Wardani turned away. ‘It’s down on the beach,’ she said.
The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale blue shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practised flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.
We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. She was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.
‘That’s it.’ She nodded ahead. ‘That’s where we buried it.’
‘Buried it?’ Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. ‘How exactly did you bury it?’
Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. ‘Use your eyes, man. How do you think?’
‘You blew it up?’
‘Bored charges.’ Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. ‘Two metres in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.’
‘You.’ Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. ‘Blew up. An artefact?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.’ Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. ‘Where do you think we found the fucking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery – this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. ‘Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million UN dollars for damaged goods.’
‘What brought the rock down?’ I asked suddenly.
Schneider turned, grinning. ‘I told you, man. Bored—’
‘No.’ I was looking at Tanya Wardani. ‘I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction under water, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?’
‘Yeah, Tanya,’ Schneider nodded vigorously. ‘You never did nail that one, did you? I mean we talked about it, but…’
‘It’s a good point.’ Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. ‘What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?’
The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.
‘Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.’
I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. ‘Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.’
‘Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.’
‘Leakage?’ asked Hand dubiously.
Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy now Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the packet, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.
‘Look,’ she said finally. ‘This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does, at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.’
When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.
‘Alright. How long does a heavy load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.’ She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. ‘Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, metres wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours, that’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?’
‘A lot of energy,’ said Hand impatiently. ‘So what’s this about leakage?’
‘Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.’
‘Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. ‘And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ’cast duration of a few seconds, well, it doesn’t add up to much air time. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilisation with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.’
‘Oops.’
The archaeologue flicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.
‘Quite,’ she said acidly. ‘Oops. Now the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.’
I nodded. ‘So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—’
‘And buries itself under five hundred thousand tonnes of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Wardani.’
The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. ‘I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.’
‘Or,’ said Schneider brightly, ‘it could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?’
‘We already talked about this, Jan.’ Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. ‘It’s not—’