Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.
‘You feel that?’
‘Yeah.’ I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. ‘Looks like we’ve engaged.’
She glanced sideways at me. ‘You OK?’
‘Threw up. Don’t look so smug. Couple of days, you’ll be at it yourself.’
‘Thanks.’
The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.
‘That’s the bead,’ said Cruickshank. ‘The first three were tracking shots. Now it’s locked on.’
‘Good.’
The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal passages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ She looked away.
I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.
Fuck.
‘Where’s Sutjiadi?’
She pointed towards the Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the assault 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 nanobes 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 passed. 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 nanobes 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 pissing 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 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 fucking 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, Kovacs. Anything’s possible. But realistically, no. No one human could have done that.’
‘Humans opened it,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah. Kovacs, a 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?’
‘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.’ 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.’
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 fucked.’
‘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 snatched from the jaws of ignorance. If it referred to some piece of technology no one had ever seen, that was no use to anybody.’