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.”

A swelling vibration spanned the cave. Dust filtered down from around the makeshift bracing. Wardani tipped a glance upward.

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, better keep an eye on that. Hansen and Sun both reckon it’ll stand reverberations a lot closer than the sentries on the inner ring, but then.” I shrugged. “Both of them have made at least one fatal mistake in the past. I’ll get a ramp in here and check the roof isn’t going to fall on you in your moment of triumph.”

“Thanks.”

I shrugged again. “In everyone’s interests, really.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh.” I gestured, suddenly feeling clumsy. “Look, you opened this thing before. You can do it again. Just a matter of time.”

“Which we don’t have.”

“Tell me,” I looked, Envoy-rapid, for some way to disrupt the spiralling gloom in her voice. “If this really is the pinnacle of Martian technology, how come your team were able to crack it in the first place? I mean…?”

I lifted my hands in appeal.

She cracked another weary smile, and I wondered suddenly how hard the radiation poisoning and the chemical counterbalance were hitting her.

“You still don’t get it, do you Kovacs? These aren’t humans we’re talking about. They didn’t think the way we do. Wycinski called it peeled-back democratic technoaccess. It’s like the storm shelters. Anyone could access them—any Martian, that is—because, well, what’s the point of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?”

“You’re right. That isn’t human.”

“It’s one of the reasons Wycinski got into trouble with the Guild in the first place. He wrote a paper on the storm shelters. The science behind the shelters is actually quite complicated, but they’d been built in such a way that it didn’t matter. The control systems were rendered back to a simplicity even we could operate. He called it a clear indication of species-wide unity, and he said it demonstrated that the concept of a Martian imperium tearing itself apart in a colonial war was just so much bullshit.”