Broken Angels

CHAPTER THIRTY

I don’t like hard space. It fucks with your head.

It’s not anything physical. You can make more mistakes in space than at the bottom of the ocean, or in a toxic atmosphere like Glimmer Five’s. You can get away with far more in a vacuum, and on occasion I have done. Stupidity, forgetfulness and panic will not get you killed with the same implacable certainty as they will in less forgiving environments. But it isn’t that.

The Harlan’s World orbitals sit five hundred kilometres out and will shoot down anything that masses more than a six-seater helicopter as soon as look at it. There have been some notable exceptions to this behaviour, but so far no one has been able to work out what caused them. As a result, Harlanites don’t go up in the air much, and vertigo is as common as pregnancy. The first time I wore a vacuum suit, courtesy of the Protectorate marines and aged eighteen, my entire mind turned to ice and looking down through the infinite emptiness, I could hear myself whimpering deep in the back of my throat. It looked like a very long way to fall.

Envoy conditioning gives you a handle on most kinds of fear, but you’re still aware of what scares you because you feel the weight of the conditioning coming online. I’ve felt that weight every single time. In high orbit over Loyko during the Pilots’ Revolt, deploying with Randall’s vacuum commandos around Adoracion’s outer moon, and once, in the depths of interstellar space, playing a murderous game of tag with members of the Real Estate Crew around the hull of the hijacked colony barge Mivtsemdi, falling endlessly along her trajectory, light years from the nearest sun. The Mivtsemdi firefight was the worst. It still gives me the occasional nightmare.

The Nagini slithered through the gap in three-dimensional space the gate had peeled back, and hung amidst nothing. I let out the same breath we’d all been holding since the assault ship began inching towards the gate, got out of my seat and walked forward to the cockpit, bouncing slightly in the adjusted grav-field. I could already see the starfield on the screen, but I wanted a genuine view through the toughened transparencies of the assault ship’s nose. It helps to see your enemy face to face, to sense the void out there a few centimetres from the end of your nose. It helps you to know where you are to the animal roots of your being.

It’s strictly against the rules of spaceflight to open connecting hatches during entry into hard space, but no one said anything, even when it must have been clear where I was going. I got a strange look from Ameli Vongsavath as I stepped through the hatch, but she didn’t say anything either. Then again, she was the first pilot in the history of the human race to effect an instantaneous transfer from a planetary altitude of six metres to the middle of deep space, so I suspect she had other things on her mind.

I stared forward, past her left shoulder. Stared down, and felt my fingers curl tight on the back of Vongsavath’s seat.

Fear confirmed.

The old shift in the head, like pressure doors locking sections of my brain up under diamond bright illumination. The conditioning.

I breathed.

“You’re going to stay, you might want to sit down,” said Vongsavath, busy with a buoyancy monitor that had just started gibbering at the sudden lack of a planet beneath us.

I clambered to the co-pilot’s seat and lowered myself into it, looking for the webbing straps.

“See anything?” I asked with elaborate calm.

“Stars,” she said shortly.

I waited for a while, getting used to the view, feeling the itch at the outer corners of my eyes as instinct-deep reflexes pulled my peripheral vision backwards, looking for some end to the intense lack of light.

“So how far out are we?”

Vongsavath punched up figures on the astrogation set.

“According to this?” She whistled low. “Seven hundred and eighty-odd million klicks. Believe that?”

It put us just inside the orbit of Banharn, the solitary and rather unimpressive gas giant that stood sentinel on the outer edges of the Sanction system. Three hundred million kilometres further in on the ecliptic was a circling sea of rubble, too extensive to be called a belt, that had for some reason never got round to coalescing into planetary masses. A couple of hundred million kilometres the other side of that was Sanction IV. Where we’d been about forty seconds ago.

Impressive.

Alright, a stellar-range needlecast can put you on the other side of so many kilometres you run out of places to put the zeroes in less time than that. But you have to be digitised first, and then you have to be downloaded into a new sleeve at the other end, and all that takes time and technology. It’s a process.

We hadn’t been through a process, or at least nothing humanly recognisable as such. We’d just bumped across a line. Given inclination and a vacuum suit, I could literally have stepped across that line.

Sutjiadi’s sense of not belonging came and touched me again at the nape of the neck. The conditioning awoke and damped it out. The wonder along with the fear.

“We’ve stopped,” murmured Vongsavath, to herself more than me. “Something soaked up our acceleration. You’d expect some. Holy. God.”

Her voice, already low, sank to a whisper on the last two words and seemed to decelerate the way the Nagini apparently had. I looked up from the figures she’d just maximised on the display, and my first thought, still scrabbling around in a planet-bound context, was that we had cruised into a shadow. By the time I remembered that there were no mountains out here, and not much in the way of sunlight to be obscured anyway, the same chilly shock that Vongsavath must have been feeling hit me.

Over our heads, the stars were sliding away.

They disappeared silently, swallowed with terrifying speed by the vast, occluding bulk of something hanging, it seemed, only metres above the overhead viewports.

“That’s it,” I said, and a small cold shiver ran through me as I said it, as if I’d just completed an obscure summoning.

“Range…” Vongsavath shook her head. “It’s nearly five kilometres off. That makes it—”

“Twenty-seven kilometres across,” I read out the data myself. “Fifty-three long. External structures extending…”

I gave up.

“Big. Very big.”

“Isn’t it.” Wardani’s voice came from right behind me. “See the crenellation at the edge. Each of those bites is nearly a kilometre deep.”

“Why don’t I just sell seats in here,” snapped Vongsavath. “Mistress Wardani, will you please return to the cabin and sit down.”

“Sorry,” murmured the archaeologue. “I was just—”

Sirens. A spaced scream, slashing at the air in the cockpit.

“Incoming,” yelled Vongsavath, and kicked the Nagini on end.

It was a manoeuvre that would have hurt in a gravity well, but with only the ship’s own grav field exerting force, it felt more like an experia special effect, an Angel wharf-conjuror’s trick with holoshift.

Vacuum combat fragments:

I saw the missile coming, falling end over end towards the right side viewports.

I heard the battle systems reporting for duty in their cosily enthusiastic machine voices.

Shouts from the cabin behind me.

I started to tense. The conditioning broke in heavily, forced me into impact-ready limpness—

Just a minute.

“That can’t be right,” said Vongsavath suddenly.

You don’t see missiles in space. Even the ones we can build move too fast for a human eye to track effectively.

“No impact threat,” observed the battle computer, sounding slightly disappointed. “No impact threat.”

“It’s barely moving.” Vongsavath punched up a new screen, shaking her head. “Axial velocity at… Ah, that’s just drift, man.”

“Those are still machined components,” I said, pointing at a small spike in the red section of the spectrum scan. “Circuitry, maybe. It ain’t a rock. Not just a rock, anyway.”

“It’s not active, though. Totally inert. Let me run the—”

“Why don’t you just bring us round and back up,” I made a quick calculation in my head. “About a hundred metres. It’ll be practically sitting out there on the windscreen. Kick on the external lights.”

Vongsavath locked onto me with a look that somehow managed to combine disdain with horror. It wasn’t exactly a flight manual recommendation. More importantly, she probably still had the adrenalin chop sloshing about in her system the same as me. It’s apt to make you grumpy.

“Coming about,” she said finally.

Outside the viewports, the environment lighting ignited.

In a way, it wasn’t such a great idea. The toughened transparent alloy of the viewports would have been built to vacuum combat spec, which means stopping all but the most energetic micrometeorites without much more than surface pitting. Certainly it wasn’t about to be ruined by bumping into something adrift. But the thing that came bumping up over the nose of the Nagini made an impact anyway.

Behind me, Tanya Wardani shrieked, a short, quickly-locked-up sound.

Scorched and ruptured though it was by the extremes of cold and the absence of pressure outside, the object was still recognisable as a human body, dressed for summer on the Dangrek coast.

“Holy God,” whispered Vongsavath, again.

A blackened face peered sightlessly in at us, empty eye sockets masked in trailing strands of exploded, frozen tissue. The mouth below was all scream, as silent now as it would have been when its owner tried to find a voice for the agony of dissolution. Beneath a ludicrously loud summer shirt, the body was swollen by a bulk that I guessed were the ruptured intestines and stomach. One clawed hand bumped knuckles on the viewport. The other arm was jerked back, over the head. The legs were similarly flexed, forward and back. Whoever it was had died flailing at the vacuum.

Died falling.

Behind me, Wardani was sobbing quietly.

Saying a name.

We found the rest of them by suit beacons, floating at the bottom of a three-hundred-metre dimple in the hull structure and clustered around what appeared to be a docking portal. There were four, all wearing cheap pull-on vacuum suits. From the look of it, three had died when their air supply ran out, which according to suit specs would have taken about six to eight hours. The fourth one hadn’t wanted to wait that long. There was a neat five-centimetre hole melted through the suit’s helmet from right to left. The industrial laser cutter that had done the damage was still tethered to the right hand at the wrist.

Vongsavath sent out the manigrab-equipped EVA robot once again. We watched the screens in silence as the little machine collected each corpse in its arms and bore it back to the Nagini with the same gentle deftness of touch it had applied to the blackened and ruptured remains of Tomas Dhasanapongsakul at the gate. This time, with the bodies enfolded in the white wrap of their vacuum suits, it could almost have been footage of a funeral run in reverse. The dead carried back out of the deep, and consigned to the Nagini’s ventral airlock.

Wardani could not cope. She came down to the hold deck with the rest of us while Vongsavath blew the inner hatch on the airlock from the flight deck. She watched Sutjiadi and Luc Deprez bring the vacuum-suited bodies up. But when Deprez broke the seals of the first helmet and lifted it off the features beneath, she uttered a choked sob and spun away to the far corner of the hold. I heard her retching. The acid reek of vomit stung the air.

Schneider went after her.

“You know this one too?” I asked redundantly, staring down at the dead face. It was a woman in a mid-forties sleeve, eyes wide and accusatory. She was frozen solid, neck protruding stiffly from the ring of the suit aperture, head lifting rigidly clear of the deck. The heating elements of the suit must have taken a while longer to give out than the air supply, but if this woman was part of the same team that we’d found in the trawl net, she’d been out here for at least a year. They don’t make suits with that kind of survivability.

Schneider answered for the archaeologue. “It’s Aribowo. Pharintorn Aribowo. Glyph specialist on the Dangrek dig.”

I nodded at Deprez. He unsealed the other helmets and detached them. The dead stared up at us in a line, heads lifted as if in the midst of some group abdominal workout. Aribowo and three male companions. Only the suicide’s eyes were closed, features composed in an expression of such peace that you wanted to check again for the slick, cauterised hole this man had bored through his own skull.

Looking at him, I wondered what I would have done. Seeing the gate slam shut behind me, knowing at that moment that I was going to die out here in the dark. Knowing, even if a fast rescue ship were dispatched immediately to these exact coordinates, that rescue would come months too late. I wondered if I would have had the courage to wait, hanging in the infinite night, hoping against hope for some miracle to occur.

Or the courage not to.

“That’s Weng,” Schneider had come back and was hovering at my shoulder. “Can’t remember his other name. He was some kind of glyph theorist too. I don’t know the others.”

I glanced across the deck to where Tanya Wardani was huddled against the hull wall, arms wrapped around herself.

“Why don’t you leave her alone?” hissed Schneider.

I shrugged. “OK. Luc, you’d better go back down into the lock and get Dhasanapongsakul bagged before he starts to drip. Then the rest of them. I’ll give you a hand. Sun, can we get the buoy overhauled? Sutjiadi, maybe you can help her. I’d like to know if we’re actually going to be able to deploy the fucking thing.”

Sun nodded gravely.

“Hand, you’d better start thinking of contingencies, because if the buoy’s fucked, we’re going to need an alternative plan of action.”

“Wait a minute.” Schneider looked genuinely scared for the first time since I’d met him. “We’re staying around here. After what happened to these people, we’re staying?”

“We don’t know what happened to these people, Schneider.”

“Isn’t it obvious? The gate isn’t stable, it shut down on them.”

“That’s bullshit, Jan.” There was an old strength trickling through the rasp in Wardani’s voice, a tone that made something flare up in my stomach. I looked back at her, and she was on her feet again, wiping her face clean of the tears and vomit specks with the heel of one palm. “We opened it last time, and it stood for days. There’s no instability in the sequencing I ran, then or now.”

“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 ready 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.”

“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct,” said Sun, pivoting about with the Nuhanovic survey set on her forearm raised. “There is detectable circuitry in the walls, but most of it is inactive.”

“There must be something running all this.” Ameli Vongsavath stood with her hands in her pocket and stared up into the draughty heights at the centre of the chamber. “We have breathable air. A bit thin, but it’s warm. Come to that, this whole place has to be heated somehow.”

“Caretaker systems.” Tanya Wardani seemed to have lost interest in the machines. She wandered back to the group. “A lot of the deeper buried cities on Mars and Nkrumah’s Land had them too.”

“After this long?” Sutjiadi didn’t sound happy.

Wardani sighed. She jerked a thumb at the docking bay entrance. “It’s not witchcraft, captain. You’ve got the same thing running the Nagini for us back there. If we all die, she’ll sit there for a good few centuries waiting for someone to come back.”

“Yes, and if it’s someone who doesn’t have the codes, she’ll blast them into soup. That doesn’t reassure me, Mistress Wardani.”

“Well maybe that’s the difference between us and the Martians. A little civilised sophistication.”

“And longer lasting batteries,” I said. “This has all been here a lot longer than the Nagini’s good for.”

“What’s the radio-transparency like?” asked Hand.

Sun did something to the Nuhanovic system she was wearing. The bulkier shoulder-mounted sections of the survey equipment flickered. Symbols evolved in the air over the back of her hand. She shrugged. “It’s not very good. I’m barely picking up the Nagini’s navigational beacon, and she’s only on the other side of the wall. Shielding, I suppose. We are in a docking station, and close to the hull. I think we will need to move further in.”

I spotted a couple of alarmed glances flicker back and forth amongst the group. Deprez caught me watching and he smiled a little.

“So who wants to explore?” he asked softly.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Hand.

I moved out from the instinctive defence huddle we’d all formed, stepped through the gap between two roost bars and reached up to the lip of the opening above and behind. Waves of tiredness and faint nausea shimmered through me as I hauled myself up, but by now I was expecting it and the neurachem locked it down.

The hollow beyond was empty. Not even dust.

“Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” I agreed, dropping back. “But how many human beings this side of the next millennium are going to get this chance? You need ten hours, right, Sun?”

“At the most.”

“And you reckon you can build us a decent map on that thing?” I gestured at the Nuhanovic set.

“Very probably. This is the best survey software money can buy.” She bowed briefly in Hand’s direction. “Nuhanovic smart systems. They don’t build it better than this.”

I looked over to Ameli Vongsavath.

“And the Nagini’s weapon systems are powered up solid.”

The pilot nodded. “Parameters I gave, she could stand off a full tactical assault with no help from us.”

“Well, then I’d say we’ve got a day-pass to the Coral Castle.” I glanced at Sutjiadi. “Those of us that want it, that is.”

Looking around, I saw the idea taking hold. Deprez was already there, face and stance betraying his curiosity, but it was slowly filling up the rest of them too. Everywhere, heads were tilted back to take in the alien architecture, features ironed soft by wonder. Even Sutjiadi couldn’t hold it off completely. The grim watchfulness he’d maintained since we breached the upper levels of the docking chamber’s layered atmosphere field was melting into something less clamped down. The fear of the unknown was ebbing, cancelled out by something stronger and older.

Monkey curiosity. The trait I’d disparaged to Wardani when we arrived on the beach at Sauberville. The scampering, chittering jungle intelligence that would cheerfully scale the brooding figures of ancient stone idols and poke fingers into the staring eyesockets just to see. The bright obsidian desire to know. The thing that’s dragged us out here, all the way from the grasslands of central Africa. The thing that one day’ll probably put us somewhere so far out that we’ll get there ahead of the sunlight from those central African days.

Hand stepped into the centre, poised in executive mode.

“Let’s achieve some sense of priority here,” he said carefully. “I sympathise with any wish you may all have to see some of this vessel—I would like to see it myself—but our major concern is to find a safe transmission base for the buoy. That we must do before anything else, and I suggest we do it as a single unit.” He turned to Sutjiadi. “After that, we can detail exploratory parties. Captain?”

Sutjiadi nodded, but it was an uncharacteristically vague motion. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t really paying attention at human frequencies any more.

If there’d been any lingering doubts about the Martian vessel’s hulk status, a couple of hours in the frozen bubbles of its architecture was enough to cancel them out. We walked for over a kilometre, winding back and forth through the apparently random connections between chambers. In places the openings were more or less at floor level, but elsewhere they were cut high enough that Wardani or Sun had to power up the grav harnesses they were wearing and float up to peer through. Jiang and Deprez took point together, splitting and edging up to the entrance to each new chamber with quiet, symmetrical lethality.

We found nothing recognisably living.

The machines we came across ignored us, and no one seemed inclined to get close enough to elicit more of a reaction.

Increasingly, as we moved deeper into the body of the ship, we began to find structures that might by a stretch of the imagination be called corridors—long, bulbous spaces with egg-shaped entrances let in at either end. It looked like the same construction technique as the standard bubble chamber, modified to suit.

“You know what this whole thing is,” I told Wardani, while we waited for Sun to scout out another overhead opening. “It’s like aerogel. Like they built a basic framework and then just,”—I shook my head. The concept stubbornly resisted chiselling out into words—“I don’t know, just blew up a few cubic kilometres of heavy-duty aerogel base all over it, and then waited for it to harden.”

Wardani smiled wanly. “Yeah, maybe. Something like that. That would put their plasticity science a little ahead of ours, wouldn’t it. To be able to map and model foam data on this scale.”

“Maybe not.” I groped at the opening shape of the idea, feeling at its origami edges. “Out here specific structure wouldn’t matter. Whatever came out would do. And then you just fill the space with whatever you need. Drivers, environmental systems, you know, weapons…”

“Weapons?” She looked at me with something unreadable in her face. “Does this have to be a warship?”

“No, it was an example. But—”

“Something in here,” said Sun over the comset. “Some kind of tree or—”

What happened next was hard to explain.

I heard the sound coming.

I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I’d only previously run into in dreams.

“Songspire,” said Wardani.

I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I’d just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.

Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.

Sutjiadi’s normally immobile features creased.

“What is that?”

“Songspire,” I said, spinning matter-of-factness around my own creeping unease. “Kind of Martian houseplant.”

I’d seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man’s objet d’art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorised into a box by human science.

“How is it attached?” Wardani wanted to know.

“Growing out of the wall,” Sun’s voice came back dented with a by now familiar wonder. “Like some kind of coral…”

Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.

“I’m coming up.”

“Just a moment, Mistress Wardani,” Hand glided in to crowd her. “Sun, is there a way through up there?”

“No. Whole bubble’s closed.”

“Then come back down.” He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. “We do not have time for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.”

A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue’s face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again—downwhining machine disappointment—and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec towards the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.

I sighed.

“Nice going, Hand. She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a native guide in this.” I gestured around. “Place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?”

“No,” he said evenly. “But they taught me not to waste time.”

“Right.” I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. “Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man’s an asshole, what are you going to do?”

“Fucking merchant.”

“Well, yeah. That too. But he is the reason we’re here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.”

“What are you, a fucking economics philosopher now?”

“I’m.” I stopped. “Listen.”

“No, I’m through with—”

“No, listen.” I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. “There. Hear that?”

“I don’t hear…” Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera’s Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.

Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.

Two chambers further on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten metres off, huddled down the corridor.

The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.

“The air,” said Wardani quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny eyed. “There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.”

I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.

“How old do you reckon they are?”

“Who knows?” She got to her feet again. “If this was a planetary grav field, I’d say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn’t.” She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. “Look at the branching pattern. They don’t. They don’t usually grow like this. Not this twisted.”

I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I’d seen on the plinthed specimen back on earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—

The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.

“Where the hell have you. Oh.”

The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound it made.

“I’m just looking at these, if that’s OK, Hand.”

“Mistress Wardani—”

I shot the exec a warning glance.

Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. “Are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. Ordinarily, no, but—”

The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.

“They’re growing towards each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.”

“That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self relating system.” Sun walked round the cluster of spires, scanning with title emissions tracer on her arm. “Though, hmm.”

“You won’t find any radiation,” said Wardani, almost dreamily. “They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn’t be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.”

“But they don’t.” Hand made it sound as if he was thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. “Why is that, Mistress Wardani?”

“If I knew that, I’d be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don’t even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.”

“They grow, don’t they?”

I saw Wardani sneer. “So do crystals. That doesn’t make them alive.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. “But this looks to me like an infestation.”

“Or art,” murmured Deprez. “How would we know?”

Vongsavath shook her head. “This is a ship, Luc. You don’t put your corridor art where you’ll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They’re all over the place.”

“And if you can fly through?”

“They’d still get in the way.”

“Collision Art,” suggested Schneider with a smirk.

“Alright, that’s enough.” Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. “We do not have—”

“Time for this,” droned Wardani. “We must find a safe transmission base.”

Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez’s direction. I suspected that Hand’s control was crumbling and I wasn’t keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he snapped.

“Sun,” the Mandrake exec’s voice came out even enough. “Check the upper openings.”

The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her bootsoles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upwards. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.

“No way through here,” she called back down from the first opening.

I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand’s back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.

Listen.

Wardani moved closer, then shook her head.

Hissing. “That’s not poss—”

But it was.

The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.

Waking up.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We found Hand’s safe transmission base four songspire clusters about another hour later. By then we’d started to hook back towards the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun’s Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn’t like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours’ wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the programme was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.

Climbing out of a massive spiralling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-metre broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.

I broke the reflex.

“Is that a forcefield?” I asked Sun, panting.

“No, it’s solid.” She frowned over the forearm display. “Transparent alloy, about a metre thick. That’s very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there’s your gate.”

It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of greyish-blue light creeping across the darkness.

“This has got to be the docking control turret,” Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. “What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don’t make it any bet—”

Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something further ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the centre of the platform, I saw the Martians.

“You’d better call the others up,” I said distantly.

They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we’d passed in the bubble chambers.

I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.

Of course, I’d seen them before. Who hasn’t. You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upwards. The Martians. They’ve replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced earthbound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends. Impossible to overestimate, wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls, the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.

The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji’s warehouse:

Bradbury, 2089 pre-colonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian data systems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child’s bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed—what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were they when the Martians were crossing interstellar space.

Of course—a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani’s mouth—established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the grey matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.

But it didn’t work.

For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence and the recently established university departments of xenology frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body…

Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different to the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.

Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep—angels, demons, Icarus and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right—that humanity clung to it.

Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just go to, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well, it says so here.

Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn’t knowledge; the Guild wasn’t that confident of its translation back then, and you don’t launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.

It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilisation. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand’s much vaunted economic liberalisation, was what drove the diaspora.

Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by. We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.

Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and colouring, drawn from the few visual records we’ve managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colourful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile, and besides do people really want to bother themselves with all that…

“Knowledge tossed away,” she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. “Wilful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.”

At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained—here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them; the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilisation’s neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn’t what they call ancient around here.

This Martian was dead.

A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing’s skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.

Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.

“Don’t touch it,” snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.

“Sorry.”

“You will be, if the skin crumbles. There’s an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it’s strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapour.” As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. “When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.”

“Right.” I moved back a couple of steps. “Thanks for the advance warning.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t expect to find them here.”

“Ships have crews.”

“Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We’ve still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.”

“Shit like that in their systems, I’m not surprised.” Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. “So what happened to this stuff if they just didn’t eat for a while?”

Wardani shot him an irritated glance. “We don’t know. Presumably the process would start up.”

“That must have hurt,” I said.

“Yes, I imagine it would.” She didn’t really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.

Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. “How come they’d end up with something like that? I mean,” he guffawed, “it’s not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you’re hungry.”

I looked up at the desiccated, spreadeagled corpse again, feeling a fresh surge of the respect I’d first felt when I realised the Martians had died at their posts. Something indefinable happened in my head, something that my Envoy senses recognised as the intuitive shimmer at the edge of understanding.

“No, it’s selective,” I realised as I spoke. “It would have driven them. It would have made them the toughest motherfuckers in the sky.”

I thought I spotted a faint smile crossing Tanya Wardani’s face. “You should publish, Kovacs. That kind of intellectual insight.”

Schneider smirked.

“In fact,” the archaeologue said, falling into gentle lecture mode while she stared at the mummified Martian. “The current evolutionary argument for this trait is that it helped keep crowded roosts hygienic. Vasvik and Lai, couple of years ago. Before that, most of the Guild agreed it would deter skin-feeding parasites and infection. Vasvik and Lai wouldn’t actually dispute that, they’re just jockeying for pole position. And, of course, there is the overarching toughest motherfuckers in the sky hypothesis, which a number of Guild Masters have elaborated, though none quite as elegantly as you, Kovacs.”

I tipped her a bow.

“Do you think we can get her down?” Wardani wondered aloud, standing back to get a better look at the cables the webbing frame depended from.

“Her?”

“Yeah. It’s a roost guardian. See the spur on the wing. That bone ridge on back of the skull. Warrior caste. They were all female as far as we know.” The archaeologue looked up at the cabling again. “Think we can get this thing working?”

“Don’t see why not.” I raised my voice to carry across the platform “Jiang. You see anything like a winch on that side?”

Jiang looked upward, then shook his head.

“What about you, Luc?”

“Mistress Wardani!”

“Speaking of motherfuckers,” muttered Schneider. Matthias Hand was striding across to join the congregation beneath the spreadeagled corpse.

“Mistress Wardani, I hope you weren’t thinking of doing anything other than look at this specimen.”

“Actually,” the archaeologue told him, “We’re looking for a way to winch it down. Got a problem with that?”

“Yes, Mistress Wardani, I have. This ship, and everything it contains, is the property of the Mandrake Corporation.”

“Not until the buoy sings, it isn’t. That’s what you told us to get us in here, anyway.”

Hand smiled thinly. “Don’t make an issue of this, Mistress Wardani. You’ve been well enough paid.”

“Oh, paid. I’ve been paid.” Wardani stared at him. “Fuck you, Hand.”

She stormed away across the platform and stood at its edge, looking out.

I stared at the Mandrake exec. “Hand, what’s the matter with you? I thought I told you to ease up on her. The architecture getting to you or something?”

I left him with the corpse and walked across to where Wardani stood with her arms wrapped tightly around her body and her head lowered.

“Not planning to jump, are you?”

She snorted. “That piece of shit. He’d have a fucking corporate holofront on the gates of paradise if he ever found them.”

“Don’t know about that. He’s a pretty serious believer.”

“Yeah? Funny how it doesn’t get in the way of his commercial life.”

“Yeah, well. Organised religion, you know.”

She snorted again, but there was a laugh in it this time and her posture unlocked a little.

“I don’t know why I got so bent out of shape. I don’t have the tools here to deal with organic remnants anyway. Let it stay up there. Who gives a shit?”

I smiled and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“You do,” I said gently.

The dome over our heads was as transparent to radio signals as it was to the visual spectrum. Sun ran a series of basic checks with the equipment she had, then we all trooped back to the Nagini and brought the damaged buoy up to the platform, together with three cases of tools Sun deemed likely to be useful. We stopped in every chamber, flagging the route with amber limpet cherries along the way, and painting the floor with illuminum paint, much to Tanya Wardani’s chagrin.

“It’ll wash off,” Sun Liping told her in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other.

Even with a couple of grav harnesses to ease the lifting, getting the buoy to its designated resting place was a long, hard job, made infuriating by the bubbling chaos of the ship’s architecture. By the time we’d assembled everything on the platform—off to one side, at a discreet distance from the mummified original occupants—I was shattered. The radiation damage raging through my cells was getting beyond the power of the drugs to do anything about it.

I found a section of the central structure that wasn’t directly below a corpse and propped myself against it, looking out at the starscape while my abused body did its best to stabilise my pulse and damp down the sickness in the pit of my guts. Out among the stars, the open gate winked at me as it rose over the platform’s horizon. Further right, the nearest Martian tugged at an upper corner of my vision. I looked up and across to where the corpse peered down at me through shrouded eyes. I raised one finger to my temple in salute.

“Yeah. Be with you shortly.”

“I’m sorry?”

I rolled my head sideways and saw Luc Deprez standing a couple of metres away. In his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, he looked almost comfortable.

“Nothing. Communing.”

“I see.” From the expression on his face, it was pretty clear he didn’t. “I was wondering. Want to go for a look around?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe later. Don’t let me stop you, though.”

He frowned, but he left me alone. I saw him leaving with Ameli Vongsavath in tow. Elsewhere on the platform, the rest of the party were gathered in small knots, talking in voices that didn’t carry much. I thought I could hear the songspire cluster making faint counterpoint, but I wasn’t up to focusing the neurachem. I felt an immense weariness come sliding down out of the starfield and the platform seemed to tilt away beneath me. I closed my eyes and drifted off into something that wasn’t exactly sleep, but came equipped with all the disadvantages.

Kovacs…

Fucking Semetaire.

Do you miss your fragmented Limon Highlander?

Don’t—

Do you wish she were here in one piece, eh? Or would you like the pieces of her squirming over you unattached?

My face twitched where her foot had smashed my lip as the nanobe cable hurled it past me.

Is there an appeal, hmmm? A segmented houri at your command. A hand here, a hand there. Curved handfuls of flesh. Consumer cut, so to speak. Soft, graspable flesh, Kovacs. Malleable. You could fill your hands with it. Mould it to you.

Semetaire, you’re pushing me—

And unattached to any inconvenient independent will. Throw away the parts you have no use for. The parts that excrete, the parts that think beyond sensual use. The afterlife has many pleasures—

Leave me the fuck alone, Semetaire.

Why should I do that? Alone is cold, a gulf of coldness deeper than you looked upon from the hull of the Mivtsemdi. Why should I abandon you to that when you have been such a friend to me. Sent me so many souls.

Alright. That’s it, motherfucker—

I snapped awake, sweating. Tanya Wardani was crouched a metre away, peering at me. Behind her, the Martian hung in mid-glide, staring blindly down like one of the angels in the Andric cathedral at Newpest.

“You OK, Kovacs?”

I pressed fingers against my eyes and winced at the ache the pressure caused.

“Not bad for a dead man, I suppose. You’re not off exploring?”

“I feel like shit. Maybe later.”

I propped myself up a little straighter. Across the platform, Sun worked steadily on the buoy’s exposed circuit plates. Jiang and Sutjiadi stood nearby, talking in low tones. I coughed. “Limited amount of later round here. I doubt it’ll take Sun the whole ten hours. Where’s Schneider?”

“Went off with Hand. How come you’re not doing the Coral Castle tour yourself?”

I smiled. “You’ve never seen the Coral Castle in your life, Tanya. What are you talking about?”

She seated herself beside me, facing the starscape.

“Trying out my Harlan’s World argot. Got a problem with that?”

“Fucking tourists.”

She laughed. I sat and enjoyed the sound until it died, and then we sat for a while in a companionable quiet broken only by the sound of Sun’s circuit soldering.

“Nice sky,” she said finally.

“Yeah. Answer me an archaeological question?”

“If you like.”

“Where did they go?”

“The Martians?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s a big cosmos. Who—”

“No, these Martians. The crew of this thing. Why leave something this big floating out here abandoned? It must have cost a planetary budget to build, even for them. It’s functional, as near as we can tell. Heated, maintained atmosphere, working docking system. Why didn’t they take it with them?”

“Who knows? Maybe they left in a hurry.”

“Oh, come—”

“No, I mean it. They pulled out of this whole region of space, or were wiped out or wiped each other out. They left a lot of stuff. Whole cities of it.”

“Yeah. Tanya, you can’t take a city away with you. Obviously you leave it. But this is a fucking starship. What could make them leave something like that behind?”

“They left the orbitals around Harlan’s World.”

“Those are automated.”

“Well? So is this, to the extent of the maintenance systems.”

“Yes, but it was built for use by a crew. You don’t have to be an archaeologue to see that.”

“Kovacs, why don’t you go down to the Nagini and get some rest. Neither of us is up to exploring this place, and you’re giving me a headache.”

“I think you’ll find that’s the radiation.”

“No, I—”

Against my chest, my discarded induction mike burred. I blinked down at it for a moment, then picked it up and fitted it.

“…just ly—…—ere,” said Vongsavath’s voice, excited and laced heavily with static breakup. “What-ver… was… don’t thin—… died of starv…”

“Vongsavath, this is Kovacs. Back up a minute. Slow down and start again.”

“I said,” the pilot enunciated with heavy emphasis. “Th—…’ve found… ther body. A hu… body. Part… gang…—eked up at the dock…—ation. An—… looks li—… thing kill—… him.”

“Alright, we’re on our way.” I struggled to my feet, forcing myself to speak at a pace Vongsavath might have a chance of understanding through the interference. “Repeat. We are on our way. Stay put, back to back and don’t move. And shoot any fucking thing you see.”

“What is it?” asked Wardani.

“Trouble.”

I looked around the platform and suddenly Sutjiadi’s words came rolling back over me.

We shouldn’t be out here at all.

Over my head, the Martian gazed blankly down at us. As far removed as any angel, and as much help.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

He was lying in one of the bulbous tunnels, about a kilometre deeper into the body of the vessel, suited up and still largely intact. In the soft blue light from the walls, the features behind the faceplate were clearly shrunken onto the bones of the skull, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have decomposed appreciably.

I knelt beside the corpse and peered at the sealed-in face.

“Doesn’t look too bad, considering.”

“Sterile air supply,” said Deprez. He had his Sunjet cocked on his hip, and his eyes flickered constantly into the swollen roof-space overhead. Ten metres further on and looking slightly less comfortable with her weapon, Ameli Vongsavath prowled back and forth by the opening where the tunnel linked to the next bubble chamber. “And antibacterials, if it’s a halfway decent suit. Interesting. The tank’s still a third full. Whatever he died of, it wasn’t suffocation.”

“Any damage to the suit?”

“If there is, I cannot find it.”

I sat back on my heels. “Doesn’t make any sense. This air’s breathable. Why suit up?”

Deprez shrugged. “Why die in your suit on the outside of an open atmosphere lock? None of it makes any sense. I’m not trying any more.”

“Movement,” snapped Vongsavath.

I cleared the right-hand interface gun and joined her at the opening. The lower lip rose a little over a metre from the floor and curved upward like a wide smile before narrowing gradually up towards the roof on either side and finally closing in a tightly rounded apex. There were two metres of clear cover on each side and space to crouch below the lip. It was a sniper’s dream.

Deprez folded into the cover on the left, Sunjet stowed upright at his side. I crouched beside Vongsavath.

“Sounded like something falling,” murmured the pilot. “Not this chamber, maybe the next.”

“Alright.” I felt the neurachem sliding coldly along my limbs, charging my heart. Good to know that, under the bone-deep weariness of the radiation poisoning, the systems were still online. And after grasping so long at shadows, fighting faceless nanobe colonies, the ghosts of the departed, human and not, the promise of solid combat was almost a pleasure.

Scratch almost. I could feel pleasure tickling up the walls of my stomach at the thought of killing something.

Deprez raised one hand from the projection ramp of his Sunjet.

Listen.

This time I heard it—a stealthy scuffing sound across the chamber. I drew the other interface gun and settled into the cover of the raised lip. The Envoy conditioning squeezed the last of the tension out of my muscles and stowed it in coiled reflexes beneath a surface calm.

Something pale moved in a space on the other side of the next chamber. I breathed in and sighted on it.

Here we go.

“You there, Ameli?”

Schneider’s voice.

I heard Vongsavath’s breath hiss out about the same time as mine. She climbed to her feet.

“Schneider? What are you doing? I nearly shot you.”

“Well, that’s fucking friendly.” Schneider appeared clearly in the opening and swung his leg over. His Sunjet was slung carelessly across one shoulder. “We come rushing to the rescue, and you blow us away for our trouble.”

“Is it another archaeologue?” asked Hand, following Schneider through into the chamber. Incongruous in his right fist was a hand blaster. It was the first time, I realised, that I’d seen the executive armed since I’d known him. It didn’t look right on him. It marred his ninetieth-floor boardroom aura. It was inappropriate, a cracked front, jarring the way genuine battle coverage would in a Lapinee recruiting number. Hand was not a man who wielded weapons himself. Or at least not weapons as straightforward and grubby as a particle blaster.

Plus he’s got a stunner tucked away in his pocket.

Recently powered up to combat readiness, the Envoy conditioning twinged uneasily.

“Come and have a look,” I suggested, masking my disquiet.

The two new arrivals crossed the open ground to us with a blasé lack of caution that screamed at my combat nerves. Hand leaned his hands on the lip of the tunnel entrance and stared at the corpse. His features, I suddenly saw, were ashen with the radiation sickness. His stance looked braced, as if he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand up. There was a tic at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been there when we touched down in the docking bay. Next to him, Schneider looked positively glowing with health.

I crushed out the flicker of sympathy. Welcome to the fucking club, Hand. Welcome to ground level on Sanction IV.

“He’s suited up,” Hand said.

“Well spotted.”

“How did he die?”

“We don’t know.” I felt another wave of weariness wash through me. “And to be honest I’m not in the mood for an autopsy. Let’s just get this buoy fixed, and get the fuck out of here.”

Hand gave me a strange look. “We’ll need to take him back.”

“Well, you can help me do it, then.” I walked back to the suited corpse and picked up one leg. “Grab a foot.”

“You’re going to drag him?”

“We, Hand. We are going to drag him. I don’t think he’ll mind.”

It took the best part of an hour to get the corpse back through the tortuous pipes and swooping chambers of the Martian vessel and aboard the Nagini. Most of that was taken up trying to locate the limpet cherries and illuminum arrows of our original mapping, but the radiation sickness took its toll along the way. At different points in the journey, Hand and I were taken with minor bouts of vomiting and had to give hauling the body over to Schneider and Deprez. Time emptying out for the final victims of Sauberville. I thought even Deprez, in his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, was starting to look ill as we fumbled the bulky suited burden through the last opening before the docking station. Now that I focused in the bluish light, Vongsavath too was starting to exhibit the same grey pallor and bruised eyes.

Do you see? whispered something that might have been Semetaire.

There seemed to be a huge, sickly sense of something waiting in the swollen heights of the ship’s architecture, hovering on parchment-thin wings, and watching.

When we were done, I stood staring into the antiseptic violet glow of the corpse locker after the others had left. The tumbled, spacesuited figures within looked like a gaggle of overly padded null G crashball players, collapsed on top of each other when the field goes down and the house lights come up at the end of the match. The pouches containing the remains of Cruickshank, Hansen and Dhasanapongsakul were almost hidden from view.

Dying—

Not dying yet…

The Envoy conditioning, worrying at something not over, not resolved.

The Ground is for Dead People. I saw Schneider’s illuminum tattoo like a beacon floating behind my eyes. His face, twisted unrecognisable with the pain of his injuries.

Dead people?

“Kovacs?” It was Deprez, standing in the hatch behind me. “Hand wants us all back on the platform. We’re taking food. You coming?”

“I’ll catch you up.”

He nodded and dropped back to the floor outside. I heard voices and tried to blank them out.

Dying?

The Ground is

Motes of light circling like a datacoil display

The gate…

The gate, seen through the viewports of the Nagini’s cockpit…

The cockpit…

I shook my head irritably. Envoy intuition is an unreliable system at the best of times, and sinking fast from the weight of radiation poisoning isn’t a great state to be in when you try to deploy it.

Not dying yet.

I gave up on trying to see the pattern and let the vagueness wash over me, seeing where it would take me.

The violet light of the corpse locker, beckoning.

The discarded sleeves within.

Semetaire.

By the time I got back to the platform, dinner was nearly over. Beneath the mummified hovering of the two Martians, the rest of the company were sitting around the stripped-down buoy on inflatable loungers, picking without much enthusiasm at the remains of tab-pull field ration pans. I couldn’t really blame them—the way I was feeling, just the smell of the stuff made my throat close up. I choked a little on it, then hastily raised my hands as the sound brought a ripple of weapon-grabbing from the diners.

“Hey, it’s me.”

Grumbling and guns discarded again. I made my way into the circle, looking for a seat. It was a lounger each, give or take. Jiang Jianping and Schneider had both seated themselves on the floor, Jiang cross-legged in a clear deck space, Schneider sprawled in front of Tanya Wardani’s lounger with a proprietorial air that made my mouth twitch. I waved an offered pan away and seated myself on the edge of Vongsavath’s lounger, wishing I felt a bit more up to this.

“What kept you?” asked Deprez.

“Been thinking.”

Schneider laughed. “Man, that shit’s bad for you. Don’t do it. Here.” He rolled a can of amphetamine cola across the deck towards me. I stopped it with one boot. “Remember what you told me back in the hospital? Don’t fucking think, soldier—didn’t you read your terms of enlistment?”

It raised a couple of half-hearted smiles. I nodded.

“When’s he get here, Jan?”

“Huh?”

“I said,” I kicked the can back at him. His hand jumped out and snugged it, very fast. “When’s he get here?”

What conversation there was dropped out of the air like Konrad Harlan’s one and only attempted gunship raid on Millsport. Particle-blasted down by the rattle of the can and the sudden silence that found it in Schneider’s closed fist.

His right fist. His empty left was a little too slow, whipping out for a weapon fractions of a second after I had the Kalashnikov levelled on him. He saw, and froze up.

“Don’t.” I told him.

At my side, I felt Vongsavath, still moving for the stunner in her pocket. I laid my free hand on her arm and shook my head slightly. Put some Envoy persuasion into my voice.

“No need, Ameli.”

Her arm dropped back to her lap. Peripheral scan told me everyone else was sitting this one out so far. Even Wardani. I eased slightly.

“When does he get here, Jan?”

“Kovacs, I don’t know what the fuck—”

“Yeah, you do. When’s he get here? Or don’t you want both hands any more?”

“Who?”

“Carrera. When’s he fucking get here, Jan. Last chance.”

“I don’t—” Schneider’s voice shrilled to an abrupt scream as the interface gun blew a hole through his hand and turned the can he was still holding into shredded metal. Blood and amphetamine cola splashed the air, curiously alike in colour. Flecks of it spotted Tanya Wardani’s face and she flinched violently.

It’s not a popularity contest.

“What’s the matter, Jan,” I asked gently. “That sleeve Carrera gave you not so hot on endorphin response?”

Wardani was on her feet, face unwiped. “Kovacs, he’s—”

“Don’t tell me it’s the same sleeve, Tanya. You fucked him, now and two years ago. You know.”

She shook her head numbly. “The tattoo…” she whispered.

“The tattoo is new. Shiny new, even for illuminum. He got it redone, along with some basic cosmetic surgery as part of the package. Isn’t that right, Jan?”

The only thing that came out of Schneider was an agonised groaning. He held his shattered hand at arm’s length, staring at it in disbelief. Blood dripped on the deck.

All I felt was tired.

“I figure you sold out to Carrera rather than go into virtual interrogation,” I said, still scanning peripherally for reactions among the crowd. “Don’t blame you really. And if they offered you a fresh combat sleeve, full rad/chem resist specs and custom trimmed, well there aren’t many deals like that kicking about Sanction IV these days. And no telling how much dirty bombing both sides are going to do from now on in. Yeah, I’d have taken a deal like that.”

“Do you have any evidence of this?” asked Hand.

“Apart from the fact he’s the only one of us still not going grey, you mean? Look at him, Hand. He’s held up better than the Maori sleeves, and they’re built for this shit.”

“I would not call that proof,” said Deprez thoughtfully. “Though it is odd.”

“He’s fucking lying,” gritted Schneider through his teeth. “If anyone’s running double for Carrera, it’s Kovacs. For Samedi’s sake, he’s a Wedge lieutenant.”

“Don’t push your luck, Jan.”

Schneider glared back at me, keening his pain. Across the platform, I thought I heard the songspires pick it up.

“Get me a fucking mediwrap,” he pleaded. “Someone.”

Sun reached for her pack. I shook my head.

“No. First he tells us how long we’ve got before Carrera comes through the gate. We need to be ready.”

Deprez shrugged. “Knowing this, are we not already ready?”

“Not for the Wedge.”

Wardani crossed wordlessly to where Sun stood and snatched the medipack from its fibregrip holster on the other woman’s chest. “Give me that. If you uniformed fucks won’t do it, I will.”

She knelt at Schneider’s side and opened the pack, spilling the entire contents across the floor as she searched for the wraps.

“The green tabbed envelopes,” said Sun helplessly. “There.”

“Thank you,” Wardani gritted. She spared me a single glance. “What are you going to do now, Kovacs? Cripple me too?”

“He would have sold us all out, Tanya. He has already.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know he somehow managed to survive two weeks aboard a restricted access hospital without any legitimate documentation. I know he managed to get into the officers’ wards without a pass.”

Her face contorted. “Fuck you, Kovacs. When we were digging at Dangrek, he bluffed us a nine-week municipal power grant from the Sauberville authorities. With no fucking documentation.”

Hand cleared his throat.

“I would have thought—”

And the ship lit up around us.

It sheeted through the space under the dome, fragments of suddenly erupting light swelling to solid blocks of translucent colour spun around the central structure. Sparkling discharge spat through the air between the colours, lines of power shaken out like storm-torn sails ripped loose of rigging. Trailing fountains of the stuff poured down from the upper levels of expanding rotating light, splashing off the deck and awakening a deeper glow within the translucent surface where they hit. Above, the stars blotted out. At the centre, the mummified corpses of the Martians disappeared, shrouded in the evolving gale of radiance. There was a sound to it all, but less heard than felt through my light-soaked skin, a building thrum and quiver in the air that felt like the adrenalin rush at the start of combat.

Vongsavath touched my arm.

“Look outside,” she said urgently. For all she was at my side, it felt as if she was yelling through a howling wind. “Look at the gate!”

I tipped my head back and threw the neurachem into seeing through the swirling currents of light to the crystal roof. At first, I couldn’t understand what Vongsavath was talking about. I couldn’t find the gate, and guessed it had to be somewhere on the other side of the ship, completing another orbit. Then I zeroed in on a vague blotch of grey, too dim to be…

And then I understood.

The storm of light and power raging around us was not confined to the air under the dome. Space around the Martian vessel was also seething to life. The stars had faded to dimly-seen gleamings through a curtain of something that stood hazed and shivering, kilometres beyond the orbit of the gate.

“It’s a screen,” said Vongsavath with certainty. “We’re under attack.”

Over our heads, the storm was settling. Motes of shadow swam in the light now, here scattering to corners like shoals of startled silverfry seen in negative, elsewhere exploding in slow tumbling motion to take up station on a hundred different levels around the re-emerging corpses of the two Martians. Sequenced splinters of flashing colour flickered at the corners of attenuated fields in shades of pearl and grey. The overall thrumming subsided and the ship began to talk to itself in more denned syllables. Fluting notes echoed across the platform, interspersed with organ deep pulses of sound.

“This is—” My mind spun back to the narrow trawler cabin, the softly awake spiral of the datacoil, the motes of data swept to the top corner. “This is a datasystem?”

“Well spotted.” Tanya Wardani stalked under the trailing skirts of radiance and pointed up to the pattern of shadow and light gathered around the two corpses. There was a peculiar exultation on her face. “A little more extensive than your average desktop holo, isn’t it. I imagine those two have the primary con. Shame they’re not in any state to use it, but then I also imagine the ship is capable of looking after itself.”

“That depends on what’s coming,” said Vongsavath grimly. “Check out the upper screens. The grey background.”

I followed her arm. High up, near the curve of the dome a pearl surface ten metres across displayed a milky version of the starscape now dimmed by the shield outside.

Something moved there, shark-slim and angular against the stars.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Deprez.

“Can’t you guess?” Wardani was almost shivering with the strength of whatever was slopping around inside her. She stood centre stage to us all. “Look up. Listen to the ship. She’s telling you what it is.”

The Martian datasystem was still talking, in no language anyone was equipped to understand, but with an urgency that required no translator. The splintered lights—technoglyph numerals jolted through me, almost as knowledge; it’s a countdown—flashed over like digit counters tracking a missile. Querulous shrieks fluted up and down an unhuman scale.

“Incoming,” said Vongsavath, hypnotised. “We’re getting ready to engage with something out there. Automated battle systems.”

The Nagini—

I whipped around.

“Schneider,” I bellowed.

But Schneider was gone.

“Deprez,” I yelled it back over my shoulder, already on my way across the platform. “Jiang. He’s going for the Nagini.”

The ninja was with me by the time I reached the downward spiral pipe, Deprez a couple of steps behind. Both men hefted Sunjets, stocks folded back for easy handling. At the bottom of the pipe I thought I heard the clatter of someone falling, and a shriek of pain. I felt a brief snarl of wolf go through me.

Prey!

We ran, slithering and stumbling on the steep downward incline until we hit bottom and the empty, cherry-flashed expanse of the first chamber. There was blood smeared on the floor where Schneider had fallen. I knelt beside it and felt my lips draw back from my teeth. I got up and looked at my two companions.

“He won’t be moving that fast. Don’t kill him if you can avoid it. We still need to know about Carrera.”

“Kovacs!!”

It was Hand’s voice from up the pipe, bawling with repressed fury. Deprez dropped me a taut grin. I shook my head and sprinted for the exit to the next chamber.

Hunt!

It isn’t easy running when every cell in your body is trying to shut down and die, but the wolf gene splice and whatever else the Wedge biotechs had thrown into the cocktail rose through the midst of the nausea and snarled down the weariness. The Envoy conditioning rode it upward.

Check functionality.

Thanks, Virginia.

Around us the ship quivered and shook to wakefulness. We ran through corridors that pulsed with sequenced rings of the purple light I’d seen splash off the edge of the gate when it opened. In one chamber, one of the spine-backed machines moved to intercept us, facings awake with technoglyph display and cluttering softly. I fetched up short, smart guns leaping to my hands, Deprez and Jiang flanking me. The impasse held for a long moment and then the machine slouched aside, muttering.

We exchanged glances. Beyond the tortured panting in my chest and the thudding in my temples, I found my mouth had bent itself into a smile.

“Come on.”

A dozen chambers and corridors further on, Schneider proved smarter than I’d expected. As Jiang and I burst into the open of a bubble, Sunjet fire spat and crackled from the far exit. I felt the sting of a near miss across my cheek and then the ninja at my elbow had floored me with a sideways flung arm. The next blast lashed where I had been. Jiang hit, rolled and joined me on the floor, face up, looking at a smouldering cuff with mild distaste.

Deprez slammed to a halt in the shadow of the entrance we’d come through, eye bent to the sighting system of his weapon. The barrage of covering fire he laid down boiled up and down the edges of Schneider’s ambush point and—I narrowed my eyes—did absolutely no damage to the material of the exitway. Jiang rolled under the strafing beam and got a narrower angle on the corridor beyond. He fired once, squinted into the glare and shook his head.

“Gone,” he said, climbing to his feet and offering me his hand.

“I, uh, I, thanks.” I got upright. “Thanks for the push.”

He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn’t even warm.

The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand’s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head cocked.

“…vacs, an… me—… ow.—peat, re… ow…”

“Say. Again?” Jiang, spacing his words.

“—saiiii…—port no…—”

Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.

What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert assault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.

Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini’s drives powering up. The covert assault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang passed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.

A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.

The Nagini’s ultravibe battery firing in a confined space.

I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view, painted bloody from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini’s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.

In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.

I made a sound and he looked up.

“Jiang?”

“This.” He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it’s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. “Is. Jiang. This is.” His fists knotted up. “Fuck.”

At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sniggered at us.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A Man Down is not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.

Most tight spec ops units like to sing that particular song; the Envoy Corps certainly did. But in the face of modern weaponry it’s getting harder and harder to sing it with a straight face. The ultravibe cannon had splashed Jiang Jianping evenly across ten square metres of docking bay deck and containing wall. None of the shredded and shattered tissue was any more solid than the stuff dripping off Luc Deprez. We walked back and forth through it for a while, scraping streaks in it with our boots, crouching to check tiny black clots of gore, but we found nothing.

After ten minutes, Deprez said it for us both.

“We are wasting our time, I think.”

“Yeah.” I lifted my head as something belled through the hull beneath our feet. “I think Vongsavath was right. We’re taking fire.”

“We go back?”

I remembered the induction rig and hooked it back on. Whoever had been yelling at us previously had given up; there was nothing on the channel but interference and a weird sobbing that might have been a carrier wave.

“This is Kovacs. Repeat, this is Kovacs. Status please.”

There was a long pause, then Sutjiadi’s voice crashed in the mike.

“—pened?—e…—aw… launch. Schnei—…—ay?”

“You’re breaking up, Markus. Status please. Are we under attack?”

There was a burst of distortion and what sounded like two or three voices trying to break in over Sutjiadi. I waited.

Finally, it was Tanya Wardani that came through, almost clear.

“…—ack here,…—acs…—afe. We…—ny,…—ger.—peat, no… da…—ger.”

The hull sang out again, like a struck temple gong. I looked dubiously down at the deck beneath my feet.

“Safe, did you say?”

“—essss…—o dang—…—ack immedi—…—afe.—peat, safe.”

I looked at Deprez and shrugged.

“Must be a new definition of the word.”

“Then we go back?”

I looked around, up at the stacked snake-body tiers of the docking bay, then back at his gore-painted face. Decided.

“Looks that way.” I shrugged again. “It’s Wardani’s turf. She hasn’t been wrong yet.”

Back on the platform, the Martian datasystems had settled to a brilliant constellation of purpose, while the humans stood beneath it all and gaped like worshippers getting an unexpected miracle.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

An array of screens and displays was stitched across the space around the central structure. Some were obvious analogues of any dreadnought’s battle systems, some defied comparison with anything I’d ever seen. Modern combat gives you a familiarity with compound datadisplay, an ability to glean the detail you need from a dozen different screens and readouts at speed and without conscious thought. Envoy Corps conditioning refines the skill even further, but in the massive radiant geometries of the Martian datasystem, I could feel myself floundering. Here and there, I spotted comprehensible input, images that I could relate back to what I knew was happening in the space around us, but even amongst these elements there were chunks missing where the screens gave out frequencies for unhuman eyes. Elsewhere, I couldn’t have told if the displays were complete, defective or totally fried.

Of the identifiable dataware, I spotted real-time visual telemetry, multi-coloured spectrograph sketches, trajectory mappers and battle dynamic analytical models, blast yield monitors and graphic magazine inventory, something that might have been grav gradient notation…

Centre screen in every second display, the attacker came on.

Skating down the curve of solar gravity at a rakish side-on angle, she was a slim, surgical-looking fusion of rods and elliptical curves that screamed warship. Hard on the heels of the thought, the proof dumped itself in my lap. On a screen that did not show real space, weaponry winked at us across the emptiness. Outside the dome, the shields our host had thrown up shimmered and fluoresced. The ship’s hull shuddered underfoot.

Meaning…

I felt my mind dilate as I got it.

“Don’t know what those are,” said Sun conversationally, as I arrived at her side. She seemed entranced by what she was watching. “Faster-than-light weaponry at any rate; she’s got to be nearly an astronomical unit out and we’re getting hit instantaneously every time. They don’t seem to do much damage, though.”

Vongsavath nodded. “Prelim systems scramblers, I’d guess. To fuck up the defence net. Maybe it’s some kind of grav disruptor, I’ve heard Mitoma are doing research into—” she broke off. “Look, here comes the next torpedo spread. Man, that’s a lot of hardware for a single launch.”

She was right. The space ahead of the attacking vessel had filled up with tiny golden traces so dense they could have been interference across the surface of the screen. Secondary displays yanked in detail and I saw how the swarm wove intricate mutual distract-and-protect evasion across millions of kilometres of space.

“These are FTL too, I think.” Sun shook her head. “The screens deal with it somehow, gives a representation. I think this has all already happened.”

The vessel I was standing on thrummed distantly, separate vibrations coming in from a dozen different angles. Outside, the shields shimmered again, and I got the vague sense of a shoal of something dark slipping out in the microsecond pulses of lowered energy.

“Counterlaunch,” said Vongsavath with something like satisfaction in her voice. “Same thing again.”

It was too fast to watch. Like trying to keep track of laser fire. On the screens, the new swarm flashed violet, threading through the approaching sleet of gold and detonating in blots of light that inked out as soon as they erupted. Every flash took specks of gold with it until the sky between the two vessels emptied out.

“Beautiful,” breathed Vongsavath. “Fucking beautiful.”

I woke up.

“Tanya, I heard the word ‘safe.’ ” I gestured up at the battle raging in rainbow representation over our heads. “You call this safe?”

The archaeologue said nothing. She was staring at Luc Deprez’s bloodied face and clothing.

“Relax, Kovacs.” Vongsavath pointed out one of the trajectory mappers. “It’s a cometary, see. Wardani read the same thing off the glyphs. Just going to swing past and trade damage, then on and out again.”

“A cometary?”

The pilot spread her hands. “Post-engagement graveyard orbit, automated battle systems. It’s a closed loop. Been going on for thousands of years, looks like.”

“What happened to Jan?” Wardani’s voice was stretched taut.

“He left without us.” A thought struck me. “He made the gate, right? You saw that?”

“Yeah, like a prick up a cunt,” said Vongsavath with unexpected venom. “Man could fly when he needed to. That was my fucking ship.”

“He was afraid,” said the archaeologue numbly.

Luc Deprez stared at her out of his blood-masked face. “We were all afraid, Mistress Wardani. It is not an excuse.”

“You fool.” She looked around at us. “All of you, you fucking. Fools. He wasn’t afraid of this. This fucking. Light show. He was afraid of him.”

The jerked nod was for me. Her eyes nailed mine.

“Where’s Jiang?” asked Sun suddenly. In the storm of alien technology around us, it had taken that long to notice the quiet ninja’s absence.

“Luc’s wearing most of him,” I said brutally. “The rest is lying back on the docking bay floor, courtesy of the Nagini’s ultravibe. I guess Jan must have been afraid of him as well, huh Tanya?”

Wardani’s gaze flinched aside.

“And his stack?” Nothing showed on Sutjiadi’s face, but I didn’t have to see it. The wolf splice custom was dying to give me the same sinus-aching ride back behind the bridge of my nose.

Pack member down.

I locked it down with Envoy displacement trickery. Shook my head.

“Ultravibe, Markus. He got the full blast.”

“Schneider—” Vongsavath broke off and had to start again. “I will—”

“Forget about Schneider,” I told her, “He’s dead.”

“Get in the queue.”

“No, he’s dead, Ameli. Really dead.” And as their eyes fixed on me, as Tanya Wardani looked back disbelieving. “I mined the Nagini’s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporised the minute he crashed the gate. Be lucky if there’s tinsel left.”

Over our heads, another wave of gold and violet missiles found each other in the machine dance and, flickering, wiped each other out.

“You blew up the Nagini?” It was hard to tell what Vongsavath was feeling, her voice was so choked. “You blew up my ship?”

“If the wreckage is so dispersed,” said Deprez thoughtfully, “Carrera may assume we were all killed in the explosion.”

“If Carrera is actually out there, that is.” Hand was looking at me the way he’d looked at the songspires. “If this isn’t all an Envoy ploy.”

“Oh, what’s the matter, Hand? Did Schneider try to cut some kind of deal with you when you went walkabout?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kovacs.”

Maybe he didn’t. I was abruptly too weary to care one way or the other.

“Carrera will come out here whatever happens.” I told them. “He’s thorough that way, and he’ll want to see the ship. He’ll have some way of standing down the nanobe system. But he won’t come yet. Not with little pieces of the Nagini littering the landscape, and emissions pick-up from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That’s going to back him up a little. It gives us some time.”

“Time to do what?” asked Sutjiadi.

The moment hung, and the Envoy crept out to play in it. Across splayed peripheral vision, I watched their faces and their stance, measured the possible allegiances, the possible betrayals. Locked down the emotions, peeled away the useful nuances they could give me, and dumped the remainder. Tied the wolf pack loyalty off, smothered whatever feeling still swam murkily in the space between Tanya Wardani and myself. Descended into the structured cold of Envoy mission time. Decided, and played my last card.

“Before I mined the Nagini, I stripped the spacesuits off the corpses we recovered, and stashed them in a recess in the first chamber outside the docking bay. Leaving aside the one with the blasted helmet, that’s four viable suits. They’re standard issue pull-ons. The airpacks will replenish from unpressured atmosphere environments like this one. Set the valves, they just suck it up. We leave in two waves. Someone from the first wave comes back with spare suits.”

“All this,” jeered Wardani, “with Carrera waiting on the other side of the gate to snap us up. I don’t think so.”

“I’m not suggesting we do it now,” I said quietly. “I’m just suggesting we go back and recover the suits while there’s time.”

“And when Carrera comes aboard? What do you suggest we do then?” The hatred welling up in Wardani’s face was one of the uglier things I’d seen recently. “Hide from him?”

“Yes.” I watched for reactions. “Exactly that. I suggest we hide. We move deeper into the ship and we wait. Whatever team Carrera deploys will have enough hardware to find traces of us in the docking bay and other places. But they won’t find anything that can’t be explained by our presence here before we all boarded the Nagini and blew ourselves to tinsel. The logical thing to do is assume that we all died. He’ll do a sweep, he’ll deploy a claim buoy, just the way we planned to, and then he’ll leave. He doesn’t have the personnel or the time to occupy a hulk over fifty klicks long.”

“No,” said Sutjiadi, “But he’ll leave a caretaker squad.”

I made an impatient gesture. “Then we’ll kill them.”

“And I have no doubt there’ll be a second detachment waiting on the other side of the gate,” Deprez said sombrely.

“So what? Jesus, Luc. You used to do this for a living, didn’t you?”

The assassin gave me an apologetic smile. “Yes, Takeshi. But we are all of us sick. And this is the Wedge you are talking about. As many as twenty men here, perhaps the same again on the other side of the gate.”

“I don’t think we really—” A sudden tremor jagged across the deck, enough to make Hand and Tanya Wardani stumble slightly. The rest of us rode it out with combat-conditioned ease, but still…

A moan in the fibres of the hull. The songspires across the platform seemed to gust sympathy at a level on the edge of hearing.

A vague unease coiled through me. Something was wrong.

I looked up at the screens and watched the attacking systems wiped out once again by the defence net. It all seemed to be taking place that little bit closer in this time.

“You did all decide, while I was gone, that we were safe here, right?”

“We did the maths, Kovacs.” Vongsavath nodded inclusively at Sun and Wardani. The systems officer inclined her head. Wardani just stared holes in me. “Looks like our friend out there hooks up with us about once every twelve hundred years. And given the dating on most of the ruins on Sanction IV, that means this engagement has been fought about a hundred times already with no result.”

But still the feeling. Envoy senses, cranked up to snapping, and feeling something not right, something so far wrong, in fact, I could almost smell the scorching.

…sobbing carrier wave…

…songspires…

…time slowing down…

I stared at the screens.

We need to get out of here.

“Kovacs?”

“We need to—”

I felt the words moth their way out between dry lips, as if someone else was using the sleeve against my will, and then they stopped.

From the attacker, came the real attack at last.

It burst from the leading surfaces of the vessel like something alive. An amorphous, turbulent dark-body blob of something spat out at us like congealed hatred. On secondary screens you could see how it tore up the fabric of space around it and left a wake of outraged reality behind. It didn’t take much to guess what we were looking at.

Hyperspace weaponry.

Experia fantasy stuff. And the sick wet dream of every naval commander in the Protectorate.

The ship, the Martian ship—and only now I grasped with instinctive Envoy-intuited knowledge that the other was not Martian, looked nothing like—pulsed in a way that sent nausea rolling through my guts and set every tooth in my head instantly on edge. I staggered and went down on one knee.

Something vomited into the space ahead of the attack. Something boiled and flexed and split wide open with a vaguely sensed detonation. I felt a recoil tremor go throbbing through the hull around me, a disquiet that went deeper than simple real-space vibration.

On the screen, the dark-body projectile shattered apart, flinging out oddly sticky-looking particles of itself. I saw the outside shield fluoresce, shudder and go out like a blown candle flame.

The ship screamed.

There was no other way to describe it. It was a rolling, modulating cry that seemed to emanate from the air around us. It was a sound so massive, it made the shriek of the Nagini’s ultravibe battery seem almost tolerable. But where the ultravibe blast had rammed and battered at my hearing, this sound sliced and passed through as effortlessly as a laser scalpel. I knew, even as I made the movement, that clapping hands over my ears would have no effect.

I did it anyway.

The scream rose, held and finally rolled away across the platform, replaced by a less agonising pastiche of fluting alert sounds from the datasystems and a splinter-thin fading echo from—

I whipped around.

—from the songspires.

This time there could be no doubt. Softly, like wind sawing over a worn stone edge, the songspires had collected the ship’s scream and were playing it back to each other in skewed cadences that could almost have been music.

It was the carrier wave.

Overhead, something seemed to whisper response. Looking up, I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the dome.

Outside, the shields came back on.

“Fuck,” said Hand, getting to his feet. “What was th—”

“Shut up.” I stared across at the place I thought I’d seen the shadow but the loss of the starscape background had drowned it in pearlish light. A little to the left, one of the Martian corpses gazed down at me from amidst the radiance of the datasystem. The sobbing of the songspires murmured on, tugging at something in the pit of my stomach.

And then, again, the gut-deep, sickening pulse and the thrum through the deck underfoot.

“We’re returning fire,” said Sun.

On screen, another dark-body mass, hawked out of some battery deep in the belly of the Martian vessel, spat at the closing attacker. This time the recoil went on longer.

“This is incredible,” said Hand. “Unbelievable.”

“Believe it,” I told him tonelessly. The sense of impending disaster had not gone with the decaying echo of the last attack. If anything, it was stronger. I tried to summon the Envoy intuition through layers of weariness and dizzying nausea.

“Incoming,” called Vongsavath. “Block your ears.”

This time, the alien ship’s missile got a lot closer before the Martian defence net caught and shredded it. The Shockwaves from the blast drove us all to the ground. It felt as if the whole ship had been twisted around us like a wrung out cloth. Sun threw up. The outside shield went down and stayed down.

Braced for the ship to scream again, I heard instead a long, low keening that scraped talons along the tendons of my arms and around my ribcage. The songspires trapped it and fed it back, higher now, no longer a fading echo but a field emanation in its own right.

I heard someone hiss behind me, and turned to see Wardani, staring up in disbelief. I followed her gaze and saw the same shadow flitting clearly across the upper regions of the data display.

“What…” It was Hand, voice fading out as another patch of darkness flapped across from the left and seemed to dance briefly with the first.

By then I knew, and oddly my first thought was that Hand, of all people, ought not to have been surprised, that he ought to have got it first.

The first shadow dipped and swooped around the corpse of the Martian.

I looked for Wardani, found her eyes and the numb disbelief there.

“No,” she whispered, little more than mouthing the word. “It can’t be.”

But it was.

They came from all sides of the dome, at first in ones and twos, sliding up the crystalline curve and peeling off into sudden full three-dimensional existence, shaken loose with each convulsive distortion that their ship suffered as the battle raged outside. They peeled off and swooped down to floor level, then soared up again and settled to circling the central structure. They didn’t seem to be aware of us in any way that mattered, but none of them touched us. Overhead, their passage had no effect on the datadisplay system other than a slight rippling as they banked, and some of them seemed even to pass occasionally through the substance of the dome and out into hard space. More came funnelling up through the tube that had first led us to the platform, packing into a flying space that was already becoming crowded.

The sound they made was the same keening the ship had begun earlier, the same dirge that the songspires now gave out from the floor, the same carrier wave I’d picked up on the comset. Traces of the cherry-and-mustard odour wafted through the air, but tinged now with something else, something scorched and old.

Hyperspatial distortion broke and burst in the space outside, the shields came back on, tinged a new, violet colour and the ship’s hull was awash with recoil as its batteries launched repeatedly at the other vessel. I was beyond caring. All feeling of physical discomfort was gone, frozen away to a single tightness in my chest and a growing pressure behind my eyes. The platform seemed to have expanded massively around me and the rest of the company were now too far out across the vast flattened space to be relevant.

I was abruptly aware that I was weeping myself, a dry sobbing in the small spaces of my sinuses.

“Kovacs!”

I turned, feeling as if I was thigh-deep in a torrent of icy water, and saw Hand, jacket pocket flapped back, raising his stunner.

The distance, I later reckoned, was less than five metres but it seemed to take forever to cross it. I waded forward, blocked the weapon arm at a pressure point and smashed an elbow strike into his face. He howled and went down, stunner skittering away across the platform. I dropped after him, looking through blurred vision for his throat. One weak arm fended me off. He was screaming something.

My right hand stiffened into the killing blade. Neurachem worked to focus my eyes through blurring.

“—all die, you fucking—”

I drew back for the blow. He was sobbing now.

Blurring.

Water in my eyes.

I wiped a hand across them, blinked and saw his face. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. The sobbing barely made words.

“What?” My hand loosened and I belted him hard across the face. “What did you say?”

He gulped. Drew breath.

“Shoot me. Shoot us all. Use the stunner. Kovacs. This is what killed the others.”

And I realised my own face was soaked in tears, my eyes filled with them. I could feel the weeping in my swollen throat, the same ache that the songspires had reflected back, not from the ship, I knew suddenly, but from her millennia-departed crew. The knife running through me was the grief of the Martians, an alien pain stored here in ways that made no sense outside of folktales around a campfire out on Mitcham’s Point, a frozen, unhuman hurt in my chest and the pit of my stomach that would not be dismissed, and a not-quite-tuned note in my ears that I knew when it got here would crack me open like a raw egg.

Vaguely, I felt the rip and warp of another dark-body near-miss. The flocking shadows above my head swirled and shrieked, beating upwards against the dome.

“Do it, Kovacs!”

I staggered upright. Found my own stunner, and fired it into Hand. Looked for the others.

Deprez, with his hands at his temples, swaying like a tree in a gale. Sun, apparently sinking to her knees. Sutjiadi between the two of them, unclear in the shimmering perspectives of my own tears. Wardani, Vongsavath…

Too far, too far off in the density of light and keening pain.

The Envoy conditioning scrabbled after perspective, shut down the flood of emotion that the weeping around me had unlocked. Distance closed. My senses reeled back in.

The wailing of the gathered shadows intensified as I overrode my own psychic defences and dimmer switches. I was breathing it in like Guerlain Twenty, corroding some containment system inside that lay beyond analytical physiology. I felt the damage come on, swelling to bursting point.

I threw up the stunner and started firing.

Deprez. Down.

Sutjiadi, spinning as the assassin fell at his side, disbelief on his face.

Down.

Beyond him, Sun Liping kneeling, eyes clamped tightly shut, sidearm lifting to her own face. Systems analysis. Last resort. She’d worked it out, just didn’t have a stunner. Didn’t know anyone else did either.

I staggered forward, yelling at her, Inaudible in the storm of grief. The blaster snugged under her chin. I snapped off a shot with the stunner, missed. Got closer.

The blaster detonated. It ripped up through her chin on narrow beam and flashed a sword of pale flame out the top of her head before the blowback circuit cut in and killed the beam. She toppled sideways, steam curling from her mouth and eyes.

Something clicked in my throat. A tiny increment of loss welling up and dripping into the ocean of grief the songspires were singing me. My mouth opened, maybe to scream some of the pain out, but there was too much to pass. It locked soundless in my throat.

Vongsavath stumbled into me from the side. I spun and grabbed her. Her face was wide-eyed with shock, drenched in tears. I tried to push her away, to give her some distance on the stunblast, but she clung to me, moaning deep in her throat.

The bolt convulsed her and she dropped on top of Sun’s corpse.

Wardani stood on the other side of both of them, staring at me.

Another dark-body blast. The winged shadows above us screamed and wept and I felt something tearing inside me

“No,” said Wardani.

“Cometary,” I shouted at her across the shrieking. “It has to pass, we just—”

Then something really did tear, somewhere, and I dropped to the deck, curled around the pain, gaping like a gaffed bottleback with the immensity of it.

Sun—dead by her own hand for the second fucking time.

Jiang—smeared pulp on the docking bay floor. Stack gone.

Cruickshank, ripped apart, stack gone. Hansen ditto. The count unreeled, speed review across time, thrashing like a snake in its death throes.

The stink of the camp I’d pulled Wardani out of, children starving under robot guns and the governance of a burnt-out wirehead excuse for a human being.

The hospital ship, limping interim space between killing fields.

The platoon, pack members torn apart around me by smart shrapnel.

Two years of slaughter on Sanction IV.

Before that, the Corps.

Innenin, Jimmy de Soto and the others, minds gnawed hollow by the Rawling virus.

Before that, other worlds. Other pain, most of it not mine. Death and Envoy deceit.

Before that, Harlan’s World and the gradual emotional maiming of childhood in the Newpest slums. The life-saving leap into the cheerful brutality of the Protectorate Marines. Days of enforcement.

Strung-out lives, lived in the sludge of human misery. Pain suppressed, packed down, stored for an inventory that never came.

Overhead the Martians circled and screamed their grief. I could feel my own scream building, welling up inside, and knew it was going to rip me apart coming out.

And then discharge.

And then the dark.

I tumbled into it, thankful, hoping that the ghosts of the unavenged dead might pass me in the darkness unseeing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It’s cold down by the shoreline, and there’s a storm coming in. Black flecks of fallout mingle with flurries of dirty snow, and the wind lifts splatters of spray off the rumpled sea. Reluctant waves dump themselves on sand turned muddy green beneath the glowering sky. I hunch my shoulders inside my jacket, hands jammed into pockets, face closed like a fist against the weather.

Further up the curve of the beach, a fire casts orange-red light at the sky. A solitary figure sits on the landward side of the flames, huddled in a blanket. Though I don’t want to, I start in that direction. Whatever else, the fire looks warm, and there’s nowhere else to go.

The gate is closed.

That sounds wrong, something I know, for some reason, isn’t true.

Still…

As I get closer, my disquiet grows. The huddled figure doesn’t move or acknowledge my approach. Before I was worried that it might be someone hostile, but now that misgiving shrivels up to make space for the fear that this is someone I know, and that they’re dead—

Like everyone else I know.

Behind the figure at the fire, I see there’s a structure rising from the sand, a huge skeletal cross with something bound loosely to it. The driving wind and the needle-thin sleet it carries won’t let me look up far enough to see clearly what the object is.

The wind is keening now, like something I once heard and was afraid of.

I reach the fire and feel the blast of warmth across my face. I take my hands from my pockets and hold them out.

The figure stirs. I try not to notice. I don’t want this.

“Ah—the penitent.”

Semetaire. The sardonic tone has gone; maybe he thinks he doesn’t need it any more. Instead there’s something approaching compassion. The magnanimous warmth of someone who’s won a game whose outcome they never had that much doubt about.

“I’m sorry?”

He laughs. “Very droll. Why don’t you kneel at the fire, it’s warmer that way.”

“I’m not that cold,” I say, shivering, and risk a look at his face. His eyes glitter in the firelight. He knows.

“It’s taken you a long time to get here, Wedge Wolf,” he says kindly. “We can wait a little longer.”

I stare through my splayed fingers at the flames. “What do you want from me, Semetaire?”

“Oh, come now. What do I want? You know what I want.” He shrugs off the blanket and rises gracefully to his feet. He is taller than I remember, elegantly menacing in his ragged black coat. He fits the top hat on his head at a rakish angle. “I want the same as all the others.”

“And what’s that?” I nod up at the thing crucified behind him.

“That?” For the first time, he seems off balance. A little embarrassed, maybe. “That’s, well. Let’s say that’s an alternative. An alternative for you, that is, but I really don’t think you want to—”

I look up at the looming structure, and suddenly it’s easier to see through the wind and sleet and fallout.

It’s me.

Pinned in place with swathes of netting, dead grey flesh pressing into the spaces between the cord, body sagging away from the rigid structure of the scaffold, head sunk forward on the neck. The gulls have been at my face. The eyesockets are empty and the cheeks tattered. Bone shows through in patches across my forehead.

It must, I think distantly, be cold up there.

“I did warn you.” A trace of the old mockery is creeping back into his voice. He’s getting impatient. “It’s an alternative, but I think you’ll agree it’s a lot more comfortable down here by the fire. And there is this.”

He opens one gnarled hand and shows me the cortical stack, fresh blood and tissue still clinging to it in specks. I slap a hand to the back of my neck and find a ragged hole there, a gaping space at the base of my skull into which my fingers slip with horrifying ease. Through on the other side of the damage, I can feel the slick, spongy weight of my own cerebral tissue.

“See,” he says, almost regretfully.

I pull my fingers loose again. “Where did you get that, Semetaire?”

“Oh, these are not hard to come by. Especially on Sanction IV.”

“You got Cruickshank’s?” I ask him, with a sudden surge of hope.

He hesitates fractionally. “But of course. They all come to me, sooner or later.” He nods to himself. “Sooner or later.”

The repetition sounds forced. Like he’s trying to convince. I feel the hope die down again, guttering out.

“Later then,” I tell him, holding my hands out to the fire one more time. The wind buffets at my back.

“What are you talking about?” The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.

“I’m going now. There’s nothing for me here.”

“Go?” His voice turns abruptly ugly. He holds up the stack between thumb and forefinger, red glinting in the firelight. “You’re not going anywhere, my wolf-pack puppy. You’re staying here with me. We’ve got some accounts to process.”

This time, I’m the one that laughs.

“Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.”

“You. Will.” One hand reaching crooked across the fire for me. “Stay.”

And the Kalashnikov is in my hand, the gun heavy with a full clip of antipersonnel rounds. Well, wouldn’t you know it.

“Got to go,” I say. “I’ll tell Hand you said hello.”

He looms, grasping, eyes gleaming.

I level the gun.

“You were warned, Semetaire.”

I shoot into the space below the hatbrim. Three shots, tight-spaced.

It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three metres beyond the fire. I wait for a moment to see if he’ll get up, but he’s gone. The flames dampen down visibly with his departure.

I look up and see that the cruciform structure is empty, whatever that means. I remember the dead face it held up before and squat by the fire, warming myself until it gutters down to embers.

In the glowing ash, I spot the cortical stack, burnt clean and metallic shiny amidst the last charred fragments of wood, I reach in amongst the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.

It scorches a little, but that’s OK.

I stow it and the Kalashnikov, thrust my rapidly chilling hands back into the pockets of my jacket and straighten up, looking around.

It’s cold, but somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.