Irina nodded, noting Thorn’s evident incredulity. ‘Yes, that’s quite correct. What you see here has been achieved in the last ten standard days. We are dealing with an industrial capacity beyond anything in our experience, Thorn. Our machines can turn a small metal-rich asteroid into a starship in a few days, but even that would seem astonishingly slow by comparison with the Inhibitor processes.’
‘Ten days to form that arc.’ The hairs on the back of Thorn’s neck were standing up, to his embarrassment. ‘Do you think they’ll keep growing it until the ends meet?’
‘It seems likely. If the ends are to form a ring, they’ll meet in a little under ninety days.’
‘Three months! You’re right. We couldn’t do that. We never could; not even during the Belle Époque. Why, though? Why throw a ring around the gas giant?’
‘We don’t know. Yet. There’s more, though.’ Irina nodded at the eye. ‘Shall we continue?’
‘Show me,’ Thorn said. ‘I want to see it all.’
‘You won’t like it.’
She showed him the rest, explaining how the three individual mass streams had followed near-ballistic trajectories from their points of origin, like chains of pebbles tossed in precise formation. But near the gas giant they were tightly orchestrated, steered and braked by machines too small to see. They were forced to curve sharply, aimed towards whichever constructional focus was their destination. One stream rained down into the maw of the moon that was extruding out the whiskers. The other two streams plunged into similar mawlike structures on two other moons, both of which had been lowered into orbits just above the cloud layer, well within the radius at which they should have been shattered by tidal forces.
‘What are the other two moons doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Here, take a look. See if you can make more sense of it than we’ve been able to.’
It was difficult to surmise exactly what was going on. There was a whisker of material emerging from each of the two lower moons, ejected aft, against the direction of orbital motion. The whiskers appeared to be about the same size as the arc that was being built by the higher moon, but they each followed a sinuous snakelike curve that took them from a tangent to the orbital motion into the atmosphere itself, like great telegraph cables being reeled into the sea by a ship. Immediately behind the impact point of each tube was an eyelike wake of roiling and disturbed atmosphere many thousands of kilometres long.
‘They don’t come out again, as far as we can see,’ Vuilleumier said.
‘How fast are they being laid?’
‘We can’t tell. There aren’t any reference points on the tubes themselves, so we can’t calculate how fast they’re emerging from the moons. There’s no way we can get a Doppler measurement, not without revealing our interest. But we know that the flux of matter falling into each of the three moons is about the same, and the tubes are all about the same width.’
‘Then they’re probably being spooled into the atmosphere at the same speed as the arc is being formed, is that it? Two hundred and eighty kilometres per hour, or thereabouts.’ Thorn looked at the two women, searching their faces for clues. ‘Any ideas, then?’
‘We can’t begin to guess,’ Irina said.
‘But you don’t think this is good news, do you?’
‘No, Thorn, I don’t. My guess, frankly, is that whatever is taking place down there is part of something even larger.’
‘And that something means we have to evacuate Resurgam?’ She nodded. ‘We still have time, Thorn. The outer arc won’t be finished for eighty days, but it seems very unlikely that anything catastrophic will happen immediately after that. More likely, another process will start, something that might take as long again to complete as the building of the arcs. We may have many months beyond that.’
‘Months, though, not years.’
‘We only need six months to evacuate Resurgam.’
Thorn remembered the calculations they had explained to him, the dry arithmetic of shuttle flights and passenger capacities. It could be done in six months, yes, but only if human behaviour was factored out of the sums. People did not behave like bulk cargo. Especially not people who had been cowed and intimidated by an oppressive regime for the last five decades.
‘What you told me before — that we might have a few years to get this done?’
Vuilleumier smiled. ‘We told a few white lies, that’s all.’
Later, following what seemed to him to be an unnecessarily tortuous route through the ship, they took Thorn to view a cavernous hangar bay where many smaller spacecraft waited. They hung in their parking racks, transatmospheric and ship-to-ship shuttles like sleek-skinned sharks or bloated, spined angelfish. Most of the ships were too small to be of any use in the proposed evacuation plan, but he could not deny that the view was impressive.
They even helped him into a spacesuit with a thruster pack so that he could be taken on a tour through the chamber itself, inspecting the ships that would lift the people off Resurgam and ferry them across space to Nostalgia for Infinity itself. If he had harboured any suspicions that any of this was being faked, he discarded them now. The sheer vastness of the chamber and the overwhelming fact of the ships’ existence rammed aside any lingering misgivings, at least with respect to the reality of Infinity.
And yet… and yet. He had seen the ship with his own eyes, had walked on it and felt the subtle difference of its spin-generated artificial gravity compared with the pull of Resurgam that he had known all his adult life. The ship could not be faked, and it would have taken extreme measures to fake the fact that the bay was full of smaller craft. But the threat itself? That was where it all broke down. They had shown him much, but not nearly enough. Everything concerning the threat to Resurgam had been shown to him second-hand. He had seen none of it with his own eyes.
Thorn was a man who needed to see things for himself. He could ask either of the two women to show him more evidence, but that would solve nothing. Even if they took him outside the ship and let him look through a telescope pointed at the gas giant, there would be no way for him to be sure that the view was not being doctored in some way. Even if they let him look with his own eyes towards the giant, and told him that the dot of light he was seeing was in some way different because of the machines’ activities, he would still be taking it on trust.
He was not a man to take things on trust.
‘Well, Thorn?’ Vuilleumier said, helping him out of the suit. ‘I take it you’ve seen enough now to know we aren’t lying? The sooner we get you back to Resurgam, the sooner we can move ahead with the exodus. Time’s precious, as we said.’
He nodded at the small dangerous-looking woman with the smoke-coloured eyes. ‘You’re right. You’ve shown me a lot, I admit. Enough for me to be sure you aren’t lying about all of it.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But that’s not good enough.’
‘No?’
‘You’re asking me to risk too much to take any of it on trust, Inquisitor.’
There was steel in her voice when she answered. ‘You saw your dossier, Thorn. There’s enough there to send you to the Amarantin.’
‘I don’t doubt it. I’ll give you more, if you want. It doesn’t change a thing. I’m not going to lead the people into anything that looks like a government trap.’