“It doesn’t make any sense,” Auger said.
“But you sense a connection none the less. Why steal an antimatter engine when we can offer something infinitely safer, and just as powerful? The only practical use for such a thing would be—”
“As a bomb,” Auger said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Think about it, Cassandra. It has to be a bomb. That’s the only thing that drive can give the Slashers that you don’t already have. Your bleed-drive engines suck energy from the vacuum in tiny, controlled doses. I know. I’ve seen the sales brochures.”
“They’re very safe,” Cassandra said defensively. “The vacuum potential reaction is self-limiting: if the energy density exceeds a critical limit, it shuts off.”
“In other words, very useful for making a safe drive, but not much use as a Molotov cocktail.”
Beside her, Floyd smiled. “I almost thought I was going to get through a whole conversation without understanding a single word. Now you’ve gone and spoiled it.”
“I confess I have no idea what a Molotov cocktail is,” Cassandra said. “Is it some kind of weapon system?”
“You could say that,” Floyd said.
“I still don’t understand,” Cassandra said. “You’re implying that someone wanted the antimatter engine to use as a bomb. But what use is such a thing? A ship large enough to contain the stolen drive assembly could never approach close enough to a planet or habitat to do serious damage. It would be intercepted and destroyed in interplanetary space, light-seconds from any target. As soon as we issue a systemwide alert—”
“Go ahead and issue your alert,” Auger said, “but I don’t think it will make any difference. I think you’ll find it a lot more difficult to track those ships than you’re expecting. I also don’t think they intend to use that antimatter against anything in this system.”
“You’re making me most anxious to have a peek inside your skull,” Cassandra said ominously. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“And you said you had something else to show me.”
“It concerns the evacuees,” she said. “And, in a way, you.”
She made the window vanish, then led them a little further along the corridor and opened another gilded doorway.
The room beyond was a kind of dormitory. Inside, ranked against the two long, incurving walls, were twenty or so coffinlike containers. Again, they had the spongy, vegetative look of recently extruded hardware, their bases merging into the floor. Pulpy, rootlike tendrils connected the pods to each other and the walls.
“This is where we’re keeping the eighteen passengers and crew from the shuttle,” Cassandra said, inviting Auger to take a closer look at one of the pods. The upper part of it consisted of a curved, glossy lid, veined like a leaf, through which the head and upper body of one of the evacuees could just be discerned. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, encased in what looked like a thick turquoise-blue support matrix of some kind. Auger even thought she recognised her as one of the other passengers she’d seen on the Twentieth.
“Is she ill?” Auger asked.
“No,” Cassandra said. “See that bluish gel she’s floating in? Pure machinery. It’s invaded her completely, right down to the cellular level.”
“Who gave you permission to do that?” Auger asked, outraged. “These people are Threshers. Most of them would never consent to having machines pumped into their bodies.”
“I’m afraid they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” Cassandra said. “It was either that or die. We can quibble over consent later.”
“Die of what? You just said that none of them were ill.”
“It’s the evasive pattern, you see. We’re sustaining ten gees, which would be bad enough in its own right, but our random manoeuvres superimpose one or two hundred gee transients on top of that background load. It’s quite intolerable for an unmodified person. Without the buffering from those machines, they’d be dead.”
“Then why aren’t we?” Auger asked.
“I’ll show you.”
Cassandra waved them through to the back of the dormitory. “I mentioned eighteen evacuees from the Twentieth,” she said, “but you’ll notice that there are twenty caskets in this room. We wouldn’t have bothered creating the extras without good reason.” She gestured to the last two, set against the far wall. “You and your companion are in those two.”
“Wait…” Auger began.
“There’s no reason for alarm,” Cassandra said. “Come closer and look inside. You’ll see that you’re perfectly unharmed.”
Auger looked through the transparent cover of the first casket. There, suspended in the same blue gel as the woman, lay the sleeping form of Floyd, his eyes closed, his face an unmoving mask of serenity. She stepped aside to let him see, then viewed her own body in the other casket.
“Why does this feel as if everything’s just turned into a bad dream?” Floyd asked.
“It’s all right,” Auger said, reaching out to squeeze his hand in an attempt to give reassurance that she didn’t really feel herself. No matter how much this bothered her, she could not begin to imagine what Floyd was feeling. “Isn’t it, Cassandra?”
“I didn’t want to alarm you immediately,” the Slasher said, “knowing how Threshers tend to feel about our machines—”
“She’s telling the truth,” Auger said to Floyd. “We are on a spaceship and we were rescued from Mars. I’m pretty certain that much is true. But we still haven’t been woken up.”
“I feel pretty awake for someone who hasn’t been woken up.”
“You’re fully conscious,” she said. “It’s just that the machines are fooling your brain into thinking that you’re walking around. Everything that you see or feel is bogus. You’re really still in that tank.”
“It’s the only way we can keep you alive,” Cassandra said, with evident concern. “The acceleration would have killed all of us by now.”
“So you’re…?” Floyd began, not really knowing how to frame the question.
“In another casket, as are all my colleagues, somewhere else in the ship. I’m sorry that a small white lie was necessary, but everything else I’ve told you was the truth.”
“Everything?” asked Auger.
Cassandra cleared a portion of the wall and created a three-dimensional grid, into which she dropped the tiny form of their ship. It veered and swerved, the ship’s lithe, flexible hull bending and twisting with each change of direction. “This is our real-time trajectory,” Cassandra said. “You saw a hint of it when I showed you the captive shuttle. I could have doctored the view—it would have been trivial—but I chose not to. You’d have guessed sooner or later.”
“Are we really all right?” Auger said.
“Absolutely,” Cassandra said, “although the healing processes are still taking place. You’ll both be good as new by the time we arrive at Tanglewood.”
“If we ever get there,” she said.
Cassandra smiled. “Let’s err on the side of optimism, shall we? In my experience there’s very little point worrying about something you can’t control.”
“Even death?”
“Most especially death.”
THIRTY-THREE
Auger was picking her way through an orange when Cassandra reappeared, stepping through a curtained doorway that rippled in an imaginary breeze.
The girl-shaped Slasher made a chair appear from nowhere, then lowered herself into it. “How are you feeling?”
“This is the best fruit I’ve ever tasted,” Auger replied.