“But we’ve been extracting records ever since we opened the Phobos portal,” Auger said. “That’s hundreds of thousands of recordings.”
“It may not matter,” Tunguska said. “You’ll remember that Niagara was extremely keen to get his hands on the final shipment. It could be that the earlier shipments contained data that was in some way provisional or flawed. They may only just have got their antenna into a properly functioning state. Allowing time to combine the data strands from all three spheres… and to imprint the signals on to these recordings… and to distribute the recordings in such a way that they would fall plausibly into your hands… well, I have no difficulty believing that the final cargo was the most significant.”
“Then we have a chance,” Auger said. “If you can decode that embedded signal, of course.”
“I don’t anticipate huge difficulties,” Tunguska said. “Remember, it would have taken significant computing power to effect a complex encryption, which would have been as problematic for them as interpreting the data on E2 in the first place. I don’t believe the encoding will tax us.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m already merging and processing the data,” he said. “I’ve assigned a significant portion of my ship’s computing resources to the effort. Of course, we could still be chasing shadows—”
“We’re not,” Floyd said firmly.
With a certain reverence, Tunguska slipped the Louis Armstrong record back into its sleeve. “We’re nearly ready for full bleed-drive thrust. We’ll continue on our present heading, taking the most likely portal. Once in transit, we’ll have eight hours to crack the numbers and determine the position of the ALS. It will be difficult—it may even be impossible—but at least it gives us the hope of one more lead against Niagara.”
“You have your uses after all, Floyd,” Auger said.
“Don’t thank me,” Floyd said. “Thank the music. I always said it would save the world.”
THIRTY-NINE
It was a little-travelled arm of the hyperweb, one that had seen only sporadic traffic since the Slashers had begun to map the network’s further fringes. Five portals lay close together in a loose, drifting quincunx, separated by no more than a light-second of interstellar space. There were no suns here, no worlds, no rogue moons—not even the rocky fragments of them, unborn or shattered. Only the spired husks of five large comets, dry and dead for billions of years, each of which formed an anchor for a single unmanned portal.
But there was something else. Sensors groped for it in the darkness. It was unthinkably dark, illuminated only by starlight. It was also unthinkably huge: as wide across as the sun itself, with room to spare.
“Are we too late?” Auger said as Tunguska assembled a composite picture of the ALS on one of the walls.
“I don’t know. If my timing’s correct, Niagara should only have achieved portal egress… ninety minutes ago.”
“Then why don’t we see him?”
“There’s a faint thrust trail,” Tunguska said. “It suggests that Niagara’s already passed around the limb of the ALS. Again—assuming that the usual margins were ignored—he would have had just enough time to do that.”
“So follow him.”
“We are. Unfortunately, the bleed-drive needs further attention. This is the maximum acceleration we can sustain.”
The composite image of the ALS gained detail by the second, as Tunguska’s sensors teased more structure out of the darkness. Complex statistical methods squeezed the maximum information from meagre data. Auger recalled the briefing she had been given aboard the Twentieth Century Limited. Peter’s schematic representation had been tinted a dull blue-grey, but there was not enough light here to trigger the eye’s colour receptors. Tunguska’s schematic ignored the faint ambient illumination and painted the entire structure a flat grey, with no shadowing except that necessary to suggest the platelike surface texturing. In Peter’s overview, that platelike structure had made her think of something viral or crystalline, but now the hide of the ALS reminded her of some magnified view of human or animal skin, with a rough hint of irregularity and—here and there—signs where healing processes had not quite erased the evidence of former injuries. It was as if the ALS had been grown, rather than constructed.
Perhaps it had. No one had the slightest idea where the raw materials had come from. Maybe there had once been an entire solar system in this pocket of space, which had then been efficiently strip-mined to create the hard, thin shell of the sphere. Or perhaps the necessary mass-energy had been conjured out of nothing, in some vastly more sophisticated version of the principle that underpinned the bleed-drive.
Auger looked at Floyd, wondering how he was taking all of this. “Not many people get to see this,” she said. “If that’s any consolation.”
“I could have lived without it,” he said. “Somehow I rather liked the idea that I could trust the night sky, or that the Sun was real.”
“Your world is real, Floyd, and so are you. Nothing else matters.”
“I’m picking something up,” Tunguska said with quiet urgency. “It could be Niagara.”
“An echo from his ship?” Auger asked.
“Not close enough for that,” he said, “but there’s a moving patch of enhanced brightness on the skin of the ALS. It’s probably the reflection from his drive. He’s doing his best to hide it, but there’s only so much he can do if he still wants to steer.”
“Remind me: do we have any more missiles in this thing?” Auger asked.
“None. I’ve instructed the factories to make more, but I can’t afford to divert too much repair capacity away from the bleed-drive. I think we’ll have to rely on beams, at least until later.”
“Are we in firing range?”
“Not yet. We’ll have to close quite a bit of distance for that.”
“Can we get close enough?” Auger asked.
“Not if Niagara maintains his latest heading. But that reflection signature suggests that he’s slowing down, relative to the ALS.”
“Why would he do that?” asked Floyd.
“Probably because he’s ready to deploy the Molotov device,” Tunguska said.
“You have to hit him before he has a chance.”
“Are you sure you want that, Floyd? If that antimatter bomb doesn’t blow a hole in the ALS, you won’t be going home.”
“Just do it,” Floyd said. “Worry about my return ticket later. A few hours ago I wasn’t even expecting to live this long.”
“I don’t think any of us were,” Tunguska replied. His forehead creased, revealing some glint of interest in the storm of numbers flooding his head. “Ah. Now this may be significant.” He looked around at their expectant faces. “I have some refined data on that reflection pattern. It looks as if there are two sources of light, rather than one.”
Auger wondered if she understood him. “Two thrust beams?”
“Yes—but far enough apart that they can’t be associated with the same craft. It looks as if Niagara’s deployed a smaller ship from the larger one. We should have a hard echo any moment now…” He pressed a thick finger against one side of his temple.
“That makes sense,” Auger said. “His main ship is just large enough to carry the Molotov device, right?”
“So it would seem.”
“He’s probably going to plough it into the ALS like a battering ram. Too much trouble to extract the antimatter core, when he already has a ready-made delivery system.” She pushed forward in her seat, ignoring the tension in her back. “The other ship must be a shuttle, something with enough range to make it to E2.”