Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

“Warhead self-detonated. This isn’t good.”

“Second fish?”

“Homing. Closing on three hundred klicks.”

The moving smudge of Niagara’s ship suddenly reversed its direction of thrust. Even without magnification, Floyd saw the craft visibly alter its crawl across the backdrop of the ocean. The great sea was as bright and clear and smooth as a marble, clouds and islands dappled across its unblemished face with painterly precision, in broken lines and elegant curves. It was his world, as no one had ever seen it before, and it was enough to make him gasp.

He was sorry. It was a wonderful, glorious sight, but there just wasn’t time to enjoy the view.

Maybe next time.

“Bastard’s slowing,” Auger said.

“He’s ready.”

“Two hundred and fifty klicks. Missile slowing.”

“Slowing?”

“The missile’s learning from its mate, trying not to make the same mistake.”

“I really hope it knows what it’s doing.”

“Two hundred klicks… still slowing. Maybe it’s malfunctioned. Oh shit I hope it hasn’t malfunctioned.”

“If it has, we need to think about ramming with this thing.”

Auger looked back at him. He couldn’t tell whether her expression was impressed or horrified. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’ve already got the intercept programmed in.”

“Nice of you to tell me.”

“I’d have got round to it.” She blinked, started to say something. Floyd could almost feel the torrent of numbers sluicing through her head.

“The fish, Auger?”

“Slowing to one hundred kilometres… No, wait.” She hesitated. “Wait. It’s sprinting again.”

“Keep talking.”

“It’s too late. It’s not going to…”

The second warhead detonated. The same pinprick of light, swelling in size and brightness… but this time it kept on swelling. Floyd jammed his eyes shut and still that did no good, the light pushing through his skin, through his bones, cleansing every thought in his head save the acknowledgement of its own intolerable luminosity, like a proclamation from God.

And then a slow, stately fade, and then nothing.

Just empty skies.

“There were no dampeners on that detonation,” Auger said, her voice distant and disconnected, like someone speaking in a dream. “It made no effort to limit its blast. It must have been confident it could make the kill.”

“There’s nothing out there.”

“I know.”

“That means we did it,” Floyd said. “It means we saved the Earth.”

“One of them,” she corrected.

“One’s enough for today. Let’s not get greedy.”

It was daylight over the Pacific, and therefore night over Paris. Clouds wrapped the city, fog choking its streets with cold, constricting coils. The shuttle dropped through the weather like a stone through smoke, conserving fuel, retarding its descent with the minimum expenditure of thrust. Closer to the ground, it reconfigured its flight surfaces and became passably aerodynamic. Hypersonic, then supersonic, then subsonic, until the shuttle lowered itself through the main swell of clouds into a gloomy window of clear air. Districts of the city, picked out in the lights of buildings, streetlamps and moving cars, poked through the low quilt of fog. Here the swell of Montmartre and the Sacré-Coeur; there the dark ribbon of the Seine; there the glowing carnival of the Champs-Elysées, like a river of light.

“Look,” Auger said, with a childlike glee. “There’s the Eiffel Tower. It’s still here, still intact. It’s still standing.”

“Everything’s still here,” Floyd said.

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It grows on you.”

“We never deserved this second chance,” she said.

“But sometimes you get what you don’t deserve.”

The console chimed. Auger strained forward and answered the call.

“Tunguska here,” they heard. “I must offer my congratulations. We saw the kill strike even at a distance of three light-seconds.”

Auger let him finish speaking before asking, “The spore? Could Silver Rain have survived the blast?”

His reply crawled back six seconds later. “Unlikely.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I hope I am, too.” He sounded more amused than alarmed, as if he had exhausted any final reserves of worry. “I suppose at this point, all one can realistically do is hope for the best. Are you both intact?”

Auger flashed Floyd a glance. “As intact as we’ll ever be.”

“Good. You did well. I’m afraid, though, that there isn’t much time to dwell on your success. The wound is closing fast. Our bleed-drive is a little unsteady, but we can begin to limp our way to the exit.”

“Go, then,” Auger said.

“The thing is,” Tunguska said, “I was rather hoping you’d come with us. There’s also the small matter of you now being Cassandra’s custodian, and I would like nothing better than for her to return to Polity space.”

Floyd leaned over, straining against his harness. “She’s keeping that appointment, Tunguska.”

“Floyd…” Auger said.

“Start your limp home,” Floyd told Tunguska, “but be prepared to pick up this shuttle at the last minute. As soon as Auger’s dropped me off, she’ll be on her way back to you immediately.”

“Telemetry suggests you have sufficient fuel,” Tunguska said guardedly. “ If you begin your return journey practically as soon as you land. If you delay, there are no guarantees. I hope I make myself clear.”

“In Technicolor,” Floyd said.

It was a strip of vacant ground between two abandoned churches, somewhere south of the Longchamp Hippodrome. If anyone had seen the shuttle lower down through the fog, screaming out of the night on vertical thrust, they had elected not to stay around for the end of the performance. Perhaps a few vagrants, drunkards or gypsies had seen it arrive… before scratching their heads and deciding that this was really not the kind of thing they needed to be involved in, especially given the city authority’s usual attitude to people poking their noses where they weren’t welcome. Whatever it was, they would have concluded, it was very unlikely to be there in the morning.

Now the ship sat on its lowered undercarriage, gleaming in reflected lamplight like a chromed egg, the fog swirling around its hot exhaust ports in curious little eddies, while the ship ticked and cooled like an old oven. The flying-horse logo of Pegasus Intersolar seemed to strain towards the sky, anxious not to spend a minute longer on the ground than necessary.

Floyd and Auger stood under the ship, at the base of its lowered access ramp.

“Did you remember the strawberries?” Auger asked.

Floyd held up the little bag. “As if I’d forget.”

“You never did tell me who they were for. Or the UR you persuaded Tunguska to give you.”

Floyd fingered the little glass vial in his pocket. It contained a harmless-looking silvery-grey fluid, tasteless and odourless. But slipped into the right person’s diet, it would infect their body with a billion tireless machines, which would identify and cure almost any illness known to Slasher science. It was bottled immortality.

Well, not quite. Tunguska had quailed at the thought of giving him the kind of full-strength UR that would keep someone alive for ever. At the time he had handed over the gift, they were, after all, still trying to prevent someone else from introducing a plague of tiny machines into E2. The UR would heal someone of any illnesses they had at the moment of ingestion, and the tiny machines would endure long enough to steer them to full health and through a period of grace thereafter. But then they would quietly disassemble, flushing themselves from the person’s body as so much microscopic metallic dust. That person might go on to live for many more years, but by the same token they might fall ill of some other complaint a month later. If they did, the machines would not be around to save them a second time.