He decided, for all its faults, that he preferred his own Paris.
It was such a shame that he would never see it again.
THIRTY-SIX
“I appreciate that circumstances might be better,” said the man in the white captain’s uniform, resplendent with epaulettes and sleeve braids, “but I still want you to feel at home on this ship.”
Tunguska offered Floyd a cigar from a little wooden humidor. Floyd declined the cigar, but accepted a shot of whisky. They sat in upholstered armchairs in the luxuriously appointed parlour room of what was either an ocean liner, airship or transatlantic flying boat. Through the square windows, only a rain-washed darkness was visible, and the droning hum of engines was sufficiently nondescript that any of the possibilities could have applied. Ceiling fans stirred the air above them, rotating with laboured slowness.
Floyd drank half his whiskey. It wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but it still took the edge off his day. “What’s the news on Auger?” he asked.
“She’s stable,” Tunguska said. “The physical injury from the malfunctioning weapon was easily attended to, and ordinarily wouldn’t have caused any difficulties.”
“But on this occasion?”
“She went into shock. It’s quite possible that she would have died without intervention from Cassie’s machines. As it is, the machines have consolidated their hold on her. It’s like a coma.”
“How long is she going to be like that?”
“No telling, I’m afraid. Even when one of us willingly accepts to become the host to someone else’s machines, it’s still a process fraught with pitfalls. The kind of field transfer that Cassandra achieved down in Paris…” The captain jogged his cigar sideways, by way of illustration. “It would have been difficult even if Auger had been another Slasher, with years of preparation and the requisite structures already present in her head, ready to accept the new patterns. But Auger is only human. To compound matters, she was injured shortly after the takeover.”
“If Cassandra hadn’t taken her over, we’d both have died down there, wouldn’t we?”
“More than likely.” Tunguska helped himself to another cigar, snipping off the end with a clever little silver guillotine. He hadn’t smoked the first, or even appeared to grasp its basic function other than as a social accessory. “By the same token, Cassandra would have died without Auger as a host.”
“I don’t think she exactly volunteered for that job.”
“Trust me,” Tunguska said, “there would have been a degree of negotiation, no matter how fleeting. It isn’t etiquette to storm someone else’s head, no matter what the crisis.”
“What are Cassandra’s chances now?”
“Better than they would have been without a host. Her machines would have survived, but her personality would have begun to break up without the anchoring effect of a physical mind.”
“And now?”
“She has a fighting chance.” He stabbed the cigar forwards for emphasis. “Thanks to Auger.”
“I think Auger misjudged you,” Floyd said.
“She misjudged some of us. Concerning the others, she was—I regret to say—entirely correct in her opinion.”
Floyd had already told Tunguska all he could of the Slasher conspiracy. Doubtless he had some of the details wrong, and was vague about other things that Auger would have understood better. But Tunguska had nodded encouragingly, and had asked what seemed like more or less the right questions in the right order.
“What will happen now?” Floyd asked.
“With Auger? We’ll keep her under observation until we can identify a suitable new host for Cassandra’s machines. It’s not entirely clear what they’re doing to Auger, but I think we’d best leave them to their own devices for the time being.”
“But will she be all right?”
“Yes. Whether she will ever be quite the same, however… well, that’s a different question.”
Floyd cradled his drink and nodded. There was no point shooting the messenger, when Tunguska was doing the best he could. “Before we left Paris,” he said, “Cassandra said she’d given orders to intercept the escape vessel.”
“We received them,” Tunguska said.
“I was just wondering what the deal with that was. Did you boys make your kill?”
Tunguska glanced sideways, as if checking that no one else was in earshot. “Not exactly. It would seem that one of the interceptor ships was compromised. The one that had the best chance of catching the escape craft just… let it slip through the net.” He spread his fingers wide. “Unfortunate.”
“You can’t let that thing escape.”
“We did what we could, but there was another, faster ship waiting in translunar space, within one of our temporary sensor shadows. Very clever.”
“And this faster ship—how big is she?”
“Big enough to carry the antimatter device from the Twentieth Century Limited, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. “We can’t be certain that it’s the same craft that was involved in the hijacking, but given all the other factors… well, it seems more than likely. Incidentally, we’ve connected that ship to Niagara.”
“You have to stop him.”
“Tricky, unfortunately. His ship’s already on a high-burn trajectory, heading towards the Sedna portal.”
“So shut it down,” Floyd said.
“We’ve already tried that. It would appear that Niagara’s allies have control of the portal. We’ll have a military presence there within the day—enough to oust the aggressors—but not before that ship makes it through to the hyperweb.”
“And then we’ll have lost her,” Floyd said heavily.
Tunguska shifted in his seat, the leather groaning as he resettled himself. “Not necessarily. We at least know that the ship’s headed to the Sedna portal, and we know where that portal comes out. There’s a triad of portals at the far end—Niagara will have to take one of them. If we can keep sufficiently hard on his tail, we may be able to read the signatures of portal activation and determine which rabbit hole he’s bolted down. At that point we’ll risk entering the hyperweb link while another ship is still in transit. This is an unorthodox procedure even for Polity ships, and we’ll have to override safety controls on the portals to attempt it at all. But at the very least we’ll be able to follow Niagara part of the way, if nothing else.”
“Much good that’ll do.”
“It’s better than turning away now. Niagara’s craft is a big ship, fast in a straight-line dash, but it won’t be able to make portal-to-portal transitions as fast as we can. That’s about our only advantage.”
“And you’ve still no idea what corner of space Niagara’s headed to?”
“None at all,” Tunguska said. “That, unfortunately, is the bit we haven’t figured out yet. I don’t suppose you’ve had any bright ideas?”
“If you want bright ideas,” Floyd said, “you’ve definitely come to the wrong guy.”
When they had finished their drinks, Tunguska led Floyd through a warren of panelled companionways to his quarters. “It’s not much,” the Slasher said, opening the door to a bedroom Howard Hughes could have used for landing practice.