Discovering them was a godsend, since it enormously quickened their rate of descent, but that gift was not without its hazards. Constrained by the linear walls of the shaft, there would be nowhere to seek refuge if an attack came, and only two possible directions of escape. Yet if they delayed further, they would face imprisonment in Cerberus when the bridgehead collapsed; no more palatable a fate. So they risked using the shafts.
They could not simply fall. That had been possible before, when the vertical distance was no more than a kilometre or so, but here the very size of the shafts brought unanticipated problems. They found themselves drifting mysteriously towards the walls, and had to keep applying bursts of corrective thrust to stop themselves being dashed against the rushing precipice of sickly jade. It was Coriolis force, of course: the same fictitious force which curved wind vectors into cyclones on the surface of a rotating planet. Here, Coriolis force objected to a strictly linear descent, since Cerberus was rotating, and Sylveste and Sajaki had to shed excess angular momentum with each movement closer to the core. Yet compared to their earlier slow progress, it was gratifyingly rapid.
They had fallen a hundred kilometres when the attack began.
‘It’s moving,’ Volyova said.
Ten hours had passed since leaving the lighthugger. She was exhausted, despite having catnapped for odd hours, knowing that she would need the energy soon. But it had not really helped; she needed more than little intermissions of unconsciousness to begin to heal all the physiological and mental stress of recent days. Now, though, she was fully awake, as if at the limits of fatigue her body had grudgingly accessed some stagnant pool of reserve energy. Doubtless it would not last, and there would be an even heavier premium to pay when she had exhausted this stop-gap — but for now she was glad of the alertness, however transitory.
‘What’s moving?’ Khouri asked.
Volyova nodded at the shuttle’s glaringly white console, at the readout windows she had called into being across its horseshoe profile.
‘What else but the damned ship?’
Pascale yawned awake. ‘What’s up?’
‘What’s up is we have trouble,’ Volyova said, fingers dancing on the keyboard to call up other readouts, though she did not really need confirmation of this. Bad news carried its own certification. ‘The lighthugger is on the move again. This means two things, neither of them good. Sun Stealer must have reinstated the major systems I disabled with Palsy.’
‘Well, ten hours wasn’t bad — at least it allowed us to get this far.’ Pascale nodded at the nearest positional display, which showed the shuttle more than one third of the distance to Cerberus.
‘What else?’ Khouri asked.
‘What it implies, which is that Sun Stealer must now have gained enough experience to manipulate the drive. Previously it was something he was only cautiously investigating, in case he harmed the ship.’
‘Meaning what?’
Volyova indicated the same positional readout. ‘Let’s assume he now has total control of the drive and knows the tolerances. The ship’s current vector puts it on an intercept trajectory with us. Sun Stealer’s trying to reach us before we reach Dan, or even the bridgehead. We’re too small a target at this range — beam weapons would disperse too much to hit us, and we could outmanoeuvre all the sub-relativistic projectiles just by executing a random flight path — but it won’t be long before we’re within kill-range.’
‘Just how long is that?’ Pascale frowned. It was not, Volyova thought, the woman’s most endearing habit, but she endured it expressionlessly. ‘Don’t we already have a massive head-start?’
‘We do, but now there’s nothing to stop Sun Stealer ramping the lighthugger’s thrust all the way up to multiple tens of gees — accelerations we simply can’t match without pulping ourselves in the process. But that’s not a problem for him. There’s nothing left alive aboard that ship which doesn’t run around on four legs and squeak and make a mess when you shoot it.’
‘And maybe the Captain,’ Khouri said. ‘Except I don’t think he’ll be much of a consideration.’
‘I asked how long,’ Pascale said.
‘If we’re lucky, we might just reach Cerberus,’ Volyova said. ‘But it wouldn’t give us much time to scout around and have second thoughts. We’d have to get inside just to avoid the ship’s weapons. And even then we’d have to get pretty deep inside.’ She dredged a clucking laugh from somewhere inside herself. ‘Maybe your husband had the right idea all along. He might be in a much safer position than any of us. For the time being at least.’
Patterns resolved in the walls of the shaft, areas of crystal beginning to glow a little more intently than the rest. The patterns were so vast that Sylveste did not immediately recognise them for what they were: vast Amarantin graphicforms. It was not simply their size, in fact, but also the fact that they were rendered differently from any he had seen before; almost another language entirely. In an intuitive flash he realised that he was seeing the language used by the Banished; the flock which had followed Sun Stealer into exile, and eventually to the stars. Tens of thousands of years spaced this writing from any example he had ever seen, which made it even more of a miracle that he was able to tease any sense out of it at all.
‘What are they telling us?’ Calvin asked.
‘That we’re not welcome,’ Sylveste said, half astonished that the graphicforms spoke to him. ‘To put it mildly.’
Sajaki must have picked up his subvocalisation. ‘What, exactly?’
‘They’re saying that they made this level,’ Sylveste said. ‘That they manufactured it.’
‘I guess,’ Calvin said, ‘that you’ve finally been vindicated — this place really was the handiwork of the Amarantin.’
‘In any other circumstances this would call for a drink,’ Sylveste said, but he was only paying half attention to the conversation now; fascinated by what he was reading; by the thoughts which were springing into his mind. More than once he had felt this feeling when deep into the process of translating Amarantin script, but never before with this fluency, or this sense of total certainty. It was enthralling, and not a little terrifying.
‘Please go on,’ Sajaki said.
‘Well, it’s what I said: a warning. It’s saying we shouldn’t progress any further.’
‘That probably means we’re not far from what we came for.’
Sylveste had that feeling as well, though he could not justify it. ‘The warning says there’s something below we shouldn’t see,’ he said.
‘See? Is that what it says, literally?’
‘Amarantin thought is very visual, Sajaki. Whatever it is, they don’t want us anywhere near it.’
‘Which suggests that whatever it is has value — don’t you agree?’
‘What if it really is a warning?’ Calvin said. ‘I don’t mean a threat; I mean a genuine heart-felt plea to keep away. Can you tell from the context if that’s the case?’
‘If it was conventional Amarantin script, perhaps.’ What Sylveste did not add was that he felt that the message was exactly what Calvin had implied, though there was no way he could rationalise that feeling. It did not deter him, though. Instead, he found himself wondering just what could have driven the Amarantin to this; what was so bad that it had to be encased in a facsimile of a world and defended by the most awesome weapons known to a civilisation? What was so unspeakable that it could not simply be destroyed? What kind of monster had they created?