“Yeah, well, these days that’s . . .” The edge ebbed out of my voice as I saw Schneider drop from the forward hatch of the Nagini and sprint up the beach. “Where’s he going?”
Below us, from under the angle of the ledge we were seated on, Tanya Wardani emerged. She was walking roughly seaward, but there was something odd about her gait. Her coat seemed to shimmer blue down one side in granular patches that looked vaguely familiar.
I got to my feet. Racked up the neurachem.
Sun laid a hand on my arm. “Is she—”
It was sand. Patches of damp turquoise sand from the inside of the cavern. Sand that must have clung when—
She crumpled.
It was a graceless fall. Her left leg gave out as she put it down and she pivoted around and downward around the buckling limb. I was already in motion, leaping down from the ledge in a series of neurachem-mapped footholds, each one good only for momentary bracing and then on to the next before I could slip. I landed in the sand about the same time Wardani completed her fall and was at her side a couple of seconds before Schneider.
“I saw her fall when she came out of the cave,” he blurted as he reached me.
“Let’s get her—”
“I’m fine.” Wardani turned over and shook off my arm. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked from Schneider to me and back. I saw, abruptly, how haggard she had become. “Both of you, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“So what’s going on?” I asked her quietly.
“What’s going on?” She coughed and spat in the sand, phlegm streaked with blood. “I’m dying, just like everyone else in this neighborhood. That’s what’s going on.”
“Maybe you’d better not do any more work today,” Schneider said hesitantly. “Maybe you should rest.”
She shot him a quizzical look, then turned her attention to getting up.
“Oh, yeah.” She heaved herself upright and grinned. “Forgot to say. I opened the gate. Cracked it.”
I saw blood in the grin.
CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN
“I don’t see anything,” said Sutjiadi.
Wardani sighed and walked to one of her consoles. She hit a sequence of screen panels and one of the stretch-filigrees eased down until it stood between us and the apparently impenetrable spike of Martian technology in the center of the cavern. Another screen switch and lamps seated in the corners of the cavern went incandescent with blue.
“There.”
Through the stretchscreen, everything was bathed in cool violet light. In the new color scheme, the upper edges of the gate flickered and ran with gobs of brilliance that slashed through the surrounding glow like revolving biohazard cherries.
“What is that?” asked Cruickshank at my back.
“It’s a countdown,” said Schneider with dismissive familiarity. He’d seen this before. “Right, Tanya?”
Wardani smiled weakly and leaned on the console.
“We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do. A lot of their visual notation seems to refer to bands in the ultraviolet range.” She cleared her throat. “They’d be able to see this unaided. And what it’s saying, more or less, is: Stand clear.”
I watched, fascinated. Each blob seemed to ignite at the peak of the spire and then separate and drip rapidly along the leading edges to the base. At intervals along the drip down, the lights fired bursts off themselves into the folding that filled the splits between the edges. It was hard to tell, but if you tracked the trajectory of these offbursts, they seemed to be traveling a long way into the cramped geometry of each crack, a longer distance than they had any right to in three-dimensional space.
“Some of it becomes visual later,” said Wardani. “The frequency scales down as we get nearer to the event. Not sure why.”
Sutjiadi turned aside. In the splashes of rendered light through the filigree screen, he looked unhappy.
“How long?” he asked.
Wardani lifted an arm and pointed along the console to the scrambling digits of a countdown display. “About six hours, standard. A little less now.”
“Samedi’s sake, that is beautiful,” breathed Cruickshank. She stood at my shoulder and stared entranced at the screened spike and what was happening to it. The light passing over her face seemed to have washed her features of every emotion but wonder.
“We’d better get that buoy up here, Captain.” Hand was peering into the explosions of radiance with an expression I hadn’t seen since I surprised him at worship. “And the launching frame. We’ll need to fire it across.”
Sutjiadi turned his back on the gate. “Cruickshank. Cruickshank!”
“Sir.” The Limon woman blinked and looked at him, but her eyes kept tugging back toward the screen.
“Get back down to the Nagini and help Hansen prep the buoy for firing. And tell Vongsavath to get a launch and landing mapped for tonight. See if she can’t break through some of this jamming and transmit to the Wedge at Masson. Tell them we’re coming out.” He looked across at me. “I’d hate to get shot down by friendly fire at this stage.”
I glanced at Hand, curious to see how he’d handle this one.
I needn’t have worried.
“No transmissions just yet, Captain.” The executive’s voice was a study in absent detachment—you would have sworn he was absorbed in the gate countdown—but under the casual tone there was the unmistakable tensile strength of an order given. “Let’s keep this on a need-to-know basis until we’re actually ready to go home. Just get Vongsavath to map the parabola.”
Sutjiadi wasn’t stupid. He heard the cabling buried in Hand’s voice and shot me another look, questioning.
I shrugged and weighed in on the side of Hand’s deception. What are Envoys for, after all?
“Look at it this way, Sutjiadi. If they knew you were on board, they’d probably shoot us down anyway, just to get to you.”
“Carrera’s Wedge,” Hand said stiffly, “will do no such thing while they are under contract to the Cartel.”
“Don’t you mean the government?” jeered Schneider. “I thought this war was an internal matter, Hand.”
Hand shot him a weary look.
“Vongsavath.” Sutjiadi had chinned his mike to the general channel. “You there?”
“In place.”
“And the rest of you?”
Four more voices thrummed in the induction mike at my ear. Hansen and Jiang taut with alertness, Deprez laconic, and Sun somewhere in between.
“Map a launch and landing. Here to Landfall. We expect to be out of here in another seven hours.”
A round of cheers rang through the induction mike at my ear.
“Try to get some idea of what the suborbital traffic’s like along the curve, but maintain transmission silence until we lift. Is that clear?”
“Silent running,” said Vongsavath. “Got it.”
“Good.” Sutjiadi nodded at Cruickshank, and the Limon woman loped out of the cavern. “Hansen, Cruickshank’s coming down to help prep the claim buoy. That’s all. The rest of you, stay sharp.” Sutjiadi unlocked his posture slightly and turned to face the archaeologue. “Mistress Wardani, you look ill. Is there anything remaining for you to do here?”
“I—” Wardani sagged visibly over the console. “No, I’m done. Until you want the damned thing closed again.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Hand called out from where he stood to one side of the gate, looking up at it with a distinctly proprietorial air. “With the buoy established, we can notify the Cartel and bring in a full team. With Wedge support, I imagine we can render this a cease-fire zone”—he smiled—“rather rapidly.”
“Try telling that to Kemp,” said Schneider.
“Oh, we will.” Hand smiled smoothly.
“In any case, Mistress Wardani”—Sutjiadi’s tone was impatient—“I suggest you return to the Nagini as well. Ask Cruickshank to jack her field medic program and look you over.”
“Well, thanks.?
??
“I beg your pardon.”
Wardani shook her head and propped herself upright. “I thought one of us should say it.”
She left without a backward glance. Schneider looked at me and, after a moment’s hesitation, went after her.
“You’ve got a way with civilians, Sutjiadi. Anyone ever tell you that?”
He stared at me impassively. “Is there some reason for you to stay?”
“I like the view.”
He made a noise in his throat and looked back at the gate. You could tell he didn’t like doing it, and with Cruickshank gone, he was letting the feeling leak out. There was a gathered stiffness about his stance as soon as he faced the device, something akin to the tension you see in bad fighters before a bout.
I put up a flat hand in clear view, and after a proper pause I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“Don’t tell me this thing scares you, Sutjiadi. Not the man who faced down Dog Veutin and his whole squad. You were my hero for a while, back there.”
If he thought it was funny, he kept it to himself.
“Come on, it’s a machine. Like a crane, like a—” I groped about for appropriate comparisons. “—Like a machine. That’s all it is. We’ll be building these ourselves in a few centuries. Take out the right sleeve insurance, you might even live to see it.”
“You’re wrong,” he said distantly. “This isn’t like anything human.”
“Oh shit, you’re not going to get mystical on me, are you?” I glanced across to where Hand stood, suddenly feeling unfairly ganged up on. “Of course it isn’t like anything human. Humans didn’t build it, the Martians did. But they’re just another race. Smarter than us maybe, farther ahead than us maybe, but that doesn’t make them gods or demons, does it? Does it?”
He turned to face me. “I don’t know. Does it?”
“Sutjiadi, I swear you’re beginning to sound like that moron over there. This is technology you’re looking at.”
“No.” He shook his head. “This is a threshold we’re about to step over. And we’re going to regret it. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the. The waiting in it?”
“No, but I can feel the waiting in me. If this thing creeps you out so much, can we go and do something constructive?”
“That would be good.”
Hand seemed content to stay and gloat over his new toy, so we left him there and made our way back along the tunnel. Sutjiadi’s jitters must have sparked across to me somehow, though, because as the first twist took us out of sight of the activated gate, I had to admit that I felt something on the back of my neck. It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind.
At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within.
I shook the thought loose irritably.
“You happy now?” I inquired acidly as we stepped out into the light.
“I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.”
I shook my head. “I don’t get you, Sutjiadi. Landfall’s built within sniper fire of six major digs. This whole planet is riddled with Martian ruins.”
“I’m from Latimer, originally. I go where they tell me.”
“All right, Latimer. They’re not short on ruins, either. Jesus, every fucking world we’ve colonized belonged to them once. We’ve got their charts to thank for being out here in the first place.”
“Exactly.” Sutjiadi stopped dead and swung on me with the closest thing I’d seen to true emotion on his face since he’d lost the tussle over blasting the rockfall away from the gate. “Exactly. And you want to know what that means?”
I leaned back, surprised by the sudden intensity. “Yeah, sure. Tell me.”
“It means we shouldn’t be out here, Kovacs.” He was speaking in a low, urgent voice I hadn’t heard him use before. “We don’t belong here. We’re not ready. It’s a stupid fucking mistake that we stumbled onto the astrogation charts in the first place. Under our own steam, it would have taken us thousands of years to find these planets and colonize them. We needed that time, Kovacs. We needed to earn our place in interstellar space. Instead we got out here bootstrapping ourselves on a dead civilization we don’t understand.”
“I don’t think—”
He trampled the objection down. “Look at how long it’s taken the archaeologue to open that gate. Look at all the half-understood scraps we’ve depended on to come this far. We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do.” He mimicked Wardani savagely. “She’s got no idea, and neither does anyone else. We’re guessing. We have no idea what we’re doing, Kovacs. We wander around out here, nailing our little anthropomorphic certainties to the cosmos and whistling in the dark, but the truth is, we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing. We shouldn’t be out here at all. We do not belong here.”
I pushed out a long breath.
“Well. Sutjiadi.” I looked at ground and sky in turn. “You’d better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a shithole, of course, but it’s where we’re from. We sure as hell belong there.”
He smiled a little, rear-guard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.
“It’s too late for that,” he said quietly. “Much too late for that.”
Down by the Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.
CHAPTER TWENTY–EIGHT
It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device’s ability to do the job.
“Look,” Hansen said irritably as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. “It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it’s patterned the trace, there’s nothing short of a dark-body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there’s no problem.”
“That isn’t impossible,” Hand told him. “Run the mass detector backup again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.”
Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-meter buoy, Cruickshank grinned.
Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini’s hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body, and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.
“All ready for the Big Deep,” he said.
With the launch cradle assembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping’s help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then around in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it, and yawned.
“Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?” he asked.
I checked my retinal time display, where I’d synchronized a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy’s nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.
“Oh for Samedi’s sake,” said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. “Well, don’t just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me—”
She ripped apart.
I was closest, already turning to ans
wer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upward in a careless back-and-forth scribble, and tossed the pieces skyward in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of Total Body gymnast’s trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.
I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word no, torn loose of its meaning.
Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.
I could see
Yells from the Nagini.
the thing
Someone cut loose with a blaster.
that did it.
Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of half a dozen, pale gray and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.
They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.
The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen walked past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.
“Get back!” I screamed at him. “Get the fuck back!”
The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.
Too late.
Hansen must have thought he was up against armoring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He’d spread his beam to beat the latter and was about to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporizes.
The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted, and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to glass in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.