The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

flank, flying up between two massively curved rib-struts, the sky above framed by the twisted, buckled ribs, the sections of the hull they had supported turned to dissociated molecules and atoms seven millennia earlier. Sal had let the flier slip four hundred metres or so into the shadows under the intact forward portion of the hull - climbing gently all the time, following the mangled, buckled floors and collapsed bulkheads forming the terrain beneath them - until they could see only the slimmest sliver of violet, star-spattered sky outside and felt they ought to be safe from whatever spaceborne craft - presumably a Beyonder - had been attacking anything that moved or had recently been moving on the surface.
    Sal had set the little craft down. The flier came to rest in a slight hollow on a relatively level patch of blackened, minutely rippled material, behind what might have been the remains of a crumpled bulkhead. The way ahead into the rest of the ship’s forward section was blocked fifty metres further in by the hanging, frozen-looking tatters of some twisted, iridescent material. Saluus had thought aloud about trying to nudge the flier through this suspended debris, but had been dissuaded.
    The flier’s comms reception - even the distorted, jammed signal that they’d experienced outside - had just faded away almost as soon as they’d entered the wreck. For something supposed to pull in a signal through tens of klicks of solid rock, this was remarkable. The air inside the vast cave of the ruined craft felt cold and smelled of nothing. Knowing they were inside, the fact that their voices did not echo in the huge space was oddly disturbing, giving the sound a strange, hollow quality. The interior and running lights of the flier put them in a tiny pool of luminescence, emphasising their insignificance within the ancient fallen ship.
    ‘Some dispute about exactly whose it might be,’ Saluus said, also quietly, and also gazing upwards at the smoothly ribbed ceiling of the vessel, arching a third of a kilometre above them and still just visible in the gloaming. ‘Marked down as a Sceuri wreck - they sent their War Graves people to clean it out - but if it was theirs it must have been requisitioned or captured. And they reckon it had a highly mixed crew, though mostly swimmers: waterworlders. Could be Oerileithe originally, oddly enough. Has the design of a dweller-with-a-small-d ship. But some sort of war craft, certainly.’
    Taince snorted.
    Sal looked at her. ‘Yes?’
    ‘What it isn’t,’ she said, ‘is a needle ship.’
    ‘Did I say it was?’ Sal asked.
    ‘Rather a fat needle, if it was,’ Fassin said, swivelling on his heel to follow the downward curve of the wrecked ship’s interior towards its crumpled, partially buried nose, over a kilometre away in the darkness.
    ‘It’s not a needle ship,’ Sal protested. ‘I didn’t call it a needle ship.’
    ‘See?’ Taince said. ‘Now you’ve confused people.’
    ‘Anyway,’ Sal said, ignoring this, ‘there’s a rumour they pulled a couple of Voehn bodies out of here, and that really does make it more interesting.’
    ‘Voehn?’ Taince burst out laughing. ‘Spiner stiffs?’ Her voice dripped scorn. She was even smiling, which Fassin knew wasn’t something you saw every day. Pity, because her smooth, slightly square face - under a regulation military bald - looked kind of impishly attractive when she smiled. Come to think of it, that was probably why she didn’t do it often. Actually Fassin thought Taince looked pretty good anyway, in her off-duty fatigues. (The rest of them just wore standard hiking\outdoorsy gear, though naturally Sal’s was subtly but noticeably superior and doubtless wildly more expensive.) Tain’s fatigues kind of bagged out in odd locations but came back in at the right places to leave no doubt that she was definitely a milgirl, not a milboy.
    They’d turned shadow-matt and dark in the surrounding gloom, too. Apparently