“You weren’t imagining those children.”
“I know,” Auger said. She sipped at the remains of her drink, knowing that she was a bit drunk and not caring. Right now, a little fogginess of mind was exactly what the doctor ordered. “But the reference on that postcard to Silver Rain—well, it means that things are about ten times as bad as I thought they were.”
“Maybe it would help if you told me what this Silver Rain is all about,” Floyd suggested.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“But it’s bad, isn’t it? When I dropped those two little words into your lap you looked as if someone had walked over your grave.”
“I was hoping that my reaction hadn’t been so obvious.”
“It was written in sky-high neon. Those two words were the last thing you wanted to hear.”
“Or expected to hear,” she said.
“Coming from my lips?”
“From anyone’s lips. You shouldn’t have held back that postcard, Wendell. It was thoroughly dishonest.”
“And you pretending to be Susan White’s sister—that’s what you call setting an appropriate example, is it?”
“That’s different. It was a necessary deception.”
“So was mine, Verity.”
“Then I suppose we’re even. Can we leave it at that?”
“Not until I know what those two little words mean.”
“As I said, I can’t tell you.”
“If I had to put money on it,” Floyd said, “I’d say it was the codename for a secret weapon. Question is: who’s on the trigger? The people behind you and White, or the people who killed White and Blanchard, and sent those children to stalk you?”
“It isn’t our weapon,” she said fiercely. “Why do you think Susan White was murdered in the first place?”
“So it’s their weapon, not yours?”
“That’s enough, Wendell.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”
“Take it any way you like, it doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“Let me join the dots here,” Floyd said. “Susan White stumbles on to a conspiracy. The Kaspar contract in Berlin is part of it. So is Silver Rain, whatever that is. I guess all these things are connected somehow, although right now I don’t see how those metal spheres can be any part of a weapon.”
“The spheres aren’t the weapon,” she said icily. “I don’t know what they are, except that they must be involved in all this somehow. And if I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting on this train being pestered by you.”
“But you do know what Silver Rain is, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know exactly what it is. I saw what it can do with my own eyes only a few days ago.”
“Where was that?”
“Looking down on Mars, from a spaceship. Where else?”
“Cute. How about the real answer?”
“The real answer is that it’s a weapon. It can kill a lot of people in one go. More than you would want to believe possible.”
“Thousands?”
“Try again.”
“Hundreds of thousands?”
“Better.”
“Millions?”
“Warm. Start thinking entire planetary populations, and you’re getting close.”
“Then it’s some kind of bomb, like the big firecracker the Americans say they’ll build one of these days.”
“An atom bomb?” She almost laughed at the quaintness of it, but checked herself in time. In the mid-twentieth century of her own timeline there had been nothing quaint about it, any more than siege towers and boiling oil had been quaint in the thirteenth. “No, it’s not an atom bomb. An atom bomb would be… bad, I grant you that. But whether you drop it from a plane or load it inside a missile, a bomb’s a weapon with a specific focus of attack: a city or a town. Bad news if you’re there when it drops… equally bad news if you live in the fallout zone. But for everyone else? Business carries on more or less as usual.”
Floyd stared at her with a kind of horrified fascination. “And Silver Rain?”
“Silver Rain is much worse. Silver Rain touches everyone. There’s no escape, nowhere to run, no way to protect yourself even if you know it’s coming. There’s no way to negotiate with it, or buy your way out.” She paused, knowing that she had to tell him enough to satisfy his curiosity, but must not even hint at the truth. Already she regretted the little “Mars” wisecrack she had made earlier: things like that could get her into serious trouble. “It’s like a plague, spreading through the air. You breathe it in, and you feel fine. It doesn’t hurt you. And then one day you just die of it. Horribly, but quickly.”
“Like some kind of mustard gas?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”
“You said it can kill millions of people.”
“Yes.”
“Who would use such a weapon? Wouldn’t they be just as likely to die at the same time?”
“If they didn’t take the necessary precautions,” she said, “then yes, they might.”
“And these precautions?”
“Too many questions, Wendell.”
“I’m just getting started.” He changed tack. “The Kaspar contract: could those spheres be a cover for something else?”
“Such as?”
“This Silver Rain you won’t talk about. Could the factory in Berlin be making this stuff?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Silver Rain isn’t like that. It isn’t something you make with foundries and lathes.”
“A chemical, then? If there’s a foundry, there’s probably a chemical works nearby.”
“It isn’t something you make in a chemical plant, either.” A small, quiet voice at the back of her head whispered “careful,” but she pressed on regardless. “Silver Rain is a special kind of weapon. It requires a very specialised manufacturing capability, one that just doesn’t exist in Germany or France.” Or anywhere else on this planet, she added to herself.
Floyd swirled around the remains of his drink. “So who is making this stuff?”
“That’s the point: I don’t know.”
“But you seem so familiar with it.”
“It can be made,” she said. “Just not locally. Which means you’d need to import it, and then find a means of deploying it.” She thought of the censor, with its automatic blockading of all forms of nanotechnology. Unless there was some as yet undiscovered means of bypassing the censor, there was no way to bring something like Silver Rain into E2. The trick Skellsgard had pulled with the pneumatic drill—dismantling it into simple, solid components and smuggling it through in pieces—wouldn’t work either. The only way to break nanotechnology down into smaller pieces and put it back together again later was with more nanotechnology.
The rhythm of the train, the wheels clicking across the joints in the rails, seemed to goad her thoughts onward, like a whip.
While it was true that the indigenous technology on E2 was nowhere near advanced enough to manufacture something like Silver Rain—and wouldn’t be for at least a century—there was always the possibility that Slasher agents had established a covert research and development programme somewhere. Auger thought about this for a moment and then dismissed it. No amount of advanced knowledge could compensate for an industrial technology still stuck in the steam age. Silver Rain was incredibly complex even in terms of the nanotechnology available in Auger’s timeline. But you couldn’t even make the simplest item of nanotechnology here on E2. You couldn’t even use the available tools to construct the specialised equipment necessary for manufacturing even the least sophisticated nanotechnological components. Given time, the necessary technical base could have been achieved—but not without some or all of that magical technology leaking into the world and thereby changing it. The Kaspar contract, on the other hand, looked more like the kind of covert programme that might actually work. Whatever function those spheres served, they had been manufactured using indigenous technology and know-how.