Broken Angels

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry.” It was the same comically crestfallen expression I’d seen on her face in the construct interview. Somehow, on the Maori sleeve it was funnier still. I chuckled, grabbed at the glimmer of laughter offered. Grabbed and grinned harder.

  “Ahhh,” she said, feeling the change. “Want to try anyway? Won’t take much, I’m all wet inside.”

  She slid back and arched over me. In the faint glow from the datacoil, I fixed my gaze on the juncture of her thighs with a kind of desperation and she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.

  The heat and pressure and the long, tensed body riding me were the fragments I used to keep going, but it still wasn’t what you’d call great sex. I slipped free a couple of times and my problems became hers as the obvious lack of abandonment braked her excitement back to not much more than methodical technical expertise and a determination to get this done.

  Do you see how—

  I flailed down the voice in the back of my head and brought some determination of my own to match that of the woman I was joined to. For a while it was work, attention to posture, and tight smiles. Then I pushed a thumb into her mouth, let her moisten it, and used it to find her clitoris in the crux of her spread legs. She took my other hand and pressed it onto her breast, and not long after she found an orgasm of sorts.

  I didn’t, but in the grinning, sweat-soaked kiss we shared after she had come, that didn’t seem to matter so much.

  It wasn’t great sex, but it slammed the door on Semetaire for a while. And later, when Cruickshank pulled her clothes back together and went back up on deck, to cheers and applause from the rest of the party, I stayed in the gloom waiting for him, and he still chose not to show.

  It was the closest thing to a victory that I ever enjoyed on Sanction IV.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–SIX

  Consciousness hit me in the head like a freak fighter’s claw.

  I flinched from the impact and rolled over in the bedshelf, trying to crawl back into sleep, but the movement brought with it a rolling wave of nausea. I stopped the vomit in its tracks with an effort of will and propped myself up on one elbow, blinking. Daylight was boring a blurry hole through the gloom above my head from a porthole I hadn’t noticed the night before. At the other end of the cabin, the datacoil wove its tireless spiral from the emanator on the desk to the shelved systems data in the top left-hand corner. Voices came through the bulkhead behind me.

  Check functionality. I heard Virginia Vidaura’s admonitions from the Envoy training modules. It’s not injury you’re concerned with, it’s damage. Pain you can either use or shut down. Wounds matter only if they cause structural impairment. Don’t worry about the blood; it isn’t yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don’t worry about wounds; check your functionality.

  My head felt as if someone were sawing it in half from the inside. Waves of feverish sweat spread down through me, apparently from a point on the back of my scalp. The floor of my stomach had climbed and was nestling somewhere at the base of my throat. My lungs hurt in an obscure, misted way. It felt as if I’d been shot with the stunner in my jacket pocket, on a not-particularly-low beam.

  Functionality!

  Thanks, Virginia.

  Hard to tell how much of this was hangover and how much was dying. Hard to care. I worked myself cautiously into a sitting position on the edge of the shelf and noticed for the first time that I’d fallen asleep more or less in my clothes. I searched my pockets, turned up the battlefield medic’s gun and the antiradiation capsules. I weighed the transparent plastic tubes in one hand and thought about it. The shock of injection was very likely going to make me vomit.

  A deeper trawl through my pockets finally turned up a stick of military-issue painkillers. I snapped one loose, held it between finger and thumb and looked at it for a moment, then added a second. Conditioned reflex took the controls as I checked the delivery muzzle of the medic’s gun, cleared the breech, and loaded the two crystal-filled capsules nose to tail. I snapped the slide, and the gun made a high-pitched scaling whine as the magnetic field charged.

  My head twinged. An excruciating hard-under-soft sensation that made me, for some reason, think of the flecks of systems data floating in the corner of the coil at the other end of the room.

  The charged light winked redly at me from the gun. Inside the breech, inside the capsules, the military-format crystal shards would be aligned, sharp-edged ends pointing down the barrel like a million poised daggers. I pushed the muzzle against the crook of my elbow and squeezed the trigger.

  The relief was instant. A soft red rush through my head, wiping the pain away in smudges of pink and gray. Wedge issue. Nothing but the very best for Carrera’s wolves. I smirked to myself, stoned on the endorphin boost, and groped for the antiradiation capsules.

  Feeling pretty fucking functional now, Virginia.

  Dumped out the shredded painkiller caps. Reloaded with antirad, snapped the slide.

  Look at yourself, Kovacs. A dying, disintegrating set of cells, woven back together with chemical thread.

  That didn’t sound like Virginia Vidaura, so it might have been Semetaire, creeping back from last night’s retreat. I pushed the observation to the back of my mind and focused on function.

  You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon . . .

  Yeah, yeah.

  Waited out the rising whine. Waited for the red-eyed wink.

  Shot.

  Pretty fucking functional.

  • • •

  Clothing arranged in something approaching fastened order, I followed the sound of the voices to the galley. Everyone from the party was gathered there, with the notable exception of Schneider, and breakfast was in progress. I got a brief round of applause as I made my appearance. Cruickshank grinned, bumped hips with me, and handed me a mug of coffee. By the look of her pupils, I wasn’t the only one who’d been at the mil-issue medicine pack.

  “What time did you guys wind up?” I asked, seating myself.

  Ole Hansen consulted his retinal display. “ ’Bout an hour ago. Luc here offered to cook. I went back to the camp for the stuff.”

  “What about Schneider?”

  Hansen shrugged and forked food into his mouth. “Went with, but then he stayed. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “Here.” Luc Deprez slid an omelet-laden plate in front of me. “Refuel.”

  I tried a couple of mouthfuls but couldn’t develop any enthusiasm for it. I wasn’t feeling any definable pain, but there was a sickly instability underlying the numbness that I knew had set in at a cellular level. I hadn’t had any real appetite for the last couple of days, and it had been getting increasingly hard to hold food down early in the morning. I cut up the omelet and pushed the pieces around the plate, but in the end I left most of it.

  Deprez pretended not to notice, but you could tell he was hurt.

  “Anyone notice if our tiny friends are still burning?”

  “There’s smoke,” said Hansen. “But not much of it. You’re not going to eat that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Give it here.” He grabbed my plate and scraped it onto his own. “You really must have overdone the local hooch last night.”

  “I’m dying, Ole,” I said irritably.

  “Yeah, maybe it’s that. Or the pipe. My father told me once, never mix alcohol and whiff. Fucks you up.”

  A comset chime sounded from the other end of the table. Someone’s discarded induction rig left on broadcast. Hansen grunted and reached for the set with his free hand. He held it to his ear.

  “Hansen. Yeah.” He listened. “All right. Five minutes.” He listened again, and a thin smile appeared on his face. “Right, I’ll tell them. Ten minutes. Yeah.”

  He tossed the set back among the plates and grimaced.

  “Sutjiadi?”

>   “Got it in one. Going to fly a recon over the nanocolonies. Oh yeah”—his grin came back—“and the man says don’t turn off your fucking rigs if you don’t want to log a fucking disciplinary.”

  Deprez chuckled. “Is that a fucking quote?”

  “No. Fucking paraphrase.” Hansen tossed his fork across his plate and stood up. “He didn’t say disciplinary, he called it a DP-nine.”

  • • •

  Running a platoon is a tricky job at the best of times. When your crew are all way-past-lethal spec ops prima donnas who’ve been killed at least once, it must be a nightmare.

  Sutjiadi wore it well.

  He watched without expression as we filed into the briefing room and found seats. The memoryboard on each seat had been set with a foil of edible painkillers, bent and stood on end. Someone whooped above the general murmur when they saw the drugs, then quieted down as Sutjiadi looked in their direction. When he spoke, his voice could have belonged to a restaurant mandroid recommending wine.

  “Anyone here who still has a hangover had better deal with it now. One of the outer-ring sentry systems is down. There’s no indication of how.”

  It got the desired reaction. The murmur of conversation damped out. I felt my own endorphin high dip.

  “Cruickshank and Hansen, I want you to take one of the bikes and go check it out. Any sign of activity, any activity at all, you veer off and get straight back here. Otherwise, I want you to recover any wreckage on-site and bring it back for analysis. Vongsavath, I want the Nagini powered up and ready to lift at my command. Everybody else, arm yourselves and stay where you can be found. And wear your rigs at all times.” He turned to Tanya Wardani, who was slumped in a chair at the back of the room, wrapped in her coat and masked with sunlenses. “Mistress Wardani. Any chance of an estimated opening time?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.” She gave no sign that she was even looking at him behind the lenses. “With luck.”

  Someone snorted. Sutjiadi didn’t bother to track it.

  “I don’t need to remind you, Mistress Wardani, that we are under threat.”

  “No. You don’t.” She unfolded herself from the chair and drifted for the exit. “I’ll be in the cave.”

  The meeting broke up in her wake.

  • • •

  Hansen and Cruickshank were gone less than half an hour.

  “Nothing,” the demolitions specialist told Sutjiadi when they got back. “No debris, no scorching, no signs of machine damage. In fact”—he looked back over his shoulder, back to where they’d searched—“no sign the fucking thing was ever there in the first place.”

  The tension in the camp notched higher. Most of the spec ops team, true to their individual callings, retreated into moody quiet and semi-obsessive examinations of the weapons they were skilled with. Hansen unpacked the corrosion grenades and studied their fuses. Cruickshank stripped down the mobile artillery systems. Sutjiadi and Vongsavath disappeared into the cockpit of the Nagini, followed after a brief hesitation by Schneider. Luc Deprez sparred seriously with Jiang Jianping down by the waterline, and Hand retreated into his bubblefab, presumably to burn some more incense.

  I spent the rest of the morning seated on a rock ledge above the beach with Sun Liping, hoping the residues from the night before would work their way out of my system before the painkillers did. The sky over us had the look of better weather. The previous day’s nailed-down gray had broken apart on reefs of blue arrowing in from the west. Eastward, the smoke from Sauberville bent away with the evacuating cloud cover. Vague awareness of the hangover that waited beyond the curtain of endorphins lent the whole scene an undeservedly mellow tone.

  The smoke from the nanocolonies that Hansen had seen was gone altogether. When I mentioned the fact to Sun, she just shrugged. I wasn’t the only one feeling irrationally mellow, it seemed.

  “Any of this worry you at all?” I asked her.

  “This situation?” She appeared to think about it. “I’ve been in more danger, I think.”

  “Of course you have. You’ve been dead.”

  “Well, yes. But that wasn’t what I meant. The nanosystems are a concern, but even if Matthias Hand’s fears are well founded, I don’t imagine they will evolve anything capable of pulling the Nagini out of the sky.”

  I thought about the grasshopper robot guns Hand had mentioned. It was one of many details he had chosen not to pass on to the rest of the team when he briefed them on the OPERN System.

  “Does your family know what you do for a living?”

  Sun looked surprised. “Yes, of course. My father recommended the military. It was a good way of getting my systems training paid for. They always have money, he told me. Decide what you want to do, and then get them to pay you to do it. Of course, it never occurred to him that there’d be a war here. Who would have thought it, twenty years ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And yours?”

  “My what? My father? Don’t know, haven’t seen him since I was eight. Nearly forty years ago, subjective time. More than a century and a half, objective.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My life got radically better when he left.”

  “Don’t you think he’d be proud of you now?”

  I laughed. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He was always a big fan of violence, my old man. Season-ticket holder to the freak fights. Course, he had no formal training himself, so he always had to make do with defenseless women and children.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, yeah. He’d be proud of what I’ve done with my life.”

  Sun was quiet for a moment.

  “And your mother?”

  I looked away, trying to remember. The downside of Envoy total recall is that memories of everything before the conditioning tend to seem blurry and incomplete by comparison. You accelerate away from it all, like liftoff, like launch. It was an effect I’d craved at the time. Now I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember.

  “I think she was pleased when I enlisted,” I said slowly. “When I came home in the uniform, she had a tea ceremony for me. Invited everyone on the block. I guess she was proud of me. And the money must have helped. There were three of us to feed—me and two younger sisters. She did what she could after my father left, but we were always broke. When I finished basic, it must have tripled our income. On Harlan’s World, the Protectorate pays its soldiers pretty well—it has to, to compete with the yakuza and the Quellists.”

  “Does she know you are here?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was away too much. In the Envoys, they deploy you everywhere except your home world. There’s less danger of you developing some inconvenient empathy with the people you’re supposed to be killing.”

  “Yes.” Sun nodded. “A standard precaution. It makes sense. But you are no longer an Envoy. Did you not return home?”

  I grinned mirthlessly.

  “Yeah, as a career criminal. When you leave the Envoys, there isn’t much else on offer. And by that time my mother was married to another man, a Protectorate recruiting officer. Family reunion seemed. Well, inappropriate.”

  Sun said nothing for a while. She seemed to be watching the beach below us, waiting for something.

  “Peaceful here, isn’t it?” I said, for something to say.

  “At a certain level of perception.” She nodded. “Not, of course, at a cellular level. There is a pitched battle being fought here, and we are losing.”

  “That’s right, cheer me up.”

  A smile flitted across her face. “Sorry. But it’s hard to think in terms of peace when you have a murdered city on one hand, the pent-up force of a hyperportal on the other, a closing army of nanocreatures somewhere just over the hill, and the air awash with lethal-dose radiation.”

  “Well, now that you put it like that . . .”

  The smile came back. “It’s my training, Kovacs. I spend my time interacting with machines at levels my normal senses can’t perceive. When you do that for a living, you start
to see the storm beneath the calm everywhere. Look out there. You see a tideless ocean, sunlight falling on calm water. It’s peaceful, yes. But under the surface of the water, there are millions of creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle to feed themselves. Look, most of the gull corpses are gone already.” She grimaced. “Remind me not to go swimming. Even the sunlight is a solid fusillade of subatomic particles, blasting apart anything that hasn’t evolved the appropriate levels of protection, which of course every living thing around here has because its distant ancestors died in their millions so that a handful of survivors could develop the necessary mutational traits.”

  “All peace is an illusion, huh? Sounds like something a Renouncer monk would say.”

  “Not an illusion, no. But it is relative, and all of it, all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.”

  “That’s what keeps you in the military, is it?”

  “My contract is what keeps me in the military. I have another ten years to serve, minimum. And if I’m honest”—she shrugged—“I’ll probably stay on after that. The war will be over by then.”

  “Always more wars.”

  “Not on Sanction Four. Once they’ve crushed Kemp, there’ll be a clampdown. Strictly police actions from then on. They’ll never let it get out of hand like this again.”

  I thought about Hand’s exultation at the no-holds-barred licensing protocols Mandrake were currently running on, and I wondered.

  Aloud, I said, “A police action can get you killed just as dead as a war.”

  “I’ve been dead. And now look at me. It wasn’t so bad.”

  “All right, Sun.” I felt a wavefront of new weariness wash through me, turning my stomach and hurting my eyes. “I give up. You’re one tough motherfucker. You should be telling this stuff to Cruickshank. She’d eat it up.”

  “I do not think Yvette Cruickshank needs any encouragement. She is young enough to be enjoying this for itself.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “And if I appear a tough motherfucker to you, it was not my intention. But I am a career soldier, and it would be foolish to build resentment against that choice. It was a choice. I was not conscripted.”