Page 37 of Kavan

No other word will do. A hundred forty meters across, hollow, and we come in at the equator onto a walkway that runs around the whole interior, and at the center, floating in nothing, is the control platform, and between us and it runs a bridge of pale material eleven meters long.

And everywhere, on the whole inner surface of that sphere, above and below and behind, there are people.

The projectors here aren't broken. Eleven millennia of shifts: crews changing over, a commander arguing with a supply officer, two people eating something out of a shared bowl on the walkway forty meters below my feet. They walk through us. A woman goes past me carrying a child.

A child, in a fortress. Nobody has ever recovered a Precursor child.

"Sophie." Kavan's voice, quiet. "Left."

Out on the platform stands Cassian Rourke.

He's exactly what Kolar described and exactly what the ration wrapper implied. Tall, gray at the temples, a coat that has been brushed, and a left hand that isn't a hand. Six people are with him. Two of them have their weapons on us and four of them are working, and what they're working on is a socket in the platform floor with a crystal already seated in it.

"Doctor Larkin." He doesn't raise his voice; the sphere carries it. "You made better time than my estimate. I'd have said tomorrow."

"Get away from the platform."

"In a moment." He's reading something. "You'll want to know that I've had eleven specialists on Precursor architecture on retainer for nine straight years, and not a single one could have found this room, and you managed it in under three weeks with a sack of rubbings. I want that on the record. I'm not a man who steals credit."

"You're a man who left three of my colleagues in a hole."

"I left six people in a hole. Three of them are alive because your marshal is better than my rear element." Now he raises his eyes, and I find no theater in them, and that's the frightening part. "I will not pretend to be sorry, Doctor. I'm going to be accurate instead. Do you know what this is?"

"Yes."

"Then you know what it's worth."

"It's worth nothing. It can't be moved, it can't be copied, and it cannot be sold, because the moment anyone above this planet understands what's under it they'll glass the island from orbit rather than let you have it." I take a step onto the bridge. "Cassian. Listen to me. The system is at eleven-twelfths. Eleven is ready. Twelve is release authority and it isn't reversible and nobody is buying it, it's an extinction event with your name on the invoice."

Something shifts behind his eyes and doesn't reach his face. He isn't a stupid man. That's the whole tragedy of him.

"Then I'll hold at eleven," he says, "and negotiate from there," and he nods to the woman at the socket.

She turns the crystal a quarter.

I don't know what he thought that would do. I have gone over it a great many times since. I think he believed he was arming a bargaining position. I suspect that a man who spends twenty years buying and selling other people's history simply could not conceive that the object might not be for sale.

The sphere goes white.

Every projection stops. Twenty millennia of dead people vanish between one heartbeat and the next, and the entire inner surface of the seat lights in a single unbroken sheet, and far below us and far above us and through the rock in every direction I feel the island start to move.

Somewhere eight hundred meters up, on a wet autumn coastline, forty-one housings are opening.

Zuri's reader is screaming. She doesn't need to read it out. I can see it on the wall in a language I've spent a fortnight learning, in glyphs four meters tall, counting.

Twelve of twelve.

CHAPTER 24

KAVAN

Everything after the crystal turns is arithmetic performed at speed.

Sophie is eleven meters out on the bridge. Rourke's two shooters are already swinging onto her. Marchant, Ansel and I are at the walkway rail with nineteen people behind us and no cover in a sphere that has no corners in it.

I do the sum in the time the white light needs to reach the walkway.

"Ansel, the left. Marchant, blow the socket."