“It’s dying,” Bella surmised.
“Running down. We could keep tapping power for decades, but sooner or later there won’t be anything left. That’s what happens to all the moons that arrive in the Structure, in the end: they run dry like old batteries. But in Structure terms, we’ve only just arrived. Our moon still has a pretty hefty charge inside it.”
“Enough to do what?”
“If the Whisperer’s intelligence is good, the Musk Dogs may be trying to tap all that remaining energy in one hit.”
“I don’t get it. Why —”
“To blow a hole in the Structure,” Chisholm said quietly. “To blast a way out to the external universe.”
Bella shivered at the implications. “Can it really be done?”
“It’s been done, according to Structure lore, but only once. And nothing was ever heard from the culture that escaped.”
“At least they tried. At least they didn’t accept being penned up in this thing for the rest of time.”
“It may not be that simple. None of the cultures has any firm data on conditions beyond the Structure. Until you get out there, you won’t know what you’re going to find. A cage can also be form of protection.”
“Those who want to stay would always have that option,” Bella said.
“Remember what I said: nothing was ever heard from the escapees again.”
“I don’t get it. If someone already blew a hole in the wall, why can’t the Musk Dogs use that one?”
“The walls heal,” Chisholm said. “After a week or two, they’re as good as new.”
Conflicting emotions wracked Bella. She liked the idea of finding a way out of the Structure, even if it cost them Janus, but not the fact that she had no control over whether or not this happened. “What would it take for the Musk Dogs to achieve this?”
“They’d have to reach deep into Janus, access the right machine layers. The Musk Dogs aren’t clever enough to figure out what to do on their own, but they’ll have had help from the Uncontained.”
“How long do we have?”
“No guessing. Could be hours, days, or even longer.”
“And then Janus goes nova.”
“Something like that. Needless to say, the Musk Dogs won’t want to be inside this chamber when that happens. They’ll use their passkey to seal themselves into the next chamber.”
“We, on the other hand, will die.”
“If we’re still here when it happens, I wouldn’t put much on our chances.”
“Okay, I’ve heard enough. We need to stop this before it starts.”
“Not quite as easy as it sounds,” Chisholm said.
“Why not? The Fountainheads can take out the Musk Dogs, can’t they?”
“They could, but they’ll need something more solid than the Whisperer evidence before they move, or they’ll risk censure from the rest of the Shaft-Five Nexus. Whisperers haven’t been the most trustworthy of cultures in the past, and there’s always the possibility that this might be a ploy to provoke action against the Musk Dogs.”
“But you said the Musk Dogs had bought passkeys from the Whisperers.”
“It’s all only intelligence, Bella. There isn’t a single piece of information that isn’t questionable on some level.”
“So you’re just going to sit tight and let us die?”
“I didn’t say that. I said we’d need something more solid than what we have so far. Don’t assume that McKinley and the others don’t care — they’re already doing everything they can to protect you from the Uncontained.”
“I’m scared,” Bella said.
“So am I. More scared than I’ve been in a long, long time.” He touched her hand, tenderly. “I need to be with the Fountainheads now. They’ve become very good friends and I can’t let them stare into that abyss alone. When the Uncontained come, I want to be with them. Whatever happens.”
“What should I do about the Musk Dogs? Can’t you give me something?”
“I wish I could, but I’ve seen our history — I know what would happen.”
“I understand,” she said resignedly. “I know what happened after the Cutoff, Jim. I know what that knowledge almost did to us.” For the first time in years, she knew she had the advantage of him. She felt cruel and delighted and sad at the same time.
“You can’t possibly know,” he said.
“I do. Someone told me.”
“Who.”
“A friend called Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird.”
He closed his eyes. She sensed the racking of ancient, inhumanly vast memories. “The politician? The Congress of the Lindblad Ring?”
“She found me. I know everything, Jim.”
He looked at her, amazed and rueful. “I had my suspicions when you said that you knew this wasn’t the Spica Structure — how could you know that unless someone else had told you how far we’d come?”
“I think I trust her to help, if things turn bad.”
“She was considered wise, in her time. But you don’t know Chromis, Bella. You know a thin shadow of her, like a death mask. It may mean well, but —”
“She may be all we have.”
* * *
Bella stood before the memorial cube, in its armoured laboratory under Crabtree. It felt as if many months had passed since she first touched it. After Chromis had entered her head, she’d had no further cause to visit the lab. She had ordered a halt to all studies into the cube, dispersing the scientific team onto other projects. The analysis instruments had been cleared away; the cube was no longer rotating on the inspection platform. There was no allure to it now, no sense that it sought her touch. It looked no more alive, no more purposeful, than a cut and polished mother lode of coal.
“I always wondered,” Bella said, as she stood with Chromis and Axford before the embossed face with its da Vinci motif, “what would have happened had I been dead. If the cube was programmed only to react to my DNA, and no one else’s —”
“Oh, that was no great matter,” Chromis said dismissively. “Frankly, we thought the chances of you finding the cube were effectively zero. We always assumed it would be one of your distant descendants who made the lucky find.”
“But who’s to say my DNA would have been passed on? What good would the cube be to them if they didn’t have the means to open it?”
“We didn’t think it would prove an obstacle for them. We assumed they’d keep your blood — or at least the relevant DNA sequence — as a kind of heirloom. It wouldn’t have cost them much to preserve a fragment of you, in case it was ever needed again.”
“Would that have fooled the cube?”
“It wouldn’t be a question of fooling it,” Chromis said, “simply of letting the cube decide whether or not it had arrived in safe hands. If it detected something that corresponded to your DNA, that would be deemed good enough.”
Bella pondered the matter. “What if they hadn’t kept my DNA?”
Axford looked on, amused and intrigued by the one-sided exchange.
“They’d still have been your descendants. With the right methods, they could have worked their way back to your sequence.”
“I still haven’t had children.”
“There’s time,” Chromis said. “But even if you don’t, your people care for you, Bella. They’d keep something of you, trust me. Look at us! We managed to find a sample, after all.”
“I’ve been wondering about that —”
“It was tricky,” Chromis admitted. “Your DNA sequence would have been stored in many places at the time of your departure: medical databases, insurance databases, and so on — but by the time the Congress of the Lindblad Ring agreed upon the memorial project, those sources were long gone. So we had to be more… inventive.”
“How, exactly?”
“We excavated the Sinai Planum on Mars. Where your husband died.”
“Garrison?” she asked, astonished. “But they never found the wreckage.”
Chromis cou
ld not help but look slightly pleased with herself. “We did. It was buried deeper than anyone looked, that’s all, and spread out over a rather larger area than they anticipated. When we found Garrison’s remains, they’d been under Martian soil for two complete cycles of attempted terra-forming. But there was still enough to work with.”
“But I’m not Garrison,” she said.
“No, but you did give him a lock of your hair. It was still there, Bella. He’d carried it in his suit. It was in his hand, safe inside the glove. It survived across all those years, all that history, waiting for us.”
“My God.”
“He’d taken good care of that lock of hair, Bella. He must have loved you very much.”
* * *
Later, she watched the Fountainhead embassy break apart into a hundred glassy shards. It called to mind the sudden, explosive scattering of a school of brilliant fish at the first glimpse of a predator. The shards rearranged themselves into loose, shimmering associations and raced away from the Iron Sky in the direction of the endcap. In less than an hour they would reach the door leading into the adjacent chamber, ready to make a stand against the Uncontained.
Bella thought about Jim Chisholm, or whatever he had become, and imagined him journeying towards that point of engagement, out of a sense of honour and obligation to his alien friends. It was brave, and it moved her. But at the same time she wondered how far from humanity he had come that he could feel such compassion — maybe even love — for the Fountainheads. Bella was grateful for the gifts they had bestowed upon her people, and reassured to a point by the knowledge that they were a known and trustworthy quantity, but her feelings were an ocean away from compassion. She felt too small, too fragile, too finite ever to imagine loving the Fountainheads.
It awed her to think that Jim Chisholm had closed some of that distance. It also took him further away from her, into a territory of the heart for which she had no maps, no compass, no desire to venture. She wished all of them well, but she could not say for sure how sad she would be if Chisholm did not come home. She knew that she had already said goodbye to him, and that the farewell had happened a long time ago.
Instead of sadness, she felt something utterly strange: an emotion lost to her for so long that it tasted exotic, like an unfamiliar spice. But it was not completely unknown. It was something she had known once, long ago.
It was peace of mind, and it had nothing to do with Jim or the aliens.
Across all those years, all those decades, she could finally think about Garrison without feeling a hitch in her thoughts. The knife in her stomach was gone. They had argued over the Earth-Mars link before he left on his final mission, but she knew now that he had forgiven her. Even as he went down, with his ship frying around him in the fires of re-entry, he must have had time to think about her, about how she would feel when she heard of his death, and he had clasped that lock of hair in his hand as a sign that it was all right, that the argument was forgotten, that he still loved her. He could not send her a voice message, but he had sent her something tangible, hoping that it would be found. And for eighteen thousand years it had lain under Martian soil, as the rains came and went, as seas and forests swept across the plains and then retreated, as the skies turned to a cloud-flecked blue and then back to a wind-torn, cloudless Martian ochre, as that cycle repeated, as empires rose and fell and humanity pushed out into the stars and became something strange and wonderful, of which Chromis was a part. And then the message that Chromis herself carried — this single redeeming fact — had itself crossed an incomprehensibly vaster span of time and space, a gulf against which eighteen thousand years was no more than a moment.
It had found Bella. The message had been delivered, the loop closed. The ironic thing was that for all the future wisdom Chromis carried with her, it was this single instance of human contact that mattered most to Bella. She felt as if she had been stalled all this time, blocked from moving on. All those relationships that had never worked out, all those men she had never allowed close to her because she felt the twisting of that knife.
The lock of hair said it was okay. She didn’t have to forget Garrison, but at least she could let go, and know that when they’d really parted — when the universe had taken him from her — they’d still been friends.
The calm she experienced was like the easing of seismic stress after an earthquake. It was delicious, and she would have liked nothing more than to take the time to enjoy it, to feel the possibilities opening before her. But the easing came just as her world was about to unravel. She would be doing very well if she was still alive by the end of the day.
That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.
Chisholm called her on the embassy channel. “We’ll be at the endcap in thirty minutes, Bella. Nexus sensors place the Uncontained in the next-but-one chamber. They’re moving quickly, and it looks as if they’re tooled up for a fight.”
“Will you win?”
“We’ll give them a bloody nose they won’t forget in a hurry. But if we don’t make it, if the other Nexus elements don’t get here in time…” Chisholm trailed off, but somehow found the strength to continue. “I can’t promise you much. We’ve left a small emplacement behind on the Iron Sky.”
“I know.” Bella had seen it.
“There’s room in it for five hundred people. If you can get them inside, we can at least move them to safety.”
She started thinking about what it would take to empty Crabtree and every other settlement on Janus. “You mean into the chamber that’s soon going to be crawling with Uncontained? Since when does that count as safe, Jim?”
“If Janus goes up, you’ll still be better off in a battle zone than inside the present chamber. At least the Shaft-Five Nexus will be able to shelter you.”
“If they show.”
“They will: the Nexus take their responsibilities very seriously. As soon as the engagement starts turning our way — as soon as it becomes clear that the Nexus has the upper hand — I’ll return to Janus and do what I can to help.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you all right, Bella?”
She nearly laughed. “The world’s going to hell in a handcart. Why shouldn’t I be all right?”
“It’s just that you look different.”
“In a bad way?”
“No,” he said. “Not in a bad way at all. You look like something good just happened to you.”
“It did,” Bella said. “Something beautiful. Now let’s hope some of my good luck rubs off on the rest of us, shall we?”
* * *
The new skyhole was perfectly circular, drilled to the same dimensions as its counterpart over Underhole. A chunk of Musk Dog machinery — a lander-sized thing like an offcut of meat wrapped around a carburettor — followed Svetlana all the way in, trailing a whipping, wire-thin tendril that reached all the way back to the gristleship. It was still with her as she neared Junction Box, at which point it swerved aside and vanished through a hitherto undiscovered aperture in the Spican machinery, something that all the patient years of human scrutiny had failed to illuminate.
In Eddytown, Svetlana expected to find that all hell had broken loose, but a review of the ShipNet feeds showed nothing out of the ordinary. She unsuited and asked Denise Nadis to supervise the transfer of the production files into her secret forge vat. Within an hour, something miraculous and strange was assuming existence within its red belly.
The maglev arrived from Crabtree. Svetlana half-expected Bella to step out of the train, but the figure that emerged was the boylike form of Ryan Axford, alone save for a protective haunt. Svetlana had him brought to the negotiating room, with its panorama of Martian landscapes.
“You can leave the haunt outside,” Svetlana said. “I won’t hurt you — we’ve always seen eye to eye.”
“What happened to you?” Axford asked.
Svetla
na rubbed a latex-gloved finger against the mark of ownership the Musk Dog had secreted across her forehead. It felt ridged and leathery, like scar tissue or a hardening scab. Beneath it her skin itched terribly. She wanted to rip the chemical marker away, rid herself of any lingering trace of alien contamination.
“Nothing much,” she said.
“Does it hurt?”
“It itches, that’s all. The Musk Dog assured me no harm would come of it. Can you smell it?”
“No,” Axford said.
Svetlana smiled equivocally. “Some people can, I think. It must depend on something very subtle in the human olfactory system. To the Musk Dogs the smell’s like a neon sign. It tells them all they need to know.”
“Can it be removed?”
“I could tear it away now, if I wished. There’d be some damage to the underlying tissue, but nothing that wouldn’t heal in time.”
Axford couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because if I did, that would be the end of my dealings with The One That Negotiates.”
“One of the Musk Dogs?” Axford guessed.
“It owns me now, while we trade. If I return to the ship without this mark of ownership — or if the Musk Dogs obtain evidence that I’ve had the mark surgically removed — that would be very damaging for the pack status of my Musk Dog.”
“What would happen?”
Svetlana smiled slightly. “He’d be reprimanded. I wouldn’t want that.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.”
“I took an initiative. From where I’m standing, it looks as if I did the right thing. They’ve given me more in one day than we’ve got from the Fountainheads in the last ten years.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe the Fountainheads don’t care to see us wipe ourselves out with technologies we barely understand. Maybe they have a sense of responsibility.”