Page 21 of Kavan

"Is it worth the weight?" I ask.

"It's from a signal vault, Kavan. Archive copies are what a city tells its citizens. Signal vaults are what a garrison tells itself."

It goes in my pack, not hers, and she raises no objection to that either, which tells me how badly her hands are hurting.

The construct catches us at the eleventh terrace junction.

The gutter crosses a live corridor for nine meters with no alternative and no unmarked lintel, and the construct comes up the corridor while five of us are still short of the gap. I put Ferreira through the gap first with Marchant hauling, then Mirek, then Neris, and Sophie is at my shoulder refusing to go and I pick her up by the pack straps and post her through the opening like cargo.

Then I lie flat in the dust of a maintenance gutter with a machine four meters away and count its plates.

Thirty-one, going right, exactly as before.

When I come through, she's waiting, filthy and furious.

"Don't ever do that again."

"Which part."

"Any part of it. All of it. You put me through a hole."

"You were standing in a corridor with an active hostile in it."

"So were you!"

"Yes," I say.

And there it is, sitting in the open between us in a dust-filled tunnel under a dead city, and I hear myself think the sentence with total clarity, for the very first time since she laughed at me in the dirt on that cliff.

If she doesn't leave this place, it won't matter to me whether I do.

That thought isn't a marshal's. It's disqualifying. Any board of inquiry would relieve me on it and be right, and I stay there in the dark turning it over and discover that I wouldn't give it back.

CHAPTER 15

SOPHIE

It takes me nineteen hours to make the data core talk, and six of them are spent on a problem so stupid I could weep.

The core is cracked across the read face, which means a third of the addressing is gone, which means it will hand me fragments in no order at all and no index to hang them on. I have four archive record cases and a drone hardcase and a woman named Zuri Neris who can build a signal bridge out of two dead lamps and a spool of monofilament, and none of that solves the ordering problem.

What solves it is Fourth Muster.

Because the manifests were dated, and I photographed every block, and the date-rings in the core fragments use the same convention, and by hour twelve I have a key. Not a good key. A key.

By hour nineteen I have enough to be sick about.

Kavan finds me sitting on the floor of the redoubt with the fragments spread around me in a spiral, which is how the Precursors indexed and now how I do, and he looks at my face and sits down on the floor with me instead of asking.

"Tell me the worst thing first," he says.

"The city isn't the point."

"Go on."

"It never was. The city is the crew quarters." I turn a fragment toward him. "Kavan, the whole island is the installation. The caldera throat isn't a construction access, it's the primary emitter housing. Osiris is a gun."

He absorbs this without moving.