“Silent running,” said Vongsavath. “Got it.”

“Good.” Sutjiadi nodded at Cruickshank, and the Limon woman loped out of the cavern. “Hansen, Cruickshank’s coming down to help prep the claim buoy. That’s all. The rest of you, stay sharp.” Sutjiadi unlocked his posture slightly and turned to face the archaeologue. “Mistress Wardani, you look ill. Is there anything remaining for you to do here?”

“I—” Wardani sagged visibly over the console. “No, I’m done. Until you want the damned thing closed again.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Hand called out from where he stood to one side of the gate, looking up at it with a distinctly proprietorial air. “With the buoy established, we can notify the Cartel and bring in a full team. With Wedge support, I imagine we can render this a ceasefire zone”—he smiled—“rather rapidly.”

“Try telling that to Kemp,” said Schneider.

“Oh, we will.”

“In any case, Mistress Wardani.” Sutjiadi’s tone was impatient. “I suggest you return to the Nagini as well. Ask Cruickshank to jack her field medic programme and look you over.”

“Well, thanks.”

“I beg your pardon.”

Wardani shook her head and propped herself upright. “I thought one of us should say it.”

She left without a backward glance. Schneider looked at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, went after her.

“You’ve got a way with civilians, Sutjiadi. Anyone ever tell you that?”

He stared at me impassively. “Is there some reason for you to stay?”

“I like the view.”

He made a noise in his throat and looked back at the gate. You could tell he didn’t like doing it, and with Cruickshank gone, he was letting the feeling leak out. There was a gathered stiffness about his stance as soon as he faced the device, something akin to the tension you see in bad fighters before a bout.

I put up a flat hand in clear view, and after a proper pause I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Don’t tell me this thing scares you, Sutjiadi. Not the man who faced down Dog Veutin and his whole squad. You were my hero for a while, back there.”

If he thought it was funny, he kept it to himself.

“Come on, it’s a machine. Like a crane, like a…” I groped about for appropriate comparisons. “Like a machine. That’s all it is. We’ll be building these ourselves in a few centuries. Take out the right sleeve insurance, you might even live to see it.”

“You’re wrong,” he said distantly. “This isn’t like anything human.”

“Oh shit, you’re not going to get mystical on me, are you?” I glanced across to where Hand stood, suddenly feeling unfairly ganged-up on. “Of course it isn’t like anything human. Humans didn’t build it, the Martians did. But they’re just another race. Smarter than us maybe, further ahead than us maybe, but that doesn’t make them gods or demons, does it? Does it?”

He turned to face me. “I don’t know. Does it?”

“Sutjiadi, I swear you’re beginning to sound like that moron over there. This is technology you’re looking at.”

“No.” He shook his head. “This is a threshold we’re about to step over. And we’re going to regret it. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the. The waiting in it?”

“No, but I can feel the waiting in me. If this thing creeps you out so much, can we go and do something constructive.”

“That would be good.”

Hand seemed content to stay and gloat over his new toy, so we left him there and made our way back along the tunnel. Sutjiadi’s jitters must have sparked across to me somehow though, because as the first twist took us out of sight of the activated gate, I had to admit that I felt something on the back of my neck. It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind.

At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within.

I shook the thought loose irritably.

“You happy now?” I enquired acidly, as we stepped out into the light.

“I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get you, Sutjiadi. Landfall’s built within sniper fire of six major digs. This whole planet is riddled with Martian ruins.”

“I’m from Latimer, originally. I go where they tell me.”

“Alright, Latimer. They’re not short on ruins either. Jesus, every fucking world we’ve colonised belonged to them once. We’ve got their charts to thank for being out here in the first place.”

“Exactly.” Sutjiadi stopped dead and swung on me with the closest thing I’d seen to true emotion on his face since he’d lost the tussle over blasting the rockfall away from the gate. “Exactly. And you want to know what that means?”

I leaned back, surprised by the sudden intensity. “Yeah, sure. Tell me.”

“It means we shouldn’t be out here, Kovacs.” He was speaking in a low, urgent voice I hadn’t heard him use before. “We don’t belong here. We’re not ready. It’s a stupid fucking mistake that we stumbled onto the astrogation charts in the first place. Under our own steam, it would have taken us thousands of years to find these planets and colonise them. We needed that time, Kovacs. We needed to earn our place in interstellar space. Instead we got out here bootstrapping ourselves on a dead civilisation we don’t understand.”

“I don’t think—”

He trampled the objection down. “Look at how long it’s taken the archaeologue to open that gate. Look at all the half-understood scraps we’ve depended on to come this far. We’re pretty sure the Martians saw farther into blue than we do.” He mimicked Wardani savagely. “She’s got no idea, and neither does anyone else. We’re guessing. We have no idea what we’re doing, Kovacs. We wander around out here, nailing our little anthropomorphic certainties to the cosmos and whistling in the dark, but the truth is we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing. We shouldn’t be out here at all. We do not belong here.”

I pushed out a long breath.

“Well. Sutjiadi.” I looked at ground and sky in turn. “You’d better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a shithole, of course, but it’s where we’re from. We sure as hell belong there.”

He smiled a little, rearguard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.

“It’s too late for that,” he said quietly. “Much too late for that.”

Down by the Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device’s ability to do the job.

“Look,” said Hansen irritably, as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. “It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it’s patterned the trace, there’s nothing short of a dark body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there’s no problem.”

“That isn’t impossible,” Hand told him. “Run the mass detector backup again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.”

Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-metre buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini’s hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.