Jorge clamped a hand on Antonio's shoulder. «Fate has smiled on us, Antonio. This was registered as a joint venture flight. No matter we were looking for something different. By law, we are entitled to an equal share of the xenoc technology. We are already trillionaires, my friend. When we get home we can buy Sonora asteroid; Holy Mother, we can buy the entire Lagrange cluster.»
Antonio managed a smile, which didn't quite correspond with the dew of sweat on his forehead. «OK, Jorge. Hell, you're right. We don't have to worry about anything any more. But . . .»
«Now what?»
«I know we can pay off the loan on the satellites, but what about the Crusade council? They won't like this. They might—«
«There's no cause for alarm. The council will never trouble us again. I maintain that I am right about the disaster which destroyed the xenoc ship. It didn't have an accident. That is a warship, Antonio. And you know what that means, don't you? Somewhere on board there will be weapons just as advanced and as powerful as the rest of its technology.»
It was Wai's third trip over to the xenoc ship. None of them spent more than two hours at a time inside. The gravity field made every muscle ache, walking round was like being put on a crash exercise regimen.
Schutz and Karl were still busy by the airlock, probing the circuitry of the cybermice, and decrypting more of their programming. It was probably the most promising line of research; once they could use the xenoc program language they should be able to extract any answer they wanted from the ship's controlling network. Assuming there was one. Wai was convinced there would be. The number of systems operating—life-support, power, gravity—had to mean some basic management integration system was functional.
In the meantime there was the rest of the structure to explore. She had a layout file stored in her neural nanonics, updated by the others every time they came back from an excursion. At the blunt end of the wedge there could be anything up to forty decks, if the spacing was standard. Nobody had gone down to the bottom yet. There were some areas which had no obvious entrance; presumably engineering compartments, or storage tanks. Marcus had the teams tracing the main power lines with magnetic sensors, trying to locate the generator.
Wai plodded after Roman as he followed a cable running down the centre of a corridor on the eighth deck.
«It's got so many secondary feeds it looks like a fish-bone,» he complained. They paused at a junction with five branches and he swept the block round. «This way.» He started off down one of the new corridors.
«We're heading towards stairwell five,» she told him, as the layout file scrolled through her skull.
There were more cybermice than usual on deck eight; over thirty were currently pursuing her and Roman, creating strong ripples in the composite floor and walls. Wai had noticed that the deeper she went into the ship the more of them there seemed to be. Although after her second trip she'd completely ignored them. She wasn't paying a lot of attention to the compartments leading off from the corridors, either. It wasn't that they were all the same, rather that they were all similarly empty.
They reached the stairwell, and Roman stepped inside. «It's going down,» he datavised.
«Great, that means we've got another level to climb up when we're finished.»
Not that going down these stairs was easy, she acknowledged charily. If only they could find some kind of variable gravity chute. Perhaps they'd all been positioned in the part of the ship that was destroyed.
«You know, I think Marcus might have been right about the dish being an emergency beacon,» she datavised. «I can't think of any other reason for it being built. Believe me, I've tried.»
«He always is right. It's bloody annoying, but that's why I fly with him.»
«I was against it because of the faith gap.»
«Say what?»
«The amount of faith these xenocs must have had in themselves. It's awesome. So different from humans. Think about it. Even if their homeworld is only two thousand light-years away, that's how long the message is going to take to reach there. Yet they sent it believing someone would still be around to receive it, and more, act on it. Suppose that was us; suppose the Lady Mac had an accident a thousand light-years away. Would you think there was any point in sending a lightspeed message to the Confederation, then going into zero-tau to wait for a rescue ship?»
«If their technology can last that long, then I guess their civilization can, too.»
«No, our hardware can last for a long time. It's our culture that's fragile, at least compared to theirs. I don't think the Confederation will last a thousand years.»
«The Edenists will be here, I expect. So will all the planets, physically if nothing else. Some of their societies will advance, possibly even to a state similar to the Kiint; some will revert to barbarism. But there will be somebody left to hear the message and help.»
«You're a terrible optimist.»
They arrived at the ninth deck, only to find the doorway was sealed over with composite.
«Odd,» Roman datavised. «If there's no corridor or compartment beyond, why put a doorway here at all?»
«Because this was a change made after the accident.»
«Could be. But why would they block off an interior section?»
«I've no idea. You want to keep going down?»
«Sure. I'm optimistic enough not to believe in ghosts lurking in the basement.»
«I really wish you hadn't said that.»
The tenth deck had been sealed off as well.
«My legs can take one more level,» Wai datavised. «Then I'm going back.»
There was a door on deck eleven. It was the first one in the ship to be closed.
Wai stuck her fingers in the dimple, and the door dilated. She edged over cautiously, and swept the focus of her collar sensors round. «Holy shit. We'd better fetch Marcus.»
Decks nine and ten had simply been removed to make the chamber. Standing on the floor and looking up, Marcus could actually see the outline of the stairwell doorways in the wall above him. By xenoc standards it was a cathedral. There was only one altar, right in the centre. A doughnut of some dull metallic substance, eight metres in diameter with a central aperture five metres across; the air around it was emitting a faint violet glow. It stood on five sable-black arching buttresses, four metres tall.
«The positioning must be significant,» Wai datavised. «They built it almost at the centre of the wreck. They wanted to give it as much protection as possible.»
«Agreed,» Katherine replied. «They obviously considered it important. After a ship has suffered this much damage, you don't expend resources on anything other than critical survival requirements.»
«Whatever it is,» Schutz reported, «it's using up an awful lot of power.» He was walking round it, keeping a respectful distance, wiping a sensor block over the floor as he went. «There's a power cable feeding each of those legs.»
«Is it radiating in any spectrum?» Marcus asked.
«Only that light you can see, which spills over into ultraviolet, too. Apart from that, it's inert. But the energy must be going somewhere.»
«OK.» Marcus walked up to a buttress, and switched his collar focus to scan the aperture. It was veiled by a grey haze, as if a sheet of fog had solidified across it. When he took another tentative step forward the fluid in his semicircular canals was suddenly affected by a very strange tidal force. His foot began to slip forwards and upwards. He threw himself backwards, and almost stumbled. Jorge and Karl just caught him in time.
«There's no artificial gravity underneath it,» he datavised. «But there's some kind of gravity field wrapped around it.» He paused. «No, that's not right. It pushed me.»
«Pushed?» Katherine hurried to his side. «Are you sure?»
«Yes.»
«My God.»
«What? Do you know what it is?»