Eden, can you perceive me?
Only from the sensitive cells around the entrance, the rest of the cavern is blocked to me.
OK.i crouched low and scuttled along the aisle. the flashing red light made it hellish difficult to spot any genuine motion on the factory floor. funnily enough, the one thing which kept running through my mind as i made my way to the rear of the factory was the thought that if steinbauer had murdered penny maowkavitz, then hoi yin was in the clear.
Incredibly unprofessional.
Harvey, wing-tsit chong called. I believe we can offer some assistance. The dysfunctional routines Steinbauer leaves behind him can be wiped completely, and fresh ones installed to replace them.
Great.
However, the ones in his direct vicinity will simply be glitched again. But that in itself will enable us to track his position, to around fifteen or twenty metres.
OK, fine. Do it now.
A blinked glimpse of the placid lake beyond the veranda. Hoi Yin bending over towards him, long rope of blonde hair brushing his knee rug, her face compressed with worry. His thin frame was trembling from the effort of countering Steinbauer's distortion, a heavy painful throbbing had started five centimetres behind his temple.
I am regaining perception of the cavern, eden informed me. Steinbauer is not inside. He must be in the inspection tunnel.
I started running for the rear of the cavern. The muscle membrane was half-open, quivering fitfully. As I approached it the lips began to calm.
It is not just the perception routines Steinbauer is glitching, wing-tsit chong said with forced calmness. Every segment of the personality in the neural strata around him is being assaulted.
A wicked smell of sulphur was belching out of the inspection tunnel. I coughed, blinking against the acrid vapour. What the hell is that?
The muscle membrane promptly closed.
It must be a leakage from the enzyme sacs, wing-tsit chong said. The duct network which connects them to the organs is regulated by muscle membranes. Steinbauer is wrecking their autonomic governor routines.
Christ.i stared helplessly at the blank wall of polyp. Have you located him yet?
He is approximately two hundred metres in from the cavern, thirty metres above you, eden said.
Rolf, do we have gas masks?
No, sir. But we could use spacesuits.
Good idea, though they're going to restrict—
The cry which burst into the communal affinity band was awesome in its sheer volume of anguish. It contained nameless dread, and loathing, and a terrified bewilderment. The tormented mind pleaded with us, wept, cursed.
Wallace Steinbauer was standing, slightly stooped, in a cramped circular tunnel. It was illuminated in a gloomy green hue, a light emitted by the strip of phosphorescent cells running along the apex. Its polyp walls had a rough wavy texture, as if they'd been carved crudely out of living rock.
He was retching weakly from the appalling stench, hands clutching his belly. Lungs heaved to pull oxygen from the thick fetid air. The floor was inclined upwards at a gentle angle ahead of him. Wide bugged eyes stared at the tide of muddy yellow sludge which was pouring down the tunnel. It reached his shoes and flowed sluggishly around his ankles. Immediately he was struggling to stay upright, but there was no traction; the sludge was insidiously slippery. Cold burned at his shins as the level rose. Then blowtorch pain was searing at his skin, biting its way inwards. His trousers were dissolving before his eyes.
He lost his footing, and fell headlong into the sludge. Pain drenched every patch of naked skin, gobbling through the fatty tissue towards the muscle and bone beneath. He screamed once. But that simply let the rising sludge into his mouth. Fire exploded down his gullet. Spastic convulsions jerked his limbs about. Sight vanished, twisting away into absolute blackness.
Coherent thoughts ended then. Insanity blew some tattered nerve impulses at us for a few mercifully brief seconds. Then there was nothing.
Minds twinkled all around me, a galaxy misted by a dense nebula. Each one radiating profound shock, shamed and guilty to witness such a moment. The need for comfort was universal. We instinctively clung together in sorrow, and waited for it to pass.
Father Cooke was quite right: sharing our grief made it that much easier to endure. We had each other, we didn't need the old pagan symbols of redemption.
The fifth day was mostly spent sorting out the chaos which came in the wake of the fourth; for the Governor, for the newscable reporters, (in a confidential report) for the JSKP board, for the police, and for the rest of the shocked population. Pieter Zernov and I organized a combined operation to clear the inspection tunnels and recover the body. I let his team handle most of it—they were welcome to the job.
Fasholé Nocord was delighted the case had been solved. The general public satisfaction with my department's performance added complications to Boston's campaign. We had proved beyond any shadow of doubt the effectiveness and impartiality of the UN administration. Not even a senior JSKP employee could escape the law.
Congratulations all round. Talk of promotions and bonuses. Morale in the station peaked up around the axial light-tube.
The one sour note was sounded when Wing-Tsit Chong collapsed. Corrine told me he had badly overstressed himself in helping us overcome Steinbauer's distortion of Eden's thought routines. She wasn't at all confident for his recovery.
All in all, it allowed me to, quite justifiably, postpone making any decisions about Jocelyn and the twins.
I used the same excuse at breakfast on the sixth day, as well. Nobody argued.
At midday I took a funicular railway car up the northern endcap, and headed down the docking spindle to inspect Steinbauer's dragon hoard. The pressurized hangar I had requisitioned was just a fat cylinder of titanium, ribbed by monomolecule silicon spars, with an airlock door at the far end large enough to admit one of the inter-orbit tugs. A thick quilt of white thermal blankets covered the metal, preventing the air from radiating its warmth off into space. Thick bundles of power and data cables snaked about in no recognizable pattern. I glided through the small egress airlock which connected the hangar to Eden's docking spindle, tasting a faint metallic tang in the air.
The Dornier SCA-4545B hung in the middle of the yawning compartment, suspended between two docking cradles that had telescoped out from the walls. It was a fat cone shape with two curving heavily shielded ports protruding from the middle of the fuselage. Every centimetre had been coated in a layer of ash-grey carbon foam which was pocked and scored from innumerable dust impacts. An array of waldo arms clustered round its nose were fully extended; with their awkward joints and spindly segments they looked remarkably like a set of insect mandibles.
Equipment bay panels had been removed all around the fuselage, revealing ranks of spherical fuel tanks, as well as the shiny intestinal tangle of actuators, life-support machinery, and avionics systems. Shannon Kershaw and Susan Nyberg were floating over one open equipment bay, both wearing navy-blue one-piece jump suits, smeared with grime. Nyberg was waving a hand-held scanner over some piping, while Shannon consulted her PNC wafer.
I grabbed one of the metal hand hoops sprouting from the Dornier's fuselage, anchoring myself a couple of metres from them. How's it going?