Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

“Keep an eye on it,” she said. “I don’t want that damned thing closing on us while we’re still inside.”

“I’ll have a better idea of the closure rate in a little while,” Tunguska said.

“Squeeze as much speed out of this thing as you can. Then we can all go home.”

For the next hour, they pushed deeper into the ALS, following the lone echo of Niagara’s shuttle. All attempts at communication were ignored, although that did not stop Tunguska from making repeated offers of negotiation. He was, he said, prepared to consider any proposal that would stop the deployment of Silver Rain. But no acknowledgement of his messages ever returned.

Despite the urgent need to intercept the shuttle before it reached Earth’s atmosphere, Auger could not help marvelling at the experience of being inside the ALS sphere and seeing her world as it should have been. This was an Earth that had never known nuclear war, or runaway climatic catastrophe, or smart weather, or a Nanocaust. The sight of it made her want to weep. No image had ever come close to the heartbreaking beauty of this small blue world, a beauty all the more acute now that she knew how exquisitely fragile it was. It was the beauty of a butterfly’s wing.

E2 hung at the exact geometric centre of the ALS. Orbiting it, or at least moving in a convincing simulacrum of Newtonian motion, was what appeared to be an identical copy of the Moon. Auger presumed it had been captured in the same quantum snapshot as E2, but it would take close-up investigation to verify this. The Moon could just as easily be a mocked-up representation, imbued with enough detail to fool surface observers and enough gravity to lift tides on the Earth. The remaining contribution to the tides—the solar component—must have been achieved through some deft trickery of gravitational manipulation—invisible small orbiting masses, perhaps—for there was no sun. Instead, there was a golden-yellow disc of exactly the right temperature and apparent brightness shining out from the inner surface of the sphere. But it was only designed to look convincing from the vantage point of the Earth’s surface, and close to they saw how its shape was distorted by the sphere’s concavity.

“There’s your source of solar-spectrum radiation,” Auger said. “From outside the sphere we were seeing its light, leaking through the hole. How long do you think it would have taken Floyd’s people to figure that out?”

“Even without spaceflight, they’d have begun to notice some puzzling things about it within a few decades,” Tunguska said. “In our timeline, a great deal of attention was focused on measuring the circularity of the solar disk, since it turned out to be a way of discriminating between competing cosmological models. With that kind of attention, the illusion probably couldn’t have been sustained for long.”

“Or maybe they’d just pick another theory,” Auger said.

“Perhaps.”

“Anyway, Floyd’s world hasn’t achieved the science ours did even by nineteen fifty-nine.”

“They could quickly make up lost ground,” Tunguska said. “And then they might put up too much of a fight if someone attempted to do what Niagara is attempting now.”

“Which means that whoever was working behind the scenes had serious co-ordination,” Auger said. “Enough to change the outcome of the Second World War before it became truly global. And whoever did that is still down there.”

“You think they deserve retribution, don’t you?” Tunguska asked.

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“They stopped a war in which millions died in our timeline, Auger. No Final Solution, no Russian Front, no Hiroshima, Nagasaki.”

“They didn’t stop that war out of the goodness of their hearts, Tunguska. They stopped it because it interfered with their plans for global genocide. And now I think they should pay for it.”

“Well, we’re almost within attack range, if that’s any consolation. That little shuttle is having to decelerate in preparation for atmospheric flight. If it released Silver Rain at this speed, even the ablative jackets wouldn’t protect the nanomachinery at the heart of the weapon. There’s some uncertainty, but I can begin attempting the strike within three minutes.”

“What about the missiles you promised us?” she asked.

“Nearly ready. Patience, please.” She heard a note of diffidence in his voice. “Concerning the other matter…”

“What other matter?”

“The healing of the wound. I’ve been keeping a close eye on it and I can now state with some authority that—”

“Is there still time for us to get out?”

“Yes, allowing for—”

“I don’t need anything else to worry about, Tunguska.”

“Good. In which case I won’t mention the bleed-drive.”

Tunguska was as good as his word. Barely two minutes later, Auger felt the slight change in the ship’s attack posture that indicated it was bringing its beam weapons to bear. When they powered up and fired, discharging in timed salvos, she felt the surging and ebbing of massive accumulators somewhere in the ship’s gut.

“How long can we sustain this fire rate?” she asked.

“For as long as it takes. Energy isn’t a problem.”

The shuttle had anticipated a beam-weapon strike—Tunguska said this was almost inevitable—but it was limited in its defensive options. It could drop reflective chaff by shedding discrete layers of its hull, but not indefinitely. It could change its course randomly, making it more difficult for the beams to lock on to the bright aura of its drive flame—which was pointed away from them now, but still visible against the background of E2 and the inner surface of the ALS sphere—but every course correction cost it some of its hard-won lead. For the pilot of the shuttle, it was the trickiest of trade-offs to balance.

“Whatever Niagara does,” Tunguska said, “it will hurt him in the long run. All my simulations now point to a successful interception before he’s within drop-range of the atmosphere.”

There was something about the cocksure confidence of that statement that gave Auger goose pimples. It was like an invitation to fate.

That was when the bleed-drive chose to fail again.

She felt the ship stall in its chase, suddenly losing ground on its victim. The drive stuttered, pushing hard and then cutting out. The cushioning embrace of the ship did its best to smooth over the sudden changes in acceleration, but Auger still felt several lapses in consciousness as the blood in her brain sloshed around like mud in a bucket.

“Tunguska…” she gasped, when she was able, “maybe you want to rethink…”

The ship was in free fall. The drive had died completely, shut down by emergency control systems before instabilities opened a drooling mouth in the flesh of space itself.

Over the next several minutes, repair estimates began to trickle in. The drive was still fixable, but the patches put in place since the missile attack had now outlived their usefulness. It would take many hours before even a moderate push of one gee could be achieved.

Sensing that its charges no longer needed to be buffered against the jolts and swerves of combat, the ship relinquished its hold on Floyd, Auger and Tunguska, the white cocoons collapsing back into the familiar forms of table, chairs, floor, walls and ceiling.

“I hope,” Auger said, “that you have a backup plan, Tunguska. Because otherwise we’re screwed.”

Tunguska, to his credit, still managed to retain a credible gloss of authority. “I’ve already reviewed the options,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear that there is still a way of intercepting that spacecraft.”

“The missiles?” Floyd asked.

“No.” He gave a self-critical grimace. “Well, yes. But it’s not quite that simple.”