Page 51

A SURFACE CREW. THE WORK ORDER IS MINE. IT WAS NOT FILED WITH ME; I RECOVERED IT FROM THE SEAL ITSELF.

Show me, I don't say, and it shows me anyway.

A war-era Authority form, photographed into a machine's memory nine days after the seal went in, and at the bottom, in a hand I would know anywhere because I learned to write by copying it, my father's signature.

I look at my father's name on a work order for some while, and Claire says nothing, and lets me.

"He never told me which shafts," I say eventually.

"I know."

"He sealed nine that year. He gave me the number and never the places. I have maintained tunnels close to at least three of them and never knew."

CAN YOU OPEN IT?

"I can open anything my father closed," I say. "He was very good. Not better than his son."

The gravitic column belongs on file, because until day fifty-seven I had no idea Precursor engineering did this, and it explains something that has bothered me since the gate.

Thirty meters of slate lifted into a ceiling with no sound and no mechanism. There was no mechanism. The column shafts run the height of the facility and manage load gravitically — not lifting, exactly. Reducing what a thing weighs while something moves it. Every silent door here has been standing in a field that made it as heavy as a chair.

The shaft has one of those fields in it. It has had one for ninety centuries, unmaintained for six of them, and it is failing the way anything fails when nobody comes: not evenly.

We go down on ropes, because I will not trust a descent to a field with no service history, and we pass through eleven distinct zones, and the transitions are the problem. At eighty meters my weight drops a third over two meters and my inner ear declares an emergency. At one hundred and forty it returns and takes half my kit off my shoulder. Ovel is sick twice and keeps going. A structural man loses a wrench at the ninety-meter transition and it doesn't fall — it drifts for eleven seconds and then remembers, and after that nobody drops anything.

Two hundred eleven meters of it. Four hours. Two collapses that Tomas shores under a field which keeps altering what his timbers weigh, and I'll be putting his name on something after this.

We reach the apron at 02:40 on day fifty-eight, and Claire is already at the wall with a lens up before her feet are properly under her.

Then she stops moving, and her finding reaches me before she speaks, because the bottom drops out of her.

"The outer layer's breached."

"How far?"

"Two of six." She scrolls, hands steady, everything under them not. "First transit authenticated eleven days ago. Second four days back. That isn't forcing, Darius, that's authentication — somebody down here is putting two hands on paired plates and getting through."

"That is not possible."

"It's evidently extremely possible."

CONFIRMED, the Custodian says, from a lens beside us. TWO TRANSITS HAVE BEEN VALIDLY AUTHENTICATED BY A PAIR I DID NOT ENTER ON THE ROSTER.

"How?"

I DO NOT KNOW. THE VALIDATION IS GENUINE. THE PAIR RESOLVED A TWO-PART CHALLENGE.

So somebody has read enough of my submissions, enough of Claire's filings, and enough of a stolen concordance to put a calculator and an improviser at a plate together and satisfy a ninety-century-old trade examination.

It never needed to be a bond. It needed two minds working two ways, and a man with four decades of money can hire that.

Claire has arrived at the same place, and does not like it.

AT THE CURRENT RATE THEY REQUIRE ELEVEN DAYS TO REACH THE SIXTH LAYER. IF THEY IMPROVE, SEVEN. I MUST BE CLEAR ABOUT WHAT FOLLOWS.

IF A PAIR REACHES THE CORE WITH STANDING, THEY ARE NOT INTRUDERS. THEY ARE CREW. I WILL BE OBLIGED TO OBEY THEM.

Silence on the apron.