Auger returned her attention to the screen. “We’re following you in, but we’ll need a few minutes to get our act together. Don’t get too far ahead of us.”
“Make it as quick as you can,” Caliskan said. “And if you have any cargo from Paris, now might not be a bad time to hand it over to me. Given what’s happened around Mars, it may be the last consignment we ever see.”
“There isn’t much,” Auger said. “Just a few boxes that the snake robot put on the transport before it sabotaged the link.”
“You’re still working for Antiquities. Bring what there is. Then follow my trajectory precisely, no matter how inefficient it looks.”
“Where are you taking us, sir?”
“For a dinner engagement,” Caliskan said. “We’re dining with the ghost of Guy de Maupassant. I just hope he doesn’t mind the company.”
THIRTY-FOUR
They hit atmosphere. It was a rougher ride than Auger had been expecting—the Slasher ship’s aerodynamic effectiveness had been badly compromised. By Cassandra’s reckoning, the ship had lost thirty per cent of its mass during the chase, discarding parts of itself to act as chaff and decoys while the main section executed increasingly desperate hairpin reversals, sidesteps and swerves.
“Did Caliskan make it through?” Auger asked.
“We’re still tracking his ship. He’s about twenty kilometres ahead of us, slowing down to supersonic speed. He seems to be headed for the northern part of Europe, specifically—”
“Paris,” Auger said. “It would have to be Paris.”
“You seem very certain of this.”
“I am.”
“What was that business about having dinner with Guy de Maupassant, anyway? Is he another colleague of yours?”
“Not exactly,” Auger said. “But we’ll worry about that when we get there.”
“Mind if I add a contribution?” Floyd asked.
“Go ahead.”
“I really do know Caliskan. I told you his face was familiar—I think I’ve placed him.”
“I know this is going to sound mean,” Auger said, trying to soften her words with a smile, “but you’re really not qualified to have an opinion on Caliskan.”
“Maybe not, but I still know that face. He’s someone I’ve met, I’m pretty sure, someone I’ve had dealings with.”
“You can’t have met him. He’s been in E1 space the whole time. There’s no way he could have slipped through the portal without everyone knowing about it.”
Cassandra leaned forward in her seat. “Perhaps Floyd has a point, if he feels so certain of his observation.”
“Don’t encourage him.”
“But if Caliskan had knowledge of the Phobos link, isn’t it conceivable that he might have made a trip through it?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Skellsgard would have told me, even if no one else did.”
“Unless Skellsgard was given specific orders not to tell you,” Cassandra said.
“I trusted her.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know what was going on either.”
“But if that’s the case, then we can’t even be sure that we can trust Caliskan any more. In which case, who the hell do we trust?”
“I still trust Caliskan,” Cassandra said. “My intelligence contacts have never pointed to him having an ulterior motive.”
“They could be wrong.”
“Or Floyd could be mistaken.” Cassandra consulted with her machines for a moment, then said, “There is another possible explanation.”
They both looked at the dark-haired girl.
“Well?” Auger asked.
“According to the biographical file we have on Caliskan, he had a brother.”
“Yes,” Auger said slowly. “He told me about him.”
“And?”
“Caliskan reckoned I had a grudge against Slashers. He didn’t think it was justified. He said that if anyone had a right to hold a grudge it was him, because of what happened to his brother.”
“The biographical file says that his brother died in the final stages of the Phobos reoccupation, when the Slashers were ousted,” Cassandra said.
“Yes,” Auger confirmed. “That’s what he told me.”
“Maybe he believed it, too. But what if his brother didn’t die?”
“She could be right,” Floyd said. “You know the link was open just before the reoccupation. It’s the only way those children could have come through.”
“But Caliskan’s brother wasn’t fighting on the side of the Slashers,” Auger said.
“Maybe they got to him,” Floyd said. “Maybe they took him prisoner and got to him later. Maybe he sneaked through at the same time.”
“And you just happened to bump into this man in E2?”
“I’m just telling you what I’ve seen.”
“You told me nothing about any children,” Cassandra said.
“They weren’t children,” Floyd said. “They were like you…” He paused. “Only uglier.”
Auger sighed. Now that Floyd had let the cat out of the bag, nothing would satisfy Cassandra until she had an explanation. “Neotenic Infantry. War babies, we called them. They must have opened the link to the ALS during the Phobos occupation twenty-three years ago.”
“And they’ve been there ever since?”
“They’re not exactly a pretty sight by now.”
“Most of them would have already died,” Cassandra said. “Those first-line neotenics were never designed for longevity. Any survivors must be near the ends of their lives.”
“They look like it. They smell like it,” Auger said with disgust.
“Why don’t you just tell me what they were doing there? As I said, I can always suck it out of your brain if you don’t. I’d rather not, but—”
“All I have is guesswork,” Auger said. “They were making something, some kind of machine—a gravity-wave sensor, I think—for establishing the physical location of the ALS. The trick was that they had to construct it using local technology.”
Cassandra mulled that over and nodded primly. “And the purpose of this data, once they obtained it?”
“To enable them to reach the shell from the outside.”
The ship rocked, hitting turbulence. The floor quivered, as if about to spring up and around them in a protective embrace.
“What do they want with the ALS?” Cassandra wondered, frowning.
“They want to depopulate it. They want to seed the atmosphere of the duplicate Earth with Silver Rain.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Genocide generally is. Especially on this scale.”
“All right,” Cassandra said, still frowning as she assimilated the new information. “Why not deliver Silver Rain via the link itself?”
“They can’t. There’s a barrier that prevents anything like that from entering Floyd’s world. The only way in is to sneak around the back.”
“But there’s still the small matter of breaking through the shell,” Cassandra said. “Ah—wait a minute. We’ve covered that already, haven’t we?”
“The theft of the antimatter drive from the Twentieth,” Auger said.
“That’s their—what did you call it? Molotov device?”
“So it would seem.”
“The neotenics couldn’t have put this together by themselves,” Cassandra said. “They’re resourceful and clever, but they were never engineered to think strategically, especially not for twenty-three years. There must have been others privy to the same plan.”
“We already know about Niagara.”
“But Niagara had no easy means of communicating with the neotenics. Those children needed leadership and co-ordination, someone to give them orders. Adult-phase Slashers, perhaps,” Cassandra suggested.
“No,” Auger said. “Not unless they were prepared to live without their machines. It was all right for the war babies: they’re purely biological, with no implants. But no one like you could have followed them through the censor device with all that nanotech running around inside them.”