M. Harrison - THE CENTAURI DEVICE

Deeper in, parts of the graveyard were still fun of a white, fitful glare, a deceptive and piscine motion, as a few bolt-shaped UASR(N) cruisers slugged it grimly out with IWG. They were outnumbered and unformated, but they seemed to be fully occupying the Fleet — no vacuum commandos were out, communications silence were being observed. Truck tried frequency after frequency, found interference breaking like waves on a beach strewn with smashed and rusting armor at the candle-end of time. He picked up a few desultory syllables of a common Morphian dialect (enough at least to tell him who had done the dying out there), a moan, gunfire scissoring open a hull, distant, decaying, obsessive.

Ella Speed nosed on through a dream of violence. None of the combatants spotted her. Behind her, quite unaware of each other, the cruisers Solomon and Nasser skulked the graveyard like two pike after the same minnow. Truck never suspected he might be followed: perhaps he was too occupied by the young gunner from Parrot who had attached himself to the boat, tumbling lazily about her bow in some gravitational eddy, beckoning Truck and Tiny on with one stiff arm as if inviting them out there to share his cold peace. His intestines, covered in a hoarfrost of condensation, were spilling infinitely slowly from his ruptured pressure suit, but his insignia were polished and bright.

Truck couldn't tell which side he was on.

Centauri captured them, filled the screens like an accusation.

Only one planet was ever killed -

At the climax, the absolute fervid crux of MIEV bombardment, when defense is a rag of memory in a hot wind and the sky shakes with ionization, much of the surface water is stripped off the crust as 'live' or superheated steam. The target vanishes under a cloudbelt several miles deep, there is a corresponding radical increase in its albedo — a last despairing heliograph of pain -

At five o'clock in the afternoon, July fourth 2180 AD, the shroud covered Centauri and, as a good shroud should, spared the living the ultimate patient indictment of the dead. The General Gaws of the day turned from their bomb-room repeaters, satisfied, shrugging and yawning — perhaps even a little bored — and certainly wondering how they might turn one half of Earth into the same sort of mess without actually damaging the other beyond habitable minimums laid down by their biologists. Ever since that merciful occlusion, Centauri had been a rubbish heap smelling of wet ashes.

By the time Dr Grishkin, under the auspices of God and a well-known Galactic encyclopedia, came to sink his first bore in search of the bunkers, a lukewarm rain had been falling evenly over the new landscape for almost two hundred years. He found a planetary fen drained by vast slow rivers: shallow, stagnant meres, inconceivable acreages of mud-flat and salting — and every cubic foot of water filled with corrupt organic matter caught at some point between decay and dissolution, cloudy, brackish with old death. None of the continents resembled anything he found on the pre-Genocide maps: finally, it was beneath the human and animal silts of the estuaries and deltaic fans that he discovered water percolating through the slaughtered regolith in small secret streams, to the abandoned redoubts miles beneath.

There, he dug.

If he was a little mad to begin with, Centauri helped him further along the way. Nothing was alive there, unless you count the echoes of water. Water: and the wind, mumbling thick-lipped between the blasted, mysterious columns of masonry that poked up through the silt like fingers searching the air for the source of their long pain. In continual twilight, corpse-lights shone. The sky was green and gray, luminous with radio-decay products. Wind walking in a rubbish heap; dead lights and water; something was haunting Centauri, but it wasn't the Centaurans -

They were underfoot, even their due corruption suspended for some other time.

John Truck brought his boat home along a line of lavender flame, aiming for Grishkin's fifteen-figure reference. She settled steaming and contracting on a mudbank. Around her stretched the flat, unmarked flood-plain of some vast estuary off to the east. Nothing moved, nothing cried out or ran away. For a moment, the rain had stopped, but there was nothing out here to notice.

After a few minutes, Truck and Tiny emerged from the cargo bay done up in white carbon-fibre helmets, lead-glass goggles, and respirators like squat black snouts. Dark, shiny jumper-suits covered their bodies, which were full of anti-radiation drugs (prescribed) and amphetamine (unprescribed) from Ella 's overstocked medical chest. Truck's Opener cloak flapped drearily in the wind. They stood around in silence, shuffling their feet and gawping at the inhospitable landscape; pointed in different directions and waved their arms at one another; then set off along the indistinct banks of a clogged watercourse.

Despite the amphetamine, Truck became quickly depressed — at first disturbed, then obsessed by the puzzling, fibrous consistency of the mud. When a tangle of thin bones, eroded and luminescent white, caught at his feet, he measured his length in the stuff. Thrashing about with revulsion, he kicked Tiny — who was irritably attempting to help — in the chest. 'Do it yourself, then.' He wiped himself off. Down there were nests of papery, corroded steel, lumps of stone, objects. He'd come up holding the broken handle of some piece of domestic apparatus, bright blue. He shuddered and threw it away. Tiny wasn't speaking to him.

It was a miserable excursion. Panting and withdrawn, they struggled upstream, looking for a sign: which they eventually found in the shape of Omega Shaft. By then, Truck was convinced by some half-dream that everything was still going on down there in the silt . He grew fearful that some initiation lay before him, some induction — inevitable by right of birth — into the strange decomposed half-life of his mother's race, an existence carried on in terms he couldn't quite imagine, in smashed houses among bits and travesties of human paraphernalia accumulated without logic after their drift down the watercourse.

Hidden in a freak fold of land, the Omega Shaft complex of buildings — from which Dr Grishkin had begun the excavation which was to lead to the discovery of the Centauri Device — was a sprawl of massive pre-cast concrete sheds, dull in color and filmed with an unpleasant moisture. They served to house the generators, air-exchangers, and lift motors of the shaft, a collection of machinery that in operation caused the ground to vibrate palpably. It was surrounded by a chainlink fence into which was set a military checkpoint — a later addition of General Alice Gaw's.

Subsonics from the deeper levels of the bore itself trembled in Truck's bones as he stood with Tiny just beyond the reach of the arc-lights that surrounded the compound, sweating in the heat from the nearest extractor outlet. A small, stubby ship was parked on its tail in the gloom a hundred yards from the checkpoint: hull scorched and deformed by a misjudged high speed re-entry, venturis sunk fifteen feet into the ooze, it wouldn't be leaving that place for some time. It was empty, and a recent, hasty paint job hadn't obscured its Opener livery. It had the air of something abandoned by an owner whose mind was occupied elsewhere.

Truck hung about indecisively for a while, human silt drying and flaking off his coverall. The gates (and indeed the whole complex) seemed to be deserted. The Fleet police weren't in evidence, and neither could he detect any sign of military activity. He turned to the dim, snouted little figure by his side, and pantomimed an advance.

'I'm not going down there, mate — '

'Yes, you bloody are.'

Tiny dragged his feet. In silence and moving slowly, like the performers of some decadent choreography rehearsing without audience, they made it to the checkpoint. No one greeted them.