That tiny sound, the little chirrup of death’s particular consequences, had shunted aside most of my earlier awe at the massive dimensions of the Martian vessel.
‘Just a bigger version of a colony barge,’ I said. ‘Theoretically, we could have built that big. It’s just harder to accelerate all that mass.’
‘Obviously not for them.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘So you think that’s what it was? A colony ship?’
I shrugged, striving for a casualness I wasn’t feeling. ‘There are a limited number of reasons for building something this big. It’s either hauling something somewhere, or you live in it. And it’s hard to see why you’d build a habitat this far out. There’s nothing here to study. Nothing to mine or skim.’
‘It’s hard to see why you’d park it here as well, if it is a colony barge.’
Crick-crickle.
I closed my eyes. ‘Why do you care, Hand? When we get back, this thing’s going to disappear into some corporate asteroid dock. None of us’ll ever see it again. Why bother getting attached? You’ll get your percentage, your bonus or whatever it is that powers you up.’
‘You think I’m not curious?’
‘I think you don’t care.’
He said nothing after that, until Sun came up from the hold deck with the bad news. The buoy, it appeared, was irreparably damaged.
‘It signals,’ she said. ‘And with some work, the drives can be reengaged. It needs a new power core, but I believe I can modify one of the bike generators to do the job. But the locational systems are wrecked, and we do not have the tools or material to repair them. Without this, the buoy cannot keep station. Even the backwash from our own drives would probably kick it away into space.’
‘What about deploying after we’ve fired our drives.’ Hand looked from Sun to myself and back. ‘Vongsavath can calculate a trajectory and nudge us forward, then drop the buoy when we’re in. Ah.’
‘Motion,’ I finished for him. ‘The residual motion it picks up from when we toss it is still going to be enough to make it drift away, right Sun?’
‘That is correct.’
‘And if we attach it?’
I grinned mirthlessly. ‘Attach it? Weren’t you there when the nanobes tried to attach themselves to the gate?’
‘We’ll have to look for a way,’ he said doggedly. ‘We are not going home empty-handed. Not when we’ve come this close.’
‘You try welding to that thing out there and we won’t be going home at all, Hand. You know that.’
‘Then,’ suddenly he was shouting at us. ‘There has to be another solution.’
‘There is.’
Tanya Wardani stood in the hatch to the cockpit, where she had retreated while the corpses were dealt with. She was still pale from her vomiting, and her eyes looked bruised, but underlying it there was an almost ethereal calm I hadn’t seen since we brought her out of the camp.
‘Mistress Wardani.’ Hand looked up and down the cabin, as if to check who else had witnessed the loss of cool. He pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. ‘You have something to contribute?’
‘Yes. If Sun Liping can repair the power systems of the buoy, we can certainly place it.’
‘Place it where?’ I asked.
She smiled thinly. ‘Inside.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Inside,’ I nodded at the screen, and the unreeling kilometres of alien structure. ‘That?’
‘Yes. We go in through the docking bay and leave the buoy somewhere secure. There’s no reason to suppose the hull isn’t radio-transparent, at least in places. Most Martian architecture is. We can test-broadcast anyway, until we find a suitable place.’
‘Sun.’ Hand was looking back at the screen, almost dreamily. ‘How long would it take you to effect repairs on the power system?’
‘About eight to ten hours. No more than twelve, certainly.’ Sun turned to the archaeologue. ‘How long will it take you, Mistress Wardani, to open the docking bay?’
‘Oh,’ Wardani gave us all another strange smile. ‘It’s already open.’
I only had one chance to speak to her before we prepared to dock. I met her on her way out of the ship’s toilet facilities, ten minutes after the abrupt and dictatorial briefing Hand had thrown down for everyone. She had her back to me and we bumped awkwardly in the narrow dimensions of the entryway. She turned with a yelp and I saw there was a slight sweat still beading her forehead, presumably from more retching. Her breath smelt bad and stomach-acid odours crept out the door behind her.
She saw the way I was looking at her.
‘What?’
‘Are you alright?’
‘No, Kovacs, I’m dying. How about you?’
‘You sure this is a good idea?’
‘Oh, not you as well! I thought we’d nailed this down with Sutjiadi and Schneider.’
I said nothing, just watched the hectic light in her eyes. She sighed.
‘Look, if it satisfies Hand and gets us home again, I’d say yes, it is a good idea. And it’s a damned sight safer than trying to attach a defective buoy to the hull.’
I shook my head.
‘That’s not it.’
‘No?’
‘No. You want to see the inside of this thing before Mandrake spirit it away to some covert dry dock. You want to own it, even if it’s only for a few hours. Don’t you.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I think, apart from Sutjiadi and Schneider, we all do.’ I knew Cruickshank would have – I could see the shine on her eyes at the thought of it. The awakening enthusiasm she’d had at the rail of the trawler. The same wonder I’d seen on her face when she looked at the activated gate countdown in the UV backwash. Maybe that was why I wasn’t protesting beyond this muttered conversation amidst the curling odour of exhausted vomiting. Maybe this was something I owed.
‘Well, then.’ Wardani shrugged. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘You know what the problem is.’
She made an impatient noise and moved to get past me. I stayed put.
‘You want to get out of my way, Kovacs?’ she hissed. ‘We’re five minutes off landing, and I need to be in the cockpit.’
‘Why didn’t they go in, Tanya?’
‘We’ve been over—’
‘That’s bullshit, Tanya. Ameli’s instruments show a breathable atmosphere. They found a way to open the docking system, or they found it already open. And then they waited out here to die while the air in their suits ran out. Why didn’t they go in?’
‘You were at the briefing. They had no food, they had—’
‘Yeah, I heard you come up with metres and metres of wholecloth rationale, but what I didn’t hear was anything that explains why four archaeologues would rather die in their spacesuits than spend their last hours wandering around the greatest archaeological find in the history of the human race.’
For a moment she hesitated, and I saw something of the woman from the waterfall. Then the feverish light flickered back on in her eyes.
‘Why ask me? Why don’t you just power up one of the ID&A sets, and fucking ask them? They’re stack-intact, aren’t they?’
‘The ID&A sets are fucked, Tanya. Leak-corroded with the buoys. So I’m asking you again. Why didn’t they go in?’
She was silent again, looking away. I thought I saw a tremor at the corner of one eye. Then it was gone, and she looked up at me with the same dry calm I’d seen in the camp.
‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘And if we can’t ask them, then there’s only one other way to find out that I can think of.’