Newton's Wake

Memory to a Secure Server. She avoided watching the virtual needle’s upward creep.

Johnstone drove the balloon-wheeled flatbed truck down the ramp and the two women clambered on. There were no seats, just a bar to hang on to. Like the ship, the vehicle was stripped to a minimum. The controls were on a handset over which Johnstone’s thumb flipped back and forth.

The cave, when they reached the entrance a minute or two later, was not at all what Carlyle had expected. The air was clearer, visibility much better. The walls—about three metres apart, just enough clearance for the truck—were smooth and the angles between them and the floor and roof were sharp. Rather than the diffuse glow of ionised air and surface radioactives, it was lit by distinct glowing patches every few metres along the roof.

‘This isn’t a cave,’ said Higgins. ‘It’s a tunnel.’

‘When you’re looking at the work of the Raptured,’ Johnstone said, ‘that distinction becomes kind of moot. Check out our expedition report sometime. None of this shows any trace of having been made, or the rock’s having been worked. It’s like some wildly unlikely coincidental outcome of geological processes. Like those natural nuclear reactors they found in Africa, only more so.’

Carlyle had often enough seen structures of which the same could have been said, but something about Johnstone’s confident statement niggled at her. Before she could track down the elusive thought, the truck emerged from the tunnel into a chamber about forty metres high and wide and over a hundred metres long. The light- patches, at this distance quite obviously rectangular, dotted the vaulting roof and soaring sides. The floor was littered with large complicated metal objects whose nature as machinery was as clear as their purpose was obscure. It was like standing in a cathedral that had been taken over by militant scientific atheists as a laboratory or factory, and then abandoned. The truck’s lights, as they moved, cast shadows like encroaching cowled inquisitors eager to avenge the sacrilege.

Johnstone idled the truck, jumped out and led the way through the machinery. He stopped in front of what looked like a solid gold omega, the circular part about two metres across, the two horizontal pieces at the bottom fixed to a steel plinth in which several control panels were embedded.

‘There it is,’ he said. ‘The transmitter.’

‘How do we get that onto the truck?’ Higgins asked.

‘Very carefully,’ said Johnstone.

He remote-controlled the truck along the path they’d taken on foot, bringing it to a halt a couple of metres away. Then he lowered the flatbed platform to the ground. He sprayed the edge of the platform, and the floor between the truck and the QTD, with buckyball lubricant. Carlyle was expecting they’d have to push it, but Johnstone tied some carbon-fibred rope to the object and Higgins expertly converted the engine shaft to a winch. Very slowly, and steadied by all three of the team, the QTD transmitter was eased on to the truck and lashed into place.

On their return to the cave entrance Johnstone called up the pilot, who brought the Extacy directly outside. Even more slowly and carefully, they got the object up the ramp and into the ship. With more buckyball lubricant and, this time, muscle force, they pushed and pulled it into the lead shelter. Cleaning up the lethally slippery lubricant took longer.

‘Now for the tricky bit,’ said Johnstone.

H

e had, as he’d claimed, done the math. The pilot already had the coordinates of the receiver’s location, and Johnstone had an even more precise spot in mind for the break-in. There was no GPS—even the radiation-hardened exploration satellites thrown into orbit by the first expedition had long decayed or burned out—so navigation was an old-fashioned affair of checking the apparent position of the more prominent of the detectable stars, then of matching local gravitational anomalies with their records, then of matching the disorderly ground with the highresolution maps, then of radar pinging.

‘This is definitely it,’ Johnstone said, as the Extacy hovered above a two- kilometre-wide bulge of upraised plain in a circle of eroded hills, all of which looked almost identical to a hundred adjacent features even on the map, let alone in the glowing murk. The radar and the gravity meter showed empty space underneath, as they had for the plain behind the nearby range, and behind the one before that.

‘You’re absolutely sure of this,’ Higgins said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Johnstone. He left the shelter and wheeled the bomb to the hatch. ‘Take us to twelve hundred metres,’ he told the pilot. ‘Forward one hundred metres, ten, four. Mark.’

Then he tipped the bomb out. A second or two later a faint thud was detectable through the ship’s external microphones. There was no flash.

‘An earth-shattering kaboom,’ Johnstone said, sauntering back to the shelter.

‘That’s it?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Of course it is,’ Johnstone said. ‘Come out and take a look.’

They did. Beneath the hatch a black round hole, still infrared at the edges, fifty metres across and surrounded by a ragged ring of ejecta, was clearly visible against the grey and glint of the plain. Deep within the blackness indistinct shapes glowed faintly.

‘Told you so,’ said Johnstone. ‘Down we go.’

Higgins clambered the ladder to the crane’s cabin and manoeuvred the huge machine to straddle the hatch. Johnstone attached himself to the end of the cable; Carlyle clipped on just above him. The descent was swift and smooth. They could have been in a lift. The lip of the hole was exactly as Johnstone had said, ten metres thick. Higgins checked the descent just after they’d passed it. Their helmet lamps and handheld lights picked out a space even vaster than the first cave, and more cluttered, and with larger and stranger machines, as big as blue whales and as complex as protein molecules: folds and helices, mirror-perfect plane surfaces, dendritic bushes, arrays of lobate panels. Tiny lights pulsed or raced among them and along them, like remote descendants of the blinkenlights on an antique server.

Johnstone guided the pilot and Higgins through a few more fine adjustments, and then they were lowered to the flat basalt floor in a motorway-wide aisle between rows of the machines. Keeping the rope attached, Johnstone strode confidently forward, turned a corner, and peered into a gap.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I died here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I gave the location in my final message,’ he said.

‘You could have been delirious by that time.’

‘I doubt it. Anyway, look.’ His beam and his pointing finger indicated a ragged scorch-rimmed hole in the smooth pedestal of the fractal pagoda in front of them. ‘Webster bolt.’ Dipping, the beam found a spattered smear on the floor, crusted over with some crystalline mould. ‘Blood.’

‘So where’s the body?’

‘That’s what I ask myself,’ said Johnstone. He giggled. ‘Watch out for Johnstone the headless Webster gunner.’

‘Fuck,’ said Carlyle, backing out of the alley and looking over her shoulder. ‘Don’t say things like that.’

‘What’s to worry about? We’re zombies ourselves now anyway. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

Carlyle checked. She was over the red line. No deep spiritual insights followed. Just as well, she thought, as they would have died with her. But she felt less spooked.

‘I thought we were heading for the QTD,’ she said.

‘It’s a few minutes walk from here. Allow me a moment of sentimental curiosity.’

As she followed him along the aisle Carlyle in fact felt reassured by the precision of his navigation. This feeling didn’t last. After about fifty metres Johnstone halted and turned aside to marvel at an inlaid screen at about eye level, a rectangle about one and a half metres by two and a half. It was a dull pewter colour and held a watery pattern that wouldn’t quite resolve into a moving monochrome picture. She wanted to stare at it, to make it stabilise, but every time its evanescent shapes eluded her—

She jerked her head sideways, breaking the spell. Before she could stop him, Johnstone had extended a lead from his helmet and was jacking it into a socket in the screen’s bottom right corner. She swiped at the cable and