‘We’ve completed a more detailed inspection of the surface of Cerberus from our present orbit,’ Alicia’s projection said. ‘And there’s still no evidence of the cometary impact point. Plenty of cratering, yes — but none of it recent. Which just doesn’t make any sense.’ She elaborated the one plausible theory they had, which was that the comet had been destroyed just before impact. Even that explanation implied the use of some form of defensive technology, but at least it avoided the paradox of the unchanged surface features. ‘But we saw no sign of anything like that, and there’s certainly no evidence of any technological structures on the surface. We’ve decided to launch a squadron of probes down to the surface. They’ll be able to hunt for anything we might have missed — machines buried in caves, or sunk in canyons below our viewing angle — and they might provoke some kind of response, if there are automated systems down there.’
Yes, Sylveste thought acidly. They had indeed provoked some kind of response. But it was almost certainly not the kind Alicia had anticipated.
Volyova located the next segment in Alicia’s narrative. The probes had been deployed; tiny automated spacecraft as fragile and nimble as dragonflies. They had fallen towards the surface of Cerberus — there was no atmosphere to retard them — only arresting their descent at the last moment, with quick spurts of fusion flame. For a while, seen from the vantage point of the Lorean, they had been sparks of brightness against the unremitting grey of Cerberus. But as the sparks had become tiny, they were a reminder that even this tiny, dead world was orders of magnitude larger than most human creations.
‘Log entry,’ said Alicia, after a gap in the narrative. ‘The probes are reporting something unusual — it’s just coming in now.’ She looked to one side, consulting a display beyond the projection volume. ‘Seismic activity on the surface. We were expecting to see it already, but until now the crust hasn’t moved at all, even though the planet’s orbit isn’t quite circularised and there should be tidal stresses. It’s almost as if the probes have triggered it, but that’s quite ridiculous.’
‘No more so than a planet that erases all evidence of a cometary impact on its surface,’ Pascale said. Then she looked at Sylveste. ‘I didn’t mean that as a criticism of Alicia, by the way.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t,’ he said. ‘But it would have been valid.’ Then he turned to Volyova. ‘Did you recover anything other than Alicia’s log entries? There must have been telemetered data from her probes…’
‘We have it,’ Volyova said cautiously. ‘I haven’t cleaned it up. It’s a little on the raw side.’
‘Patch me in.’
Volyova breathed a string of commands into the bracelet she always wore and the bridge burned away, a barrage of synaesthesia jumbling Sylveste’s senses. He was being immersed in the data from one of Alicia’s probes — the surveyor’s sensorium fully as raw as Volyova had warned. But Sylveste had known more or less what to expect; the transition was merely jarring rather than — as could easily have been the case — agonising.
He floated above a landscape. Altitude was difficult to judge, since the fractal surface features — craters, clefts and rivers of frozen grey lava — would have looked very similar at any distance. But the surveyor told him he was only half a kilometre above Cerberus. He looked down at the plain, hunting for some sign of the seismic activity Alicia had mentioned. Cerberus looked eternally old and unchanging, as if nothing had happened to it for billions of years. The only hint of motion came from the fusion jets, casting radial shadows away from his position as the machine loitered.
What had the drones seen? Certainly nothing in the visual band. Feeling his way into the sensorium — it was like slipping on an unfamiliar glove — Sylveste found the neural commands which accessed different data channels. He turned to thermal sensors, but the plain’s temperature showed no signs of variation. Across the complete EM spectrum there was nothing anomalous. Neutrino and exotic particle fluxes remained steadfastly within expectation. Yet when he switched to the gravitational imagers, he knew that something was very wrong with Cerberus. His visual field was overlaid with coloured, translucent contours of gravitational force. The contours were moving.
Things — huge enough to register via the mass sensors — were travelling underground, converging in a pincer movement directly below the point where he was hovering. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe that these moving forms were only vast, buried flows of lava — but that comforting delusion lasted no more than a second.
This was nothing natural.
Lines appeared on the plain, forming a starlike mandala centred on the same focus. Dimly, on the limits of his perception, he was aware that similar starlike patterns were opening below the other probes. The cracks widened, opening into monstrous black fissures. Through the fissures, Sylveste had a glimpse into what seemed to be kilometres of luminous depth. Coiled mechanical shapes writhed, sliding blue-grey tendrils wider than canyons. The motion was busy; orchestrated, purposeful, machinelike. He felt a special kind of revulsion. It was the feeling of biting an apple and exposing a colony of wrigglingly industrious maggots. He knew now. Cerberus was not a planet.
It was a mechanism.
Then the coiled things erupted through the star-shaped hole in the plain, rushing dreamily towards him, as if reaching to snatch him out of the sky. There was a horrible moment of whiteness — a whiteness in every sense he had — before Volyova’s sensorium-feed ended with screaming suddenness, Sylveste almost shrieking with existential shock as his sense of self crashed back into his body in the bridge.
He had time enough, after he had gathered his faculties, to observe Alicia mouthing something soundlessly, her face carved in what might have been fear, and what might equally have been the dismay at learning — in the instant prior to her death — that she had been wrong all along.
Then her image dissolved into static.
‘Now at least we know he’s mad,’ Khouri said, hours later. ‘If that didn’t persuade him against going any closer to Cerberus, I don’t think anything will.’
‘It may well have had the opposite effect,’ Volyova said, voice low despite the relative security furnished by the spider-room. ‘Now Sylveste knows there is something worth investigating, rather than merely suspecting so.’
‘Alien machinery?’
‘Evidently. And perhaps we can even guess at the purpose, too. Cerberus clearly isn’t a real world. At the very least, it’s a real world surrounded by a shell of machines, with an artificial crust. That explains why the cometary impact-point was never found — the crust, presumably, repaired itself before Alicia’s crew could get close enough.’
‘Some kind of camouflage?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘So why draw attention by attacking those probes?’
Volyova had evidently given the matter some prior thought. ‘The illusion of verisimilitude obviously can’t be foolproof at distances less than a kilometre or so. My guess is the probes were about to learn the truth just before they were destroyed, so the world lost nothing and gained some additional raw material in the bargain.’
‘Why, though? Why surround a planet with a false crust?’
‘I have no idea, and neither, I suspect, does Sylveste. That’s why he’s now even more likely to insist on going closer.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’s already asked me to devise a strategy, in fact.’
‘A strategy for what?’
‘For getting him inside Cerberus.’ She paused. ‘He knows about the cache-weapons, of course. He presumes they’ll be sufficient to achieve his aims, by weakening the crustal machinery in one area of the planet. More than that will be needed, of course…’ Her tone of voice shifted. ‘Do you think this Mademoiselle of yours always knew this would be his objective?’