Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

Molinella took up the narrative. “The agent in this syringe reacts with those tagged neural structures, dismantling them. Again, the effects won’t be fatal, but you’ll remember nothing that Caliskan told you, and nothing that we’re about to tell you. In fact, you won’t retain a single memory from this entire period. Of course, we’ll only use it on you if we absolutely have to.”

“So if I screw up, or even get on your nerves, I’ll wake up with a large hole in my memory.”

“Which won’t be much help on the eve of a tribunal,” Molinella added. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, shall we?”

“Let’s,” Auger agreed, with exaggerated pleasantness. “But you still haven’t told me why I need to learn all this now.”

“The reason,” Molinella said patiently, “is that a day from now there will only be one person on this ship who knows anything about the contents of this briefing. And no, that doesn’t mean that Agent Ringsted and I are going anywhere.” He returned the syringe to its container and the container to his pocket, patting it gently. “If you see us outside this room once this briefing is over, treat us like any other pair of passengers. There’ll be no point in asking us further questions. We literally won’t remember you.”

“We’ll begin with the essentials,” Ringsted said. “The lights, please, Agent Molinella.”

Molinella stood up and dimmed the cabin lights.

“This is very cosy,” Auger began, but she had barely opened her mouth when patterns of light appeared on one blank wall of the cabin. She traced the rays back to a ruby-stoned ring on Molinella’s finger.

The patterns of light resolved into what she presumed was the seal of the Contingencies Board, accompanied by a warning that the ensuing information was covered by a level of security so chillingly high that Auger had never even heard of it.

“Aren’t I supposed to have signed something by now?” she asked.

Ringsted and Molinella looked at each other and laughed. “Just watch,” the woman said. “And save your questions for later.”

The security seal vanished, replaced by a picture of what Auger assumed to be the Milky Way galaxy, seen from above.

And then a man appeared, superimposed over the image of the galaxy. He wore a mid-grey suit with red cuffs and looked very athletic, his muscles straining against the seams of the fabric. He was very handsome and self-assured and Auger recognised him with a jolt.

It was Peter.

“Hello, Verity,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of apology and mild embarrassment. “I suspect this probably comes as something of a surprise. All I can do is apologise for the secrecy, and hope that you’ll forgive me—all of us, in fact—for the necessary subterfuge.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but Peter raised one palm and flashed a knowing smile. “No, don’t say anything. You’ll just have to listen to what I have to say and fill in the gaps yourself. I’ll do my best not to leave out anything critical.”

“Peter,” she said, unable to stop herself. “What are…”

Oblivious of her interruption, the recording continued. “Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, shall we? Everything you think you know about me is correct. I am in the diplomatic service, and I have just returned from an extended tour of the Polities, culminating with a trip into the hyperweb. That’s the public story, and it’s all true. But there’s more to it than that. I was also functioning as an undercover agent, gathering intelligence while playing the role of a sweet-talking airhead diplomat.” He smiled again, anticipating his ex-wife’s reaction to this news. “At, I should add, considerable risk to both myself and my friends amongst the Slashers. Things are getting very serious out there now, and spies aren’t looked upon too favourably. As it is, I’ve probably exhausted my usefulness. A pity, as I rather enjoyed being a spook.” Peter’s measured, actorly voice seemed to come from somewhere in the cabin, rather than the projector ring.

“I suppose I should get to the point, though. And the point, rather predictably, is the hyperweb itself.” Peter turned around and spread a hand across the face of the Milky Way, like a farmer casting seed. A bright web of lines appeared, transecting the spiral, and then the entire ensemble rotated to reveal a three-dimensional structure. “This is our best guess as to the extent of the hyperweb network as mapped by Slasher explorers,” he said. “It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a rendering like this. When explorers pop out of the far end of a given portal, unless they’ve exited near some unique, immediately recognisable landmark, like a supernova remnant or a super-massive outgassing star, there’s no way for them to calculate exactly where they are in the galaxy. All they can do is fix their position using reference points, for which purpose pulsars turn out to be rather more suitable than stars.”

“Who made it?” Auger muttered under her breath. “That’s all we really care about.”

Something twinkled in Peter’s eye as he turned back to the camera. How well he knew her, she thought, even now. “The one thing we don’t know is who built it. Neither do our friends in the Polities. Of course, there’s a great deal of guesswork, some of it rather compelling. The system is clearly of alien origin, but whoever built it—and presumably used it—doesn’t seem to be around any more.” Peter, Auger could tell, was rather enjoying this. From airhead, vain diplomat to airhead, vain spy: it really wasn’t much of a leap. Then she rebuked herself for her snideness, conjecturing that Peter would almost certainly have been executed (or something worse) had his duplicity become known to his Slasher hosts.

She felt a flicker of admiration: quite unlike her, and most especially so where her ex-husband was concerned.

“What we suspect is this,” Peter continued. “The system is old. It’s been here for hundreds of millions of years, at the very least. It may be nearly as old as the solar system. Most of the portals that the explorers have found are anchored to solid bodies: terrestrial planets, moons, large planetoids. The Sedna portal is a classic example, and as far as the Slashers know it’s the only active portal in our system.”

Something made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It was the way he said “as far as the Slashers know.”

Peter tuned back to the representation of the Milky Way, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “We still have no idea how the damned thing functions. Even the Slashers are in the dark on that one, despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise. They have some theories about metric engineering—triple-bounded hypervacuum solutions to the Krasnikov equations, that kind of thing. But really, if we’re all honest with ourselves, they’re pissing in the wind.” He tapped a finger against his upper lip. “But let’s give them credit where it’s due. They found a way to use it. They grafted some of their technology on to the portal mechanisms, found a way to manipulate the throat geometry so they could squeeze a ship through in more or less one piece. You have to admire them for that. Like it or not, they’re way ahead of us.”

Peter laced his hands behind his back, standing with his legs spaced slightly apart. “Now let’s talk hard numbers. How far have they reached? What have they actually found out there?”

Auger sat forward, sensing that some kind of climax was imminent.

“We still don’t know exactly when they found the Sedna portal,” Peter said. “Our best guess is that it was somewhere around fifty years ago, between twenty-two ten and twenty-two fifteen. Since then they’ve surveyed—or at least visited—somewhere in the region of fifty to sixty thousand solar systems. Pretty impressive, by anyone’s measure. There’s just one nagging little problem: they haven’t actually found anything to justify all this effort.”