Broken Angels

  “Yeah, but they gave you the codes to the nanobe system. Something more valuable than that? On Sanction Four? Come on, Isaac, you must have guessed what it was.”

  He shrugged. “They named figures, that’s all. That’s how the Wedge works, you know that. Which reminds me. That’s Hand over by the door, right? The slim one.”

  I nodded. Carrera wandered over and looked intently at the sleeping exec.

  “Yeah. Missing some weight off the pix I’ve got on stack.” He paced the makeshift ward, glancing left and right at the other beds and the corpse in the corner. Through the ’meth rush and the weariness, I felt an old caution go itching along my nerves. “Course, that’s not surprising, the rad count around here. I’m surprised any of you are still up and walking around.”

  “We’re not,” I pointed out.

  “Right.” His smile was pained. “Jesus, Takeshi. Why didn’t you hold back a couple of days? Could have halved your dosage. I’ve got everybody on standard antirad, we’ll all walk out of here with no worse than headaches.”

  “Not my call.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it was. Who’s the inactive?”

  “Sun Liping.” It hurt more to look at her than I’d expected. Wolf pack allegiances are a slippery thing, it seems. “Systems officer.”

  He grunted. “The others?”

  “Ameli Vongsavath, pilot officer.” I pointed them out with a cocked finger and thumb. “Tanya Wardani, archaeologue, Jiang Jianping, Luc Deprez, both stealth ops.”

  “I see.” Carrera frowned again and nodded in Vongsavath’s direction. “So if that’s your pilot, who was flying the assault launch when she blew?”

  “Guy called Schneider. He’s the one put me onto this whole gig in the first place. Fucking civilian pilot. He got rattled when the fireworks started out there. Took the ship, trashed Hansen, the guy we left on picket, with the ultravibe, and then just blew hatches, left us to—”

  “He went alone?”

  “Yeah, unless you want to count the riders in the corpse locker. We lost two bodies to the nanobes before we went through. And we found another six on the other side. Oh, yeah, and two more drowned in the trawler nets. Archaeologue team from back before the war, looks like.”

  He wasn’t listening, just waiting until I stopped.

  “Yvette Cruickshank, Markus Sutjiadi. Those were the members of your team the nanobe system took out?”

  “Yeah.” I tried for mild surprise. “You got a crew list? Jesus, these Tower-dwellers of yours cut some mean corporate security.”

  He shook his head. “Not really. These Tower-dwellers are from the same Tower as your friend over there. Rivals for promotion, in fact. Like I said, scum.” There was a curious lack of venom in his voice as he said it, an absent tone that seemed to my Envoy antennae to carry with it a tinge of relief. “I don’t suppose you recovered stacks for any of the nanobe victims?”

  “No, why?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t really think you would. My clients tell me the system goes after any built components. Cannibalizes them.”

  “Yeah, that’s what we guessed, too.” I spread my hands. “Isaac, even if we had recovered stacks, they’d have been vaporized with just about everything else aboard the Nagini.”

  “Yes, it was a remarkably complete explosion. Know anything about that, Takeshi?”

  I summoned a grin. “What do you think?”

  “I think Lock Mit fast assault launches don’t vaporize in midair for no reason. And I think you seem less than outraged about this guy Schneider running out on you.”

  “Well, he is dead.” Carrera folded his arms and looked at me. I sighed. “Yeah, okay. I mined the drives. I never trusted Schneider farther than a clingfilm condom anyway.”

  “With cause, it appears. And lucky for you we came along, given the results.” He got up, brushed his hands together. Something unpleasant definitely seemed to have slid off his screen. “You’d better get some rest, Takeshi. I’ll want a full debriefing tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “Not much more to tell, anyway.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s not what my scanners say. We registered more energy discharged on the other side of that gate in the last seven hours than the sum generating cost of every hypercast to and from Sanction Four since it was settled. Myself, I’d say there’s a reasonable chunk of story left to tell.”

  “Oh, that.” I gestured dismissively. “Well, you know, galactic ancients’ automated naval engagement. No big deal.”

  “Right.”

  He was on his way out when something seemed to strike him.

  “Takeshi.”

  I felt my senses tilt like mission time.

  “Yeah?” Striving to stay casual.

  “Just out of curiosity. How did you plan to get back? After you blew the assault launch? You know, with the nanobes operative, the background rad count. No transport, except maybe that piece-of-shit trawler. What were you going to do, walk out? You’re barely two steps ahead of inactive, all of you. What the hell kind of strategy was blowing your only available ride out?”

  I tried to think back. The whole situation, the upward-sucking vertigo of the Martian ship’s empty corridors and chambers, the mummified gaze of the corpses, and the battle with weapons of unimaginable power raging outside—all of it seemed to have receded an immense distance into the past. I suppose I could have yanked it all back in with Envoy focus, but there was something dark and cold in the way, advising against it. I shook my head.

  “I don’t know, Isaac. I had suits stashed. Maybe swim out and hang around at the edge of the gate broadcasting a Mayday squawk across to you guys.”

  “And if the gate wasn’t radio-transparent?”

  “It’s starlight-transparent. And scanner-transparent, apparently.”

  “That doesn’t mean a coherent—”

  “Then I’d have tossed through a fucking remote beacon and hoped it survived the nanobes long enough for you to get a fix. Jesus, Isaac. I’m an Envoy. We make this stuff up on the fly. Worst-case scenario, we had a close-to-working claim buoy. Sun could have fixed it, set it to transmit, and then we could all have blasted our brains out and waited until someone came out to take a look. Wouldn’t have mattered much—none of us had more than a week left in these sleeves anyway. And whoever came out to check the claim signal would have had to resleeve us—we’d be the resident experts, even if we were dead.”

  He smiled at that. We both did.

  “Still not what I’d call leak-tight strategic planning, Takeshi.”

  “Isaac, you just don’t get it.” A little seriousness dripped back into my voice, erasing my smile. “I’m an Envoy. The strategic plan was to kill anyone who tried to backstab me. Surviving afterward, well, that’s a bonus if you can do it, but if you can’t.” I shrugged. “I’m an Envoy.”

  His own smile slipped slightly.

  “Get some rest, Takeshi,” he said gently.

  I watched him walk out, then settled to watching Sutjiadi’s motionless form. Hoping the tetrameth would keep me up until he came around and found out what he had to do to avoid formal execution at the hands of a Wedge punishment squad.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–SEVEN

  Tetrameth is one of my favorite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like No, you can’t fly without a grav harness or Punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.

  The comedown is no worse than most poisons.

  I was starting to feel slig
htly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi overvigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.

  “Jiang, hey, Jiang. Open your fucking eyes. Guess where we are?”

  He blinked up at me, face curiously childlike.

  “Whuhh—”

  “Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.” The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades in arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness, and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. “Fucking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.”

  “The Wedge? That’s.” Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. “Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.”

  I sat back again on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.

  “They came looking for me.” For all the pretense, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 Platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. “You believe that?”

  “If you say so.” Sutjiadi propped himself up. “Who else made it out?”

  “All of us except Sun.” I gestured. “And she’s retrievable.”

  His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. “Back there. Did you. See?”

  “Yeah, I saw.”

  “They were ghosts,” he said, biting down on the words.

  “Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.”

  “That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.” Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. “Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?”

  I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. “What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.”

  She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.

  “Good for you.” Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. “So whom do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?”

  “Take your pick.”

  After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity—a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breathe this stuff for a living.

  Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage among us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken of, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.

  “At least,” I said at one point, “we know why they left the fucking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.”

  “I,” Deprez said emphatically, “do not. Believe. In ghosts.”

  “That didn’t seem to bother them.”

  “Do you think”—Vongsavath picked her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide—“all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?”

  Wardani shook her head. “If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.”

  “I felt”—Sutjiadi swallowed—“they were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilization far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, anymore. Maybe they evolved past that.”

  I grunted. “Neat trick, if you can manage it.”

  “And we apparently can’t,” said Wardani.

  “Maybe we would have if that kind of thing were left floating around every time we committed mass murder.”

  “Kovacs, that’s absurd.” Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. “All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction Four? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.”

  “Bravo, Hand.” Vongsavath clapped a handful of slow, sardonic applause.

  “You should have been a political officer. Just one problem with your muscular humanism there: That second ship wasn’t Martian. Right, Mistress Wardani? Totally different config.”

  All eyes fixed on the archaeologue, who sat with her head bowed. Finally, she looked up, met my gaze, and nodded reluctantly.

  “It did not look like any Martian technology I have ever seen or heard of.” She drew a deep breath. “On the evidence I saw. It would appear the Martians were at war with someone else.”

  The unease rose from the floor again, winding among us like cold smoke, chilling the conversation to a halt. A tiny premonition of the wake-up call humanity was about to get.

  We do not belong out here.

  A few centuries we’ve been let out to play on these three dozen worlds the Martians left us but the playground has been empty of adults all that time, and with no supervision there’s just no telling who’s going to come creeping over the fence or what they’ll do to us. Light is fading from the afternoon sky, retreating across distant rooftops, and in the empty streets below it’s suddenly a cold and shadowy neighborhood.

  “This is nonsense,” said Hand. “The Martian domain went down in a colonial revolt, everyone agrees on that. Mistress Wardani, the Guild teaches that.”

  “Yeah, Hand.” The scorn in Wardani’s voice was withering. “And why do you think they teach that? Who allocates Guild funding, you blinkered fuckwit? Who decides what our children will grow up believing?”

  “There is evidence—”

  “Don’t fucking talk to me about evidence.” The archaeologue’s wasted face lit with fury. For a moment I thought she was going to physically assault the executive. “You ignorant motherfucker. What do you know about the Guild? I do this for a living, Hand. Do you want me to tell you how much evidence has been suppressed because it didn’t suit the Protectorate worldview? How many researchers were branded antihuman and ruined, how many projects butchered, all because they wouldn’t ratify the official line? How much shit the appointed Guild Chancellors spurt every time the Protectorate sees fit to give them a funding handjob?”

  Hand seemed taken aback by the sudden eruption of rage from this haggard, dying woman. He fumbled. “Statistically, the chances of two starfaring civilizations evolving so close to—”

  But it was like walking into the teeth of a gale. Wardani had her own emotional ’meth shot now. Her voice was a lash.

  “Are you mentally defective? Or weren’t you paying attention when we opened the gate? That’s instant matter transmission across interplanetary distance, technology that they left lying around. You think a civilization like that is going to be limited to a few hundred cubic light-years of space?
The weaponry we saw in action out there was faster than light. Those ships could both have come from the other side of the fucking galaxy. How would we know?”

  The quality of light shifted as someone opened the bubblefab flap. Glancing away from Wardani’s face for a moment, I saw Tony Loemanako standing in the entrance to the bubblefab, wearing noncom-flashed chameleochrome and trying not to grin.

  I raised a hand. “Hello, Tony. Welcome to the hallowed chambers of academic debate. Feel free to ask if you don’t follow any of the technical terms.”

  Loemanako gave up trying to hide the grin. “I got a kid back on Latimer wants to be an archaeologue. Says he doesn’t want a profession of violence like his old man.”

  “That’s just a stage, Tony. He’ll get over it.”

  “Hope so.” Loemanako shifted stiffly, and I saw that under the chameleochrome coveralls, he wore a mobility suit. “Commander wants to see you right away.”

  “Just me?”

  “No, he said bring anyone who’s awake. I think it’s important.”

  • • •

  Outside the bubblefab, evening had closed the sky down to a luminous gray in the west and thickening darkness in the east. Under it all, Carrera’s camp was a model of ordered activity in the glow of tripod-mounted Angier lamps.

  Envoy habit mapped it for me, cold detail floating over and above a tingling warm sense of hearthfire and company against the encroaching night.

  Up by the gate, the sentries sat astride their bugs, leaning back and forth and gesturing. The wind carried down shreds of laughter I recognized as Kwok’s, but distance rendered the rest inaudible. Their faceplates were hinged up, but otherwise they were swim-prepped and still armed to the teeth. The other soldiers Loemanako had detailed to back them up stood around a mobile ultravibe cannon in similar casual alertness. Farther down the beach, another knot of Wedge uniforms busied themselves with what looked like the components for a blast shield generator. Others moved back and forth from the Angin Chandra’s Virtue to the polalloy cabin and the other bubblefabs, carrying crates that could have been anything. Behind and above the scene, lights gleamed from the bridge of the Chandra and at the loading level, where onboard cranes swung more equipment out of the battlewagon’s belly and down onto the lamplit sand.