Page 36 of Kavan

"Two hundred meters. Sixty seconds if the shutter holds."

"Wounded?"

"Behind the buttress line with Kolar. They're better there than with us."

"Rourke?"

She looks at the outer gate, and the outer gate is open.

It shouldn't be open. It's a Precursor gate as tall as a hangar and it has stood shut since the Precursors shut it, and now it gapes with a scatter of dead constructs across the threshold and a smear of blood on the left jamb at shoulder height.

"He's inside," she says.

"How long?"

"With the index? Twenty minutes. Half an hour."

Twenty-three people came into this district. Nineteen are standing, and I count them twice on purpose, because the number I want isn't the number standing and pretending otherwise is how officers get people killed in the last hour of a thing. Vesk is gray and upright and won't sit down. My right sleeve is full of blood and Auclair has bound it unasked and without comment.

Nobody argues about the wounded staying where Auclair has put them. That's Kolar's doing; she has spent eight days in a cell learning exactly how much use she is, and she has decided the answer is this.

"Marchant. Charge on the gate mechanism, set to blow it shut behind us."

"Behind us?"

"Nothing else comes in after we do." I look at Sophie. "Say the number again."

"Nine minutes."

"Then get me a door."

We pass the outer gate of the command core at 1447, into a corridor of white light, moving toward a man who thinks he has won.

CHAPTER 23

SOPHIE

The gateway into the seat isn't locked. It's asked.

There's a chamber past the outer gate, forty meters of it, and at the far side a door with no mechanism, no plinth, no disc. Only a wall of glyphs from floor to vault, and Rourke has been here, because there's a burn scar three meters wide where somebody put a shaped charge against it and achieved a scorch mark.

He got through. Of course he did. He had the index and the index answers questions, and the wall asked him one and he handed it a key.

It asks me the same one.

Nine hundred glyph clusters and they're all the same construction: who returns. Nine hundred times, in nine hundred variants, because this is no lock. It's a census. Every returning ship for eleven thousand years signed this wall.

And the last four hundred entries are blank.

I stand in front of four hundred empty spaces where the fleets that never came home didn't sign, and I flatten my palm against it and say, out loud, in a language nobody has spoken since before the pyramids, that we aren't the fleet, that we came from somewhere else, that we found their door and we're sorry and we're coming through.

The door opens.

"What did you tell it?" Kavan asks.

"The truth. It's a census, not a password. It just wants to know who's walking in."

The seat is a sphere.