normal, knowledgeable, interested types, keen to get on a team. They could restrain their excitement long enough to complete a few missions successfully, often distinguishing themselves with what seemed like bravery. Then, just when you trusted them enough for a really challenging job, they’d let their obsession get the better of them, break away and plunge deep into the works. If they didn’t disappear entirely—into the ravenous tornado of Singularity, or destroyed by the machinery—they came back changed: bodies mutilated or enhanced, minds time-sharing with, or displaced entirely by, other entities. Posthuman processors used human-level minds as subroutines. Some of these minds were eager to escape into other systems. With sufficient care one could trap them—as Shlaim had been—but without it, they could possess the incautious. The best outcome was when the Rapture-fucker was the only victim.
Some of the less autistic wrecks of such adventures were frazzling their neurons further in the corners of this bar. Trying to make the voices go away, or shut up, or speak more clearly; trying to make the fleeting impossible insight come back. A woman with long silver hair leaned against the outward overhang of the window wall, palms and forehead pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Every so often she’d rock back, reach behind her for a bottle on the table, swig, and resume her outward staring without turning around.
‘This is the one you want,’ Johnstone said, pushing the slate across the table and swivelling it at the same time. He’d highlighted the relevant paragraph in the long list of bits of kit DK considered the equivalent of one of their new ships. All of them looked almost impossible to get hold of, with the resources she could muster; this one she’d dismissed entirely.
‘One (1) macroscale quantum teleportation device (transmitter and receiver) fully functioning with human- level interface control enabled; minimum mass transfer capability: two (2) tonnes; minimum resolution scale: atomic; minimum range 10 1y.’
‘This is some kind of joke,’ Carlyle said. ‘The little commie bastards are trying it on. There’s only been one, brackets, one of these ever found, and we sold it to the Knights for a fucking solar system. One with two gas giants and a habitable terrestrial, at that.’
‘There wasn’t only one found,’ said Johnstone. ‘There’s only one been
The name made her shoulders hunch a little. ‘That’s a pulsar planet! And it’s right in the beam!’
Johnstone nodded. ‘Every two point seven seconds. Chernobyl’s tidal-locked to the primary—no rotation, and the gate’s on the day side, if you call getting nuked every two-and-a-bit seconds “day.” The gate’s fifty-odd klicks from the caves—from the known entrance to the cave system, that is. The terrain is rough, the atmosphere’s thick, ionised, stormy … let’s just say you wouldn’t want to fly in it. What light gets through is from the stars and from secondary radioactivity. The machine, the QTD, masses about five tonnes and is as delicate and about as radiation-tolerant as a leaf photometer. It’s only because it’s three hundred metres below ground that it’s survived at all.’ He smiled. ‘And that’s just the transmitter. The receiver is a few thousand kilometres away—still on the day side, worse luck. Heavily shielded with a hundred tons of lead, because it’s in a shallower cave. One that doesn’t have any known entrance. And believe me, the planet’s been satellite-mapped to centimetre resolution.’
‘So how come anyone knows where it is, or even that it exists?’
‘We fired up the QTD transmitter and sent a probe through it. It was possible to deduce its new location by timing the radiation pulses. Some of that shit punches straight through half a klick of rock, and this was maybe ten metres below the surface.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, you can only do so much with probes. Especially in these conditions. Terribly bad line, you know. So I took a backup and went through myself.’
She tried not to show quite how impressed she felt. ‘What did you find?’
‘Oh, a cave full of very nice kit. Nothing as good as the QTD, though. And no way out, no exit that I could find. No transmitter the other way, either.’
‘So how did you—oh.’
‘I didn’t. I died there. Gives me claustrophobia just thinking about it.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I’m the backup.’
‘How did you die?’ she asked.
‘Suicide, I’m pleased to say. Webster bolt to the head. Good to know I have the balls for it. Though considering it was the first symptoms of radiation sickness that made me do it—puking up in the suit and all that, very messy—maybe “balls” isn’t quite the mot juste.’
‘Somehow,’ Carlyle said, ‘I get the impression you’re not telling me all this to show how tough you are. You think there’s a way to get the thing out.’
‘Oh, I know there is,’ said Johnstone. ‘Think about it. The Raptured may have been as gods, but they couldn’t work miracles. How did the receiver get into a closed cave? There must be another gate, in the second cave.’
‘Leading to God knows where.’
‘Well, yes.’ He grinned. ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’
‘What about the transmitter?’
‘I’m afraid there’s no way around that one. There’s simply no way to get it to the gate. So forget about gates. You’d have to land a starship as near to the entrance as possible and load it on. Come to think of it, you could do the same with the other one. Use a bunker-buster to break into the cave—the receiver’s shielded, like I said, so it’s pretty robust—and carry it out.’
‘Why hasn’t that been done?’
‘The pulsar beam is like a nuclear bomb going off nearby in vacuum every two point seven seconds. You’ll recall what a radiation burst like that does to a starship main drive.’
‘I do indeed,’ said Carlyle. ‘But you could protect the drive by cladding it with enough lead. Hundreds of tons.’
Johnstone leaned back. ‘You could,’ he said. ‘And why isn’t that done routinely, I ask, given the low but unfortunately not zero frequency of nuclear skirmishes?’
‘Because if you did that, you wouldn’t have enough power to shift anything much else.’
‘Exactly,’ said Johnstone. ‘It isn’t just the added weight—shielding the drive against radiation weakens the field’s grip on the spacetime manifold. And don’t forget, we’re talking about loading
Carlyle ran through some mental calculations. ‘It could still be done,’ she said. ‘Cutting it very fine, leaving out every scrap of mass you didn’t need … shit. And some that you would. There’d be nowhere near enough for the team’s protective suits, or extra armour for the search engine. Or a search engine at all, come to that. The team and the crew would have to stay in the same shelter as the drive … yeah, that’s possible, but when they went out …’
‘How clearly you see the problem,’ said Johnstone. ‘Believe me, I’ve done the math. Factored in all the equipment you’d need—a crane and a truck, principally—and whichever way you cut it, you’re right at the margin. You can’t get the ship there safely
‘Do it in two trips. Or two ships. Or a really big KE ship, or one of those AO arks …’
‘Can you afford that? Any of that?’
‘If I could get the investment in advance … but not for this, no. Just a standard AO truck.’
‘Well, then.’
Carlyle stared at him. His fixed-pupil eyes stared back.
‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘One-way.’
‘Dying’s not so hard,’ said Johnstone. ‘Take it from me.’
A
lot of things could go through your mind at a moment like this. The first thing that Carlyle thought about was robots. She dismissed the thought. She couldn’t afford robots. Robots autonomous and smart enough to do that kind of job were more expensive and harder to hire than humans, and less easily replaced. The second thing she thought about was dying. She’d never done it before, and there was a certain pride in that, an existential security in
