was being brought back to life each time just for that.’
‘I had the same dream,’ I said, wonderingly. ‘And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind of—’ I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. ‘Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.’
Hirz nodded. ‘The dream with the hat, right?’
‘My God, yes.’ I grinned like a madman. ‘I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!’
Celestine looked at me with something between icy detachment and outright hostility. ‘I had that one too.’
‘Me too,’ Hirz said, chuckling. ‘But I said fuck the hat. Sorry, but with the kind of money Childe’s paying us, buying a new one ain’t gonna be my biggest problem.’
An awkward moment followed, for only Hirz seemed at all comfortable about discussing the generous fees Childe had arranged as payment for the expedition. The initial sums had been large enough, but upon our return to Yellowstone we would all receive nine times as much; adjusted to match any inflation which might occur during the time — between sixty and eighty years — which Childe said the journey would span.
Generous, yes.
But I think Childe knew that some of us would have joined him even without that admittedly sweet bonus.
Celestine broke the silence, turning to Hirz. ‘Did you have the one about the cubes, too?’
‘Christ, yes,’ the infiltration specialist said, as if suddenly remembering. ‘The cubes. What about you, Richard?’
‘Indeed,’ I answered, flinching at the memory of that one. I had been one of a party of people trapped inside an endless series of cubic rooms, many of which contained lethal surprises. ‘I was cut into pieces by a trap, actually. Diced, if I remember accurately.’
‘Yeah. Not exactly on my top ten list of ways to die, either.’
Childe coughed. ‘I feel I should apologise for the dreams. They were narratives I fed into your minds — Doctor Trintignant excepted — during the transition to and from reefersleep.’
‘Narratives?’ I said.
‘I adapted them from a variety of sources, thinking they’d put us all in the right frame of mind for what lies ahead.’
‘Dying nastily, you mean?’ Hirz asked.
‘Problem-solving, actually.’ Childe served pitch-black coffee as he spoke, as if all that was ahead of us was a moderately bracing stroll. ‘Of course, nothing that the dreams contained is likely to reflect anything that we’ll find inside the Spire… but don’t you feel better for having had them?’
I gave the matter some thought before responding.
‘Not exactly, no,’ I said.
Thirteen hours later we were on the surface, inspecting the suits Forqueray had provided for the expedition.
They were sleek white contraptions, armoured, powered and equipped with enough intelligence to fool a roomful of cyberneticians. They enveloped themselves around you, forming a seamless white surface which lent the wearer the appearance of a figurine moulded from soap. The suits quickly learned how you moved, adjusting and anticipating all the time like perfect dance partners.
Forqueray told us that each suit was capable of keeping its occupant alive almost indefinitely; that the suit would recycle bodily wastes in a near-perfect closed cycle, and could even freeze its occupant if circumstances merited such action. They could fly and would protect their user against just about any external environment, ranging from a vacuum to the crush of the deepest ocean.
‘What about weapons?’ Celestine asked, once we had been shown how to command the suits to do our bidding.
‘Weapons?’ Forqueray asked blankly.
‘I’ve heard about these suits, Captain. They’re supposed to contain enough firepower to take apart a small mountain.’
Childe coughed. ‘There won’t be any weapons, I’m afraid. I asked Forqueray to have them removed from the suits. No cutting tools, either. And you won’t be able to achieve as much with brute force as you would with an unmodified suit. The servos won’t allow it.’
‘I’m not sure I understand. You’re handicapping us before we go in?’
‘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
