“We can’t just… give up,” I said, thinking of the man we had left behind on Burdock’s ship. “We owe it to Burdock, and Grisha, and Grisha’s people.”
“If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there,” Purslane said.
She was right. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
We landed on the island and reset our body clocks so that—to first approximation—we looked and felt as if we had just passed a restful, dream-filled night. That was the idea, at least. But when I conjured a mirror and examined my face in it I saw a quivering, ticlike tightness around the mouth. I tried a kinesic reset but it didn’t go away. When Purslane and I met alone on one of the high balconies, after breakfasting with a few other line members, I swear I saw the same tightness.
“How did it go?” I asked.
She kept her voice low. “It was as bad as I feared. They thought my strand was wonderful, darling. They won’t stop asking me about it. They hate me.”
“That’s sort of the reaction we were hoping for. The one thing no one will be wondering about is what you were up to last night. And we can be sure no one ducked out of the strand.”
“What about Burdock’s impostor? We didn’t know about him when we hatched this plan.”
“He still had to act like Burdock,” I said. “That means he’ll have needed to dream your strand.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You only have to get through this one day. It’s Squill’s strand tonight. He always gives good dream.”
Purslane looked at me pityingly. “Keep up, Campion. Squill’s been off-form for half a million years.”
Unfortunately, she was right about Squill. His strand consisted of endless visits to planets and artifacts left over from the Interstitial Uprising, overlaid with tedious, self-serving monologues of historical analysis. It was not the hit of the Reunion, and it did little to take the heat off Purslane. The next night wasn’t much better: Mullein’s strand was a workmanlike trudge through thirty cultures that had collapsed back to pre-industrial feudalism. “Mud,” I heard someone say dispiritedly, the day after. “Lots of… mud.”
The third night was a washout as well. That was when Asphodel would have delivered her strand, had she made it back to the Reunion. As was our custom, her contribution took the form of a compilation from her previous strands. It was all very worthy, but not enough to stop people talking about Purslane’s exploits.
Thankfully, things picked up for her on the fourth night. Borage’s strand detailed his heroic exploits in rescuing an entire planet’s worth of people following the close approach of a star to their Oort cloud. Borage dropped replicators on their nearest moon and converted part of it into a toroidal defence screen, shielding their planet from the infall of dislodged comets. Then he put the moon back together again and (this was a touch of genius, we had to admit) he wrote his signature on the back of the tide-locked moon in a chain of craters. It was flashy, completely contrary to any number of Line strictures, but it got people talking about Borage, not Purslane.
I could have kissed the egomaniacal bastard.
“I think we got away with that one,” I told Purslane, when she was finally able to move through the island without being pestered by an entourage of hangers-on.
“Good,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re any closer to finding out who killed Grisha’s people.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe there’s something in that data after all.”
“We’ve been through it with a fine-toothed comb.”
“But looking for the obvious signatures,” I said.
“There are too many gaps.”
“But maybe the gaps are telling us something. What caused the gaps?”
“Burdock being too cautious, throwing up his screens every time a speck of dust came within a light-second of his ship. His screens are sensor-opaque, at least in all the useful bands.”
“Correct. But some of those activations were probably necessary: there was a lot of rubble, after all.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Well, if there was a lot of debris that far out, there must have been even more closer to the action. Enough to trigger the screens of the other ship.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Me neither, until now. And the type of search we’ve been doing wouldn’t have picked up screen signatures. We need to slice the data up into short time windows and filter on narrow-band graviton pulses. Then we might find something.”
“I’m already on it,” Purslane said.
I closed my eyes and directed a command at my own ship. “Me too. Want to take a bet on who finds something first?”
“No point, Campion. I’d thrash you.”
She did, too. Her ship found something almost immediately, now that it had been given the right search criteria. “It’s still at the limits of detection,” she said. “They must have had their screens tuned right down, for just this reason. But they couldn’t run with them turned off.”
“Is this enough to narrow it down?”
“Enough to improve matters. The resonant frequency of the graviton pulse is at the low end: that means whoever’s doing this was throwing up a big screen.”
Like blowing a low note in a big bottle, rather than a high note in a small bottle.
“Meaning big ship,” I said.
“I’m guessing fifty or sixty kilometres at the minimum.” She looked at the parade of hanging ships. “That already narrows it down to less than a hundred.”
My ship pushed a memory into my head: a girl seated in the lotus position, with a golden, glowing cube rotating above her cupped palms. It meant that the ship had a result.
“Mine’s in,” I said, requesting a full summary. “My ship says seventy kilometres at the low end, with a central estimate around ninety. See: slow, but she gets there in the end.”
“My ship’s refined its analysis and come to more or less the same conclusion,” Purslane said. “That narrows it down even more. We’re talking about maybe twenty ships.”
“Still not good enough,” I said ruefully. “We can’t point fingers unless we have a better idea than that.”
“Agreed. But we have the drive flame as an additional constraint. Not all of those twenty ships even use visible thrust. And we also know who Burdock spoke to about the Great Work.”
I paused and let those numbers crunch against each other. “Better. Now we’re down to… what? Seven or eight ships, depending on where you draw the cut-off for the size estimate. Seven or eight names. One of which happens to be Fescue.”
“Still not good enough, though.”
I thought for a moment. “If we could narrow it down to one ship… then we’d be sure, wouldn’t we?”
“That’s the problem, Campion. We can’t narrow it down. Not unless we saw what those anti-collision fields looked like.”
“Exactly,” I said. “If we could get them to put up their screens… all we’d need to do is find the ship with the closest resonance to the one in Grisha’s system.”
“Wherever you’re taking this line of thought…” Purslane’s eyes flashed a warning at me.
“All I need to do is find a way to get them to trigger their shields. Full ship screens, of course.”
“It won’t work. If they get an inkling of what you’re up to, they’ll tune to a different resonance.”
“Then I’d better not give them much warning,” I said. “We’ll do it on Thousandth Night, just the way we said we would. They’ll be too distracted to plan anything in advance, and they won’t be expecting a last-minute surprise.”
“I like the way you say ‘we’.”