“What do you know about Phobos?” Aveling asked. He sounded as if his voice box had been stitched back together from tatters, reconstructed like a shredded document.
“I know to keep away. Other than that, not much. Mars is basically civilian, but you military boys have the moons sewn up pretty tight.”
“The moons offer the perfect strategic platform for defending the planet against Slasher incursions. Given the existing security measures already in place, they’re also a perfect venue for conducting any sensitive business that might come our way.”
“Do I count as sensitive business?”
“No, Auger. You count as a pain in the ass. If there’s one thing I hate more than civilians, it’s having to be nice to them.”
“You mean this is you being nice?”
They led Auger to a small, windowless chamber with a couple of closed doors leading away into other rooms. The room contained three seats, a low table and a flagon of water accompanied by two glasses. A grey cabinet occupied one wall, crammed with magnetic tapes in white plastic spools, with a p-mail hopper set next to it.
They left her alone. Auger poured herself a glass of water and sipped at it experimentally. She had finished half the glass when one of the other doors whisked open and a short, tough-looking woman entered. She had an efficient, low-maintenance bob of straw-coloured hair, framing a face that might have been pretty except for the scowl that seemed moulded into it. She wore coveralls with many pockets and loops, the top zipped low enough to reveal a grubby white T-shirt beneath. Quick, intelligent eyes appraised Auger. The woman took the stub of a cigarette from her lips and flicked it into one corner of the room.
“Verity, right?”
“Yes,” she said cautiously.
The woman leaned down, rubbed one hand against her thigh and then offered it to Auger. “Maurya Skellsgard. Have those pricks been treating you all right?”
“Well…” Auger began, suddenly lost for words.
Skellsgard sat down on one of the other seats and helped herself to some water. “What you have to understand about those people—and believe me, it took me a while to arrive at this conclusion—is that you’re better with them than without them. Aveling is a cold-hearted son of a bitch, but he’s our cold-hearted son of a bitch.”
“Are you military?” Auger asked.
Skellsgard downed her glass of water in one gulp, then poured another. “Hell no—I’m just a snotty-nosed academic. Until a year ago I was happily minding my own business trying to come up with a mathematical treatment of pathological matter.” Anticipating Auger’s question she continued, “The normal mathematics of wormhole mechanics says you need something called exotic matter to enlarge and stabilise a wormhole throat. That’s matter with negative energy density—already seriously weird stuff. But as soon as we got our hands on a few crumbs of intelligence about the hyperweb, it became clear that this wasn’t really a wormhole in the classical sense. Pretty soon we realised we needed something several degrees weirder than exotic matter to make it hang together. Hence… pathological matter.” She shrugged. “We’re physicists. You have to allow us our little jokes, no matter how piss-poor they are.”
“It’s all right,” Auger said. “You should hear some of the jokes archaeologists think are funny.”
“I guess we’re both in the same boat, then: a pair of pain-in-the-ass civilian experts Aveling has no choice but to work with.”
Auger smiled. “That guy just loves civilians, doesn’t he?”
“Oh yes, can’t get enough of ’em.” Skellsgard emptied her glass a second time. Her knuckles were barked and grazed, dark crescents of grime caked under her very short fingernails. “I heard about the tribunal. Sounds as if they’ve got you by the short and curlies.”
“I deserve it. I nearly killed a boy.”
Skellsgard waved that away. “They’ll fix him, if his family’s as rich and influential as I heard they are.”
“Well, I hope they do fix him. He wasn’t a bad kid.”
“What about you? I heard that you’re married to Peter Auger.”
“Was married to him,” Auger corrected.
“Hmm. Please don’t tell me Mr. Perfect is really a pig behind closed doors. I don’t think I could stand having my illusions shattered.”
“No,” Auger said, wearily. “Peter’s a decent enough man. Not perfect… but not bad, either. I was the problem, not him. I let my work take over.”
“I hope it was worth it. What else? Any kids?”
“A boy and a girl I love very much, but who I don’t make enough time for.”
Skellsgard looked sympathetic. “I guess that must have simplified things when it came to Caliskan’s nice little offer.”
“They’d have thrown away the key,” Auger said, “put me somewhere like Venus Deep. By the time I got to see my kids again they’d have barely recognised me. At least this way I have a chance of coming through this with my life at least vaguely intact.” She shifted in her seat, uneasy about discussing her private life. “Of course, it might help if I knew what the hell it is I’m supposed to do.”
Skellsgard regarded her shrewdly. “What have they told you so far?”
“They told me about the Slasher intelligence on the ALS objects,” Auger replied.
“Good. That’s a start, at least.”
“They said they’d found a way into one. They also told me I was supposed to go inside. I guess Phobos has something to do with that.”
“More than a little. About two years ago, the USNE found an inactive portal right here, buried under a couple of kilometres of Phobos topsoil. That was when I was drafted on to the team. I’m the closest thing to an expert on hyperweb travel outside of the Polities. Which, I hasten to add, isn’t saying much. But at least now we have a real one to play with.”
“And you’ve made it work?”
“As long as you don’t mind a bumpy ride.”
“And the Slashers still know nothing about it? How come they didn’t find it when they were running Phobos?”
“They didn’t look deep enough. We only stumbled on it by accident, when we were excavating a new living chamber.”
Auger suddenly felt very awake and very alert. “I want to see it.”
“Good. That was sort of the idea of bringing you here in the first place.” Skellsgard hitched up a frayed sleeve to glance at her watch. “We’d better get a move on. There’s an incoming transport due any minute.”
“I still don’t know what Paris has to do with all this.”
“We’ll come to that,” Skellsgard said.
The chamber was large and very nearly spherical, the incurving walls gouged and blasted from coal-dark Phobos core material and then sprayed with some kind of plastic on to which platforms, lighting rigs and catwalks had been bolted or glued. Occupying much of the interior was a glass sphere about half as wide as the chamber, supported in a complex cradle of bee-striped struts and shock-absorbing pistons. Catwalks, caged ladders, pipes and conduits wrapped the sphere in a gristle of metal and plastic. White-clad technicians perched at various locations around the sphere, tapping equipment into open access ports. With their headphones, goggles and gloves they looked like safecrackers engaged in some spectacular heist.
“We’re just in time,” Skellsgard said, consulting an instrument-crammed panel bolted to one bar of the viewing cage in which they stood. “Transport hasn’t come through yet, but we’re already picking up bow-shock distortion ahead of it.” On the panel, the needles on numerous analogue dials were twitching into the red. “Looks like it was a rough ride. Hope they packed their barf bags.”