The Replicator-front red-spread on the strategic display reached the P6Y-112 perimeter at 1714 on the angle AURORA-7 had been tracking for sixty-three hours and would not have surfaced as urgent for another four hours if the contraction rate had held to its projected curve.
The contraction rate had not held.
It had jumped two hours ago — a sudden acceleration AURORA-7 had attributed at fifty-three percent confidence to local terrain feedback in the agricultural sector and at forty-seven percent confidence to unmodeled variable. The unmodeled variable was the part she had not been able to name. She had not pushed to name it. She had pushed me to the strategic display at 1655 and held the second tactical layer behind her at the half-degree softer register she had been holding since Replicator-front operations began.
I had been at the display since 1657.
Tarn was on the ground at P6Y-112.
He had been there since 1130 supervising the joint engineering team's pre-evacuation. Twenty-three personnel — fourteen Earth, six Serrakin, three contracted civilian engineers from a small Earth firm we had cleared on day forty-six. Reka was with him. The transport had been on standby at the gate since 1500 against a contingency we had projected for tomorrow morning.
The red-spread reached the perimeter at 1714.
"Evacuation now."
Acknowledged. Routing the transport.
I watched the strategic display update with the transport's routing. The transport went up at 1716. AURORA-7's tactical layer skipped a beat at 1718. The skip was small — eleven seconds, a half-cycle of latency in the corridor projection — and she recovered before I had decided whether to ask.
Corruption window. Recovered.
"Watch it."
Watching.
The transport's corrected routing came up at 1719.
I read the routing in zero point six seconds.
The routing put the transport through an extended corridor at thirty-eight degrees to the gate vector — eight minutes longer than the direct line, with two right-angle turns through a sub-territory AURORA-7 had flagged green on the strategic overlay. The sub-territory had been red at 1612. It was green now. Green was the corrupted state. The contraction rate had jumped two hours ago and the sub-territory could not have cleared in two hours, which meant AURORA-7's overlay was reading a stale state, which meant the corrupted layer was deeper than the corridor recommendation.
I overrode at 1721:14.
"Manual route. Transport northeast through corridor four. Add eight minutes to ETA. Tarn — hold the perimeter for eight minutes."
Tarn's voice came up at 1722:01.
"Drew. The northeast adds eight."
"Yes."
"My disruptor will hold for nine."
"Yes."
"Acknowledged. Holding."
He did not ask which sub-territory the original routing would have crossed. He did not ask why the override. He held.
The transport corrected course at 1722:34. Reka was on board. AURORA-7's tactical layer steadied at 1726 with no further corruption windows for the rest of the engagement, the corruption that had cost us the eight minutes already inside the operational record and now permanent.
The next thirty-seven minutes were the long-corridor flight to the gate. Tarn at the perimeter with the site's primary defensive disruptor — a Serrakin-Earth hybrid unit Tarn had personally tuned during the joint engineering installation on day forty-eight, calibrated for sustained fire against high-replication-rate ground targets. The disruptor was a ground-mounted asset. It did not move. Tarn did not move from the disruptor.
At 1801 his comm opened.
"Drew Ramsey."
"Tarn."
"I have the disruptor. You have the team. We are even."
The line came across the SRD speakers in the Serrakin commercial register he used for formal communications, the same register he had used at the hull seam on day eighty-four when he had signed the shielding spec, the same register he had used at the joint flag-planting on day fifty-nine when his hand had been on the Hebridan marker beside mine. The line was nine words.
I did not respond into the comm channel.
I nodded at the strategic display.
The nod was small. The nod was for me. Tarn did not see it. AURORA-7 catalogued it without comment.
The disruptor's signature on the strategic overlay held for seven minutes thirty-three seconds. The signature flickered at 1808:51. It dropped at 1809:14. It went to zero at 1809:33.
The Replicator-block count on the P6Y-112 perimeter went from forty-one to sixty-three in the next four minutes.
The transport reached the gate at 1812.
Reka was the last off. The Serrakin engineers had to hold her back at the gate door at 1811, two of them, for the seven seconds it took her to stop trying to turn around. The hold was theirs. The chapter recorded the hold as theirs. I authorized the gate close at 1813:18 with my hand flat on the desk and AURORA-7 at the cool register and the carmine arc on the strategic display now consuming the territory I had personally claimed on day sixty-one.
Director.
"Not yet."
Acknowledged.
I sat at the console. The chairs in the SRD office were the chairs from the original 1991 installation, repadded twice. The chair under me was the one I had been in for the last three hours. The pad on the chair's right armrest had a wear pattern from my right elbow that was specific enough that AURORA-7 had once offered to have it replaced and I had refused.
I did not move from the chair for sixteen minutes.
Hammond came in at 1834. He did not knock. He sat in the visitor chair across from me. He did not speak. He had a folder in his lap. He did not open it.
"Mr. Ramsey."
"Sir."
"Sokar's House."
"Sir?"
"Absorbed into Ba'al's coalition at fifteen-thirty. Tok'ra channel. I held it until your operational window closed."
"Acknowledged."
"That's the Replicator war metabolizing the Goa'uld political order."
"Yes sir."
He looked at the strategic display through the open office door. The carmine on P6Y-112 had stabilized. The territory was on the display as a small dark zone, the kind of dark a territory had when the system had stopped tracking it as a holding.
"Mr. Ramsey."
"Sir."
"Tell me what you need."
"Forty-eight hours. Without an inquiry."
"You have it."
He stood. He paused at the door.
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Tarn was a good man."
"He was."
Hammond left.
I went home at 2103. I drove. I did not stop at Janet's. I did not call Janet. I went to the apartment. I had not slept in the apartment for nine days. The apartment smelled of nothing, the way an apartment smelled when no one was metabolizing inside it.
I came back to the SRD office at 2241.
The dark pencil at the casualty-wall draft column had snapped at the second stroke this morning — I had used the stub through the SG-13 entries — and the stub had cracked through during a brief touch at 1614. I had not replaced it. The wall had a green pencil in the small ledge under the column from the spare supply Walter kept in the rolling cabinet.
I picked up the green pencil at 2247.
I wrote on the next line of the column.
TARN-KO — SERRAKIN ENGINEER — P6Y-112
I did not stop there.
Below his name, in the Serrakin script he had signed the shielding spec in on day eighty-four — the three characters of which I could read, the rest of which AURORA-7 quietly translated for me in real time to keep my strokes accurate — I wrote:
P6Y-112, hull-shielding signature, given freely.
The Serrakin script was harder to write than to read. The fourth character was a glyph with a downstroke that required a specific wrist angle Tarn had taught his juniors with their hands physically guided over the marker on day eighty-four. I had watched the lesson from the catwalk. The downstroke under my green pencil was not the right angle. AURORA-7 catalogued the inaccuracy and did not correct it. The chapter recorded both — the inaccuracy and the not-correcting.
I set the pencil down on the ledge at 2253.
My left thumb was on the paper where I had been pressing it to steady the page. The smudge from the pad of my thumb was small and grey along the right margin beside the Serrakin script. The smudge would not come off.
I did not say the math works out.
I had not said it for nine chapters. AURORA-7 had been logging the absence. The absence was now structural. The structural absence was the kind of thing a man noticed only when he stopped to notice the not-noticing. I noticed at 2255. I noted the noticing. I did not name it to AURORA-7. AURORA-7 catalogued the noticing without raising it.
I walked to the door of the office.
I turned off the lights.
I left the green pencil on the ledge under the column where Tarn-ko's name was now between SG-13's Avraham and the blank line for the next entry.
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