As her sodden knee boots wrapped themselves to her legs like sheet lead, Polly fought to peel them off without swallowing any more sea water. Free of them at last, and now fighting to swim to a shoreline etched by the orange light of the setting sun, she felt horribly weary, but understanding came at last from the killer’s recent words: You take us any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea. She had travelled back in time, just like in the movies or the interactives, but in none of those had the heroine been immediately drowned after transit—she always arrived at some hugely interesting point in history where she could influence important events of recorded history.
Closer to the shore and she saw wooden frameworks supporting vicious tubular nests of barbed wire. Up on stilts behind this defence was a wooden cabin and below it a sandbag bunker, from which protruded the recognizable twin barrels of a gun.
Second World War, at a guess. Not many aircraft attacking during the First.
‘What?’ she managed, swallowing water. ‘What?’
That’s an anti-aircraft gun. The onomatopoeic ack-ack, I should think.
She really just did not have the breath at present to carry on a conversation with Muse, and she did not have the energy to wonder why the device attached below her throat was talking to her in such a conversational manner in Nandru’s voice. Struggling on, she could feel her reserves of energy depleting, and was beginning to notice that if anything the shore was now getting further away. But perhaps this was an illusion caused by the descending twilight. The sun was gone now and the shore was silhouetted against a sky of bright red and dull iron. Behind she heard the low thunder of engines and glanced back to see a squadron of bombers only just distinct through encroaching darkness.
Now those are Heinkels with a Messerschmitt escort, it would seem. That confirms it.
‘Nandru… Nandru, is that you?’ she managed.
She ceased swimming, to tread water, and realized to her horror that she was being dragged out to sea. The planes were closer now and suddenly she was blinded by a strobing of light. The sound impacted a second after, as guns all along the coast opened up and powerful searchlights probed the sky from somewhere further inland. Ahead, when the gunfire paused long enough for her eyes to clear, she saw more planes appearing high against the blood-red western sky.
Spitfires probably… now that’s something I knew before… No, apparently I’m wrong: they’re more likely to be Hurricanes.
‘Nandru… what happened?’
You know, my memory has never been so clear—it’s eidetic in fact — but every second… and those seconds are long in here… I find it harder and harder to distinguish between what’s my memory and Muse’s reference library.
‘You… died,’ said Polly, beginning to swim again.
And so I did, but it seems my Muse uploaded a copy of me to your Muse. I didn’t know they could do that. There’s the facility for transferring recordings in the event of the bearer’s death, just so that vital battlefield intelligence won’t be lost, but apparently you’ve copped the lot… well, as far as I know.
The red tinge in the sky was almost gone, lost in the fall of night and blasted away by cordite light as the guns hammered the air. Glancing up, Polly saw the fighter planes attacking and the flickering of gunfire like the distant glow of ignited cigarettes. Then suddenly she was pinned in the actinic glare of a new sun, and a grey wall loomed over her. Waves slapped her from side to side.
‘Frank, it’s a woman. What should I do?’ someone shouted.
‘Throw her the ring, you berk, and haul her in!’ replied an older voice.
Trailing rope, a life-ring splashed in the sea beside her and, with a surge of gratitude to the unseen rescuers, she grabbed hold of it.
You’ll probably be shot as a spy.
Her current gratitude did not extend to this particular incarnation of Nandru.
Systems, keyed to the Dopplered light intensity of the red dwarf it was approaching, began operating inside the probe. It flipped over and extruded long struts from around the monopoles of its AG motors, spreading them out into space. Linking struts split from the main ones and joined to others, forming a structure like a spider’s web, but one that was ten kilometres across. Between these struts a silvery meniscus spread, which, like the rest of the probe, healed itself when it struck interstellar particles. It had only been a matter of luck that so far nothing larger than a hydrogen atom had got in the way—at such speed anything bigger might have obliterated the probe.
Against the tide of photons, this light sail slowed the probe, but minimally. It further decelerated when the AG motors came back online—powered by the sail, which was also photovoltaic. As the probe drew closer to the red dwarf, light pressure on the sail increased, as did the supply of power to the AG motors. But it was ten years from the probe’s deployment of its light sail, before it fell into orbit of Proxima Centauri, and another two years before it found a dead, cold world orbiting that old sun, and went into orbit about that.
Far above grey mountain chains and methane fogs, the probe folded away its sail, like someone putting away an umbrella after coming in from a blustery day. It then spent a year scanning and mapping the surface of the planet. Finally satisfied, it ejected a two-metre sphere of plumbeous metal which, on independent AG, descended to the surface. Landing on a plain of black rock, this miniprobe hinged down claw arms from where they rested up against its surface like the sepals of a flower, and from the ends of these, explosive bolts thumped down into the surface. From its underside a drilling head extruded and began to turn, a haze of dust all about it as it bored down. At a predetermined depth the probe tested a rock sample, using thorium dating, then began to scan more closely the detritus from the drilling. The layer it had been searching for was penetrated a metre away from where predicted, but geological activity accounted for that. Compressed in the rock, the layer was only a few microns thick, but there was plenty enough material in that layer for the probe’s intensive analysis.
The results, immediately transmitted, took four point three years to get back to Earth: a confirmation that was a happy revelation to some, a source of dread to others.
3
Astolere:
The two leaders of the remaining seven thousand troops, now pinned down by my brother’s forces, but in a position from which it would cost Saphothere greatly to expel them, have surprisingly surrendered—it has ever been my previous experience that Umbrathane always fight to the death. While they go to parley with Saphothere on Station Seventeen, I can only wonder at the extent of the plan. The Umbrathane were attacking because of our development of what is being called vorpal technology (a word from an ancient rhyme I have yet to find the time to track down), so must have understood what they were facing. The failed attempt by the Umbrathane fleet to knock out the energy dam between Io and Jupiter confirms this: they knew the energy requirement for time travel to be immense, and had the fleet’s attack succeeded, then Saphothere would have been unable to plant the atomic. Still, I do not think that we can afford many dangerous ventures such as my brother’s, and I wonder at the consequences of what both we and the preterhuman, Cowl, are creating.
Tack tried to hold it at bay by concentrating on his immediate circumstances but, like the black wall of depression, an utter lack of purpose loomed in around him. U-gov did not exist in this earlier time, nor did the girl, nor the item she had bound to her arm, and this rendered his mission not only impossible but irrelevant. Slowly, inexorably, emergency programming was coming online, compelling him to return to the Agency for debriefing—only there was nowhere for him to return to. As he stumbled across a ploughed field in the pouring rain, he fought impulses he could not satisfy. He felt almost drunk or drugged, and could not control surges of emotion that one moment had him in fits of giggles and in another moment had him railing at the downpour.