“It doesn’t matter: the portal’s no use to me until the ship returns. I’m pretty sure I can make it to Berlin and back in plenty of time.”
“You mean you don’t know for certain?”
“I haven’t had time to plan this to the last detail,” Auger said. “All I know is that there’s a lead in Berlin and Susan would have followed it up if she hadn’t been killed. I owe it to her to do what I can. There’s an overnight train leaving tonight and I plan to be on it. I’ll be in Berlin by tomorrow morning, and with any luck I’ll be on my way back by the evening.”
“With any luck,” Skellsgard echoed.
“Look, don’t worry about me. Just get yourself home and make sure Caliskan sees those pieces of paper. I have a feeling the letter is more important than any of us realise.”
Skellsgard squeezed Auger’s hand. “You really don’t have to send me back instead of you.”
“I know.”
“But I do appreciate it. It’s a brave thing you’re doing.”
Auger squeezed the other woman’s hand in return. “Listen, it’s no big hardship. It gives me a chance to see a bit more of this world before they pull me out of it for good.”
“You almost sound convincing.”
“I mean it. As much as part of me would love to be riding that ship back with you, there’s another part that just wants to soak up as much of E2 as I can. I’ve barely scratched the surface, Skellsgard. That’s all any of us has done.”
“Take good care of yourself, Auger.”
“I will.” Auger stood back from the cabin. “All right. Let’s close you up and get this show on the road.”
“You’re clear on those throat adjustments?”
“If the ride gets bumpy, you’ll know why.”
“Reassuring as ever.”
Auger pushed the door until it was nearly closed, then stepped away as servo-motors completed the job. Only a few inches of armoured metal now separated her from Skellsgard, but she suddenly felt vastly more alone. She walked back through the airlock, then ran through the sequence of umbilical disconnection commands, ending with the retraction of the connecting bridge. Through the scuffed and scratched window in the side of the ship, Skellsgard gave her a final thumbs up. Auger walked back to the main ring of consoles and tried to blank everything from her mind except the procedure necessary for dispatching the ship.
None of the individual steps were particularly difficult. Initial throat stabilisation and launch were handled by a preprogrammed routine that worked exactly as advertised. In the translucent bronze structures of the alien machinery, the suspended sparks and filaments of amber light quickened their movements almost imperceptibly. The surrounding clots and plaques of human machinery throbbed and flickered with red and green status lights and indicator numerals. On the console before her, analogue dials lurched hard into the red, but she had been told to expect this and kept her nerve. The grilled catwalk beneath her feet began to vibrate. She increased the power to the throat machines and a metal toolkit slid off a console halfway across the room, spilling spanners and torque wrenches to the ground and making her jump.
On the panel, a sequence of lights changed one by one to orange: throat aperture was now wide enough to accept the ship. The geodesic stress indices were low enough not to rip it to shreds, provided it plunged straight down the middle without grazing the sides.
Auger found a pair of protective goggles and bent the stalk of a microphone to her lips. “You getting all this, Skellsgard?”
Her reply buzzed from a grilled speaker in the console. It sounded thin and distant, as if she was hundreds of kilometres away. “Everything looks OK from in here. Let’s get this over with.”
Auger checked that the orange lights were holding steady. “Injecting in five seconds.”
“Spare me the countdown. Just do it.”
“Here goes, then.”
The movement was more violent than Auger had been expecting. The cradle suddenly lurched forward, propelling the ship faster and faster. In an eyeblink, cradle and ship had exited the main globe of the recovery bubble, the entire structure creaking in response to the sudden transfer of momentum. From her vantage point, Auger watched the ship haring down the mirror-lined injection tunnel, picking up speed like a torpedo. Two or three seconds later, the cradle reached the limit of its guidance rail and slammed to a halt, lobbing the ship ahead of it on the lazy arc of a ballistic trajectory. The throat of the wormhole—exposed now that the iris had opened—was a vortex of blue and violet static discharge just ahead of the ship, gaping like the mouth of a starfish. Spring-loaded arms whipped out from the ship’s sides and glanced against the incurving wall, spitting coils of light and molten metal. An instant later they sheared away, warped into toffeelike shapes. But they’d done the work they were designed for, nudging the transport out of harm’s way. With a final shower of golden sparks, the ship picked up yet more speed at an impossible rate, diminishing to a dot of light in a heartbeat.
All round her, emergency klaxons and warning strobes had come on. A recorded voice began to repeat a message about unsustainable power levels. Above the din she heard a distant voice: “Auger… you reading this?”
Auger leaned closer to the microphone, checking her watch at the same time. “Guess you’re on your way. How was it?”
“Interesting.” Skellsgard’s voice was already breaking up, becoming thready. Routing communications through the link was difficult enough when there was no ship en route, but it was almost impossible otherwise.
“Skellsgard—I don’t know if you can hear me now, but I’m going to start controlled constriction of the throat in about fifteen seconds.”
The microphone crackled in reply, but it was nothing Auger could understand. It made no difference now, in any case. The die was cast.
She descended the spiral staircase to the lower console, checked her watch and began to drop the stabilising power as Skellsgard had instructed her. When she had notched it down sufficiently, the klaxons, strobes and recorded warnings turned themselves off, leaving her with only the warm hum of the surrounding machinery. The amber sparks and filaments had quietened themselves. She returned to the higher level and peered down the injection shaft, but there was no sign of the departed ship. Instead, the cradle was returning to the recovery bubble, while a circular sweeper mechanism was clearing the tube of any lingering debris from the mangled guidance arms.
“Skellsgard? Maurya?” she said into the microphone.
But there was no answer.
Auger checked her watch and counted ahead sixty hours. Someone might route a signal down the link once Skellsgard was home, but in all likelihood Auger would not know whether she had been successful until a new ship dropped into the bubble.
She did not want to be in Berlin when that happened.
Auger’s third passage through the censor was as uneventful as the first two. She shivered and picked herself up, then set about gathering the things she would need for the rest of her mission. She found a torch that worked, then stuffed clean clothes and bundles of local currency into a red suitcase. She had retrieved the automatic from Skellsgard and found a fresh clip of ammunition on one of the storage racks in the censor chamber. Now the automatic nestled in her handbag, next to the war-baby weapon. It was good to feel armed as she started the slow and filthy walk back to the station. After ten minutes she had reached the Métro tunnel, the torch picking out the lethal gleam of the electrified rails.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She had forgotten all about the electricity.
With Aveling and the others gone, there was no one to short-circuit the supply while she got clear of the tunnel. It would be nearly a dozen hours before the trains stopped running for the night, and then she would have the additional problem of escaping from a locked Métro station. If she couldn’t get out until the station was opened again the next morning—assuming no one arrested her for suspicious behaviour in the meantime—she would have wasted almost a day’s worth of the sixty hours available before the ship returned. She could probably find a way to short-circuit the track, but not to restore the power once she was free of the tunnel. And if it wasn’t restored, there would be too much danger of Métro engineers poking around in the tunnel, with the risk of them finding the entrance to the tunnel leading to the portal.