‘No airlock guards,’ Serena replied, ‘but we have technicians capable of splicing photonic cables and disabling sensors.’
‘That’s not enough,’ Agata said ruefully. ‘There’ll be people at all the airlocks, from now to the disruption.’
Serena hummed angrily. ‘So do you believe we’re going to do this, or do you think we’re going to cower in our rooms and wait for whatever unfolds?’
‘I don’t know.’ Agata hadn’t been able to bring herself to reveal what Ramiro had told her about the inscription. The only certainty they had now was the disruption; there was no promise of any kind of triumph to follow.
‘Are you still working in the cooling tunnels?’ Serena asked.
‘No.’
‘But you’re familiar with the whole system?’
‘I’ve done the induction – it was fairly detailed. Why?’
Serena said, ‘Cooling air leaves the mountain – and there won’t be people guarding every vent. If my technician friends can disable the sensors, we can go out with the air and start looking for these bombs.’
Agata began buzzing softly. ‘You think they’ll let a mob of saboteurs congregate at an air vent? There are cameras in every corridor, there are people watching every move we make.’
‘Maybe your moves,’ Serena conceded. ‘The mere fact that you were on the Surveyor with the anti-messager Ramiro taints you a little. But who am I? Who are my friends? There aren’t enough people in the entire security department to watch everyone, and the software never got smart enough to take over the job. We’re not saboteurs, we’re not known dissidents. While they’re watching the usual suspects, all we have to do is avoid setting off the kind of alarms that can’t be ignored.’
In Gineto’s apartment, Vala spent a chime scrupulously copying Agata’s posture and learning to mimic her gait.
‘No one would mistake our faces,’ Vala admitted, ‘but if I hold this box of books on my shoulder to obscure my face from the camera . . .’ She demonstrated.
Agata had carried Medoro’s real books home in more or less the same way; a second instalment need not attract suspicion. She handed Vala the key to her apartment. ‘Happy reading.’
She waited with Serena and Gineto, practising her imitation of Vala but hoping that no one would even be watching the camera feeds. Let them all be busy following Ramiro and Tarquinia.
Serena checked the clock on her belt. ‘Time to go.’
Gineto said, ‘Good luck.’
Agata followed Serena out of the apartment, trying to appear suitably motherly: mildly affectionate but mostly aloof. Vala had always seemed bemused that two lumps of flesh shed from her body had grown into fully functioning creatures, with no further intervention on her part. The corridor wasn’t too busy, so Serena took the adjoining rope, never concealing Agata entirely from the cameras they passed, but often obscuring part of the view. Anyone with access to the feeds would be able to reconstruct every party’s true movements easily enough, in retrospect – or long before the event, if the information was recognised as important enough to send back – so their not being caught out now would be largely contingent on their not being caught out later. From their position of ignorance, success and failure seemed balanced on a knife edge, but from a cosmic point of view the two slabs of self-consistent events had been utterly distinct for at least the last three years.
As they drew nearer to the utility shaft, Agata could see a camera gazing straight down at the entrance portal. They hung back, and Serena glanced at her clock. ‘Where are they?’ she muttered. A moment later Agata heard a group of people approaching, talking and buzzing.
‘Now,’ Serena whispered. They advanced together. There were a dozen people coming the other way, spread out between the two guide ropes. Some of them, politely, tried to shift ropes to let Serena and Agata pass, but they were packed too close together along both ropes for them to all fit on either one. As the impasse clumsily sorted itself out, two women who looked like mother and daughter managed to break out of the throng and move away. Agata followed Serena down into the shaft and pulled the portal cover closed behind her. If the security sensors here hadn’t been dealt with, they wouldn’t be the first ones to trigger them: the portal’s lock had been snapped a few bells before, and most of the team was meant to have come through before them.
As they descended the ladder in the red-tinged gloom, Agata could hear the muffled hiss of gas in the tunnel beside them. No one came here on regular cleaning shifts; the warm air was inimical to moss.
When they arrived at the bottom of the shaft the darkness was impenetrable. Serena said quietly, ‘It’s us,’ and someone switched on a coherer. Agata squinted into the glare and counted two dozen and nine figures squeezed around them, already wearing their corsets, cooling bags and jetpacks. Many of them had never used the jetpacks; they should all have had one-on-one briefings earlier from their more experienced friends, but it was Agata’s job now to go through the safety checks and remind them of everything they’d forgotten.
‘If you get into trouble,’ she began, climbing two steps back up the ladder to make herself visible to everyone, ‘just draw a stop line: a straight horizontal line across your chest.’ She demonstrated. ‘The rock will still be moving below you, but don’t let that confuse you: the pack will bring you to a halt relative to the mountain’s axis, so you won’t go flying off into the void.’
There was no time for more than the basics, but if they could retain it, it ought to keep them alive. Agata put on her own equipment.
‘Does everyone understand what we need to do with the occulters?’ The protocol she’d written had been copied discreetly from skin to skin, and some of the volunteers would not have received it until they’d reached this assembly point. In a perfect world they would have rehearsed the manoeuvre daily for a stint or two, but at least the jetpacks would handle most of the navigation.
‘Can the machines drill into our bodies?’ a young man asked anxiously.
‘Not intentionally,’ Agata assured him. ‘They’re not that sophisticated; they have no defensive strategies as such. The only danger is if they’re so confused that they mistake you for rock, but if you get out of their way they won’t pursue you.’
Serena passed Agata a helmet. They were aiming not to use the links; this would probably be their last chance to talk until they were back in the mountain again.
‘Happy Travellers’ Day,’ Serena said.
‘Happy Travellers’ Day,’ Agata replied. She put on her helmet and turned towards the maintenance hatch.
A succession of shutters sealed off portions of the final length of the cooling tunnel, opening in sequence to allow air to pass from chamber to chamber at ever lower pressures until it was expelled into the void. The maintenance hatch wasn’t meant to open unless the whole cycle had been stopped and all the chambers had reached the ambient pressure of the mountain’s interior, but Serena’s technician friends had managed to fake the sensor data to convince the hatch that it was safe to operate. The only catch was that it had been too complicated to try to lock it against any real part of the cycle. It would be up to each person exiting to synchronise their access with a time when the shutter below them wasn’t open to the void.
Agata pressed her helmet to the hatch and listened to the sequence of clanks and hisses until the rhythm was embedded in her mind. The last time she’d dealt with machinery in the tunnels it hadn’t ended well, but at least she’d had the timing right.
She slid the hatch open. Air blew in from behind her, but it only took a flicker for the pressure to equalise. She climbed into the tunnel and braced herself against the walls with her hands and feet. Serena closed the hatch behind her.