Sylveste agreed, though before they headed back into the mesa they took time to crudely measure the direction from which the flash had come. ‘We know when it happened,’ Sylveste said. ‘And we know the direction. When the pressure wave comes through, we’ll know how far away it was. Settlements on Resurgam are still widely spread, so we should be able to pinpoint it.’
‘She said the name of the place,’ Pascale said.
Sylveste nodded.
‘But while I’d believe any threat she made, I also know Volyova’s not to be trusted.’
‘I don’t know anything about Phoenix,’ Sluka said, as they descended via a cargo elevator. ‘I thought I knew most of the recent settlements. But then again I’ve not exactly been at the heart of government these last few years.’
‘She would have started with something small,’ Sylveste said. ‘Otherwise she wouldn’t have room to escalate. We can assume Phoenix was a soft target; a scientific or geological outpost; something on which the rest of the colony wasn’t materially dependent. Just people, in other words.’
Sluka shook her head. ‘We’re talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It’s like their only reason for existing was so they could die.’
Sylveste felt physically sick; on the nauseous cusp of actually vomiting. It was, he thought, the only occasion in his life when this feeling had been engendered by an external event; something in which he was not directly participating. He had not even felt this way when Carine Lefevre had died. The mistake — the error — had not been his to commit. And while he had argued with Sluka that the crew would inflict what they threatened, some part of him had clung to the idea that, ultimately, they would not; that he was wrong and Sluka and the other humanitarians were correct. Perhaps, had he been in Sluka’s position, he too would have ignored the warning, irrespective of how sure he had felt before the attack. The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.
The pressure wave came three hours later. By then it was little more than a gust, but it was a gust completely out of place on such a still night. After it had passed, the air was turbulent, prone to sudden squalls, as if a full-blooded razorstorm was on the verge. Timing of the shock indicated that the site of the attack was somewhat less than three and a half thousand miles away (seismic data also confirmed this); almost due north- east, according to the visual evidence. Retiring under guard to Sluka’s stateroom, they pushed themselves beyond sleep with strong coffee, calling up global maps of the colony from Mantell’s archives.
Feeling edgy, Sylveste sipped his drink.
‘Like you say, it could be a new settlement they’ve hit. Are these maps up to date?’
‘As good as,’ Sluka said. ‘They were refreshed from Cuvier’s central cartographics section about a year ago, before things became too serious around here.’
Sylveste looked at the map, projected over Sluka’s table like a ghostly, topographic tablecloth. The area displayed by the map was two thousand kilometres square, large enough to contain the destroyed colony, even if their directional estimate was crude.
But there was no sign of Phoenix.
‘We need more recent maps,’ he said. ‘It’s possible this place was founded in the last year.’
‘That’s not going to be easy to arrange.’
‘Then you’d better find a way. You have to make a decision in the next twenty-four hours. Probably the biggest of your life.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve as good as decided to let them have you.’
Sylveste shrugged, as if it were of no consequence to him. ‘Even so, you should still be in possession of the facts. You’re going to be dealing with Volyova. If you can’t be sure that her threats are genuine, you might be tempted to call her bluff.’
She looked at him, long and hard.
‘We do still have — in principle — data links to Cuvier, via what remains of the comsat girdle. But they’ve barely been used since the domes were blown. It would be risky to open them — the data-trail could lead back to us.’
‘I’d say that’s the least of anyone’s worries right now.’
‘He’s right,’ Pascale said. ‘With all this going on, who’s going to care about a minor breach of security in Cuvier? I’d say it would be worthwhile just to get the maps updated.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘An hour; two hours. Why, were you planning on going somewhere?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said, conspicuously failing to smile. ‘But someone else might be deciding for me.’
They went surfaceside again while they were waiting for the maps to be revised. There were no stars visible in the low north-east; just a hump of sooty nothingness, as if a gargantuan crouched figure were looming over the horizon. It must have been an uplifted wall of dust, edging towards them. ‘It’ll blanket the world for months,’ Sluka said. ‘Just as if a massive volcano had gone off.’
‘The winds are getting stronger,’ Sylveste said.
Pascale nodded. ‘Could they have done that — changed the weather, this far from the attack? What if the weapon they used caused radioactive contamination?’
‘It needn’t have been,’ Sylveste said. ‘Some kind of kinetic-energy weapon would have sufficed. Knowing Volyova, she wouldn’t have done anything more than was absolutely necessary. But you’re right to worry about radiation. That weapon probably opened a hole right through the lithosphere. It’s anyone’s guess what was released from the crust.’
‘We shouldn’t spend too much time surfaceside.’
‘Agreed — but that probably goes for the colony as a whole.’
One of Sluka’s aides appeared in the exit door.
‘You’ve got the maps?’ she asked.
‘Give us another half-hour,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the data, but the encryption’s pretty heavy. There’s news from Cuvier, though. We just picked it up, publicly broadcast.’
‘Go on.’
‘It seems the ship took pictures of the — uh — aftermath. They transmitted them to the capital, and now they’ve been sent around the planet.’ The aide took a battered compad from his pocket, its flatscreen throwing his features into lilac relief. ‘I have the images.’
‘You’d better show us.’
The aide placed the compad on the mesa’s gritty, wind-smoothed surface. ‘They must have used infrared,’ he said.
The pictures were awesome and terrifying. Molten rock was still snaking from the crater and beyond, or spraying in fountainlike cascades from dozens of suddenly birthed baby volcanoes. All evidence of the settlement had been obliterated, completely swallowed by the wide cauldron of the crater, which must have been a kilometre or two across. There were vast patches of glassy smoothness near its centre, like solidified tar; black as night.
‘For a moment I hoped we were wrong,’ Sluka said. ‘I hoped that the flash, even the pressure-wave — I hoped that somehow they’d been faked, like a theatrical effect. But I can’t see how they could have faked this without actually blowing a hole in the planet.’
‘We’ll know in a while,’ the aide said. ‘I presume I can speak freely?’
‘This concerns Sylveste,’ Sluka said. ‘So he may as well hear it.’
‘Cuvier has a plane heading towards the site of the attack. They’ll be able to confirm that this imagery wasn’t fabricated.’
By the time they returned underground the maps had been cracked, replacing the outdated copies in Mantell’s archive. Once again they retired to Sluka’s stateroom to view the data. This time the map’s accompanying information showed that it had been updated only a few weeks earlier.
‘They’ve done pretty well,’ Sylveste said. ‘To have kept up with the business of cartography while the city was crumbling around them. I admire their dedication.’
‘Never mind their motives,’ Sluka said, brushing her fingers against one of the pedestal-mounted globes which flanked the room, seemingly to anchor herself to the planet which now seemed to be spinning irrevocably beyond her control. ‘As long as Phoenix — or whatever they called it — is there, that’s all I care.’
