Broken Angels

“The floor’s flat though,” murmured Sun Liping, kneeling to brush at the sheened surface underfoot. “And they had—have—grav generators.”

“Origin of species.” Tanya Wardani’s voice boomed slightly in the cathedric emptiness. “They evolved in a gravity well, just like us. Zero g isn’t healthy long-term, no matter how much fun it is. And if you have gravity, you need flat surfaces to put things down on. Practicality at work. Same as the docking bay back there. All very well wanting to stretch your wings, but you need straight lines to land a spaceship.”

We all glanced back at the gap we’d come through. Compared to where we stood now, the alien curvatures of the docking station had been practically demure. Long, stepped walls tapered outward like two-metre-fat sleeping serpents stretched out and laid not quite directly on top of each other. The coils wove just barely off a straight axis, as if even within the strictures of the docking station’s purpose, the Martian shipwrights had not quite been able to restrain themselves from an organic flourish. There was no danger involved in bringing a docking vessel down through the increasing levels of atmospheric density held in by some mechanism in the stepped walls, but looking out to the sides, you still felt you were being lowered into the belly of something sleeping.

Delirium.

I could feel it brushing lightly at the upper extremities of my vision, sucking gently at my eyeballs and leaving me with a faintly swollen feeling behind the brow. A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn’t let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you. It was the same feeling here, the promise of a dull ache behind the eyes from constantly trying to see what was up there. An awareness of space overhead that you kept wanting to check on.

The curve on the gleaming surfaces around us put a tilt on it all, a vague sense that you were about to topple over sideways and that, in fact, toppled over and lying down might be the best stance to take in this gratingly alien environment. That this whole ridiculous structure was eggshell thin and ready to crack apart if you did the wrong thing, and that it might easily spill you out into the void.

Delirium.

Better get used to it.

The chamber was not empty. Skeletal arrangements of what looked like scaffolding loomed on the edges of the level floor space. I recalled holoshot images in a download I’d sca

“They’ve been folded down,” murmured Wardani, staring upward. She looked puzzled.

At the lower curves of the bubble wall, machines whose functions I couldn’t even guess at stood beneath the—apparently—tidied-away roost bars. Most of them looked spiny and aggressive, but when the archaeologue brushed past one, it did nothing more than mutter to itself and pettishly rearrange some of its spines.

Plastic rattle and swift scaling whine—armament deployed in every pair of hands across the hollow bell of the chamber.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Wardani barely spared us a backward glance. “Loosen up, will you. It’s asleep. It’s a machine.”

I put up the Kalashnikovs and shrugged. Across the chamber Deprez caught my eye, and gri

“A machine for what?” Hand wanted to know.

This time the archaeologue did look round.

“I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “Give me a couple of days and a fully equipped lab team, maybe I could tell you. Right now, all I can tell you is that it’s dormant.”

Sutjiadi took a couple of steps closer, Sunjet still raised. “How can you tell that?”

“Because if it wasn’t, we’d already be dealing with it on an interactive basis, believe me. Plus, can you see anybody with wingspurs rising a metre above their shoulders putting an active machine that close to a curved wall? I’m telling you, this whole place is powered down and packed up.”

“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct,” said Sun, pivoting about with the Nuhanovic survey set on her forearm raised. “There is detectable circuitry in the walls, but most of it is inactive.”

“There must be something ru

“Caretaker systems.” Tanya Wardani seemed to have lost interest in the machines. She wandered back to the group. “A lot of the deeper buried cities on Mars and Nkrumah’s Land had them too.”

“After this long?” Sutjiadi didn’t sound happy.

Wardani sighed. She jerked a thumb at the docking bay entrance. “It’s not witchcraft, captain. You’ve got the same thing ru

“Yes, and if it’s someone who doesn’t have the codes, she’ll blast them into soup. That doesn’t reassure me, Mistress Wardani.”

“Well maybe that’s the difference between us and the Martians. A little civilised sophistication.”

“And longer lasting batteries,” I said. “This has all been here a lot longer than the Nagini’s good for.”

“What’s the radio-transparency like?” asked Hand.

Sun did something to the Nuhanovic system she was wearing. The bulkier shoulder-mounted sections of the survey equipment flickered. Symbols evolved in the air over the back of her hand. She shrugged. “It’s not very good. I’m barely picking up the Nagini’s navigational beacon, and she’s only on the other side of the wall. Shielding, I suppose. We are in a docking station, and close to the hull. I think we will need to move further in.”

I spotted a couple of alarmed glances flicker back and forth amongst the group. Deprez caught me watching and he smiled a little.

“So who wants to explore?” he asked softly.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Hand.

I moved out from the instinctive defence huddle we’d all formed, stepped through the gap between two roost bars and reached up to the lip of the opening above and behind. Waves of tiredness and faint nausea shimmered through me as I hauled myself up, but by now I was expecting it and the neurachem locked it down.

The hollow beyond was empty. Not even dust.

“Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” I agreed, dropping back. “But how many human beings this side of the next mille

“At the most.”

“And you reckon you can build us a decent map on that thing?” I gestured at the Nuhanovic set.

“Very probably. This is the best survey software money can buy.” She bowed briefly in Hand’s direction. “Nuhanovic smart systems. They don’t build it better than this.”

I looked over to Ameli Vongsavath.

“And the Nagini’s weapon systems are powered up solid.”

The pilot nodded. “Parameters I gave, she could stand off a full tactical assault with no help from us.”

“Well, then I’d say we’ve got a day-pass to the Coral Castle.” I glanced at Sutjiadi. “Those of us that want it, that is.”

Looking around, I saw the idea taking hold. Deprez was already there, face and stance betraying his curiosity, but it was slowly filling up the rest of them too. Everywhere, heads were tilted back to take in the alien architecture, features ironed soft by wonder. Even Sutjiadi couldn’t hold it off completely. The grim watchfulness he’d maintained since we breached the upper levels of the docking chamber’s layered atmosphere field was melting into something less clamped down. The fear of the unknown was ebbing, cancelled out by something stronger and older.