I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.

“How old do you reckon they are?”

“Who knows?” She got to her feet again. “If this was a planetary grav field, I’d say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn’t.” She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. “Look at the branching pattern. They don’t. They don’t usually grow like this. Not this twisted.”

I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I’d seen on the plinthed specimen back on earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—

The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.

“Where the hell have you. Oh.”

The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound it made.

“I’m just looking at these, if that’s OK, Hand.”

“Mistress Wardani—”

I shot the exec a warning glance.

Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. “Are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. Ordinarily, no, but—”

The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.

“They’re growing towards each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.”

“That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self relating system.” Sun walked round the cluster of spires, scanning with title emissions tracer on her arm. “Though, hmm.”

“You won’t find any radiation,” said Wardani, almost dreamily. “They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn’t be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.”

“But they don’t.” Hand made it sound as if he was thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. “Why is that, Mistress Wardani?”

“If I knew that, I’d be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don’t even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.”

“They grow, don’t they?”

I saw Wardani sneer. “So do crystals. That doesn’t make them alive.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. “But this looks to me like an infestation.”

“Or art,” murmured Deprez. “How would we know?”

Vongsavath shook her head. “This is a ship, Luc. You don’t put your corridor art where you’ll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They’re all over the place.”

“And if you can fly through?”

“They’d still get in the way.”

“Collision Art,” suggested Schneider with a smirk.

“Alright, that’s enough.” Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. “We do not have—”

“Time for this,” droned Wardani. “We must find a safe transmission base.”

Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez’s direction. I suspected that Hand’s control was crumbling and I wasn’t keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he snapped.

“Sun,” the Mandrake exec’s voice came out even enough. “Check the upper openings.”

The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her bootsoles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upwards. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.

“No way through here,” she called back down from the first opening.

I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand’s back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.

Listen.

Wardani moved closer, then shook her head.

Hissing. “That’s not poss—”

But it was.

The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.

Waking up.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We found Hand’s safe transmission base four songspire clusters about another hour later. By then we’d started to hook back towards the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun’s Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn’t like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours’ wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the programme was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.

Climbing out of a massive spiralling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-metre broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.

I broke the reflex.

“Is that a forcefield?” I asked Sun, panting.

“No, it’s solid.” She frowned over the forearm display. “Transparent alloy, about a metre thick. That’s very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there’s your gate.”

It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of greyish-blue light creeping across the darkness.

“This has got to be the docking control turret,” Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. “What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don’t make it any bet—”

Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something further ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the centre of the platform, I saw the Martians.

“You’d better call the others up,” I said distantly.

They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we’d passed in the bubble chambers.

I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.

Of course, I’d seen them before. Who hasn’t. You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upwards. The Martians. They’ve replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced earthbound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends. Impossible to overestimate, wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls, the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.