Broken Angels

  The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.

  “You going?”

  “I’ve got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?”

  She looked at me strangely. “Nothing else, thanks.” She straightened up a little in the lounger. “I’ve got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I’ll be down to eat.”

  “Good. See you then. Oh.” I paused on my way out. “What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something.”

  “Tell him I’ll have this gate open inside two days.”

  “Really?”

  She smiled. “No, probably not. But tell him anyway.”

  • • •

  Hand was busy.

  The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the center of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Hand?”

  He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.

  “I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me.”

  “Yeah, he told me that. Now, what the fuck are you doing?”

  The moment hung. I read Hand. The body language said he was yawing close to violence, which was fine by me. Dying slowly was making me twitchy and keen to do harm. Any sympathy I’d had for him a couple of days back was fast evaporating.

  Maybe he read me, too. He made a downward spiral motion with his left hand, and the tension in his face smoothed out. He set the bowl aside and licked the surplus blood off his thumb.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Kovacs.”

  “Let me guess.” I looked around at the candles. The smell of their incense was dark and acrid. “You’re calling up a little supernatural help to get us out of this mess.”

  Hand reached back and snuffed the nearest of the candles without getting up. His Mandrake mask was back in place, his voice even. “As usual, Kovacs, you approach what you do not understand with all the sensitivity of a chimpanzee troop. Suffice it to say there are rituals that must be honored if any relationship with the spirit realm is to be fruitful.”

  “I think I can grasp that, just about. You’re talking about a payoff system. Quid pro quo. A little blood for a handful of favors. Very commercial, Hand, very corporate.”

  “What do you want, Kovacs?”

  “An intelligent conversation. I’ll wait outside.”

  I stepped back through the flap, surprised at a slight trembling that had set in my hands. Probably unhandled feedback from the biocircuits in my palm plates. They were as twitchy as racing dogs at the best of times, intensely hostile to any incursions on their processing integrity, and they probably weren’t handling the radiation any better than the rest of my body.

  Hand’s incense sat at the back of my throat like fragments of wet cloth. I coughed it out. My temples pulsed. I grimaced and made chimpanzee noises. Scratched under my arms. Cleared my throat and coughed again. I settled into a chair in the briefing circle and examined one of my hands. Eventually, the trembling stopped.

  It took the Mandrake exec about five minutes to clear away his paraphernalia, and he emerged looking like a close-to-functional version of the Matthias Hand we were used to seeing around camp. There were blue smears under each eye and his skin had an underlying grayish pallor, but the distance I had seen in the eyes of other men dying of radiation sickness was not there. He had it locked down. There was only the slow seeping knowledge of imminent mortality, and that you had to look for with Envoy eyes.

  “I’m hoping this is very important, Kovacs.”

  “I’m hoping it’s not. Ameli Vongsavath tells me the Nagini’s onboard monitoring system shut itself down last night.”

  He looked at me. I nodded. “Yeah. For about five or six minutes. It isn’t difficult to do—Vongsavath says you can convince the system it’s part of a standard overhaul. So, no alarms.”

  “Oh, Damballah.” He looked out at the beach. “Who else knows?”

  “You do. I do. Ameli Vongsavath does. She told me, I’ve told you. Maybe you can tell Ghede, and he’ll do something about it for you.”

  “Don’t start with me, Kovacs.”

  “It’s time for a management decision, Hand. I figure Vongsavath has to be clean—there was no reason for her to tell me about this otherwise. I know I’m clean, and I’m guessing you are, too. Outside of that, I wouldn’t like to say who else we can trust.”

  “Has Vongsavath checked the ship?”

  “She says, as well as she can without takeoff. I was thinking more about the equipment in the hold.”

  Hand closed his eyes. “Yeah. Great.”

  He was picking up my speech patterns.

  “From a security perspective, I’d suggest Vongsavath takes the two of us up, ostensibly for a check on our nanosized friends. She can run the systems checks while we go through the manifest. Call it late this afternoon—that’s a credible gap since the remotes kicked in.”

  “All right.”

  “I’d also suggest you start carrying one of these where it can’t be seen.” I showed him the compact stunner Vongsavath had given me. “Cute, isn’t it? Navy standard issue apparently, out of the Nagini’s cockpit emergency box. In case of mutiny. Minimal consequences if you fuck up and shoot the wrong guy.”

  He reached for the weapon.

  “Uh-uh. Get your own.” I dropped the tiny weapon back into my jacket pocket. “Talk to Vongsavath. She’s tooled up, too. Three of us ought to be enough to stop anything before it gets started.”

  “Right.” He closed his eyes again, pressed thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of his eyes. “Right.”

  “I know. It feels like someone really doesn’t want us to get through that gate, doesn’t it? Maybe you’re burning incense to the wrong guys.”

  Outside, the ultravibe batteries cut loose again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR

  Ameli Vongsavath put us five kilometers up, flew about for a while, and then kicked on the holding auto. The three of us crowded the cockpit and crouched around the flight-display holo like hunter-gatherers around a fire, waiting. When none of the Nagini’s systems had catastrophically failed three minutes later, Vongsavath pushed out a breath she seemed to have been holding since we stationed.

  “Probably never was anything to worry about,” she said without much conviction. “Whoever’s been playing around in here isn’t likely to want to die with the rest of us, whatever else they might want to achieve.”

  “That,” I said gloomily, “all depends on the level of your commitment.”

  “You’re thinking Ji—”

  I put a finger to my lips. “No names. Not yet. Don’t shape your thoughts ahead of time. And besides, you might want to consider that all our saboteur would really need is a little faith in their recovery team. We’d all still be stack-intact if this thing fell out of the sky, wouldn’t we?”

  “Unless the fuel cells were mined, yes.”

  “There you are, then.” I turned to Hand. “Shall we?”

  • • •

  It didn’t take long to find the damage. When Hand cracked the seal on the first high-impact shielded canister in the hold, the fumes that boiled out were enough to drive us both back up the hatch onto the crew deck. I slapped the emergency isolate panel, and the hatch dropped and locked with a solid thump. I rolled onto my back on the deck, eyes streaming, hacking a cough that dug claws in the bottom of my lungs.

  “Holy. Fuck.”

  Ameli Vongsavath darted into view. “Are you guys—”

  Hand waved her back, nodding weakly.

  “Corrosion grenade,” I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. “Must have just tossed it in
and locked up after. What was in HIS One, Ameli?”

  “Give me a minute.” The pilot went back into the cockpit to run the manifest. Her voice floated back through. “Looks like medical stuff, mostly. Backup plug-ins for the autosurgeon, some of the antiradiation drugs. Both ID and A sets, one of the major-trauma mobility suits. Oh, and one of the Mandrake declared ownership buoys.”

  I nodded at Hand.

  “Figures.” I pushed myself into a sitting position against the curve of the hull. “Ameli, can you check where the other buoys are stored. And let’s get the hold vented before we open this hatch again. I’m dying fast enough without that shit.”

  There was a drink dispenser on the wall above my head. I reached up, tugged a couple of cans free, and tossed one to Hand.

  “Here. Something to wash your alloy oxides down with.”

  He caught the can and coughed out a laugh. I grinned back.

  “So.”

  “So.” He popped the can. “Whatever leakage we had back in Landfall seems to have followed us here. Or do you think someone from outside crept into the camp last night and did this?”

  I thought about it. “It’s stretching credibility. With the nanoware on the prowl, a two-ring sentry system, and lethal-dose radiation blanketing the whole peninsula, they’d have to be some kind of psychotic with a mission.”

  “The Kempists who got into the Tower at Landfall would fit that description. They were carrying stack burnouts, after all. Real death.”

  “Hand, if I was going up against the Mandrake Corporation, I’d probably fit myself with one of those. I’m sure your counterintelligence arm have some really lovely interrogation software.”

  He ignored me, following up his train of thought.

  “Sneaking aboard the Nagini last night wouldn’t be a hard reprise for anyone who can crack the Mandrake Tower.”

  “No, but it’s more likely we’ve got leakage in the house.”

  “All right, let’s assume that. Who? Your crew or mine?”

  I tipped my head in the direction of the cockpit hatch and raised my voice.

  “Ameli, you want to kick on the auto and get in here. I’d hate you to think we’re talking about you behind your back.”

  There was a very brief pause, and Ameli Vongsavath appeared in the hatchway, looking slightly uncomfortable.

  “Already on,” she said. “I, uh, I was listening anyway.”

  “Good.” I gestured her forward. “Because logic dictates that right now you’re the only person we can really trust.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He said logic dictates.” Hand’s mood hadn’t improved since I hauled him out of prayers. “There are no compliments going down here, Vongsavath. You told Kovacs about the shutdown; that pretty much clears you.”

  “Unless I was just covering myself for when someone opened that canister and discovered my sabotage anyway.”

  I closed my eyes. “Ameli . . .”

  “Your crew or mine, Kovacs.” The Mandrake exec was getting impatient. “Which is it?”

  “My crew?” I opened my eyes and stared at the labeling on my can. I’d already run this idea through a couple of times since Vongsavath’s revelation, and I thought I had the logic sorted. “Schneider probably has the flier skills to shut down the onboard monitors. Wardani probably doesn’t. And in either case someone would have had to come up with a better offer than—” I stopped and glanced toward the cockpit. “—than Mandrake has. That’s hard to imagine.”

  “It’s been my experience that enough political belief will short-circuit material benefit as a motivation. Could either of them be Kempists?”

  I thought back down the line of my association with Schneider.

  I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes

  and Wardani

  Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered . . . if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there

  “I don’t see it, somehow.”

  “Wardani was in an internment camp.”

  “Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.”

  Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.

  “All right, my crew.” He glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. “They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have gotten to them in that time.”

  “Do you trust Semetaire?”

  “I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.”

  “I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?”

  Hand rolled his eyes.

  “All right, who? Who’s your money on?”

  “There is another possibility you’re not considering.”

  He looked across at me. “Oh, please. Not the half-meter-fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an expedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and”—I jabbed a thumb at the floor—“we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.”

  Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. “Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?”

  “None that they noticed, no.” I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. “But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of . . . I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.”

  Hand snorted. “Which does what exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out, and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.” I saw the way they were both looking at me. “All right, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now, we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.”

  “Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defense mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency.”

  “You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?”

  Hand shrugged. “Ask Kemp. He did it.”

  “All right, then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that leveled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?”

  “Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?” Hand looked skeptical. “After a year? Come on.”

  “But what if you can’t stop it,” I said softly.

/>   It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.

  “What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioral protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.”

  “Eva—” Hand saw where it was going and shut up.

  “You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.”

  The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.

  “You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction Four?” Hand asked finally. “A behavioral virus?”

  “Well, it would explain the war,” Vongsavath said brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.

  The tension shattered.

  • • •

  Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.

  Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage: A faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armory stock.

  Fuck.

  A third of the antiradiation chemicals. Lost.

  Backup software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.

  One functional buoy left.

  • • •

  Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks, and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.

  Corrosion within.

  “So what are you going to tell the rest?” Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.

  I traded glances with Hand.

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Not a fucking thing. We keep this among the three of us. Write it off to an accident.”

  “Accident?” Vongsavath looked startled.

  “He’s right, Ameli.” I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. “There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was power-pack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.”