brought them to a halt next to a piece of equipment jutting from the wall. To Dreyfus it looked almost indistinguishable from the countless rust-coloured items of machinery they had already passed, but Sparver was paying it particular attention.
“Something we can use?” Dreyfus asked. Sparver flipped aside a panel, revealing a matrix of tactile input controls and sockets.
“It’s a tap-in point,” he said.
“No promises, but if this is hooked up to any kind of local network, I should be able to find my way to the transmitter and maybe open a two-way channel to Panoply.”
“How long will it take?” Sparver’s suit had been conjured with a standard toolkit. He dug into it and retrieved a strand of luminous cabling with a writhing, slug-shaped quickmatter universal adaptor at the end.
“I should know within a few minutes,” he said.
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll move on.”
“See what you can get out of it. I’ll be back here in five or ten minutes.” Sparver’s eyes were wide behind his face-patch.
“We should stay together.”
“I’m just taking a look a little further along this shaft. We’ll remain in contact the whole time.” Dreyfus left his deputy attending to the equipment, fiddling with adaptors and spools of differently coloured froptic and electrical cabling. He had no doubt that if there was a way to get a message to Panoply, Sparver would find it. But he could not afford to wait around for that to happen. Elsewhere in the rock, someone might be erasing evidence or preparing to make their escape via a hidden ship or lifepod.
Eventually Dreyfus looked back and saw that Sparver had vanished around the curve of the shaft.
“How are you doing?” he asked via the suit-to-suit comms channel.
“Making slow progress, but I think it’s doable. The protocols are pretty archaic, but nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Good. Keep in touch. I’m pressing on.” Dreyfus passed through a constriction in the cladding of the tunnel, tucking his elbows in to avoid banging them against the narrow flange where the walls pinched tighter. Looking back now, he could not even see the faint glow caused by the light spilling from Sparver’s helmet lamp. Psychologically, it felt as if they were kilometres apart rather than the hundreds of metres that was really the case.
Suddenly there came a bell-like clang, hard and metallic. Dreyfus’ gut tightened. He knew exactly what had happened, even before his conscious mind had processed the information. Where the constriction had been was now a solid wall of metal. A bulkhead door—part of an interior airlock system—had just slammed down between him and Sparver.
He returned to the door and checked the rim for manual controls, but found nothing. An automatic system had sealed the door, and the same automatic system would have to open it again.
“Sparver?” His deputy’s voice came through chopped and metallic.
“Still reading you, but faintly. What just happened?”
“I tripped a door,” Dreyfus said, feeling sheepish.
“It doesn’t want to open again.”
“Stay where you are. I’ll see if I can work it from my side.”
“Leave it for now. We made a plan and we’ll stick to it, even if I have to stay here until help arrives. If necessary I should be able to cut through with my whiphound, provided the door doesn’t incorporate any active quickmatter. In the meantime I’ll try circumnavigating and see if I can meet you from the other side.”
“Try not to trip any more doors on the way.”
“I will.”
“You should think about conserving air,” Sparver said, in a gently reminding tone.
“These m-suits don’t recirculate, Boss. You’re only good for twenty-six hours.”
“That’s about twenty-four hours longer than I expect to be here.”
“Just saying we need to allow for all eventualities. I can make it back to the corvette; you may not be able to.”
“Point taken,” Dreyfus said.
The suit was indeed still assuring him that the air surrounding him was breathable. He clearly had little to lose by trusting it. He reached up and unlatched the helmet; the suit had been conjured in one piece, but it obliged by splitting into familiar components.
He sucked in his first lungful of cold, new air. After the initial shock of it hitting his system, he judged that it was tolerable, with little of the mustiness he’d been anticipating.
“I’m breathing ambient air, Sparv. No ill effects so far.”
“Good. All I’ve got to do now is kid this system that I’m a valid user, and then we should get ourselves a hotline to Panoply. I’ll be out of touch when I’m calling home—I’ll have to reassign the suit-to-suit channel to make this work.”
“Whatever you have to do.”
Dreyfus pressed the helmet against his belt until it formed a cusp-like bond. He’d made perhaps another hundred metres of progress when he encountered a junction in the shaft. The main tunnel, the one he’d been following, continued unobstructed ahead, but now it was joined by another route, set at right angles and leading towards the centre of the rock.
“Sparver,” he said, “slight change of plan. While I’m not using suit air, I’m going to explore a sub-shaft I’ve just run into. It appears to head deeper. My guess is it leads to whatever this place is concealing.”
“You be careful.”
“As ever.”
The new shaft turned out to be much shorter than the one they’d descended from the surface, and within thirty metres he detected a widening at the far end. Dreyfus continued his approach, caution vying with curiosity, and emerged into a hemispherical chamber set with heavy glass facets. His helmet lamp played across the bolted and welded partitions between the window elements. Beyond the glass loomed a profound darkness, more absolute than space itself, as if the very heart of the rock had been cored out.
“It’s hollow, an empty shell,” he said to himself, as much in wonder as perplexity.
The hemispherical chamber was not just some kind of viewing gallery. One of the facets was covered with a sheet of burnished silver rather than glass, and next to that was a simple control panel set with tactile controls of old-fashioned design. Dreyfus propelled himself to the panel and appraised its contents. The chunky controls were designed to be used by someone wearing a spacesuit with thick gloves, and most of them were labelled in antiquated Canasian script. Most of the abbreviations meant nothing to Dreyfus, but he saw that one of the controls was marked with a stylised representation of a sunburst.
His hand moved to the control. At first it was so stiff that he feared it had seized into place. Then it budged with a resounding clunk, and vast banks of lights began to blaze on beyond the armoured glass.
He’d been wrong, he realised. The hollowed-out interior of the Nerval-Lermontov rock was not empty.
It contained a ship.
“I’ve found something interesting,” he told Sparver.
“What I don’t understand,” Thalia said as the train whisked the entourage across the first window band of House Aubusson, “is how this place pays for itself. No offence, but I’ve spoken to most of you by now and I’m puzzled. I assume you’re a representative slice of the citizenry, or you wouldn’t have been selected for the welcoming party. Yet none of you seem to be doing any work that’s marketable outside Aubusson. One of you breeds butterflies. Another designs gardens. Another one of you makes mechanical animals, for fun.”
“There’s no law against hobbies,” said Paula Thory, the plump butterfly-keeper.
“I totally agree. But hobbies won’t pay for the upkeep of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat.”
“We have a full-scale manufactory complex in the trailing endcap,” Caillebot said.
“We used to make ships. Lovely things, too: single-molecule hulls in ruby and emerald. It hasn’t run at anything like full capacity for decades, but smaller habitats occasionally contract us to build components and machines. The big enterprises on Marco’s Eye will always out-compete us when it comes to efficiency and economies of scale, but we don’t have to lift anything out of a gravity well, or pay Glitter Band import duties. That takes care of some of our finances.”
