“Then an unaugmented person: a normal human being—like Caliskan’s brother.”
“Possibly, if he decided to turn traitor.”
“And if there was one such, there might well have been more,” Cassandra said. “A lot of people died or went missing during the reoccupation.”
“They could all still be alive,” Auger said, “living in the ALS, meddling with the course of history.”
“But why would they meddle?” Cassandra asked.
“To hold things back. To stop Floyd’s people developing the technology and science that might actually have made them a threat to their grand plan, as soon as they realised their true situation.”
“Given time and the accumulation of random changes, the two timelines would be bound to diverge eventually,” Cassandra said. “How can you be sure there was conscious intervention?”
“Because it’s all too deliberate. In Floyd’s timeline there was never a Second World War. Whoever went through the link twenty-three years ago knew just enough about the actual course of events in nineteen forty to change them. All they had to do was get the right intelligence to the right people. The fulcrum was the German invasion through the Ardennes. It came close to failure in our timeline, but the allies never knew how vulnerable the advancing forces were. No one acted. But in Floyd’s timeline they did. They got bombers into the air and pounded those tanks into the mud. The German invasion of France collapsed.”
“So there was never a second global war. I presume millions of lives were spared because of that.”
“At the very least.”
“Doesn’t that make it rather a good thing?”
“No,” Auger said, “because those lives were only spared so that billions could be extinguished now. It was a purely clinical intervention. Saving lives had nothing to do with it. The only motivation was to keep those people in the dark.”
“Then a crime has already been committed. The children will soon be dead. But their leader—or leaders—must be found and brought to justice.”
“Then you need to find the ALS as well,” Auger said, “before one crime becomes another.”
“Niagara’s allies must indeed be close to acting,” Cassandra said. “They wouldn’t have moved on the liner unless they were ready to attack the ALS. This is very grave.”
“You said it, kid,” Floyd commented.
“The more I think about it,” Cassandra said, “the more I wonder if this entire attack against Tanglewood and Earth isn’t a diversionary tactic. They never really wanted our ruined Earth back, did they? They always had their sights set on a bigger prize.”
“We have to stop them,” Auger said.
“Agreed,” Cassandra said. “But do you think Caliskan will be able to help? Do you think he can even be trusted, if his brother is indeed a traitor?”
“He thinks his brother died,” Auger said. “I’m inclined to take him at his word. Anyway, we can’t afford not to trust him. He has contacts, including allies in the Polities.”
“So do I,” Cassandra said.
“But Caliskan has political clout. At the very least he can publicise the Slasher plan and maybe shame them into not acting.”
“This could be a trap,” Floyd said.
“I’m trying very hard not to think about that possibility,” Auger replied.
Cassandra’s face became glazed as she absorbed a welter of data concerning their approach to Paris. “Trap or not, we’re in the thick of the clouds now. Slowing to subsonic speed. I think this is about as low as I want to go in this ship. The particulate density is already rather on the high side for my liking.”
“Can we release the Twentieth’s shuttle?”
“Now is as good a time as ever,” Cassandra said. “Follow me.”
They howled through clouds as thick as coal, bellowing with thunder and flickering with lightning in slow, pink-tinged bursts.
“Still tracking Caliskan?” Auger asked.
“With difficulty,” Cassandra said, turning briefly away from the antique control console. “Did you have any more luck with figuring out who that de Maupassant fellow Caliskan mentioned is?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think I know exactly what he meant. It doesn’t matter if we lose his trace—we can still make the RV.”
“Couldn’t he have just told you where to land?” Floyd asked.
“Caliskan likes his little games,” Auger said, smiling thinly. Around them, the hull creaked and groaned like a very old chair.
“Cloud density is lessening,” Cassandra said. “I believe we’re nearly through the worst of it.”
Through the cabin windows, the grey took on a rushing, streamlike quality, evoking great speed. The ship slammed through two or three final scarves of attenuated cloud before entering clear air above the city. This was a true Parisian night, as dark as it ever got except when there was some calamitous failure of ground-side power. The only sources of steady illumination were the artificial lights installed by Antiquities, mounted on buildings and towers or slung from hovering dirigibles and drone platforms. Now and then, lightning flickering above the clouds shone through the circuitlike patterns via which the clouds communicated, etching a negative ghost of those patterns on to the icebound streets and buildings laid out below.
They were about five kilometres up, a high enough elevation for a panoramic view of the entire city, right out to the artificial moat of the Périphérique defences.
“I don’t know whether you’re going to like this,” Auger said to Floyd, “but welcome to Paris. You’ve never been here before.”
Floyd looked down through the small windows set into the lower part of the cabin. “I guess this means you were telling me the truth all along,” he said, struggling to deal with the enormity of that final realisation.
“Did you still have doubts?”
“I still had hopes.”
She directed his attention to the edge of the city, where the tower-top beacons of the perimeter defences flashed red and green in sequence. “That’s the Périphérique,” she said, “a ring of roads encircling Paris. It didn’t exist in your version of the city.”
“What’s the wall?”
“The ice cliff. It’s armoured with metal and concrete, sensors and weapons, to keep the larger furies out, the ones that are big enough to see. Most of the time, it more or less works. But they still get through now and then, and when they do, they come in quickly.”
That was the problem with Paris: the spiderweb of Métro and road tunnels offered numerous swift routes in from the perimeter. It didn’t matter that half of those tunnels were blocked by cave-ins: the hostile machines would always find an alternative route, or burrow their way into the older system of water and sewerage tunnels. The smallest of them could slip through telegraphic conduits, optical-fibre trunk lines and gas pipes. If push came to shove, they could even drill new tunnels of their own. They could be stopped—they could even be destroyed—but not without inflicting unacceptable damage on the very city that the researchers were trying to preserve and study.
“I don’t recognise much,” Floyd said.
“You’re looking at a city frozen more than a hundred years after your time,” Auger said. “Even so, there are still some landmarks you should recognise. It’s just a question of learning to see them, under all the ice.”
“It’s like the face of a friend under a funeral shroud.”
“There’s the curve of the Seine,” Auger said, pointing. “The Pont Neuf. Notre Dame and Ile de la Cité. Do you see it now?”