Broken Angels (20 page)

“There's no reason to assume this boat's local.” I gestured out at the placid ocean. “On this planet you could sail a boat like this one all the way up from Bootkinaree and never spill your coffee.”

“Yeah, but you could hide the bodies from aerial surveillance by chucking them down into the galley with the rest of the mess,” objected Cruickshank. “It doesn't add up.”

Luc Deprez reached up and shifted the net slightly. The skulls bobbed and leaned. “The stacks are gone,” he said. “They were put in the water to hide the rest of their identity. Faster than leaving them for the rats, I think.”

“Depends on the rats.”

“Are you an expert?”

“Maybe it was a burial,” offered Ameli Vongsavath.

“In a
net
?”

“We're wasting time,” Sutjiadi said loudly. “Deprez, get them down, wrap them up, and put them somewhere the rats can't get at them. We'll run a postmortem with the autosurgeon back on the
Nagini
later. Vongsavath and Cruickshank, I want you to go through this boat from beak to backside. Look for anything that might tell us what happened here.”

“That's stem to stern, sir,” Vongsavath said primly.

“Whatever. Anything that might tell us something. The clothing that came off these two, maybe, or . . .” He shook his head, irritable with the awkward new factors. “Anything. Anything at all. Get on with it. Lieutenant Kovacs, I'd like you to come with me. I want to check on our perimeter defenses.”

“Sure.” I scooped up the lie with a slight smile.

Sutjiadi didn't want to check on the perimeter. He'd seen Sun and Hansen's résumés, just like me. They didn't need their work checked.

He didn't want to see the perimeter.

He wanted to see the gate.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Schneider had described it to me, several times. Wardani had sketched it for me once in a quiet moment at Roespinoedji's. An imaging shop on the Angkor Road had run up a 3-D graphic from Wardani's input for the Mandrake pitch. Later, Hand had the Mandrake machines blow up the image to a full-scale construct we could walk around in virtual.

None of it came close.

It stood in the man-made cavern like some vertically stretched vision from the dimensionalist school, some element out of the nightmare technomilitary landscapes of Mhlongo or Osupile. There was a gaunt
foldedness
to the structure, like six or seven ten-meter-tall vampire bats crushed back-to-back in a defensive phalanx. There was none of the passive openness that the word
gate
suggested. In the soft light filtering down through chinks in the rocks above, the whole thing looked hunched and waiting.

The base was triangular, about five meters on a side, though the lower edges bore less resemblance to a geometric shape than to something that had grown down into the ground like tree roots. The material was an alloy I'd seen in Martian architecture before, a dense black-clouded surface that would feel like marble or onyx to the touch but always carried a faint static charge. The technoglyph paneling was dull green and ruby, mapped in odd, irregular waves around the lower section, but never rising higher than a meter and a half from the ground. Toward the top of this limit, the symbols seemed to lose both coherence and strength: They thinned out, grew less well defined, and even the style of the engraving seemed more hesitant. It was as if, Sun said later, the Martian technoscribes were afraid to work too close to what they had created on the plinth above.

Above, the structure folded rapidly in on itself as it rose, creating a series of compressed black alloy angles and upward-leading edges that ended in a short spire. In the long splits between the folds, the black clouding on the alloy faded to a dirty translucence, and inside this, the geometry seemed to continue folding in on itself in some indefinable way that was painful to look at for too long.

“Believe it now?” I asked Sutjiadi as he stood beside me, staring. He didn't respond for a moment, and when he did there was the same slight numbness in his voice that I'd heard from Sun Liping over the comlink.

“It is not still,” he said quietly. “It feels. In motion. Like turning.”

“Maybe it is.” Sun had come up with us, leaving the rest of the team down by the
Nagini
. No one else seemed overkeen to spend time either in or near the cavern.

“It's supposed to be a hyperspatial link,” I said, moving sideways in an attempt to break the hold the thing's alien geometry was exerting. “If it maintains a line through to wherever, then maybe it moves in hyperspace, even when it's shut down.”

“Or maybe it cycles,” Sun suggested. “Like a beacon.”

Unease.

I felt it course through me at the same time as I spotted it in the twitch across Sutjiadi's face. Bad enough that we were pinned down here on this exposed tongue of land without the added thought that the thing we had come to unlock might be sending off
Come and get me
signals in a dimension we as a species had only the vaguest of handles on.

“We're going to need some lights in here,” I said.

The spell broke. Sutjiadi blinked hard and looked up at the falling rays of light. They were graying out with perceptible speed as evening advanced across the sky outside.

“We'll have it blasted out,” he said. I exchanged an alarmed glance with Sun.

“Have what blasted?” I asked cautiously.

Sutjiadi gestured. “The rock.
Nagini
runs a front-mounted ultravibe battery for ground assault. Hansen should be able to clear the whole thing back this far without putting a scratch on the artifact.”

Sun coughed. “I don't think Commander Hand will approve that, sir. He ordered me to bring up a set of Angier lamps before dark. And Mistress Wardani has asked for remote monitoring systems to be installed so she can work directly on the gate from—”

“All right, Lieutenant. Thank you.” Sutjiadi looked around the cavern once more. “I'll talk to Commander Hand.”

He strode out. I glanced at Sun and winked.

“That's a conversation I want to hear,” I said.

•         •         •

Back at the
Nagini
, Hansen, Schneider, and Jiang were busy erecting the first of the rapid-deployment bubblefabs. Hand was braced in one corner of the assault ship's loading hatch, watching a cross-legged Wardani sketch something on a memoryboard. There was an unguarded fascination in his expression that made him look suddenly younger.

“Some problem, Captain?” he asked as we came up the ramp.

“I want that thing,” said Sutjiadi, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, “out in the open. Where we can watch it. I'm having Hansen 'vibe-blast the rocks out of the way.”

“Out of the question.” Hand went back to watching what the archaeologue was doing. “We can't risk exposure at this stage.”

“Or damage to the gate,” Wardani said sharply.

“Or damage to the gate,” agreed the executive. “I'm afraid your team are going to have to work with the cavern as it is, Captain. I don't believe there's any risk involved. The bracing the previous visitors put in appears to be solid.”

“I've seen the bracing,” said Sutjiadi. “Bonding epoxy is not a substitute for a permanent structure, but that's—”

“Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it.” Hand's urbane tone was edged with irritation. “But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.”

“I was going to say,” Sutjiadi said evenly, “that the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.”

Wardani looked up from her sketching.

“Well, that's good, Captain,” she said brightly. “You've gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours of real time. What exactly are you concerned about?”

Sutjiadi looked uncomfortable.

“This artifact,” he said. “You claim it's a gate. Can you give me any guarantees that nothing will come through it from the other side?”

“Not really, no.”

“Do you have any idea
what
might come through?”

Wardani smiled. “Not really, no.”

“Then I'm sorry, Mistress Wardani. It makes military sense to have the
Nagini
's main weaponry trained on it at all times.”

“This is not a military operation, Captain.” Hand was working on ostentatiously bored now. “I thought I made that clear during briefing. You are part of a commercial venture, and the specifics of our commerce dictate that the artifact cannot be exposed to aerial view until it is contractually secured. By the terms of the Incorporation Charter, that will not become the case until what is on the other side of the gateway is tagged with a Mandrake ownership buoy.”

“And if the gate chooses to open before we are ready, and something hostile comes through it?”

“Something hostile?” Wardani set aside her memoryboard, apparently amused. “Something such as what?”

“You would be in a better position than I to evaluate that, Mistress Wardani,” Sutjiadi said stiffly. “My concern is simply for the safety of this expedition.”

Wardani sighed.

“They weren't vampires, Captain,” she said wearily.

“I'm sorry?”

“The Martians. They weren't vampires. Or demons. They were just a technologically advanced race with wings. That's all. There's nothing on the other side of that thing”—she stabbed a finger in the general direction of the rocks—“that we won't be able to build ourselves in a few thousand years. If we can get a lock on our militaristic tendencies, that is.”

“Is that intended as an insult, Mistress Wardani?”

“Take it any way you like, Captain. We are, all of us, already, dying slowly of radiation poisoning. A couple of dozen kilometers in that direction a hundred thousand people were vaporized yesterday. By soldiers.” Her voice was starting to rise, trembling at base. “Anywhere else on about sixty percent of this planet's landmass, your chances of an early, violent death are excellent. At the hands of soldiers. Elsewhere, the camps will kill you with starvation or beatings if you step out of political line. This service, too, brought to us by soldiers. Is there something else I can add to clarify my reading of militarism for you?”

“Mistress Wardani.” Hand's voice held a tight strain I hadn't heard before. Below the ramp, Hansen, Schneider, and Jiang had stopped what they were doing and were looking over toward the raised voices. “I think we're getting off the point. We were discussing security.”

“Were we?” Wardani forced a shaky laugh, and her voice evened out. “Well, Captain. Let me put it to you that in the seven decades I have been a qualified archaeologue, I have never come across evidence to suggest that the Martians had anything more unpleasant to offer than what men like you have already unleashed across the face of Sanction Four. Excluding the small matter of the fallout from Sauberville, you are probably safer sitting in front of that gate than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere at the moment.”

There was a small silence.

“Maybe you want to train the
Nagini
's main guns on the entrance to the cavern,” I suggested. “Same effect. In fact, with the remote monitoring in place, it'll be better. If the monsters with half-meter fangs turn up, we can collapse the tunnel on them.”

“A good point.” Seemingly casual, Hand moved to position himself carefully in the hatch between Wardani and Sutjiadi. “That seems the best compromise, does it not, Captain?”

Sutjiadi read the executive's stance and took the hint. He threw a salute and turned on his heel. As he went down the ramp past me, he glanced up. He didn't quite have his previous immobility of feature down with the new Maori face. He looked betrayed.

You find innocence in the strangest places.

At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.

“Hansen,” he snapped tightly. “Jiang. Get all this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred meters from the ship on all sides.”

Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn't looking—he'd already stalked away toward the water's edge.

Something wasn't right.

•         •         •

Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition's grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a skirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the
Nagini
, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath, and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated, and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each 'fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms separated by a central living space, but two of the units had been assembled in a nonstandard configuration with half the bed space, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani's lab.

I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.

The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.

“What do you want?” she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

“It's me.”

“I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?”

“An invitation over the threshold?”

She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.

“We're not in virtual anymore, Kovacs. I—”

“I wasn't looking for a fuck.”

She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. “That's just as well.”

“So do I get to come in?”

“Suit yourself.”

I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme: sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.

“Getting anywhere?”

“Slowly.” She yawned. “I don't remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.”

I propped myself against a table edge.

“So how long do you reckon?”

She shrugged. “A couple of days. Then there's testing.”

“How long for that?”

“The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don't know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?”

I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131, and all their numerous friends, like a 'methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jeweled presence.

I twitched despite myself.

“I'm just curious.”

“An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.”

I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. “I think you're confusing curiosity with empathy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Curiosity's a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn't make you a better human being.”