“He was afraid,” the archaeologue said 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?” Sun asked 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 trying 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 added, “I mined the Nagini’s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporized 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,” Deprez said 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 pickup from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That’s going to slow him down 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 stances, 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 air packs 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 somberly.
“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 fibers 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 defense 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 math, 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 Four, 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 were 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 t
han 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 agonizing 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 amid 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 defense net caught and shredded it. The shock waves 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 rib cage. 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 datadisplay.
“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 gotten 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 funneling 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 odor 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 color, 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 were 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 meters 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 realized 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 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 upward 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 defenses and dimmer switches. I was br
eathing 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.