"From me?"

"From any Thresher."

"Then I suppose we both had things wrong. Let's just hope we aren't the only ones who can find some

common ground."

"There'll be others," Ca.s.sandra said. "But that doesn't mean we can't play our part. When we've dealt with Niagara, when we've returned to Sedna, there'll be some very raw wounds that need healing."

"If anyone's left alive."

"We'll just have to hope things haven't gone to the brink. If they haven't...if the progressive Threshers

and the moderate Slashers can put their differences aside...then there may be hope for all of us. Whatever the case, an example of co-operation could make all the difference."

"An example like us, you mean?"

The little girl with the dark hair nodded. "I'm not saying I should stay in your head for ever. But when the peace is being negotiated, someone who could be trusted by both parties might be a very important player indeed."

"Or they might choose not to trust us at all."

"That's a risk," Ca.s.sandra conceded. "But one I'd be prepared to take." Then something seemed to amuse her. "And you never know, Auger."

"Never know what?"

"This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

After much insistence, Tunguska finally caved in and permitted Auger to walk around the ship. She was washed and alert, the voices in her head no longer quite so insistent. A sheet of intelligent bedclothing hugged her every move, preserving her modesty and-whenever she caught a glimpse of herself in some polished surface or actual mirror-quietly flattering her as well, she noticed. A little while ago, she would have been appalled at the thought of allowing Slasher machinery to become so intimate with her. Now, whenever she tried to summon the appropriate reflex disgust, it just wasn't there. In spite of her little tete a tete with Ca.s.sandra, she wondered whether this was because the machines were surrept.i.tiously doctoring her thoughts, or whether the events of the last few days had finally forced her to realise that not everything about the Slashers was automatically repugnant. At the same time, she wondered if she really needed an answer. The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.

Tunguska and Floyd sat on one side of an extruded table, watching patterns play across the wall opposite them. As Auger approached the table, a chair bulged up from the floor in antic.i.p.ation.

"You're quite sure you feel well enough for this?" Tunguska asked.

"I'm fine. Ca.s.sandra and I have come to an...accommodation."

Tunguska offered her the newly formed seat. She took it, sitting between the two men. Tunguska was dressed in a simple two-piece outfit of white flannel, slashed low across his broad, hairless chest, while Floyd wore a clean white shirt, with black trousers supported by striped elastic braces. Those were definitely not the clothes that Floyd had been wearing when they left Paris, so Tunguska must have conjured them up for him. She wondered if he had dug them out of some obscure memory, or followed Floyd's specifications.

"We have an echo from Niagara's ship," Tunguska said, gesturing towards one of the image panels on the wall. Gold-threaded lines formed a flowing contour map reminiscent of the navigational display in the transport, but with a great deal more complexity. Cryptic symbols hovered in boxes around the edge of the diagram, connected by thin lines back to knotty features in the contour plot. As the features shifted and merged, the symbols altered from one perplexing configuration to another.

"We're sending acoustic signals up the line," Tunguska continued, "using the same high-speed propagation layer you employ for your navigation and communications channel."

"I thought you'd have come up with something more sophisticated than that by now," Auger said.

"We've tried various things, but the acoustic technique is still the only reliable method open to us. As you probably know, it's difficult to push a signal through when a ship is in transit. The ship acts as a mirror, bouncing the signal back to us with a high reflection efficiency."

"And you're getting a signal from Niagara?"

"A faint one," Tunguska said, "but definitely there. With a smaller craft, there'd be various things he

could try to damp the return bounce. But that's a big, fat ship, and it doesn't leave him with a lot of scope for stealth."

"All right," Auger said. "If you can bounce a signal off him, can you tell how far ahead he is?"

"Yes. Of course, spatial distance is a rather slippery concept in hyperweb transit-"

"Just give me your best guess."

"His ship must be about two hundred kilometres ahead of us. a.s.suming the usual propagation speed,

he'll exit about an hour before we do."

"Two hundred kilometres," Auger said. "That doesn't sound all that far."

"It isn't," Tunguska agreed.

"Then haven't you got something you can fire ahead of us, something that will cover the distance before

his ship exits the tunnel?"

"Yes," Tunguska said, "but I wanted to discuss it with you before I acted."

"If you have something," Auger said, "then d.a.m.n well use it."

"I have beam weapons," Tunguska told her. "But they don't work well in the hyperweb for the same

reason that EM pulses are ineffective-due to scattering off the tunnel lining. That leaves missiles. We have six warhead-tipped devices with bleed-drive propulsion."

"So use them."

"It's not that simple. Objects under thrust behave unpredictably in the hyperweb: that's why we surf the throat wave, rather than flying through under our own power."

"It's still worth a try."

Tunguska kept his voice level, but his face was beginning to show concern. "Understand the risk. With a beam weapon, we'd have a degree of surgical control if we could get close enough to avoid the scattering effect. We could disable his ship sufficiently to prevent him from making it to the next portal."

"I'm not interested in disabling him. I'm not interested in interrogation, or whatever it is you'd do to Niagara if you got your hands on him. I want a clean kill."

"Don't underestimate the value of interrogation," Tunguska said quietly, with the gently reproving note of a kindly schoolmaster. "This conspiracy is almost certainly wider than one man. If we lose Niagara, we lose any hope of catching his a.s.sociates. And what they have attempted once, they may attempt again."

"But you just said you can't disable him."

"Not in the hyperweb," he said, raising a finger. "But if we can catch his ship in open s.p.a.ce, between portals...then we might have a chance."

Auger shook her head. "Too much risk of him getting away."

"We'll still have the missiles," Tunguska said. "But the one thing they're not is surgical."

She imagined a school of swift, dolphinlike missiles skewering Niagara's ship, blowing it apart in a soundless orgy of light. "I'm not going to shed any tears over that."

"Or over your own death, which would doubtless ensue in the process? It would be suicide, Auger. His ship is carrying the Molotov device. That's enough antimatter to crack open a moon, and it's only two hundred kilometres away."

Tunguska was right. It would have occurred to her sooner or later, but she was so fixated on killing Niagara that she had not really considered what his execution would actually entail.

"Even so," she said, forcing out the words one by one, "we still have to do it."

Tunguska's expression was grave but approving. "I thought you'd say that. I just had to be sure."

"What about Floyd?" she asked, her voice quavering as the realisation of what she had just decided slowly sunk in.

"Floyd and I have discussed the matter already," Tunguska said. "For what it's worth, we arrived at the same conclusion."

She turned to Floyd. "Is that true?"

Floyd shrugged. "If that's what it takes."

Still looking into Floyd's eyes, she said, "Then launch your missiles, Tunguska. And quickly, before any of us changes our minds."

The faintest of shudders ran through the floor.

"It's done," Tunguska said. "They're launched and running."

THIRTY-SEVEN.

Two hundred kilometres up the pipe, she thought. It was nothing in spatial terms. The missiles should have leapt across that distance in an eyeblink. But the hyperweb appeared to actively stifle attempts to pa.s.s through it more rapidly than the normal speed of a collapse wave. The missiles-according to Tunguska's telemetry-were streaking ahead of his ship, following the expected acceleration curves for their ma.s.s and thrust, just as if they had been deployed in external s.p.a.ce. For a little while it was even possible to bounce an electromagnetic pulse off them, or read the acoustic signal induced by their exhaust as it washed in a widening cone against the tunnel sides. But then something began to happen to them. They slowed, their acceleration curves levelling out, as if they had flown into spatial treacle. The faint, dwindling whisper of data from each missile reported no anomalies...but they were no longer travelling ahead with sufficient speed to intercept Niagara's ship.

Tunguska stared at the spread of tactical displays-which were more for their benefit than his, Auger suspected-with obvious dissatisfaction. "This is what I feared," he said. "There's no telling whether any of them will reach Niagara in time."

"Will we know when it happens?" she asked.

"Would you like to know?"

"I'd like to know that we'd succeeded, before..." Hervoice trailed off. There was no need for her to state the obvious.

"I'm afraid you probably won't have that luxury. It's anyone's guess how the matter-antimatter fireball will travel back down the pipe, but it's likely to be swift. There'll be no time to reflect on victory. Equally, your deaths will be mercifully swift."

Auger didn't need reminding that she had effectively signed her own death warrant if one of the missiles got through. She was trying to push that knowledge to one side, but it kept squirming back to the forefront of her thoughts.

"Will you sense anything?" Floyd asked Tunguska.

"I'll have an inkling," he said. "When the fireball hits the skin of my ship, the information from the hull sensors should reach my skull an instant ahead of the destructive wave itself."

"Giving you enough time to form a thought?" Auger asked, lacing her hand tightly with Floyd's. "Enough time to extract a crumb of comfort that your sacrifice will have been worth it?"

"Perhaps." Tunguska smiled at them. "It doesn't have to be a very complicated thought, after all."

"I'm not sure I envy you," Auger said.

"And perhaps you're right not to, but there it is. I could disable the connection between my neural machines and the hull sensors, but I don't think I have the nerve." He looked back at one of the wall images, studying it with suddenly alarmed eyes.

"What's wrong?" Auger asked.

"Nothing that I didn't expect, I suppose. The telemetry feeds from all the missiles are now silent."

"Does that mean the missiles are dead?" Floyd asked.

"No-not necessarily, just that the data they're trying to send back to us can't find its way home. The missiles probably can't hear our signals to them, either. They'll have switched to autonomous flight mode."

"Somehow I preferred it when we knew for certain that they were still out there," Floyd said.

"Me, too," Tunguska said. Then he reached out and placed his own hand over theirs, and the three of them sat in silence, waiting for something to happen, or for everything to stop happening.

Silence was the one thing Auger didn't want. It left a vacuum in her head into which certain thoughts were too easily able to slip. She wanted the easy cadences of normal human conversation, the gossip and the small talk. She wanted to be able to think about anything other than that killing wall of furious light, the explosion that might even now be rushing towards them, faster than any advance information of its arrival could possibly travel. Faster than any possible news of success. How long had it been since the missiles had streaked away? She had lost all sense of time; it could have been minutes or hours. But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

She looked at the other two-Floyd and the Slasher both-and knew that in their own way they were working through exactly the same thought process. As if in some silent acknowledgement of this, all three of them chose that moment to tighten their hands together.

Suddenly, a convulsive change occurred in the displays on the wall. Auger had an instant to register this, and another instant to let the implications unravel in her head. One of the missiles must have found its mark, and now the ship had detected the approaching h.e.l.lfire...

But the voices in her head, quiet of late, told her no, that was not what was happening.