‘Caretaker systems.’ Tanya Wardani seemed to have lost interest in the machines. She wandered back to the group. ‘A lot of the deeper buried cities on Mars and Nkrumah’s Land had them too.’
‘After this long?’ Sutjiadi didn’t sound happy.
Wardani sighed. She jerked a thumb at the docking bay entrance. ‘It’s not witchcraft, captain. You’ve got the same thing running the Nagini for us back there. If we all die, she’ll sit there for a good few centuries waiting for someone to come back.’
‘Yes, and if it’s someone who doesn’t have the codes, she’ll blast them into soup. That doesn’t reassure me, Mistress Wardani.’
‘Well maybe that’s the difference between us and the Martians. A little civilised sophistication.’
‘And longer lasting batteries,’ I said. ‘This has all been here a lot longer than the Nagini’s good for.’
‘What’s the radio-transparency like?’ asked Hand.
Sun did something to the Nuhanovic system she was wearing. The bulkier shoulder-mounted sections of the survey equipment flickered. Symbols evolved in the air over the back of her hand. She shrugged. ‘It’s not very good. I’m barely picking up the Nagini’s navigational beacon, and she’s only on the other side of the wall. Shielding, I suppose. We are in a docking station, and close to the hull. I think we will need to move further in.’
I spotted a couple of alarmed glances flicker back and forth amongst the group. Deprez caught me watching and he smiled a little.
‘So who wants to explore?’ he asked softly.
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Hand.
I moved out from the instinctive defence huddle we’d all formed, stepped through the gap between two roost bars and reached up to the lip of the opening above and behind. Waves of tiredness and faint nausea shimmered through me as I hauled myself up, but by now I was expecting it and the neurachem locked it down.
The hollow beyond was empty. Not even dust.
‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea,’ I agreed, dropping back. ‘But how many human beings this side of the next millennium are going to get this chance? You need ten hours, right, Sun?’
‘At the most.’
‘And you reckon you can build us a decent map on that thing?’ I gestured at the Nuhanovic set.
‘Very probably. This is the best survey software money can buy.’ She bowed briefly in Hand’s direction. ‘Nuhanovic smart systems. They don’t build it better than this.’
I looked over to Ameli Vongsavath.
‘And the Nagini’s weapon systems are powered up solid.’
The pilot nodded. ‘Parameters I gave, she could stand off a full tactical assault with no help from us.’
‘Well, then I’d say we’ve got a day-pass to the Coral Castle.’ I glanced at Sutjiadi. ‘Those of us that want it, that is.’
Looking around, I saw the idea taking hold. Deprez was already there, face and stance betraying his curiosity, but it was slowly filling up the rest of them too. Everywhere, heads were tilted back to take in the alien architecture, features ironed soft by wonder. Even Sutjiadi couldn’t hold it off completely. The grim watchfulness he’d maintained since we breached the upper levels of the docking chamber’s layered atmosphere field was melting into something less clamped down. The fear of the unknown was ebbing, cancelled out by something stronger and older.
Monkey curiosity. The trait I’d disparaged to Wardani when we arrived on the beach at Sauberville. The scampering, chittering jungle intelligence that would cheerfully scale the brooding figures of ancient stone idols and poke fingers into the staring eyesockets just to see. The bright obsidian desire to know. The thing that’s dragged us out here, all the way from the grasslands of central Africa. The thing that one day’ll probably put us somewhere so far out that we’ll get there ahead of the sunlight from those central African days.
Hand stepped into the centre, poised in executive mode.
‘Let’s achieve some sense of priority here,’ he said carefully. ‘I sympathise with any wish you may all have to see some of this vessel – I would like to see it myself – but our major concern is to find a safe transmission base for the buoy. That we must do before anything else, and I suggest we do it as a single unit.’ He turned to Sutjiadi. ‘After that, we can detail exploratory parties. Captain?’
Sutjiadi nodded, but it was an uncharacteristically vague motion. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t really paying attention at human frequencies any more.
If there’d been any lingering doubts about the Martian vessel’s hulk status, a couple of hours in the frozen bubbles of its architecture was enough to cancel them out. We walked for over a kilometre, winding back and forth through the apparently random connections between chambers. In places the openings were more or less at floor level, but elsewhere they were cut high enough that Wardani or Sun had to power up the grav harnesses they were wearing and float up to peer through. Jiang and Deprez took point together, splitting and edging up to the entrance to each new chamber with quiet, symmetrical lethality.
We found nothing recognisably living.
The machines we came across ignored us, and no one seemed inclined to get close enough to elicit more of a reaction.
Increasingly, as we moved deeper into the body of the ship, we began to find structures that might by a stretch of the imagination be called corridors – long, bulbous spaces with egg-shaped entrances let in at either end. It looked like the same construction technique as the standard bubble chamber, modified to suit.
‘You know what this whole thing is,’ I told Wardani, while we waited for Sun to scout out another overhead opening. ‘It’s like aerogel. Like they built a basic framework and then just,’ – I shook my head. The concept stubbornly resisted chiselling out into words – ‘I don’t know, just blew up a few cubic kilometres of heavy-duty aerogel base all over it, and then waited for it to harden.’
Wardani smiled wanly. ‘Yeah, maybe. Something like that. That would put their plasticity science a little ahead of ours, wouldn’t it. To be able to map and model foam data on this scale.’
‘Maybe not.’ I groped at the opening shape of the idea, feeling at its origami edges. ‘Out here specific structure wouldn’t matter. Whatever came out would do. And then you just fill the space with whatever you need. Drivers, environmental systems, you know, weapons…’
‘Weapons?’ She looked at me with something unreadable in her face. ‘Does this have to be a warship?’
‘No, it was an example. But—’
‘Something in here,’ said Sun over the comset. ‘Some kind of tree or—’
What happened next was hard to explain.
I heard the sound coming.
I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I’d only previously run into in dreams.
‘Songspire,’ said Wardani.
I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I’d just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.
Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.
Sutjiadi’s normally immobile features creased.