A year passed.
Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.
Back to the lab.
These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.
Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth—tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.
The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.
The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.
There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.
“Nobody down here either,” said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. “Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.”
Sutjiadi frowned. “There’s food out?”
“Yeah, lots of it.” Deprez hauled himself out: of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. “Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.”
“I’ve had parties like that,” said Vongsavath.
Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.
“Cruickshank is shooting the rats,” he said. “They are quite large.”
Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. “Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?”
“Rats?” Deprez’s grin widened. “It is hard to tell.”
I repressed a smile of my own.
“Crew,” said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. “How many crew, sergeant?
Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. “I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.”
“I used to be a chef,” said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. “Maybe I’ll go down and look.”
“You stay here.” Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. “Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.”
Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.
“My kind of work,” he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.
The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.
“…is secured.” It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.
“Secured how?” he snapped.
“We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.” Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. “That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.”
“What about the uh, the mission objective?” I broke in. “Is it intact?”
Sutjiadi snorted. “Is it there?”
I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.
I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.
Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.
“Yes, it’s here.” There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. “It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Sun? Is it open?”
“Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.”
I cleared my throat. “Wardani? You there?”
“Busy.” Her voice was taut. “What did you find on the boat?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Yeah, well. Same here. Out.”
I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.
The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.
Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.
It turned out worth it.
Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.
We stood looking up at them for a while.
“Good guess,” I said to Sutjiadi.
“It made sense to look.” He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. “They’ve been stri
pped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?”
“Yeah, but nobody did,” Vongsavath pointed out.
Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. “The war?”
I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. “Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.” I nodded towards the twists of smoke. “They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?”
“Vividly,” said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.
“That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.”
“So why hide these guys at all?” asked Cruickshank.
I shrugged. “Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.”
“Indigo City,” said Sutjiadi pointedly.
“Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.” Cruickshank grinned. “He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a fucking compliment!”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.”
“It does if the boat was hired in Sauberville.” Sutjiadi shook his head. “Bought even, it’s still local interest. Who were those guys? Isn’t that old Chang’s trawler out there? Come on, Kovacs, it’s only a couple of dozen kilometres.”
“There’s no reason to assume this boat’s local.” I gestured out at the placid ocean. “On this planet you could sail a boat like this one all the way up from Bootkinaree and never spill your coffee.”
“Yeah, but you could hide the bodies from aerial surveillance by chucking them down into the galley with the rest of the mess,” objected Cruickshank. “It doesn’t add up.”
Luc Deprez reached up and shifted the net slightly. The skulls bobbed and leaned. “The stacks are gone,” he said. “They were put in the water to hide the rest of their identity. Faster than leaving them for the rats, I think.”
“Depends on the rats.”
“Are you an expert?”
“Maybe it was a burial,” offered Ameli Vongsavath.
“In a net?”
“We’re wasting time,” said Sutjiadi loudly. “Deprez, get them down, wrap them up and put them somewhere the rats can’t get at them. We’ll run a post mortem with the autosurgeon back on the Nagini later. Vongsavath and Cruickshank, I want you to go through this boat from beak to backside. Look for anything that might tell us what happened here.”
“That’s stem to stern, sir,” said Vongsavath primly.
“Whatever. Anything that might tell us something. The clothing that came off these two maybe or…” He shook his head, irritable with the awkward new factors. “Anything. Anything at all. Get on with it. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like you to come with me. I want to check on our perimeter defences.”
“Sure.” I scooped up the lie with a slight smile.
Sutjiadi didn’t want to check on the perimeter. He’d seen Sun and Hansen’s résumés, just like me. They didn’t need their work checking.
He didn’t want to see the perimeter.
He wanted to see the gate.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Schneider had described it to me, several times. Wardani had sketched it for me once in a quiet moment at Roespinoedji’s. An imaging shop on the Angkor Road had run up a 3-D graphic from Wardani’s input for the Mandrake pitch. Later, Hand had the Mandrake machines blow up the image to a full-scale construct we could walk around in virtual.
None of it came close.
It stood in the man-made cavern like some vertically stretched vision from the Dimensionalist school, some element out of the nightmare technomilitary landscapes of Mhlongo or Osupile. There was a gaunt foldedness to the structure, like six or seven ten-metre tall vampire bats crushed back to back in a defensive phalanx. There was none of the passive openness that the word ‘gate’ suggested. In the soft light filtering down through chinks in the rocks above, the whole thing looked hunched and waiting.
The base was triangular, about five metres on a side, though the lower edges bore less resemblance to a geometric shape than to something that had grown down into the ground like tree roots. The material was an alloy I’d seen in Martian architecture before, a dense black-clouded surface that would feel like marble or onyx to the touch but always carried a faint static charge. The technoglyph panelling was dull green and ruby, mapped in odd, irregular waves around the lower section, but never rising higher than a metre and a half from the ground. Towards the top of this limit, the symbols seemed to lose both coherence and strength—they thinned out, grew less well defined and even the style of the engraving seemed more hesitant. It was as if, Sun said later, the Martian technoscribes were afraid to work too close to what they had created on the plinth above.
Above, the structure folded rapidly in on itself as it rose, creating a series of compressed black alloy angles and upward leading edges that ended in a short spire. In the long splits between the folds, the black clouding on the alloy faded to a dirty translucence and inside this, the geometry seemed to continue folding in on itself in some indefinable way which was painful to look at for too long.
“Believe it now?” I asked Sutjiadi, as he stood beside me, staring. He didn’t respond for a moment, and when he did there was the same slight numbness in his voice that I’d heard from Sun Liping over the comlink.
“It is not still,” he said quietly. “It feels. In motion. Like turning.”
“Maybe it is.” Sun had come up with us, leaving the rest of the team down by the Nagini. No one else seemed overkeen to spend time either in or near the cavern.
“It’s supposed to be a hyperspatial link,” I said, moving sideways in an attempt to break the hold the thing’s alien geometry was exerting. “If it maintains a line through to wherever, then maybe it moves in hyperspace, even when it’s shut down.”
“Or maybe it cycles,” Sun suggested. “Like a beacon.”
Unease.
I felt it course through me at the same time as I spotted it in the twitch across Sutjiadi’s face. Bad enough that we were pinned down here on this exposed tongue of land without the added thought that the thing we had come to unlock might be sending off ‘come and get me’ signals in a dimension we as a species had only the vaguest of handles on.
“We’re going to need some lights in here,” I said.
The spell broke. Sutjiadi blinked hard and looked up at the falling rays of light. They were greying out with perceptible speed as evening advanced across the sky outside.
“We’ll have it blasted out,” he said.
I exchanged an alarmed glance with Sun.
“Have what blasted?” I asked cautiously.
Sutjiadi gestured. “The rock. Nagini runs a front-mounted ultravibe battery for ground assault. Hansen should be able to clear the whole thing back this far without putting a scratch on the artefact.”
Sun coughed. “I don’t think Commander Hand will approve that, sir. He ordered me to bring up a set of Angier lamps before dark. And Mistress Wardani has asked for remote monitoring systems to be installed so she can work direct on the gate from—”
“Alright, lieutenant. Thank you.” Sutjiadi looked around the cavern once more. “I’ll talk to Commander Hand.”
He strode out. I glanced at Sun and winked.
“That
’s a conversation I want to hear,” I said.
Back at the Nagini, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang were busy erecting the first of the rapid deployment bubblefabs. Hand was braced in one corner of the assault ship’s loading hatch, watching a cross-legged Wardani sketch something on a memoryboard. There was an unguarded fascination in his expression that made him look suddenly younger. “Some problem, captain?” he asked, as we came up the ramp.
“I want that thing,” said Sutjiadi, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, “out in the open. Where we can watch it. I’m having Hansen ‘vibe-blast the rocks out of the way.”
“Out of the question.” Hand went back to watching what the archaeologue was doing. “We can’t risk exposure at this stage.”
“Or damage to the gate,” said Wardani sharply.
“Or damage to the gate,” agreed the executive. “I’m afraid your team are going to have to work with the cavern as it is, captain. I don’t believe there’s any risk involved. The bracing the previous visitors put in appears to be solid.”
“I’ve seen the bracing,” said Sutjiadi. “Bonding epoxy is not a substitute for a permanent structure, but that’s—”
“Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it,” Hand’s urbane tone was edged with irritation. “But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.”
“I was going to say,” Sutjiadi said evenly, “That the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.”
Wardani looked up from her sketching.
“Well that’s good, captain,” she said brightly. “You’ve gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours real time. What exactly are you concerned about?”
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