Broken Angels

“Then,” suddenly he was shouting at us. “There has to be another solution.”

“There is.”

Tanya Wardani stood in the hatch to the cockpit, where she had retreated while the corpses were dealt with. She was still pale from her vomiting, and her eyes looked bruised, but underlying it there was an almost ethereal calm I hadn’t seen since we brought her out of the camp.

“Mistress Wardani.” Hand looked up and down the cabin, as if to check who else had witnessed the loss of cool. He pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. “You have something to contribute?”

“Yes. If Sun Liping can repair the power systems of the buoy, we can certainly place it.”

“Place it where?” I asked.

She smiled thinly. “Inside.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Inside,” I nodded at the screen, and the unreeling kilometres of alien structure. “That?”

“Yes. We go in through the docking bay and leave the buoy somewhere secure. There’s no reason to suppose the hull isn’t radio-transparent, at least in places. Most Martian architecture is. We can test-broadcast anyway, until we find a suitable place.”

“Sun.” Hand was looking back at the screen, almost dreamily. “How long would it take you to effect repairs on the power system?”

“About eight to ten hours. No more than twelve, certainly.” Sun turned to the archaeologue. “How long will it take you, Mistress Wardani, to open the docking bay?”

“Oh,” Wardani gave us all another strange smile. “It’s already open.”

I only had one chance to speak to her before we prepared to dock. I met her on her way out of the ship’s toilet facilities, ten minutes after the abrupt and dictatorial briefing Hand had thrown down for everyone. She had her back to me and we bumped awkwardly in the narrow dimensions of the entryway. She turned with a yelp and I saw there was a slight sweat still beading her forehead, presumably from more retching. Her breath smelt bad and stomach-acid odours crept out the door behind her.

She saw the way I was looking at her.

“What?”

“Are you alright?”

“No, Kovacs, I’m dying. How about you?”

“You sure this is a good idea?”

“Oh, not you as well! I thought we’d nailed this down with Sutjiadi and Schneider.”

I said nothing, just watched the hectic light in her eyes. She sighed.

“Look, if it satisfies Hand and gets us home again, I’d say yes, it is a good idea. And it’s a damned sight safer than trying to attach a defective buoy to the hull.”

I shook my head.

“That’s not it.”

“No?”

“No. You want to see the inside of this thing before Mandrake spirit it away to some covert dry dock. You want to own it, even if it’s only for a few hours. Don’t you?”

“You don’t?”

“I think, apart from Sutjiadi and Schneider, we all do.” I knew Cruickshank would have—I could see the shine on her eyes at the thought of it. The awakening enthusiasm she’d had at the rail of the trawler. The same wonder I’d seen on her face when she looked at the activated gate countdown in the UV backwash. Maybe that was why I wasn’t protesting beyond this muttered conversation amidst the curling odour of exhausted vomiting. Maybe this was something I owed.

“Well, then.” Wardani shrugged. “What’s the problem?”

“You know what the problem is.”

She made an impatient noise and moved to get past me. I stayed put.

“You want to get out of my way, Kovacs?” she hissed. “We’re five minutes off landing, and I need to be in the cockpit.”

“Why didn’t they go in, Tanya?”

“We’ve been over—”

“That’s bullshit, Tanya. Ameli’s instruments show a breathable atmosphere. They found a way to open the docking system, or they found it already open. And then they waited out here to die while the air in their suits ran out. Why didn’t they go in?”

“You were at the briefing. They had no food, they had—”

“Yeah, I heard you come up with metres and metres of wholecloth rationale, but what I didn’t hear was anything that explains why four arch archaeologues would rather die in their spacesuits than spend their last hours wandering around the greatest archaeological find in the history of the human race.”

For a moment she hesitated, and I saw something of the woman from the waterfall. Then the feverish light flickered back on in her eyes.

“Why ask me? Why don’t you just power up one of the ID&A sets, and fucking ask them? They’re stack-intact, aren’t they?”

“The ID&A sets are fucked, Tanya. Leak-corroded with the buoys. So I’m asking you again. Why didn’t they go in?”

She was silent again, looking away. I thought I saw a tremor at the corner of one eye. Then it was gone, and she looked up at me with the same dry calm I’d seen in the camp.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “And if we can’t ask them, then there’s only one other way to find out that I can think of.”

“Yeah.” I propped myself away from her wearily. “And that’s what this is about, isn’t it. Finding out. Uncovering history. Carrying the fucking torch of human discovery. You’re not interested in the money, you don’t care who ends up with the property rights, and you certainly don’t mind dying. So why should anybody else, right?”

She flinched, but it was momentary. She locked it down. And then she was turning away, leaving me looking at the pale light from the illuminum tile where she had been pressed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was like delirium.

I remember reading somewhere that when the archaeologues on Mars first got into the buried mausoleum spaces they later categorised as cities, a fair percentage of them went insane. Mental collapse was an occupational hazard of the profession back then. Some of the finest minds of the century were sacrificed in pursuit of the keys to Martian civilisation. Not broken and dragged down to raving insanity the way the archetypal antiheroes of experia horror flicks always end up. Not broken, just blunted. Worn down from the sharp edge of intellectual prowess to a slightly numb, slightly blurred distracted vagueness. They went that way in their dozens. Psychically abraded by the constant contact with the leavings of unhuman minds. The Guild spent them like surgical blades rammed against a spi

“Well, I suppose if you can fly…” said Luc Deprez, eyeing the architecture ahead without enthusiasm.

His stance telegraphed irritated confusion. I guessed he was having the same problem locking down potential ambush corners that I was. When the combat conditioning goes in that deep, not being able to do what they’ve trained you to itches like quitting nicotine. And spotting an ambush in Martian architecture would have to be like trying to catch a Mitcham’s Point slictopus with your bare hands.

From the ponderously overhanging lintel that led out of the docking bay, the internal structure of the ship burst up and around us like nothing I had ever seen. Groping after comparison, my mind came up with an image from my Newpest childhood. One spring out on the Deeps side of Hirata’s Reef, I’d given myself a bad scare when the feed tube on my scrounged and patched scuba suit snagged on an outcrop of coral fifteen metres down. Watching oxygen explode out through the rupture in a riot of silver-bellied corpuscles, I’d wondered fleetingly what the storm of bubbles must look like from the inside.

Now I knew.

These bubbles were frozen in place, tinged mother-of-pearl shades of blue and pink where indistinct low-light sources glowed under their surfaces, but aside from that basic difference in longevity, they were as chaotic as my escaping air supply had been that day. There appeared to be no architectural rhyme or reason to the way they joined and merged into each other. In places the link was a hole only metres across. Elsewhere the curving walls simply broke their sweep as they met an intersecting circumference. At no point in the first space we entered was the ceiling less than twenty metres overhead.