Takeshi Kovacs - Broken Angels Part 27

She pointed towards the Nagini Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the a.s.sault ship's nose and Sutjiadi stood on it with Ole Hansen, apparently discussing some aspect of the vessel's forward battery. A short distance up the beach, Ameli Vongsavath sat on a low dune and watched. Deprez, Sun and Jiang were either still at breakfast in the ship's galley, or off doing something to kill the waiting.

Cruickshank shaded her eyes and looked at the two men on the ramp.

"I think our captain's been looking forward to this," she said reflectively. "He's been rubbing up against that big bunch of guns every day since we got here. Look, he's smiling."

I trudged across to the ramp, riding out slow waves of nausea. Sutjiadi saw me coming and crouched down on the edge. No trace of the alleged smile.

"It seems our time has run out."

"Not yet. Hand said it'll take the nan.o.bes a few days to evolve suitable responses to the ultravibe. I'd say we're about halfway."

"Then let's hope your archaeologue friend is similarly advanced. Have you talked to her recently?"

"Has anybody?"

He grimaced. Wardani hadn't been very communicative since the news about the OPERN system broke. At mealtimes, she ate for fuel and left. She shot down attempts at conversation with monosyllable fire.

"I'd appreciate a status report," said Sutjiadi.

"On it."

I went up the beach via Cruickshank, trading a Limon handshake she'd shown me as I pa.s.sed. It was applied reflex, but it gusted a little smile across my face and the sickness in my guts receded a fraction. Something the Envoys taught me. Reflex can touch some odd, deep places.

"Talk to you?" asked Ameli Vongsavath when I reached her vantage point.

"Yeah, I'll be back down here in a moment. Just want to check on our resident driven woman."

It didn't get much of a smile.

I found Wardani slumped in a lounger at one side of the cave, glowering at the gate. Playback sequences flickered on the filigree screens stretch-deployed over her head. The datacoil weaving at her side was cleared, motes of data circling forlornly at the top left corner where she had left them minimised. It was an unusual configuration-most people crush the display motes flat to the projection surface when they're done-but either way it was the electronic equivalent of sweeping an arm across your desk and dumping the contents all over the floor. On the monitors, I'd watched her do it time and again, the exasperated gesture made somehow elegant by the reversed, upward sweep. It was something I liked watching.

"I'd rather you didn't ask the obvious question," she said.

"The nan.o.bes have engaged."

She nodded. "Yeah, felt it. What's that give us, about three or four days?"

"Hand said four at the outside. So don't feel like you're under any kind of pressure here."

That got a wan smile. Evidently I was warming up.

"Getting anywhere?"

"That's the obvious question, Kovacs."

"Sorry." I found a packing case and perched on it. "Sutjiadi's getting twitchy though. He's looking for parameters."

"I guess I'd better stop p.i.s.sing about and just open this thing, then."

I mustered a smile of my own. "That'd be good, yeah."

Quiet. The gate sucked my attention.

"It's there," she muttered. "The wavelengths are right, the sound and vision glyphs check out. The maths works, that is, as far as I understand understand the maths, it works. I've backed up from what I know should happen, extrapolated, this is what we did last time, near as I can remember. It the maths, it works. I've backed up from what I know should happen, extrapolated, this is what we did last time, near as I can remember. It should should f.u.c.king work. I'm missing something. Something I've forgotten. Maybe something I had." Her face twitched. "Battered out of me." f.u.c.king work. I'm missing something. Something I've forgotten. Maybe something I had." Her face twitched. "Battered out of me."

There was a hysterical snap in her voice as she shut up, an edge cutting back along the line of memories she couldn't afford. I scrambled after it.

"If someone's been here before us, could they have changed the settings in some way?"

She was silent for a while. I waited it out. Finally, she looked up.

"Thanks." She cleared her throat. "Uh. For the vote of confidence. But you know, it's kind of unlikely. Millions to one unlikely. No, I'm pretty sure I've just missed something."

"But it is possible?"

"It's possible possible, Kovacs. Anything's possible. But realistically, no. No one human could have done that."

"Humans opened it," I pointed out.

"Yeah. Kovacs, a dog dog can open a door if it stands tall enough on its hind legs. But when was the last time you saw a dog take the hinges off a door and rehang it?" can open a door if it stands tall enough on its hind legs. But when was the last time you saw a dog take the hinges off a door and rehang it?"

"Alright."

"There's an order of competence here. Everything we've learnt to do with Martian technology-reading the astrogation charts, activating the storm shelters, riding that metro system they found on Nkrumah's Land-these are all things any ordinary adult Martians could do in their sleep. Basic tech. Like driving a car or living in a house. This This." She gestured at the hunched spire on the other side of her battery of instruments. "This is the pinnacle of their technology. The only one we've found in five hundred years of scratching around on more than thirty worlds."

"Maybe we're just looking in the wrong places. Pawing shiny plastic packing while we tread underfoot the delicate circuitry it once protected Pawing shiny plastic packing while we tread underfoot the delicate circuitry it once protected."

She shot me a hard look. "What are you, a Wycinski convert?"

"I did some reading in Landfall. Not easy finding copies of his later stuff, but Mandrake has a pretty eclectic set of datastacks. According to what I saw, he was pretty convinced the whole Guild search protocol is f.u.c.ked."

"He was bitter by the time he wrote that. It isn't easy to be a certified visionary one day and a purged dissident the next."

"He predicted the gates, didn't he?"

"Pretty much. There were hints in some of the archive material his teams recovered at Bradbury. A couple of references to something called the Step Beyond. The Guild chose to interpret that as a lyrical poet's take on hypercast technology. Back then we couldn't tell what we were reading. Epic poetry or weather reports, it all looked the same and the Guild were just happy if we could squeeze some raw meaning out. The Step Beyond as a translation of hypercaster was meaning s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of ignorance. If it referred to some piece of technology no one had ever seen, that was no use to anybody."

A swelling vibration spanned the cave. Dust filtered down from around the makeshift bracing. Wardani tipped a glance upward.

"Uh-oh."

"Yeah, better keep an eye on that. Hansen and Sun both reckon it'll stand reverberations a lot closer than the sentries on the inner ring, but then." I shrugged. "Both of them have made at least one fatal mistake in the past. I'll get a ramp in here and check the roof isn't going to fall on you in your moment of triumph."

"Thanks."

I shrugged again. "In everyone's interests, really."

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh." I gestured, suddenly feeling clumsy. "Look, you opened this thing before. You can do it again. Just a matter of time."

"Which we don't have."

"Tell me," I looked, Envoy-rapid, for some way to disrupt the spiralling gloom in her voice. "If this really is the pinnacle of Martian technology, how come your team were able to crack it in the first place? I mean...?"

I lifted my hands in appeal.

She cracked another weary smile, and I wondered suddenly how hard the radiation poisoning and the chemical counterbalance were hitting her.

"You still don't get it, do you Kovacs? These aren't humans we're talking about. They didn't think the way we do. Wycinski called it peeled-back democratic technoaccess. It's like the storm shelters. Anyone could access them-any Martian, that is-because, well, what's the point point of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?" of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?"

"You're right. That isn't human."

"It's one of the reasons Wycinski got into trouble with the Guild in the first place. He wrote a paper on the storm shelters. The science behind the shelters is actually quite complicated, but they'd been built in such a way that it didn't matter. The control systems were rendered back to a simplicity even we could operate. He called it a clear indication of species-wide unity, and he said it demonstrated that the concept of a Martian imperium tearing itself apart in a colonial war was just so much bulls.h.i.t."

"Just didn't know when to shut up, huh?"

"That's one way of putting it."

"So what was he arguing? A war against another race? Somebody we haven't run up against yet?"

Wardani shrugged. "That, or they just pulled out of this region of the galaxy and went somewhere else. He never really went far down either line of reasoning. Wycinski was an iconoclast. He was more concerned with tearing down the idiocies the Guild had already perpetrated than with constructing his own theories."

"That's a surprisingly stupid way to behave for someone so bright."

"Or surprisingly brave."

"That's one way of putting it."

Wardani shook her head. "Whatever. The point is, all the technology we've discovered that we understand, we can work." She gestured at the banks of equipment ranged around the gate. "We have to synthesise the light from a Martian throat gland, and the sonics we think they produced, but if we understand it understand it, we can make it work. You asked how come we were able to crack it last time. It was designed that way. Any Martian needing to get through this gate could open it. And that means, given this equipment and enough time, we can too."

The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.

"You going?"

"I've got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?"

She looked at me strangely. "Nothing else, thanks." She straightened up a little in the lounger. "I've got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I'll be down to eat."

"Good. See you then. Oh," I paused on my way out. "What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something."

"Tell him I'll have this gate open inside two days."

"Really?"

She smiled. "No, probably not. But tell him anyway."

Hand was busy.

The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the centre of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing, Hand?"

He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.

"I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me."

"Yeah, he told me that. Now what the f.u.c.k are you doing?"

The moment hung. I read Hand. The body language said he was yawing close to violence, which was fine by me. Dying slowly was making me twitchy and keen to do harm. Any sympathy I'd had for him a couple of days back was fast evaporating.

Maybe he read me too. He made a downward spiral motion with his left hand, and the tension in his face smoothed out. He set the bowl aside and licked the surplus blood off his thumb.

"I wouldn't expect you to understand, Kovacs."

"Let me guess." I looked around at the candles. The smell of their incense was dark and acrid. "You're calling up a little supernatural help to get us out of this mess."

Hand reached back and snuffed the nearest of the candles without getting up. His Mandrake mask was back in place, his voice even. "As usual, Kovacs, you approach what you do not understand with all the sensitivity of a chimpanzee troop. Suffice it to say there are rituals that must be honoured if any relationship with the spirit realm is to be fruitful."

"I think I can grasp that, just about. You're talking about a pay-off system. Quid pro quo. A little blood for a handful of favours. Very commercial, Hand, very corporate corporate."

"What do you want, Kovacs?"

"An intelligent conversation. I'll wait outside."

I stepped back through the flap, surprised at a slight trembling that had set in in my hands. Probably unhandled feedback from the biocircuits in my palm plates. They were as twitchy as racing dogs at the best of times, intensely hostile to any incursions on their processing integrity, and they probably weren't handling the radiation any better than the rest of my body.

Hand's incense sat at the back of my throat like fragments of wet cloth. I coughed it out. My temples pulsed. I grimaced and made chimpanzee noises. Scratched under my arms. Cleared my throat and coughed again. I settled into a chair in the briefing circle and examined one of my hands. Eventually, the trembling stopped.

It took the Mandrake exec about five minutes to clear away his paraphernalia and he emerged looking like a close-to-functional version of the Matthias Hand we were used to seeing around camp. There were blue smears under each eye and his skin had an underlying greyish pallor, but the distance I had seen in the eyes of other men dying of radiation sickness was not there. He had it locked down. There was only the slow seeping knowledge of imminent mortality, and that you had to look for with Envoy eyes.

"I'm hoping this is very very important, Kovacs." important, Kovacs."

"I'm hoping it's not. Ameli Vongsavath tells me the Nagini Nagini's...o...b..ard monitoring system shut itself down last night."

"What?"

I nodded. "Yeah. For about five or six minutes. It isn't difficult to do-Vongsavath says you can convince the system it's part of a standard overhaul. So, no alarms."

"Oh, Damballah." He looked out at the beach. "Who else knows?"

"You do. I do. Ameli Vongsavath does. She told me, I've told you. Maybe you can tell Ghede, and he'll do something about it for you."

"Don't start with me, Kovacs."