. “It’s almost as if he’s a man from the past, from before the twenty-first century.”
“Good guess. What else did you figure out?”
“He must have come through the hyperweb, from the other end of the link. What did you find there, Auger?”
“If I don’t tell you, you’ll just take it from my memory, won’t you?”
“If I decided you were withholding something of strategic importance, I’m afraid I’d have little choice. Regrettably, this is war.”
He surfaced to the sound of Auger’s voice. She came into focus, looking down on him against a background of spotless cinematic white.
“Floyd. Wake up. You’re OK.”
His mind was as clean and clear as the dawn sky. He was vaguely affronted by this on some level, feeling that he should have been allowed a grace period of disorientation and grogginess. Even his memories felt bright and sparkling, as if they had been taken out for a quick spit and polish.
He ran his tongue around the inside surface of his teeth. None of them were broken. They felt like church gargoyles that had been taken down and sandblasted clean.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were rescued,” Auger said. She was standing over his bed, wearing a kind of satin toga. It moved around her in strange, unsettling ways, flowing like one of those very flat fish that skim the seabed. “We’re all right, at least for now.”
He sat up and touched his scalp. There was no sign of the injury, although his hair had been shaved almost to his scalp where the cut had been. “Where is this place?”
“We’re aboard a ship.”
“A space ship?”
“Yes. You can cope with that, can’t you? I mean, after what’s happened to us, a spaceship is not the strangest thing imaginable, is it?”
“I’ll cope,” Floyd said. “Who’s running this jalopy, and are they the good guys?”
“I know the woman who seems to be in charge. She’s a moderate Slasher by the name of Cassandra. I’ve already had dealings with her on Earth. In theory that makes her more trustworthy than the aggressors.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“They’ve taken care of us. It doesn’t mean they have my automatic gratitude. Not until I know what’s going on, and where exactly they’re taking us.”
“Haven’t they told you?”
“They’re supposed to be homing in on the location of some kind of transmission from Caliskan. That’s all I know.”
Floyd rubbed a hand across his face. They had even shaved him. It was, by some distance, the best shave he had ever had. “You don’t like them much, do you?”
“I like them even less after…” But she stopped and shook her head. “If she wants to know everything, she can damn well work for it. The only person I want to talk to is Caliskan.”
Floyd pushed himself upright. He was on the point of asking Auger if she knew where he might get a drink when the dryness in his throat was suddenly gone, as if he had been imagining it all along.
“What did you tell Cassandra?” he asked.
“I told her everything. If she’d suspected I was holding anything back, she’d have read my mind anyway.”
“How’d she take… me?”
“I’m not sure she thought your being here was a great idea.”
“That makes two of us,” Floyd said. “I also know there isn’t much point in complaining about it.”
“I’m sorry about all this.”
“Auger—do me a favour and stop apologising, will you? No regrets. Never.”
She smiled. “I don’t believe you for a second. But I’m still glad you made it, Floyd.”
“I’m glad we both made it. Now how about a kiss, before they come to put me in the monkey house?”
At first, Auger thought that Cassandra had somehow lost her way and led them into the wrong part of the ship: some kind of waiting room or chill-out den, perhaps, but definitely not a tactical room. It was another white chamber, brightly lit where she had expected subdued, vision-enhancing reds. Instead of urgent, cycling displays, the walls were the usual gold-threaded white. There was a toadstool-shaped table in the middle of the room, rising seamlessly from the floor, and around this stood half a dozen toadstool-shaped chairs. The chairs had a spongy, haphazard look to them, like the furniture of a gingerbread house. Six Slashers occupied them, facing each other across the equally spongy table. None of them were in what Auger would have called a tense or particularly agitated posture. One of them rested an elbow on the table, hand supporting his chin. Another woman (although she could have passed for a child) pressed her steepled fingers to her brow, as if in meditation. The other four Slashers had their hands tucked limply in their laps, as if they were waiting their turns in a slow, dull parlour game. No one was saying anything and their eyes were either closed or heavy-lidded. There was, however, a dense cloud of twinkling machines hovering above the middle of the table, and the extremities of this cloud encompassed all six participants, its boundary shifting from moment to moment.
“Tunguska,” Cassandra said. “Can you spare enough of yourself to talk to us?”
The one with his elbow on the table turned his head minutely in their direction. He was a large man, black-skinned and round of face, with sad, heavily lidded eyes and long silver-black hair tied back in a pony-tail.
“I can always make time for you, Cassie,” he said in a very slow, very deep voice.
“Tunguska is my battle manager,” Cassandra said. “He’s also my friend and ally. Tunguska and I go back a long way.”
“I didn’t know an outmoded concept like friendship was tolerated in the Polities,” Auger said.
“Then you know even less about us than you think.” Cassandra nodded at Tunguska. “Our guests are curious. Can you show them the state of play?”
“Let me see what I can do.”
Tunguska turned to the wall and with brisk hand gestures somehow made an area of it become black. Circles and spheres dropped into place: a view of the solar system, looking down on the plane of the ecliptic. The view zoomed in on the inner system, as far out as the orbit of Mars. Mars itself was indicated by a red sphere, very much out of scale, accompanied by one intact moon and the glowing smudge that had recently been Phobos.
“The collapse of the quasi-wormhole knocked out all forces within a few dozen kilometres of the moon,” Tunguska said, his voice as slow and measured as if he was reciting a sermon. “But that still leaves a large concentration of ships within the immediate volume of space around Mars. We’re tracking at least two hundred distinct thrust signatures.”
“Who do those ships belong to?” Auger asked.
“Everyone who has a stake in controlling the inner system. Various Polity factions account for about seventy per cent of active combatants. Twenty per cent are USNE, with the remainder made up of non-aligned parties: lunar breakaway groups and suchlike.” As Tunguska spoke, icons dropped into place, forming a bustling crowd of flags and emblems around Mars. It was quite impossible to make any sense of it.
“Did anyone make it out of Phobos alive?” Auger asked.