Feeling edgy, Sylveste sipped his drink.
“Like you say, it could be a new settlement they’ve hit. Are these maps up to date?”
“As good as,” Sluka said. “They were refreshed from Cuvier’s central cartographics section about a year ago, before things became too serious around here.”
Sylveste looked at the map, projected over Sluka’s table like a ghostly, topographic tablecloth. The area displayed by the map was two thousand kilometres square, large enough to contain the destroyed colony, even if their directional estimate was crude.
But there was no sign of Phoenix.
“We need more recent maps,” he said. “It’s possible this place was founded in the last year.”
“That’s not going to be easy to arrange.”
“Then you’d better find a way. You have to make a decision in the next twenty-four hours. Probably the biggest of your life.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve as good as decided to let them have you.”
Sylveste shrugged, as if it were of no consequence to him. “Even so, you should still be in possession of the facts. You’re going to be dealing with Volyova. If you can’t be sure that her threats are genuine, you might be tempted to call her bluff.”
She looked at him, long and hard.
“We do still have—in principle—data links to Cuvier, via what remains of the comsat girdle. But they’ve barely been used since the domes were blown. It would be risky to open them—the data-trail could lead back to us.”
“I’d say that’s the least of anyone’s worries right now.”
“He’s right,” Pascale said. “With all this going on, who’s going to care about a minor breach of security in Cuvier? I’d say it would be worthwhile just to get the maps updated.”
“How long will it take?”
“An hour; two hours. Why, were you planning on going somewhere?”
“No,” Sylveste said, conspicuously failing to smile. “But someone else might be deciding for me.”
They went surfaceside again while they were waiting for the maps to be revised. There were no stars visible in the low north-east; just a hump of sooty nothingness, as if a gargantuan crouched figure were looming over the horizon. It must have been an uplifted wall of dust, edging towards them. “It’ll blanket the world for months,” Sluka said. “Just as if a massive volcano had gone off.”
“The winds are getting stronger,” Sylveste said.
Pascale nodded. “Could they have done that—changed the weather, this far from the attack? What if the weapon they used caused radioactive contamination?”
“It needn’t have been,” Sylveste said. “Some kind of kinetic-energy weapon would have sufficed. Knowing Volyova, she wouldn’t have done anything more than was absolutely necessary. But you’re right to worry about radiation. That weapon probably opened a hole right through the lithosphere. It’s anyone’s guess what was released from the crust.”
“We shouldn’t spend too much time surfaceside.”
“Agreed—but that probably goes for the colony as a whole.”
One of Sluka’s aides appeared in the exit door.
“You’ve got the maps?” she asked.
“Give us another half-hour,” he said. “We’ve got the data, but the encryption’s pretty heavy. There’s news from Cuvier, though. We just picked it up, publicly broadcast.”
“Go on.”
“It seems the ship took pictures of the—uh—aftermath. They transmitted them to the capital, and now they’ve been sent around the planet.” The aide took a battered compad from his pocket, its flatscreen throwing his features into lilac relief. “I have the images.”
“You’d better show us.”
The aide placed the compad on the mesa’s gritty, wind-smoothed surface. “They must have used infrared,” he said.
The pictures were awesome and terrifying. Molten rock was still snaking from the crater and beyond, or spraying in fountainlike cascades from dozens of suddenly birthed baby volcanoes. All evidence of the settlement had been obliterated, completely swallowed by the wide cauldron of the crater, which must have been a kilometre or two across. There were vast patches of glassy smoothness near its centre, like solidified tar; black as night.
“For a moment I hoped we were wrong,” Sluka said, “I hoped that the flash, even the pressure-wave—I hoped that somehow they’d been faked, like a theatrical effect. But I can’t see how they could have faked this without actually blowing a hole in the planet.”
“We’ll know in a while,” the aide said. “I presume I can speak freely?”
“This concerns Sylveste,” Sluka said. “So he may as well hear it.”
“Cuvier has a plane heading towards the site of the attack. They’ll be able to confirm that this imagery wasn’t fabricated.”
By the time they returned underground the maps had been cracked, replacing the outdated copies in Mantell’s archive. Once again they retired to Sluka’s stateroom to view the data. This time the map’s accompanying information showed that it had been updated only a few weeks earlier.
“They’ve done pretty well,” Sylveste said. “To have kept up with the business of cartography while the city was crumbling around them. I admire their dedication.”
“Never mind their motives,” Sluka said, brushing her fingers against one of the pedestal-mounted globes which flanked the room, seemingly to anchor herself to the planet which now seemed to be spinning irrevocably beyond her control. “As long as Phoenix—or whatever they called it—is there, that’s all I care.”
“It’s there all right,” Pascale said.
Her finger penetrated the projected terrain, arrowing a tiny, labelled dot in the otherwise unpopulated north-eastern ranges. “It’s the only thing so far north,” she said. “And the only settlement in remotely the right direction. It’s called Phoenix, too.”
“What else do you have on it?”
Sluka’s aide—he was a small man with a delicately oiled moustache and goatee—spoke softly into his sleeve-mounted compad, instructing the map to zoom in on the settlement. A series of demographic icons popped into existence above the table. “Not much,” he said. “Just a few multi-family surface shacks linked by tubes. A few underground workings. No ground connections, although they did have a landing pad for aircraft.”
“Population?”
“I don’t think population’s quite the word for it,” the man said. “Just a hundred or so; about eighteen family units. Most of them from Cuvier, by the look of this.” He shrugged. “Actually, if this was her idea of a strike against the colony, I think we did remarkably well. A hundred or so people—-well, it’s a tragedy. But I’m surprised she didn’t play her hand against a more populous target. The fact that none of us really knew this place existed—it almost nullifies the act, don’t you think?”
“A splendidly inept thing,” Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.
“What?”
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feels a damn about these people.” Sylveste looked at the map, wondering what it must have been like for the inhabitants, given those few seconds of warning which Volyova had prescribed them. He wondered if any of them had taken the trouble to leave their dwellings and face the sky, in order to quicken—fractionally—the coming annihilation. “But I do know one thing. We have all the evidence we need that she’s a woman of her word. And that means you have to let me go to them.”