Broken Angels

Monkey curiosity. The trait I’d disparaged to Wardani when we arrived on the beach at Sauberville. The scampering, chittering jungle intelligence that would cheerfully scale the brooding figures of ancient stone idols and poke fingers into the staring eyesockets just to see. The bright obsidian desire to know. The thing that’s dragged us out here, all the way from the grasslands of central Africa. The thing that one day’ll probably put us somewhere so far out that we’ll get there ahead of the sunlight from those central African days.

Hand stepped into the centre, poised in executive mode.

“Let’s achieve some sense of priority here,” he said carefully. “I sympathise with any wish you may all have to see some of this vessel—I would like to see it myself—but our major concern is to find a safe transmission base for the buoy. That we must do before anything else, and I suggest we do it as a single unit.” He turned to Sutjiadi. “After that, we can detail exploratory parties. Captain?”

Sutjiadi nodded, but it was an uncharacteristically vague motion. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t really paying attention at human frequencies any more.

If there’d been any lingering doubts about the Martian vessel’s hulk status, a couple of hours in the frozen bubbles of its architecture was enough to cancel them out. We walked for over a kilometre, winding back and forth through the apparently random co

We found nothing recognisably living.

The machines we came across ignored us, and no one seemed inclined to get close enough to elicit more of a reaction.

Increasingly, as we moved deeper into the body of the ship, we began to find structures that might by a stretch of the imagination be called corridors—long, bulbous spaces with egg-shaped entrances let in at either end. It looked like the same construction technique as the standard bubble chamber, modified to suit.

“You know what this whole thing is,” I told Wardani, while we waited for Sun to scout out another overhead opening. “It’s like aerogel. Like they built a basic framework and then just,”—I shook my head. The concept stubbornly resisted chiselling out into words—“I don’t know, just blew up a few cubic kilometres of heavy-duty aerogel base all over it, and then waited for it to harden.”

Wardani smiled wanly. “Yeah, maybe. Something like that. That would put their plasticity science a little ahead of ours, wouldn’t it. To be able to map and model foam data on this scale.”

“Maybe not.” I groped at the opening shape of the idea, feeling at its origami edges. “Out here specific structure wouldn’t matter. Whatever came out would do. And then you just fill the space with whatever you need. Drivers, environmental systems, you know, weapons…”

“Weapons?” She looked at me with something unreadable in her face. “Does this have to be a warship?”

“No, it was an example. But—”

“Something in here,” said Sun over the comset. “Some kind of tree or—”

What happened next was hard to explain.

I heard the sound coming.

I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I’d only previously run into in dreams.

“Songspire,” said Wardani.

I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I’d just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.

Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.

Sutjiadi’s normally immobile features creased.

“What is that?”

“Songspire,” I said, spi

I’d seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man’s objet d’art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorised into a box by human science.

“How is it attached?” Wardani wanted to know.

“Growing out of the wall,” Sun’s voice came back dented with a by now familiar wonder. “Like some kind of coral…”

Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.

“I’m coming up.”

“Just a moment, Mistress Wardani,” Hand glided in to crowd her. “Sun, is there a way through up there?”

“No. Whole bubble’s closed.”

“Then come back down.” He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. “We do not have time for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.”

A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue’s face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again—downwhining machine disappointment—and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec towards the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.

I sighed.

“Nice going, Hand. She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a native guide in this.” I gestured around. “Place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?”

“No,” he said evenly. “But they taught me not to waste time.”

“Right.” I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. “Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man’s an asshole, what are you going to do?”

“Fucking merchant.”

“Well, yeah. That too. But he is the reason we’re here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.”

“What are you, a fucking economics philosopher now?”

“I’m.” I stopped. “Listen.”

“No, I’m through with—”

“No, listen.” I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. “There. Hear that?”

“I don’t hear…” Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera’s Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.

Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.

Two chambers further on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten metres off, huddled down the corridor.

The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.

“The air,” said Wardani quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny eyed. “There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.”