“Tanya,” Schneider looked suddenly betrayed. He spread his hands wide. “I mean—”
“I don’t know what happened here, I don’t know what,” she squeezed out the words, “fucked up Glyph sequences Aribowo used, but it isn’t going to happen to us. I know what I am doing.”
“With respect, Mistress Wardani,” Sutjiadi looked around at the assembled faces, gauging support. “You’ve admitted that our knowledge of this artefact is incomplete. I fail to see how you can guarantee—”
“I am a Guild Master.” Wardani stalked back towards the lined up corpses, eyes flaring. It was as if she was furious with them all for getting killed. “This woman was not. Weng Xiaodong. Was not. Tomas Dhasanapongsakul. Was not. These people were Scratchers. Talented, maybe, but that is not enough. I have over seventy years of experience in the field of Martian archaeology, and if I tell you that the gate is stable, then it is stable.”
She glared around her, eyes bright, corpses at her feet. No one seemed disposed to argue the point.
The poisoning from the Sauberville blast was gathering force in my cells. It took longer to deal with the bodies than I’d expected, certainly longer than it ought have taken any ranking officer in Carrera’s Wedge, and when the corpse locker hinged slowly shut afterwards, I felt wrung out.
Deprez, if he felt the same, wasn’t showing it. Maybe the Maori sleeves were holding up according to spec. He wandered across the hold to where Schneider was showing Jiang Jianping some kind of trick with a grav harness. I hesitated for a moment, then turned away and headed for the ladder to the upper deck, hoping to find Tanya Wardani in the forward cabin.
Instead, I found Hand, watching the vast bulk of the Martian starship roll past below us on the cabin’s main screen.
“Takes some getting used to, huh?”
There was a greedy enthusiasm in the executive’s voice as he gestured at the view. The Nagini’s environment lights provided illumination for a few hundred metres in all directions, but as the structure faded away into the darkness, you were still aware of it, sprawling across the starfield. It seemed to go on forever, curving out at odd angles and sprouting appendages like bubbles about to burst, defying the eye to put limits on the darkness it carved out. You stared and thought you had the edge of it; you saw the faint glimmer of stars beyond. Then the fragments of light faded or jumped and you saw that what you thought was starfield was just an optical trick on the face of more bulking shadow. The colony hulks of the Konrad Harlan fleet were among the largest mobile structures ever built by human science, but they could have served this vessel as lifeboats. Even the Habitats in the New Beijing system didn’t come close. This was a scale we weren’t ready for yet. The Nagini hung over the starship like a gull over one of the bulk freighters that plied the Newpest to Millsport belaweed runs. We were an irrelevance, a tiny uncomprehending visitor along for the ride.
I dropped into the seat opposite Hand and swivelled it so that I faced the screen, feeling shivery in the hands and the spine. Shifting the corpses had been cold work, and when we bagged Dhasanapongsakul the frozen strands of eye tissue branching like coral from his emptied sockets had broken off under the plastic, under the palm of my hand. I felt them give through the bag, I heard the brittle crickling noise they made.
That tiny sound, the little chirrup of death’s particular consequences, had shunted aside most of my earlier awe at the massive dimensions of the Martian vessel.
“Just a bigger version of a colony barge,” I said. “Theoretically, we could have built that big. It’s just harder to accelerate all that mass.”
“Obviously not for them.”
“Obviously not.”
“So you think that’s what it was? A colony ship?”
I shrugged, striving for a casualness I wasn’t feeling. “There are a limited number of reasons for building something this big. It’s either hauling something somewhere, or you live in it. And it’s hard to see why you’d build a habitat this far out. There’s nothing here to study. Nothing to mine or skim.”
“It’s hard to see why you’d park it here as well, if it is a colony barge.”
Crick-crickle.
I closed my eyes. “Why do you care, Hand? When we get back, this thing’s going to disappear into some corporate asteroid dock. None of us’ll ever see it again. Why bother getting attached? You’ll get your percentage, your bonus or whatever it is that powers you up.”
“You think I’m not curious?”
“I think you don’t care.”
He said nothing after that, until Sun came up from the hold deck with the bad news. The buoy, it appeared, was irreparably damaged.
“It signals,” she said. “And with some work, the drives can be reengaged. It needs a new power core, but I believe I can modify one of the bike generators to do the job. But the locational systems are wrecked, and we do not have the tools or material to repair them. Without this, the buoy cannot keep station. Even the backwash from our own drives would probably kick it away into space.”
“What about deploying after we’ve fired our drives.” Hand looked from Sun to myself and back. “Vongsavath can calculate a trajectory and nudge us forward, then drop the buoy when we’re in. Ah.”
“Motion,” I finished for him. “The residual motion it picks up from when we toss it is still going to be enough to make it drift away, right Sun?”
“That is correct.”
“And if we attach it?”
I grinned mirthlessly. “Attach it? Weren’t you there when the nanobes tried to attach themselves to the gate?”
“We’ll have to look for a way,” he said doggedly. “We are not going home empty-handed. Not when we’ve come this close.”
“You try welding to that thing out there and we won’t be going home at all, Hand. You know that.”
“Then,” suddenly he was shouting at us. “There has to be another solution.”
“There is.”
Tanya Wardani stood in the hatch to the cockpit, where she had retreated while the corpses were dealt with. She was still pale from her vomiting, and her eyes looked bruised, but underlying it there was an almost ethereal calm I hadn’t seen since we brought her out of the camp.
“Mistress Wardani.” Hand looked up and down the cabin, as if to check who else had witnessed the loss of cool. He pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. “You have something to contribute?”
“Yes. If Sun Liping can repair the power systems of the buoy, we can certainly place it.”
“Place it where?” I asked.
She smiled thinly. “Inside.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Inside,” I nodded at the screen, and the unreeling kilometres of alien structure. “That?”
“Yes. We go in through the docking bay and leave the buoy somewhere secure. There’s no reason to suppose the hull isn’t radio-transparent, at least in places. Most Martian architecture is. We can test-broadcast anyway, until we find a suitable place.”
“Sun.” Hand was looking back at the screen, almost dreamily. “How long would it take you to effect repairs on the power system?”
“About eight to ten hours. No more than twelve, certainly.” Sun turned to the archaeologue. “How long will it take you, Mistress Wardani, to open the docking bay?”
“Oh,” Wardani gave us all another strange smile. “It’s already open.”
I only had one chance to speak to her before we prepared to dock. I met her on her way out of the ship’s toilet facilities, ten minutes after the abrupt and dictatorial briefing Hand had thrown down for everyone. She had her back to me and we bumped awkwardly in the narrow dimensions of the entryway. She turned with a yelp and I saw there was a slight sweat still beading her forehead, presumably from more retching. Her breath smelt bad and stomach-acid odours crept out the door behind her.
She saw the way I was looking at her.
“What?”
“Are you alright?”
“No, Kovacs,
I’m dying. How about you?”
“You sure this is a good idea?”
“Oh, not you as well! I thought we’d nailed this down with Sutjiadi and Schneider.”
I said nothing, just watched the hectic light in her eyes. She sighed.
“Look, if it satisfies Hand and gets us home again, I’d say yes, it is a good idea. And it’s a damned sight safer than trying to attach a defective buoy to the hull.”
I shook my head.
“That’s not it.”
“No?”
“No. You want to see the inside of this thing before Mandrake spirit it away to some covert dry dock. You want to own it, even if it’s only for a few hours. Don’t you?”
“You don’t?”
“I think, apart from Sutjiadi and Schneider, we all do.” I knew Cruickshank would have—I could see the shine on her eyes at the thought of it. The awakening enthusiasm she’d had at the rail of the trawler. The same wonder I’d seen on her face when she looked at the activated gate countdown in the UV backwash. Maybe that was why I wasn’t protesting beyond this muttered conversation amidst the curling odour of exhausted vomiting. Maybe this was something I owed.
“Well, then.” Wardani shrugged. “What’s the problem?”
“You know what the problem is.”
She made an impatient noise and moved to get past me. I stayed put.
“You want to get out of my way, Kovacs?” she hissed. “We’re five minutes off landing, and I need to be in the cockpit.”
“Why didn’t they go in, Tanya?”
“We’ve been over—”
“That’s bullshit, Tanya. Ameli’s instruments show a breathable atmosphere. They found a way to open the docking system, or they found it already open. And then they waited out here to die while the air in their suits ran out. Why didn’t they go in?”
“You were at the briefing. They had no food, they had—”
“Yeah, I heard you come up with metres and metres of wholecloth rationale, but what I didn’t hear was anything that explains why four arch archaeologues would rather die in their spacesuits than spend their last hours wandering around the greatest archaeological find in the history of the human race.”
For a moment she hesitated, and I saw something of the woman from the waterfall. Then the feverish light flickered back on in her eyes.
“Why ask me? Why don’t you just power up one of the ID&A sets, and fucking ask them? They’re stack-intact, aren’t they?”
“The ID&A sets are fucked, Tanya. Leak-corroded with the buoys. So I’m asking you again. Why didn’t they go in?”
She was silent again, looking away. I thought I saw a tremor at the corner of one eye. Then it was gone, and she looked up at me with the same dry calm I’d seen in the camp.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “And if we can’t ask them, then there’s only one other way to find out that I can think of.”
“Yeah.” I propped myself away from her wearily. “And that’s what this is about, isn’t it. Finding out. Uncovering history. Carrying the fucking torch of human discovery. You’re not interested in the money, you don’t care who ends up with the property rights, and you certainly don’t mind dying. So why should anybody else, right?”
She flinched, but it was momentary. She locked it down. And then she was turning away, leaving me looking at the pale light from the illuminum tile where she had been pressed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was like delirium.
I remember reading somewhere that when the archaeologues on Mars first got into the buried mausoleum spaces they later categorised as cities, a fair percentage of them went insane. Mental collapse was an occupational hazard of the profession back then. Some of the finest minds of the century were sacrificed in pursuit of the keys to Martian civilisation. Not broken and dragged down to raving insanity the way the archetypal antiheroes of experia horror flicks always end up. Not broken, just blunted. Worn down from the sharp edge of intellectual prowess to a slightly numb, slightly blurred distracted vagueness. They went that way in their dozens. Psychically abraded by the constant contact with the leavings of unhuman minds. The Guild spent them like surgical blades rammed against a spinning grindstone.
“Well, I suppose if you can fly…” said Luc Deprez, eyeing the architecture ahead without enthusiasm.
His stance telegraphed irritated confusion. I guessed he was having the same problem locking down potential ambush corners that I was. When the combat conditioning goes in that deep, not being able to do what they’ve trained you to itches like quitting nicotine. And spotting an ambush in Martian architecture would have to be like trying to catch a Mitcham’s Point slictopus with your bare hands.
From the ponderously overhanging lintel that led out of the docking bay, the internal structure of the ship burst up and around us like nothing I had ever seen. Groping after comparison, my mind came up with an image from my Newpest childhood. One spring out on the Deeps side of Hirata’s Reef, I’d given myself a bad scare when the feed tube on my scrounged and patched scuba suit snagged on an outcrop of coral fifteen metres down. Watching oxygen explode out through the rupture in a riot of silver-bellied corpuscles, I’d wondered fleetingly what the storm of bubbles must look like from the inside.
Now I knew.
These bubbles were frozen in place, tinged mother-of-pearl shades of blue and pink where indistinct low-light sources glowed under their surfaces, but aside from that basic difference in longevity, they were as chaotic as my escaping air supply had been that day. There appeared to be no architectural rhyme or reason to the way they joined and merged into each other. In places the link was a hole only metres across. Elsewhere the curving walls simply broke their sweep as they met an intersecting circumference. At no point in the first space we entered was the ceiling less than twenty metres overhead.
“The floor’s flat though,” murmured Sun Liping, kneeling to brush at the sheened surface underfoot. “And they had—have—grav generators.”
“Origin of species.” Tanya Wardani’s voice boomed slightly in the cathedric emptiness. “They evolved in a gravity well, just like us. Zero g isn’t healthy long-term, no matter how much fun it is. And if you have gravity, you need flat surfaces to put things down on. Practicality at work. Same as the docking bay back there. All very well wanting to stretch your wings, but you need straight lines to land a spaceship.”
We all glanced back at the gap we’d come through. Compared to where we stood now, the alien curvatures of the docking station had been practically demure. Long, stepped walls tapered outward like two-metre-fat sleeping serpents stretched out and laid not quite directly on top of each other. The coils wove just barely off a straight axis, as if even within the strictures of the docking station’s purpose, the Martian shipwrights had not quite been able to restrain themselves from an organic flourish. There was no danger involved in bringing a docking vessel down through the increasing levels of atmospheric density held in by some mechanism in the stepped walls, but looking out to the sides, you still felt you were being lowered into the belly of something sleeping.
Delirium.
I could feel it brushing lightly at the upper extremities of my vision, sucking gently at my eyeballs and leaving me with a faintly swollen feeling behind the brow. A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn’t let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you. It was the same feeling here, the promise of a dull ache behind the eyes from constantly trying to see what was up there. An awareness of space overhead that you kept wanting to check on.
The curve on the gleaming surfaces around us put a tilt on it all, a vague sense that you were about to topple over sideways and that, in fact, toppled over and lying down might be the best stance to take in this gratingly alien environment. That this whole ridiculous structure was eggshell thin and re
ady to crack apart if you did the wrong thing, and that it might easily spill you out into the void.
Delirium.
Better get used to it.
The chamber was not empty. Skeletal arrangements of what looked like scaffolding loomed on the edges of the level floor space. I recalled holoshot images in a download I’d scanned as a child, Martian roosting bars, complete with virtually generated Martians roosting on them. Here, somehow, the emptiness of the bars gave each structure an eerie gauntness that did nothing for the creeping unease on the nape of my neck.
“They’ve been folded down,” murmured Wardani, staring upward. She looked puzzled.
At the lower curves of the bubble wall, machines whose functions I couldn’t even guess at stood beneath the—apparently—tidied-away roost bars. Most of them looked spiny and aggressive, but when the archaeologue brushed past one, it did nothing more than mutter to itself and pettishly rearrange some of its spines.
Plastic rattle and swift scaling whine—armament deployed in every pair of hands across the hollow bell of the chamber.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Wardani barely spared us a backward glance. “Loosen up, will you. It’s asleep. It’s a machine.”
I put up the Kalashnikovs and shrugged. Across the chamber Deprez caught my eye, and grinned.
“A machine for what?” Hand wanted to know.
This time the archaeologue did look round.
“I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “Give me a couple of days and a fully equipped lab team, maybe I could tell you. Right now, all I can tell you is that it’s dormant.”
Sutjiadi took a couple of steps closer, Sunjet still raised. “How can you tell that?”
“Because if it wasn’t, we’d already be dealing with it on an interactive basis, believe me. Plus, can you see anybody with wingspurs rising a metre above their shoulders putting an active machine that close to a curved wall? I’m telling you, this whole place is powered down and packed up.”
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