Broken Angels

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 i

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.