Broken Angels

  Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.

  Corrosion within.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FIVE

  Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.

  “Are those webs?” someone asked.

  Sutjiadi dialed the magnifier up to full. He got gray cobwebbing, hundreds of meters long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.

  “That is fast work,” said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. “But to me it looks defensive.”

  “For the moment,” Hand agreed.

  “Well, let’s keep it that way.” Cruickshank looked belligerently around the circle. “We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.”

  “They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.” Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the power-pack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. “They’ll learn and adapt on us again.”

  Cruickshank made an angry gesture. “Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?”

  “That sounds like sense to me.” Sutjiadi stood up. “Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma-cored, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.”

  • • •

  Sutjiadi got what he wanted.

  After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processor, and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.

  I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leaning on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whiskey we’d found in a locker on the bridge.

  “Very pretty,” said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass. “And very crude.”

  “Well, it’s a war.”

  He eyed me curiously. “Strange point of view for an Envoy.”

  “Ex-Envoy.”

  “Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps have a reputation for subtlety.”

  “When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.”

  “Innenin.”

  “Yeah, Innenin, too.” I looked into the dregs of my drink.

  “Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.”

  “You reckon?” I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.

  “For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis and ice that fuck. War. Over.”

  “That’s simplistic, Deprez.” I poured refills. “He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?”

  “Them, too, of course.” Deprez raised his glass. “Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what? It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?”

  I knocked back the first of the new drink and grimaced. “Do I look like an accountant?”

  “All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.”

  “Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that, either.”

  “No,” the assassin said somberly. “That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.”

  “You sound kind of squeamish for a covert-ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

  He shook his head.

  “I know what I am,” he said. “But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai—there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.”

  I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometers southwest of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die, either.

  Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.

  “Well, that’s that.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  I shrugged. “Like Hansen says. For a while.”

  “So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons—the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?”

  “Sharp sticks?”

  “Are we close to opening the gate?”

  “Why ask me? Wardani’s the expert.”

  “You seem. Close to her.”

  I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.

  “Are you staying out here?”

  I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.

  “No reason to leave yet that I can see.”

  He chuckled. “You do realize that we are drinking a collector’s item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean”—he gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be—“they aren’t going to be making any more.”

  “Yeah.” I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck toward the murdered city. I poured another glass full and raised it to the sky. “So here’s to them. Let’s drink the fucking bottle.”

  We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser’s handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.

  At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me:

  “Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?”

  I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and tankhead was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I’d been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops . . .

  “No, of course not. Were you?”

  “Of course I fucking was not. But the Envoys—”

  “Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual, and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned shit that in your saner moments you’d probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that’s pretty much essential.”

  “Not really.” Deprez wagged a finger. “They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed, and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn’t even have to know it hadn’t had a real upbringing. You could be something like that for all you know.”

  I yawned. “Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It’s something you live with every time you get resleeved, every time you get DHF’d, and you know how I know they haven’t done that to me?”

  “How?”

  “Because there’s no way they’d pr
ogram an upbringing as fucked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority, and emotionally unpredictable. Some fucking clone warrior that makes me, Luc.”

  He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.

  “It brings you to think, though,” he said, laughter drying up.

  “What does?”

  He gestured around. “All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it’s all some military construct, man. Maybe it’s a place to shunt us while we’re dead, while they decide where to decant us next.”

  I shrugged. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  “You would be happy like that? In a construct?”

  “Luc, after what I’ve seen in the last two years, I’d be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the damned.”

  “Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality.”

  “We differ over terms.”

  “You consider yourself damned?”

  I downed more Sauberville whiskey and grimaced past the burn. “It was a joke, Luc. I’m being funny.”

  “Ah. You should warn me.” He leaned forward suddenly. “Can I ask you something? When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?”

  “If it’s not a personal question.”

  “We may die on this beach. Really die.”

  “Not if it’s a construct.”

  “Then what if we are damned, as you say?”

  “I don’t see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you.”

  Deprez pulled a face. “We’ll talk about something else, then. Are you fucking the archaeologue?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “What?”

  “Sixteen. I was sixteen. That’s closer to eighteen, Earth-standard. Harlan’s World orbits slower.”

  “Still very young.”

  I considered. “Nah, it was about time. I’d been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I’d come close a couple of times already.”

  “It was a gang killing?”

  “It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we’d expected. The others ran, I got caught.” I looked at my hands. “Then I was tougher than he expected.”

  “Did you take his stack?”

  “No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got resleeved, but I’d joined up by then. He wasn’t connected enough to fuck with the military.”

  “And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death.”

  “I’m sure I would have gotten around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly fucked run-up at this stuff?”

  “Oh no,” he said lightly. “It’s in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historical links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military.” He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. “You might say we were bred for it.”

  “So how does covert ops sit with your historical military family history? They disappointed you didn’t end up with a command? If that’s not a personal question.”

  Deprez shrugged. “Soldier’s a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains.”

  “And your first?”

  “On Latimer.” He smiled again, remembering. “I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose. During the Soufriere Uprising, I was part of a reconnaissance squad across the swamplands. Walked around a tree and bam!” He brought fist and cupped hand together. “There he was. I shot him before I realized it. It blasted him back ten meters and cut him in two pieces. I saw it happen and in that moment I did not understand what had happened. I did not understand that I had shot this man.”

  “Did you take his stack?”

  “Oh, yes. We had been instructed. Recover all fatalities for interrogation, leave no evidence.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  Deprez shook his head.

  “I was sick,” he admitted. “Very sick. The others in my squad laughed at me, but the sergeant helped me do the cutting. He also cleaned me up and told me not to worry about it too much. Later there were others, and I, well, I became accustomed.”

  “And good at it.”

  He met my gaze, and the confirmation of that shared experience sparked.

  “After the Soufriere campaign, I was decorated. Recommended for covert duties.”

  “You ever run into the Carrefour Brotherhood?”

  “Carrefour?” He frowned. “They were active in the troubles farther south. Bissou and the cape—do you know it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bissou was always their home ground, but who they were fighting for was a mystery. There were Carrefour hougans running guns to the Rebels on the cape—I know, I killed one or two myself—but we had some working for us as well. They supplied intelligence, drugs, sometimes religious services. A lot of the rank-and-file soldiers were strong believers, so getting a hougan blessing before battle was a good thing for any commander to do. Have you had dealings with them?”

  “A couple of times in Latimer City. More by reputation than actual contact. But Hand is a hougan.”

  “Indeed.” Deprez looked abruptly thoughtful. “That is very interesting. He does not. Behave like a man of religion.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “It will make him. Less predictable.”

  “Hoy. Envoy guy.” The shout came from under the port rail, and in its wake I caught the murmur of motors. “You aboard?”

  “Cruickshank?” I looked up from my musing. “That you, Cruickshank?”

  Laughter.

  I stumbled upright and went to the rail. Peering down, I made out Schneider, Hansen, and Cruickshank, all crammed onto one grav bike and hovering. They were clutching bottles and other party apparatuses, and from the erratic way the bike hovered, the party had started a while ago back on the beach.

  “You’d better come aboard before you drown,” I said.

  • • •

  The new crew came with music attached. They dumped the sound system on the deck and the night lit up with Limon Highland salsa. Schneider and Hansen put together a tower pipe and powered it up at the base. The smoke fumed off fragrant amid the hung nets and masting. Cruickshank passed out cigars with the ruin-and-scaffold label of Indigo City.

  “These are banned,” observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.

  “Spoils of war.” Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, then hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn’t been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.

  “All right,” she said, commandeering the bottle from me. “Now we’re running interference.”

  I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.

  “This was a quiet party until you turned up.”

  “Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?”

  The cigar smoke bit. “So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?”

  “Armory supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn’t steal anything, we have an arrangement. He’s meeting me in the gun room”—she shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display—“in about an hour from now. So. Were you two old dogs comparing kills?”

  I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.

  “No.”

  “That’s good.” She plumed smoke skyward. “I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless assholes. I mean, Samedi’s sake, it’s not like killing people is hard. We’ve all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.”

  “And refining your technique, of course.”

  “You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?”

&nbs
p; I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.

  “You’re from Limon, yes?” Deprez asked.

  “Highlander, born and bred. Why?”

  “You must have had some dealings with Carrefour, then.”

  Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. “Those fuckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of ’twenty-eight. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn’t work, burning villages.”

  Deprez threw me a glance.

  I said it. “Hand’s ex-Carrefour.”

  “Doesn’t show.” She blew smoke. “Fuck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings till it’s time for worship. You know, for all the shit they pile on Kemp—” She hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. “—at least he won’t have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City; I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.”

  “Well, God,” Deprez said dryly. “You know, that’s a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp’s.”

  “I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.”

  I snorted.

  “Hey.” Schneider pushed his way into the ring. “Come on, I heard that, too. What was that Quell said? Spit on the tyrant God if the fucker tries to call you to account? Something like that?”

  “Kemp’s no fucking Quellist,” said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. “Right, Kovacs?”

  “It’s questionable. He borrows from it.” I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my rib cage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider’s direction. “And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.”