“Nothing yet.”

“Yeah, well. Same here. Out.”

I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.

The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.

Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.

It turned out worth it.

Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.

We stood looking up at them for a while.

“Good guess,” I said to Sutjiadi.

“It made sense to look.” He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. “They’ve been stripped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?”

“Yeah, but nobody did,” Vongsavath pointed out.

Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. “The war?”

I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. “Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.” I nodded towards the twists of smoke. “They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?”

“Vividly,” said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.

“That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.”

“So why hide these guys at all?” asked Cruickshank.

I shrugged. “Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.”

“Indigo City,” said Sutjiadi pointedly.

“Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.” Cruickshank grinned. “He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a fucking compliment!”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.”

“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.”