I stared at the Mandrake exec. ‘Hand, what’s the matter with you? I thought I told you to ease up on her. The architecture getting to you or something?’
I left him with the corpse and walked across to where Wardani stood with her arms wrapped tightly around her body and her head lowered.
‘Not planning to jump, are you?’
She snorted. ‘That piece of shit. He’d have a fucking corporate holofront on the gates of paradise if he ever found them.’
‘Don’t know about that. He’s a pretty serious believer.’
‘Yeah? Funny how it doesn’t get in the way of his commercial life.’
‘Yeah, well. Organised religion, you know.’
She snorted again, but there was a laugh in it this time and her posture unlocked a little.
‘I don’t know why I got so bent out of shape. I don’t have the tools here to deal with organic remnants anyway. Let it stay up there. Who gives a shit?’
I smiled and placed a hand on her shoulder.
‘You do,’ I said gently.
The dome over our heads was as transparent to radio signals as it was to the visual spectrum. Sun ran a series of basic checks with the equipment she had, then we all trooped back to the Nagini and brought the damaged buoy up to the platform, together with three cases of tools Sun deemed likely to be useful. We stopped in every chamber, flagging the route with amber limpet cherries along the way, and painting the floor with illuminum paint, much to Tanya Wardani’s chagrin.
‘It’ll wash off,’ Sun Liping told her in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other.
Even with a couple of grav harnesses to ease the lifting, getting the buoy to its designated resting place was a long, hard job, made infuriating by the bubbling chaos of the ship’s architecture. By the time we’d assembled everything on the platform – off to one side, at a discreet distance from the mummified original occupants – I was shattered. The radiation damage raging through my cells was getting beyond the power of the drugs to do anything about it.
I found a section of the central structure that wasn’t directly below a corpse and propped myself against it, looking out at the starscape while my abused body did its best to stabilise my pulse and damp down the sickness in the pit of my guts. Out among the stars, the open gate winked at me as it rose over the platform’s horizon. Further right, the nearest Martian tugged at an upper corner of my vision. I looked up and across to where the corpse peered down at me through shrouded eyes. I raised one finger to my temple in salute.
‘Yeah. Be with you shortly.’
‘I’m sorry?’
I rolled my head sideways and saw Luc Deprez standing a couple of metres away. In his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, he looked almost comfortable.
‘Nothing. Communing.’
‘I see.’ From the expression on his face, it was pretty clear he didn’t. ‘I was wondering. Want to go for a look around?’
I shook my head.
‘Maybe later. Don’t let me stop you, though.’
He frowned, but he left me alone. I saw him leaving with Ameli Vongsavath in tow. Elsewhere on the platform, the rest of the party were gathered in small knots, talking in voices that didn’t carry much. I thought I could hear the songspire cluster making faint counterpoint, but I wasn’t up to focusing the neurachem. I felt an immense weariness come sliding down out of the starfield and the platform seemed to tilt away beneath me. I closed my eyes and drifted off into something that wasn’t exactly sleep, but came equipped with all the disadvantages.
Kovacs…
Fucking Semetaire.
Do you miss your fragmented Limon Highlander?
Don’t—
Do you wish she were here in one piece, eh? Or would you like the pieces of her squirming over you unattached?
My face twitched where her foot had smashed my lip as the nanobe cable hurled it past me.
Is there an appeal, hmmm? A segmented houri at your command. A hand here, a hand there. Curved handfuls of flesh. Consumer cut, so to speak. Soft, graspable flesh, Kovacs. Malleable. You could fill your hands with it. Mould it to you.
Semetaire, you’re pushing me—
And unattached to any inconvenient independent will. Throw away the parts you have no use for. The parts that excrete, the parts that think beyond sensual use. The afterlife has many pleasures—
Leave me the fuck alone, Semetaire.
Why should I do that? Alone is cold, a gulf of coldness deeper than you looked upon from the hull of the Mivtsemdi. Why should I abandon you to that when you have been such a friend to me? Sent me so many souls.
Alright. That’s it, motherfucker—
I snapped awake, sweating. Tanya Wardani was crouched a metre away, peering at me. Behind her, the Martian hung in mid-glide, staring blindly down like one of the angels in the Andric cathedral at Newpest.
‘You OK, Kovacs?’
I pressed fingers against my eyes and winced at the ache the pressure caused.
‘Not bad for a dead man, I suppose. You’re not off exploring?’
‘I feel like shit. Maybe later.’
I propped myself up a little straighter. Across the platform, Sun worked steadily on the buoy’s exposed circuit plates. Jiang and Sutjiadi stood nearby, talking in low tones. I coughed. ‘Limited amount of later round here. I doubt it’ll take Sun the whole ten hours. Where’s Schneider?’
‘Went off with Hand. How come you’re not doing the Coral Castle tour yourself?’
I smiled. ‘You’ve never seen the Coral Castle in your life, Tanya. What are you talking about?’
She seated herself beside me, facing the starscape.
‘Trying out my Harlan’s World argot. Got a problem with that?’
‘Fucking tourists.’
She laughed. I sat and enjoyed the sound until it died, and then we both sat for a while in a companionable quiet broken only by the sound of Sun’s circuit soldering.
‘Nice sky,’ she said finally.
‘Yeah. Answer me an archaeological question?’
‘If you like.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘The Martians?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, it’s a big cosmos. Who—’
‘No, these Martians. The crew of this thing. Why leave something this big floating out here abandoned? It must have cost a planetary budget to build, even for them. It’s functional, as near as we can tell. Heated, maintained atmosphere, working docking system. Why didn’t they take it with them?’
‘Who knows? Maybe they left in a hurry.’
‘Oh, come—’
‘No, I mean it. They pulled out of this whole region of space, or were wiped out, or wiped each other out. They left a lot of stuff. Whole cities of it.’
‘Yeah. Tanya, you can’t take a city away with you. Obviously you leave it. But this is a fucking starship. What could make them leave something like that behind?’
‘They left the orbitals around Harlan’s World.’
‘Those are automated.’
‘Well? So is this, to the extent of the maintenance systems.’
‘Yes, but it was built for use by a crew. You don’t have to be an archaeologue to see that.’
‘Kovacs, why don’t you go down to the Nagini and get some rest. Neither of us is up to exploring this place, and you’re giving me a headache.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s the radiation.’
‘No, I—’