Broken Angels

“Uh-uh.”

“Then we found out it was a warship. Aribowo found a weapons battery up near the prow. Pretty unmistakable. Then another one. I, uh.” She stopped and sipped some water. Cleared her throat again. “They changed. Almost overnight, they all changed. Even Aribowo. She used to be so… It was like possession. Like they’d been taken over by one of those sentiences you see in experia horror flicks. Like something had come through the gate and…”

Another grimace.

“I guess I never knew them all that well after all. The two on the trawler, they were cadres. I didn’t know them at all. But they all went the same way. All talking about what could be done. The necessity of it, the revolutionary need. Vaporise Landfall from orbit. Power up whatever drives the ship had, they were speculating FTL now, talking about taking the war to Latimer. Doing the same thing there. Planetary bombardment. Latimer City, Portausaint, Soufriere. All gone, like Sauberville, until the Protectorate capitulated.”

“Could they have done that?”

“Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.” She shrugged. “Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing fucking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government cha

“But you took it away again,” I said gently.

Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.

“Were you pla

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said urgently. “These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.”

A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was just surviving.”

“Good enough,” I told her.

We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.

Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.

I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.

“I hope he doesn’t come here,” she muttered.

“Sorry?”

“Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.”

“Will they let him come?”

She shrugged. “Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the ru

“Well, predator stock…”

“I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old fucking song.”

“Same old fucking universe,” I pointed out gently.

“It’s just…”

“At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. “They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like ru

“And then the hull what, melted?”

She shook her head again, slowly. “I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,” she gestured, “I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.”

I shivered a little, remembering.

“It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,” she went on. “What we saw didn’t come close.”

I grunted. “Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?”

“No.”

“He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.”

She stopped in the street to look at me.

“Look, if it did…”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

“We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.”

“It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.”

“Statistically,” she breathed.

“Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?”

“Astronomical.”

“And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.”

“Unless.”

I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.

“That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.”

“We would have seen it,” she said uncertainly. “By now, we would have spotted some of them.”