Broken Angels

  Another planet, another sleeve.

  I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.

  Thoughts for a brothel lobby. Ye Gods.

  The desk clerk came back, read one of Schneider’s chips, and banged a scarred plastic key card on the counter.

  “Through the back and down the stairs. Fourth level. I’ve activated the shower and screen till curfew break. You want any of it longer, you’ll need to come up and pay again.” The silicoflesh face flexed in what was probably supposed to be a grin. He shouldn’t have bothered. “Rooms are all soundproofed. Do what you like.”

  The corridor and steel-frame stairwell were, if anything, worse lit than the lobby. In places the illuminum tiles were peeling off the walls and ceiling. Elsewhere they had just gone out. The stair rail was painted luminous but that, too, was fading, coming off microns at a time with every hand that gripped and slid along the metal.

  We passed a scattering of whores on the stairs, most with customers in tow. Little bubbles of fake hilarity floated around them, tinkling. Business seemed to be brisk. I spotted a couple of uniforms among the clientele, and what looked like a Cartel political officer leaned on the second-level landing rail, smoking pensively. No one gave us a second glance.

  The room was long and low-ceilinged with a quickmold resin cornice-and-pillar effect epoxied onto the raw concrete walls, the whole then painted in violent primary red. About halfway down, two bedshelves jutted out from opposing walls with half a meter of space between their adjacent sides. The second bed had plastic chains molded into the four corners of the shelf. At the far end of the room stood a self-contained shower stall wide enough to take three bodies at a time, should the occasion so require. Opposite each bed was a wide screen with a menu display glowing on a pale pink background.

  I looked around, puffed a single breath out into blood-warm air, and then stooped to the carryall at my feet.

  “Make sure that door’s secured.”

  I pulled the sweeper unit out of the bag and waved it around the room. Three bugs showed up in the ceiling, one above each bed and one in the shower. Very imaginative. Schneider snapped a Wedge-standard limpet neutralizer onto the ceiling next to each one. They’d get into the bugs’ memories, pull out whatever had been stored there over the last couple of hours, and then recycle it endlessly. The better models will even scan the content and then generate plausible improvised scenes from stock, but I didn’t think that was going to be necessary here. The desk clerk had not given the impression that he was fronting a high-security operation.

  “Where do you want this stuff?” Schneider asked Wardani, unpacking one of the other carryalls onto the first bedshelf.

  “Right there is fine,” she said. “Here, I’ll do it. It’s, um, complicated.”

  Schneider raised an eyebrow. “Right. Fine. I’ll just watch.”

  Complicated or not, it took the archaeologue only about ten minutes to assemble her equipment. When she was done, she took a pair of modified EV goggles from the flaccid skin of the empty carryall and settled them over her head. She turned to me.

  “You want to give me that?”

  I reached into my jacket and produced the segment of spine. There were still fresh streaks of gore clinging to the tiny bumps and crannies of the bone, but she took it without apparent revulsion and dumped it into the top of the artifact scrubber she’d just finished snapping together. A pale violet light sprang up under the glass hood. Schneider and I watched fascinated as she jacked the goggles into one side of the machine, picked up the connected handset, and settled cross-legged to work. From within the machine came tiny crackling sounds.

  “Working all right?” I asked.

  She grunted.

  “How long is this going to take?”

  “Longer, if you keep asking me stupid questions,” she said without looking away from what she was doing. “Don’t you have anything else to do?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Schneider grinning.

  By the time we’d put together the other machine, Wardani was almost done. I peered over her shoulder into the purple glow and saw what remained of the spinal segment. Most of it was gone, and the final pieces of vertebrae were being eaten away from the tiny metal cylinder of the cortical stack. I was fixated. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a cortical stack removed from a dead spine, but it had to be among the most elegant versions of the operation I’d ever witnessed. The bone retreated, vanishing one minute increment at a time as Tanya Wardani cut it away with her tools, and the stack casing emerged scrubbed clean of surrounding tissue and shiny as new tin.

  “I do know what I’m doing, Kovacs,” Wardani said, voice slow and absent with concentration. “Compared to scrubbing the accretion off Martian circuitboards, this is like sandblasting.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I was just admiring your handiwork.”

  She did look up then, sharply, pushing the goggles up on her forehead to see if I was laughing at her. When she saw I wasn’t, she lowered the goggles again, made a couple of adjustments to something on the handset, then sat back. The violet light went out.

  “It’s done.” She reached into the machine and removed the stack, holding it between thumb and forefinger. “Incidentally, this isn’t great equipment. In fact it’s the sort of thing Scratchers buy for their thesis work. The sensors are pretty crude. I’m going to need a lot better than this up on the Rim.”

  “Don’t worry.” I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. “If this works out, they’ll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we’re going to assume he is. That means we’ve got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a Casualty ID and A, but cranked up we’ll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.”

  “What are you going to do to him?” This was Wardani, looking unhappy.

  I reached for the skullcap. “Nothing. There isn’t time. I’m just going to talk to him.”

  “Talk?” There was a strange light in her eyes.

  “Sometimes,” I told her, “that’s all it takes.”

  • • •

  It was a rough ride in.

  Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn’t have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn’t appear until after I’d bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren’t ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we’d liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.

  I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late-afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to, a single-story wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision, and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an A.I. with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock,
and that’s probably exactly what it was.

  Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

  Time to Identify and Assess.

  It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth resleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource, and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Bar coding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it’s chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield, and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.

  Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for resleeving. How you die—fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony, or numb—is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So, too, does your resleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Resleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often-retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want anymore.

  Oops.

  The point is, there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand, and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.

  I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiseled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: DENG ZHAO JUN. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.

  He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realize where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.

  I coughed gently.

  “Good evening, Deng.”

  He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.

  “We were set up, man, it was a fucking setup. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—”

  His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognized me.

  “Yes.”

  He jerked to his feet. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “That’s not really important. Look—”

  But it was too late, he was up and coming for me around the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.

  “Look, there’s no point—”

  He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and midlevel punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm, and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet and came at me again.

  This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knees and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back, and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.

  “Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.” I got my breath back and lowered my voice. “Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?”

  He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.

  “All right.” I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. “Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilized fashion. I want to ask you some questions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.”

  I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.

  “You wired for virtual trace?”

  He shook his head.

  “Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re running a mirror-code scrambler. Now, I want to know who your controller is.”

  He stared at me. “Why should I tell you a fucking thing?”

  “Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably resleeve you.” I leaned forward in the chair. “That’s a onetime special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.”

  “If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.”

  Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.

  I deployed one from the manual.

  “They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hard-line outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.” I gestured with one open hand. “But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack-intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?”

  I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.

  Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.

  But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.

  Try it again.

  “Something like that, Deng?”

  “You’d better go ahead and kill me,” he said tautly.

  I let the smile come out slow—

  “I’m not going to kill you, Deng.”

  —and waited.

  As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.

  All the time in the universe.

  “You’re—?” he said, finally.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said. I’m. Not. Going to kill you.” I shrugged. “Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don??
?t get to be a corporate hero that easy.”

  I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.

  “Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture, either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a onetime special offer. Answer the questions now, while you’ve still got the chance.”

  “Or what?” Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume-thin, but rising.

  I shrugged.

  “Or I’ll leave you here.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometers of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.”

  He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.

  “You’re in a Casualty ID and A system. Runs off a battlefield power pack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.”

  I sat back again. Let it sink into him.

  “Or you can answer my questions. Onetime offer. What’s it going to be?”

  The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.

  “You had your chance.”

  I got almost to the door before he cracked.