She shut down all of her nexuses, and she kept her eyes closed.
Quietly, Locke identified himself to someone, then demanded, “I need immediate passage to Marrow. I have a critical prisoner with me.”
Not for the first time, Washen asked herself:
“What if?”
Locke had offered to bring her here. On his own, without compliant, he had helped find workable ways through the security systems—a journey that had gone remarkably well. Which made her wonder if everything was a ruse. What if Till had told his old friend,’I want you to find your mother somehow. For both of us. Find her and bring her back home, and use any means you wish. With my blessing.”
It was possible, yes.
Always.
She remembered a different day, following their son into a distant jungle. Locke was obeying Till’s orders then. Unlikely as it seemed, it could be the same now. Of course, Locke hadn’t warned anyone about the rebellion coming, or the Remoras’ plan to scuttle the ship’s shields. Unless those events had also been allowed to happen, serving some greater, harder-to-perceive purpose.
She thought about it again, and again, with a muscular conviction, she tossed the possibility aside.
The hammerwing in front of them was slowing.
Locke pulled around it, then dove for the still invisible bottom.
Perhaps he guessed his mother’s thoughts. Or maybe it was the moment, the shared mood. “I never told you,” he began. “Did I? One of Miocene’s favorites came up with an explanation for the buttresses.”
“Which favorite?”
“Virtue,” Locke replied. “Have you met him?”
“Once,” she admitted. “Briefly.”
Their AI took control, braking their descent as they passed thousands of empty hammerwings docked and waiting for the next belly full of troops.
“You know how it is with hyperfiber,” her son continued. “How the bonds are strengthened by taming little quantum fluxes.”
“I’ve never quite understood the concept,’she confessed.
Locke nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment. Then he smiled. He smiled and turned to his mother, his face never more sad. “According to Virtue, these buttresses are those same fluxes, but they’ve been stripped of normal matter. They’re naked, and as long as they have power, they’re very nearly eternal.”
If true, she thought, it would be the basis of another fantastic technology.
Her mind shifted. “What did Miocene think about his hypothesis?”
“If that’s true,” he said, “it would be an enormous tool. Once we learned how to duplicate it, of course.”
She waited for a moment, then asked, “What about Till?”
Locke didn’t seem to hear her question. Instead, he mentioned, “Virtue was worried. After he offered his speculation, he told everyone that stealing energy from Marrow’s core was the same as stealing it from the buttresses. We could weaken the machinery, and eventually, if we weren’t careful, we might even destroy Marrow and the ship.”
Washen listened, and she didn’t.
Their car had passed through a quick series of demon doors and slowed to a near stop, and suddenly the tunnel around her opened up, revealing the diamond blister below, the bridge thick and impressive at its center, and Marrow visible on every side. She thought she was prepared for the darkness, but it surprised her regardless. The entire world had swollen since she was last here, and it had fallen into a deeper dusk, countless lights sparkling on its iron face, each little light plainly visible through a hot, dry atmosphere.
Marrow was one vast, uninterrupted city.
And despite being warned, Washen felt a sudden sadness.
“Till listened to Virtue’s worries,” Locke reported. “Listened to every one of them, and he looked concerned throughout. But do you know what he said to that man? What he said to all of us?”
Obeying some inaudible command, their car dove toward the bridge, toward an open shaft. Toward home.
“What did Till say?” Washen muttered.
“ ‘These buttresses are too strong to be destroyed that easily,’ he told us. ‘I’m certain of it.’ Then he showed his smile to each of us. You know how he smiles. ‘They’re simply too strong,’ he repeated. ‘That would be too easy. The Builders don’t work that way…’ ”
Forty-eight
From the breathing mouth came a long whistle, hard and sharp, plainly excited. Pamir growled, “Quiet.”
As if it were necessary; as if anyone could possibly hear them inside here.
“She comes,” said the translator fused to the harum-scarum’s chest. “I see the false Master. One little shot, and she is forever removed.”
“No,” said Pamir. Then he announced to everyone, “We will wait. Wait.”
He was speaking to five hundred humans, including seven of the surviving captains, and perhaps twice as many harum-scarums. But this was a mammoth facility, and most of them were busy attacking the last-moment work with their ad hoc training and a professional desperation. Booby traps had to be found and disabled. Machinery that hadn’t worked in billions of years had to be awakened, in secret. And this team’s actions had to be married to the actions of twenty other teams, each operating at a key note, everyone pushing to meet a timetable that looked more fanciful with each worried breath.
Again, the harum-scarum said, “I will shoot her”
“Shoot yourself,” Pamir snapped.
That was a savage, dangerous insult; suicide was the ultimate abomination.
But the alien had known Pamir for a long time, respecting him in a joyless fashion. He decided to absorb the insult without comment. Instead, an enormous finger pointed to a tiny knot of data moving rapidly down the fuel line, and with a slow, reflective whisde, he told the human, “This is the false Master’s vehicle. It is. And with the reigning confusion, no one will miss her until it is too late. If you allow me—”
“Expose us?”
Both mouths closed tight.
Pamir shook his head, disgust mixed with a burning fatigue. “Miocene isn’t an imbecile. Mask your scan to make it look Wayward, then examine that car as it passes. She won’t be on board. Even in a hurry, she knows better.”
The alien made ready, big hands and an obstinate mind sending out a string of crisp instructions to hidden sensors.
Pamir hunkered closer to the viewing port, watching the Waywards’ steel vehicles rising and falling past their hiding place. Miocene’s cap-car was a tiny fleck of hyperfiber, barely visible to the naked eye and past them in a half-instant. He waited another few moments, then asked, “What did you see?”
“A passenger.”
Pamir nearly flinched. Then he thought to ask, “What sort of passenger?”
“Composed of shaped light,” the harum-scarum confessed. “A holo in the false Master’s likeness.”
A single nod was the only gloating that Pamir allowed himself. Miocene probably slipped inside one of the empty troop cars, telling no one her whereabouts… in case her enemies were waiting en route…
The gloating quiet was interrupted by a sudden deep rambling.
In the distance, humans and harum-scarums called out to each other, asking, “An attack? Or another impact?”
“An impact,” barked several knowledgeable voices. “How big?”
“How bad?”
A fat comet had struck not far from Port Erindi, and scanning the early data, Pamir knew it was a huge blast. A record breaker. He fought the urge to call the Remoras, to order Orleans or whoever was left to bring up the shields again. But it was still too soon. “Keep working,” he told everyone, including himself. And he stared at images stolen from farther below, picking one of the steel machines at random, watching it plunging into the access tunnel’s mouth, rushing past the waystation where Washen and her son had lingered, waiting for permission before vanishing into those impossible depths.