‘No — far from it. I’m just abiding by the rules that the Spire sets. It doesn’t allow weapons inside itself, you see — or anything else that might be used against it, like fusion torches. It senses such things and acts accordingly. It’s very clever.’
I looked at him. ‘Is this guesswork?’
‘Of course not. Argyle already learned this much. No point making exactly the same mistakes again, is there?’
‘I still don’t get it,’ Celestine said when we had assembled outside the shuttle, standing like so many white soap statuettes. ‘Why fight the thing on its own terms at all? There are bound to be weapons on Forqueray’s ship we could use from orbit; we could open it like a carcase.’
‘Yes,’ Childe said, ‘and in the process destroy everything we came this far to learn?’
‘I’m not talking about blowing it off the face of Golgotha. I’m just talking about clean, surgical dissection.’
‘It won’t work. The Spire is a living thing, Celestine. Or at least a machine intelligence many orders of magnitude cleverer than anything we’ve encountered to date. It won’t tolerate violence being used against it. Argyle learned that much.
‘Even if it can’t defend itself against such attacks — and we don’t know that — it will certainly destroy what it contains. We’ll still have lost everything.’
‘But still… no weapons?’
‘Not quite,’ Childe said, tapping the forehead region of his suit. ‘We still have our minds, after all. That’s why I assembled this team. If brute force would have been sufficient, I’d have had no need to scour Yellowstone for such fierce intellects.’
Hirz spoke from inside her own, smaller version of the armoured suit. ‘You’d better not be taking the piss.’
‘Forqueray?’ Childe said. ‘We’re nearly there now. Put us down on the surface two klicks from the base of the Spire. We’ll cross the remaining distance on foot.’
Forqueray obliged, bringing the triangular formation down. Our suits had been slaved to his, but now we regained independent control.
Through the suit’s numerous layers of armour and padding I felt the rough texture of the ground beneath my feet. I held up a thickly gauntleted hand and felt the breeze of Golgotha’s thin atmosphere caress my palm. The tactile transmission was flawless, and when I moved, the suit flowed with me so effortlessly that I had no sense of being encumbered by it. The view was equally impressive, with the suit projecting an image directly into my visual field rather than forcing me to peer through a visor.
A strip along the top of my visual field showed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view all around me, and I could zoom in on any part of it almost without thinking. Various overlays — sonar, radar, thermal, gravimetric — could be dropped over the existing visual field with the same ease. If I looked down I could even ask the suit to edit me out of the image, so that I could view the scene from a disembodied perspective. As we walked along the suit threw traceries of light across the scenery: an etchwork of neon which would now and then coalesce around an odd-shaped rock or peculiar pattern of ground markings. After several minutes of this I had adjusted the suit’s alertness threshold to what I felt was a useful level of protectivity, neither too watchful nor too complacent.
Childe and Forqueray had taken the lead on the ground. They would have been difficult to distinguish, but my suit had partially erased their suits, so that they seemed to walk unprotected save for a ghostly second skin. When they looked at me they would perceive the same consensual illusion.
Trintignant followed a little way behind, moving with the automaton-like stiffness I had now grown almost accustomed to.
Celestine followed, with me a little to her stern.
Hirz brought up the rear, small and lethal and — now that I knew her a little better — quite unlike any of the few children I had ever met.
And ahead — rising, ever rising — was the thing we had come all this way to best.
It had been visible, of course, long before we set down. The Spire was a quarter of a kilometre high, after all. But I think we had all chosen to ignore it; to map it out of our perceptions, until we were much closer. It was only now that we were allowing those mental shields to collapse; forcing our imaginations to confront the fact of the tower’s existence.
Huge and silent, it daggered into the sky.
It was much as Childe had shown us, except that it seemed infinitely more massive; infinitely more present. We were still a quarter of a kilometre from the thing’s base, and yet the flared top — the bulb-shaped finial — seemed to be leaning back over us, constantly on the point of falling and crushing us. The effect was exacerbated by the occasional high-altitude cloud that passed overhead, writhing in Golgotha’s fast, thin jetstreams. The whole tower looked as if it were toppling. For a long moment, taking in the immensity of what stood before us — its vast age; its vast, brooding capacity for harm — the idea of trying to reach the summit felt uncomfortably close to insanity.
Then a small, rational voice reminded me that this was exactly the effect the Spire’s builders would have sought.
Knowing that, it was fractionally easier to take the next step closer to the base.
‘Well,’ Celestine said. ‘It looks like we’ve found Argyle.’
Childe nodded. ‘Yes. Or what’s left of the poor bastard.’
We had found several body parts by then, but his was the only one that was anywhere near being complete. He had lost a leg inside the Spire, but had been able to crawl to the exit before the combination of bleeding and asphyxiation killed him. It was here — dying — that he had been interviewed by Childe’s envoy, which had only then emerged from its hiding place.
Perhaps he had imagined himself in the presence of a benevolent steel angel.
He was not well preserved. There was no bacterial life on Golgotha, and nothing that could be charitably termed weather, but there were savage dust-storms, and these must have intermittently covered and revealed the body, scouring it in the process. Parts of his suit were missing, and his helmet had cracked open, exposing his skull. Papery sheets of skin adhered to the bone here and there, but not enough to suggest a face.
Childe and Forqueray regarded the corpse uneasily, while Trintignant knelt down and examined it in more detail. A float-cam belonging to the Ultra floated around, observing the scene with goggling arrays of tightly packed lenses.
‘Whatever took his leg off did it cleanly,’ the Doctor reported, pulling back the tattered layers of the man’s suit fabric to expose the stump. ‘Witness how the bone and muscle have been neatly severed along the same plane, like a geometric slice through a platonic solid? I would speculate that a laser was responsible for this, except that I see no sign of cauterisation. A high-pressure water-jet might have achieved the same precision of cut, or even an extremely sharp blade.’
‘Fascinating, Doc,’ Hirz said, kneeling down next to him. ‘I’ll bet it hurt like fuck, too, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not necessarily. The degree of pain would depend acutely on the manner in which the nerve ends were truncated. Shock does not appear to have been the primary agent in this man’s demise.’ Doctor Trintignant fingered the remains of a red fabric band a little distance above the end of the leg. ‘Nor was the blood loss as rapid as might have been expected given the absence of cauterisation. This band was most likely a tourniquet, probably applied from his suit’s medical kit. The same kit almost certainly included analgesics.’
‘It wasn’t enough to save him, though,’ Childe said.
‘No.’ Trintignant stood up, the movement reminding me of an escalator. ‘But you must concede that he did rather well, considering the impediments.’