Broken Angels (12 page)

“Yes, but it makes
sense
, Jan. You don't build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you're likely to find out there.”

“Oh, come
on
, Tanya, what about—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs,” Hand said loudly. “Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I'd like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn't mind.”

“Sure.”

We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand's shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out of nowhere, Hand spoke.

“Remarkable woman.”

I grunted.

“I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigors of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon . . .”

“She'll be fine,” I said shortly.

“Yes, I'm sure she will.” A delicate pause. “I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.”

“That's over, I think.”

“Oh, really?”

There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.

“About this military perspective, Hand.”

“Oh, yes.” The Mandrake exec stopped a few meters short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. “I'm not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn't ideal fighting ground.”

“Got it in one.” I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. “Once we get down here, we're a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It's an open field of fire right back to the foothills.”

“And then there's the sea.”

“And then there's the sea,” I echoed gloomily. “We're open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we'll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That's unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.”

“Hmm.” Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. “I've talked to the lawyers.”

“Did you disinfect afterward?”

“Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artifact in nonorbital space is only considered valid if a fully operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometer of said artifact. No loopholes, we've looked. If there's a starship on the other side of this gate, we're going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that's going to take some time.”

I shrugged. “A small army, then.”

“A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It'll show up on satellite tracking like a holowhore's chest. And we can't really afford that, can we?”

“A holowhore's chest? I don't know, the surgery can't be that expensive.”

Hand cocked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. “Very droll. Thank you. We can't really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?”

“Not if you want an exclusive.”

“I think that goes without saying, Lieutenant.” Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. “So, then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit.”

“If we want to come out alive, yes.”

“Yes.” Unexpectedly, Hand rocked back on his heels and dumped himself into a sitting position in the sand. He rested his forearms on his knees and seemed lost in searching the horizon for something. In the dark executive suit and white winged collar, he looked like a sketch by one of the Millsport absurdist school.

“Tell me, Lieutenant,” he said finally. “Assuming we can get the peninsula cleared, in your professional opinion, what's the lower limit on a support team for this venture? How few can we get away with?”

I thought about it. “If they're good. Spec ops, not just plankton-standard grunts. Say six. Five, if you use Schneider as flier.”

“Well, he doesn't strike me as the sort to be left behind while we look after his investment for him.”

“No.”

“You said spec ops. Do you have any specific skills in mind?”

“Not really. Demolitions, maybe. That rockfall looks pretty solid. And it wouldn't hurt if a couple of them could fly a shuttle, just in case something happens to Schneider.”

Hand twisted his head around to look up at me. “Is that likely?”

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Dangerous world out there.”

“Indeed.” Hand went back to watching the place where the sea met the gray of Sauberville's undecided fate. “I take it you'll want to do the recruiting yourself.”

“No, you can run it. But I want to sit in, and I want veto on anyone you select. You got any idea where you're going to get half a dozen spec ops volunteers? Without ringing any alarm bells, I mean.”

For a moment I thought he hadn't heard me. The horizon seemed to have him body and soul. Then he shifted slightly and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“In these troubled times,” he murmured, almost to himself, “it shouldn't be a problem finding soldiers who won't be missed.”

“Glad to hear it.”

He glanced up again and there were still traces of the smile clinging to his mouth.

“Does that offend you, Kovacs?”

“You think I'd be a lieutenant in Carrera's Wedge if I offended that easily?”

“I don't know.” Hand looked back out to the horizon again. “You've been full of surprises so far. And I understand that Envoys are generally pretty good at adaptive camouflage.”

So.

Less than two full days since the meeting in the auction hall, and Hand had already penetrated the Wedge datacore and unpicked whatever shielding Carrera had applied to my Envoy past. He was just letting me know.

I lowered myself to the blued sand beside him and picked my own point on the horizon to stare at.

“I'm not an Envoy anymore.”

“No. So I understand.” He didn't look at me. “No longer an Envoy, no longer in Carrera's Wedge. This rejection of groupings is verging on pathological, Lieutenant.”

“There's no verging about it.”

“Ah. I see some evidence of your Harlan's World origins emerging.
The essential evil of massed humanity,
wasn't that what Quell called it?”

“I'm not a Quellist, Hand.”

“Of course not.” The Mandrake exec appeared to be enjoying himself. “That would necessitate being part of a group. Tell me, Kovacs, do you hate me?”

“Not yet.”

“Really? You surprise me.”

“Well, I'm full of surprises.”

“You honestly have no feelings of rancor toward me after your little run-in with Deng and his squad.”

I shrugged again. “They're the ones with the added ventilation.”

“But I sent them.”

“All that shows is a lack of imagination.” I sighed. “Look, Hand. I knew
someone
in Mandrake would send a squad, because that's the way organizations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn't have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully's nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully's wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don't hate you personally, because you haven't given me any reason to yet.”

“But you hate Mandrake.”

I shook my head. “I don't have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says,
Rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?
”

“People.”

“That's right. People. It's all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I'll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I'll take them all down if I can. But don't expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.”

“How very balanced of you.”

“Your government would call it antisocial derangement and put me in a camp for it.”

Hand's lip curled. “Not
my
government. We're just wet-nursing these clowns till Kemp calms down.”

“Why bother? Can't you deal direct with Kemp?”

I wasn't looking, but I got the sense that his gaze had jerked sideways as I said it. It took him a while to formulate a response he was happy with.

“Kemp is a crusader,” he said finally. “He has surrounded himself with others like him. And crusaders do not generally see sense until they are nailed to it. The Kempists will have to be defeated, bloodily and resoundingly, before they can be brought to the negotiating table.”

I grinned. “So you've tried.”

“I didn't say that.”

“No. You didn't.” I found a violet pebble in the sand and tossed it into the placid ripples in front of us. Time to change the subject. “You didn't say where you were going to get our spec ops escort, either.”

“Can't you guess?”

“The Soul Market?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

I shook my head, but inside me something smoked off the detachment like stubborn embers.

“By the way”—Hand twisted around to look back at the rockfall—“I have an alternative explanation for that collapsed cliff.”

“You didn't buy the micrometeorite, then?”

“I am inclined to believe in Mistress Wardani's velocity brake. It makes sense. As does her circuit-breaker theory, to a point.”

“That point being?”

“That if a race as advanced as the Martians appear to have been built a circuit breaker, it would work properly. It would not leak.”

“No.”

“So we are left with the question. Why, fifty thousand years ago, did this cliff collapse? Or, perhaps, why
was
it collapsed?”

I groped around for another pebble. “Yeah, I wondered about that.”

“An open door to any given set of coordinates across interplanetary, possibly even interstellar distances. That's dangerous, conceptually and in fact. There's no telling what might come through a door like that. Ghosts, aliens, monsters with half-meter fangs.” He glanced sideways at me. “Quellists, even.”

I found a second, larger stone somewhere back behind me.

“Now that
would
be bad,” I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. “The end of civilization as we know it.”

“Precisely. Something that the Martians, no doubt, also thought of and built for. Along with the power brake and the circuit breaker, they would presumably have a monster-with-half-meter-fangs contingency system.”

From somewhere Hand produced a pebble of his own and spun it out over the water. It was a good throw from a seated position, but it still fell a little short of the ripples I had created with my last stone. Wedge-customized neurachem—hard to beat. Hand clucked in disappointment.

“That's some contingency system,” I said. “Bury your gate under half a million tons of cliff face.”

“Yes.” He was still frowning at the impact site of his throw, watching as his ripples merged with mine. “It makes you wonder what they were trying to shut out, doesn't it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You like him, don't you?”

It was an accusation, dealt faceup in the low gleam from the muffled illuminum bartop. Music twanged, irritatingly sweet, from speakers not nearly high enough above our heads. Crouched at my elbow like a large comatose beetle, the personal space resonance scrambler that Mandrake had insisted we carry at all times showed a clear green functioning light, but apparently wasn't up to screening out external noise. Pity.

“Like who?” I asked, turning to face Wardani.

“Don't be obtuse, Kovacs. That slick streak of used coolant in a suit. You're fucking bonding with him.”

I felt the corner of my mouth quirk. If Tanya Wardani's archaeologue lectures had seeped into some of Schneider's speech patterns during their previous association, it looked as if the pilot had given as good as he'd gotten.

“He's our sponsor, Wardani. What do you want me to do? Spit at him every ten minutes to remind us all how morally superior we are?” I tugged significantly at the shoulder flash of the Wedge uniform I was wearing. “I'm a paid killer, Schneider here is a deserter, and you, whatever your sins may or may not be, are encoded all the way with us in trading the greatest archaeological find of the millennium for a ticket offworld and a lifetime pass to all the ruling-elite fun-park venues in Latimer City.”

She flinched.

“He tried to have us killed.”

“Well, given the outcome, I'm inclined to forgive him that one. Deng's goon squad are the ones who ought to be feeling aggrieved.”

Schneider laughed, then shut up as Wardani cut him a freezing stare.

“Yes, that's right. He sent those men to their deaths, and now he's cutting a deal with the man who killed them. He's a piece of shit.”

“If the worst Hand ever scores is eight men sent to their deaths,” I said, more roughly than I'd intended, “then he's a lot cleaner than me. Or anyone else with a rank that I've met recently.”

“You see. You're defending him. You use your own self-hatred to let him slide off the scope and save yourself a moral judgment.”

I looked hard at her, then drained my shot glass and set it aside with exaggerated care.

“I appreciate,” I said evenly, “that you've been through a lot recently, Wardani. That's why I'm cutting you some slack. But you're not an expert on the inside of my head, so I'd prefer it if you'd keep your fucking amateur psychosurgeon bullshit to yourself. Okay?”

Wardani's mouth compressed to a thin line. “The fact remains—”

“Guys.” Schneider leaned across Wardani with the rum bottle and filled my glass. “Guys, this is supposed to be a celebration. If you want to fight, go north, where it's popular. Right here, right now, I'm celebrating the fact I won't ever have to get in a fight again, and you two are spoiling my run-up. Tanya, why don't you—”

He tried to top up Wardani's glass, but she pushed the neck of the bottle aside with the edge of one hand. She was looking at him with a contempt that made me wince.

“That's all that matters to you, Jan, isn't it?” she said in a low voice. “Sliding out from under with heavy credit. The quick-fix, shortcut, easy-solution route to some swimming-pool existence at the top of the pile. What happened to you, Jan? I mean, you were always shallow, but . . .”

She gestured helplessly.

“Thanks, Tanya.” Schneider knocked back his shot, and when I could see his face again, he was grinning fiercely. “You're right, I shouldn't be so selfish. I ought to have stuck with Kemp for a while longer. After all, what's the worst that can happen?”

“Don't be childish.”

“No, really. I see it all so much more clearly now. Takeshi, let's go tell Hand we've changed our minds. Let's all go down fighting, it's so much more
significant
.” He stabbed a finger at Wardani. “And you. You can go back to the camp we pulled you out of because I wouldn't want you to miss out on any of this noble suffering.”

“You pulled me out of the camp because you needed me, Jan, so don't pretend any different.”

Schneider's open hand was well into the swing before I realized he intended to hit her. My neurachem-aided responses got me there in time to lock down the slap, but I had to lunge across Wardani to do it and my shoulder must have knocked her off the stool. I heard her yelp as she hit the floor. Her drink went over and spilled across the bar.

“That's enough,” I told Schneider quietly. I had his forearm flattened to the bar under mine, and my other hand floating in a loose fist back at my left ear. My face was close enough to his to see the faint tear sheen on his eyes. “I thought you didn't want to fight anymore.”

“Yeah.” It came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, that's right.”

I felt him relax, and unlocked on his arm. Turning, I saw Wardani picking her stool and herself up from the floor. Behind her, a few of the bar's table occupants had come to their feet and were watching uncertainly. I met their eyes, and they seated themselves hurriedly. A graft-heavy tactical marine in one corner lasted longer than the rest, but in the end even she sat down, unwilling to tussle with the Wedge uniform. Behind me, I felt more than saw the bartender clearing up the spilled drink. I leaned back on the newly dried surface.

“I think we'd better all calm down, agreed?”

“Suits me.” The archaeologue set her stool back on its feet. “You're the one who knocked me over. You and your wrestling partner.”

Schneider had hooked the bottle and was pouring himself another shot. He downed it and pointed at Wardani with the empty glass.

“You want to know what happened to me, Tanya? You—”

“I have a feeling you're going to tell me.”

“—really want to know? I got to watch a six-year-old girl. Fucking die of shrapnel. Fucking shrapnel wounds that I fucking inflicted because she was hiding in an automated bunker I rolled fucking grenades into.” He blinked and trickled more rum into his glass. “And I'm not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I'm out, whatever it takes. However
shallow
that makes me. For your fucking information.”

He looked back and forth between us for a couple of seconds, as if he couldn't honestly remember who either of us was. Then he got off his stool and walked an almost straight line to the door and out. His last drink stood untouched on the muted glow of the bartop.

“Oh shit,” said Wardani, into the small silence left beside the drink. She was peering into her own empty glass as if there might be an escape hatch at the bottom.

“Yeah.” I wasn't about to help her get off the hook with this one.

“You think I should go after him?”

“Not really, no.”

She put down the glass and fumbled for cigarettes. The Landfall Lights pack I'd noticed in the virtuality came out and she fed herself one mechanically. “I didn't mean . . .”

“No, I thought you probably didn't. So will he, once he sobers up. Don't worry about it. He's most likely been carrying that memory around in sealwrap since it happened. You just fed him enough catalyst to vomit it up. Probably better that way.”

She breathed the cigarette into life and glanced sideways at me through the smoke. “Does none of this touch you anymore?” she asked. “How long does it take to get like that?”

“Thank the Envoys. It's their specialty.
How long
is a meaningless question. It's a system. Psychodynamic engineering.”

This time she turned on her stool and stayed facing me. “Doesn't that ever make you angry? That you've been tampered with like that?”

I reached across for the bottle and topped off both our drinks. She made no move to stop me. “When I was younger, I didn't care. In fact, I thought it was great. A testosterone wet dream. See, before the Envoys, I served in the regular forces and I'd already used a lot of quickplant jack-in software. This just seemed like a super-ramped version of the same thing. Body armor for the soul. And by the time I got old enough to think any differently, the conditioning was in to stay.”

“You can't beat it? The conditioning?”

I shrugged. “Most of the time, I don't want to. That's the nature of good conditioning. And this is a very superior product. I work better when I go with it. Fighting it is hard work, and it slows me down. Where did you get those cigarettes?”

“These?” She looked down at the pack absently. “Oh, Jan, I think. Yeah, he gave them to me.”

“That was nice of him.”

If she noticed the sarcasm in my voice, she didn't react. “You want one?”

“Why not? By the look of it, I'm not going to be needing this sleeve much longer.”

“You really think we're going to get as far as Latimer City?” She watched me shake out a cigarette and draw it to life. “You trust Hand to keep his side of this bargain?”

“There's really very little point in him double-crossing us.” I exhaled and stared at the smoke as it drifted away across the bar. A massive sense of departure from something was coursing unlooked-for through my mind, a sense of unnamed loss. I groped after the words to sew everything back together again. “The money's already gone; Mandrake can't get it back. So if it cuts us out, all Hand saves himself is the cost of the hypercast and three off-the-rack sleeves. In return for which he gets to worry forever about automated reprisals.”

Wardani's gaze dropped to the resonance scrambler on the bar. “Are you sure this thing is clean?”

“Nope. I got it from an indie dealer, but she came Mandrake-recommended, so it could be tagged for all I know. It doesn't really matter. I'm the only person who knows how the reprisals are set up, and I'm not about to tell you about it.”

“Thanks.” There was no appreciable irony in her tone. An internment camp teaches you things about the value of not knowing.

“Don't mention it.”

“And what about silencing us after the event?”

I spread my hands. “What for? Mandrake isn't interested in silence. This'll be the biggest coup a single corporate entity has ever pulled off. It'll want it known. Those time-locked data launches we set are going to be the oldest news on the block when they finally decay. Once Mandrake has your starship hidden away somewhere safe, it'll be dropping the fact through every major corporate dataport on Sanction Four. Hand's going to use this to swing instant membership of the Cartel, and probably a seat on the Protectorate Commercial Council into the bargain. Mandrake'll be a major player overnight. Our significance in that particular scheme of things will be nil.”

“Got it all worked out, huh?”

I shrugged again. “This isn't anything we haven't already discussed.”

“No.” She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. “I just didn't think you'd be so fucking congenial with that piece of corporate shit.”

I sighed.

“Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He'll do the job we want him to do. That's what counts. We've been paid, we're on board, and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I'm concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I'll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?”

Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. “You'd better hope this isn't tagged. If Hand's listening to you . . .”

“Well,” I reached across her and picked up Schneider's untouched drink. “If he is, he's probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here's to mistrust and mutual deterrence.”

I knocked back the rum and upended the glass on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.

“Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need.”

“What you need,” I said, yawning, “is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the Tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew.”

“I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn't an issue.”

I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. “Yeah, well. Probably isn't, but we're supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be bloody-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think? Want to walk?”

“Going to hold my hand?” It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other's personal space.

The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.

I turned to crush out my cigarette.

“Sure,” I said, trying for lightness. “It's dark out there.”

I pocketed the scrambler and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.

It's dark out there.

Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.