‘It does if the boat was hired in Sauberville.’ Sutjiadi shook his head. ‘Bought even, it’s still local interest. Who were those guys? Isn’t that old Chang’s trawler out there? Come on, Kovacs, it’s only a couple of dozen kilometres.’
‘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,’ said Sutjiadi loudly. ‘Deprez, get them down, wrap them up and put them somewhere the rats can’t get at them. We’ll run a post mortem 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,’ said Vongsavath 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 defences.’
‘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 checking.
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-metre 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 metres 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 panelling was dull green and ruby, mapped in odd, irregular waves around the lower section, but never rising higher than a metre and a half from the ground. Towards 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 which 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 greying 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 artefact.’
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 direct on the gate from—’
‘Alright, 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,’ said Wardani 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—’