Broken Angels

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 ca

“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 gri

“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.”