Broken Angels (17 page)

“They're not big on mirrors in the camp,” she said, maybe reading something in my expression. “Except for interrogation. And after a while you try not to see yourself in windows walking past. I probably still look a lot worse than I think I do. Especially after that instant fix you loaded into me.”

I couldn't think of anything even remotely appropriate to say.

“You on the other hand . . .” She stepped forward and, reaching out low, caught me by the prick. “Well, let's see what you've got here.”

I was hard almost instantly.

Maybe it was something written into the protocols of the system, maybe just too long without the release. Or maybe there was some unclean fascination in anticipating the use of this body with its lightly accented marks of privation. Enough to hint artfully at abuse, not enough to repel.
Freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck?
No telling how a combat sleeve might be wired at this level. Or any male sleeve, come to that. Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It's a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you'll drag up once you start excavating.

“That's good,” she breathed, abruptly close to my ear. She had not let go. “But I don't rate this much. You haven't been looking after yourself, soldier.”

Her other hand spread wide and scraped up my belly from the roots of my prick to the arc of my rib cage. Like a carpenter's sanding glove, planing back the layering of flab that had begun to thicken over my sleeve's tank-grown abdominal musculature. I glanced down, and saw with a slight visceral shock that some of the flab really had started to plane off, fading out with the motion of her flattened palm. It left a warm feeling threaded through the muscle beneath, like whiskey going down.

“Sy-system magic,”
I managed through the spasm as she tugged hard at me with the gripping hand and repeated the upward smoothing gesture with the other.

I lifted my own hands toward her, and she skipped back.

“Uh-uh.” She took another step away. “I'm not ready yet. Look at me.”

She lifted both hands and cupped her breasts. Pushed upward with the heels of her palms, then let them fall back, fuller, larger. The nipples—had one of them been broken before?—swollen dark and conical like chocolate sheathing on the copper skin.

“Like that?” she asked.

“Very much.”

She repeated the open-handed grasping motion, topping it with a circular massaging action. When she let go this time, her breasts were well on their way to the dimensions of one of Djoko Roespinoedji's gravity-defying concubines. She reached back and did something similar to her buttocks, turning to show me the cartoon rounding she'd given them. She bent forward and pulled the cheeks apart.

“Lick me,” she said, with sudden urgency.

I went down on one knee and pressed my face into the crease, spearing forward with my tongue, working at the tight whorl of closed sphincter. I wrapped an arm around one long thigh to steady myself and with the other hand I reached up and found her already wet. The ball of my thumb sank into her from the front as my tongue worked deeper from the rear, both rubbing soft synchronized circles amid her insides. She grunted, somewhere at the base of her throat, and we

Shifted

Into liquid blue. The floor was gone, and most of the gravity with it. I thrashed and lost my thumbhold. Wardani twisted languidly around and fastened to me like belaweed around a rock. The fluid was not water; it had left our skins slick against each other, and I could breathe it as well as if it were tropical air. I gasped my lungs full of it as Wardani slithered down, biting at my chest and stomach, and finally laid hands and mouth on my hard-on.

I didn't last long. Floating in the infinite blue while Tanya Wardani's newly pneumatic breasts pressed against my thighs and her nipples traced up and down on my oiled skin and her mouth sucked and her curled fingers pumped, I had just enough time to notice a light source above us before my neck muscles started to tauten, cranking my head back, and the twitching messages along my nerves gathered together for a final climactic rush.

There was a scratch replay vibrato effect built into the construct. My orgasm went on for over thirty seconds.

As it tailed off, Tanya Wardani floated up past me, hair spread around her face, threads of semen blown out amid bubbles from the corners of her grin. I struck out and grabbed one passing thigh, dragged her back into range.

She flexed in the water analog as my tongue sank into her, and more bubbles ran out of her mouth. I caught the reverberation of her moan through the fluid like the sympathetic vibration of jet engines in the pit of my stomach, and felt myself stiffening in response. I pressed my tongue down harder, forgetting to breathe and then discovering I didn't actually need to for a long time. Wardani's writhing grew more urgent and she crooked her legs around my back to anchor herself in place. I cupped her buttocks and squeezed, pushing my face into the folds of her cunt, then slid my thumb back inside her and recommenced the soft circular motion in counterpoint to the spiraling of my tongue. She gripped my head in both hands and crushed my face against her. Her writhings became thrashings, her moans a sustained shout that filled my ears like the sound of surf overhead. I sucked. She stiffened, and screamed, and then shuddered for minutes.

We drifted to the surface together. An astronomically unlikely red giant sun was sinking at the horizon, bathing the suddenly normalized water around us in stained-glass light. Two moons sat high in the eastern sky and behind us waves broke on a white sand beach fringed by palms.

“Did you. Write this?” I asked, treading water and nodding at the view.

“Hardly.” She wiped water out of her eyes and slicked back her hair with both hands. “It's off the rack. I checked out what they had this afternoon. Why, you like it?”

“So far. But I have a feeling that sun is an astronomical impossibility.”

“Yeah, well, breathing underwater's not overly realistic, either.”

“I didn't get to breathe.” I held my hands above the water in claws, miming the grip she'd had on my head, and pulled a suffocated face. “This bring back any memories?”

To my amazement, she flushed scarlet. Then she laughed, splashed water in my face, and struck out for the shore. I treaded water for a moment, laughing, too, and then went after her.

•         •         •

The sand was warm, powder-fine, and system-magically unwilling to stick to wet flesh. Behind the beach, coconuts fell sporadically from the palms and, unless collected, broke down into fragments that were carried away by tiny jewel-colored crabs.

We fucked again at the water's edge, Tanya Wardani seated astride my cock, cartoon ass bedded soft and warm on my crossed legs. I buried my face in her breasts, settled hands at her hips, and lifted her gently up and down until the shuddering started in her again, caught me like a contagious fever, and ran through us both. The scratch replay subroutine had a resonance system built in that cycled the orgasm back and forth between us like an oscillating signal, swamping and ebbing for what felt like forever.

It was love. Perfect passion compatibility, trapped, distilled, and amped up almost beyond bearing.

“You knock out the baffles?” she asked me, a little breathlessly, after.

“Of course. You think I want to go through all this and
still
come out swilling full of semen and sex hormones?”

“Go through?”
She lifted her head from the sand, outraged.

I grinned back. “Sure. This is for
your
benefit, Tanya. I wouldn't be here other— Hoy, no throwing sand.”

“Fucking—”

“Look—”

I fended off the fistful of sand with one arm and pushed her into the surf. She went over backward, laughing. I stood up in a ludicrous Micky Nozawa fighting stance, while she picked herself up. Something out of
Siren Fist Demons
.

“Don't try to lay your profane hands on me, woman.”

“Looks to me like you want to have hands laid on you,” she said, shaking back her hair and pointing.

It was true. The sight of the system-magic-enhanced body, beaded with water, had the signals flickering through my nerve endings again, and my glans was already filling up with blood like a ripening plum in time-lapse fast-forward sequence.

I gave up the guard and glanced around the construct. “You know, off the rack or not, this is some good shit, Tanya.”

“Last year's
CyberSex Down
seal of approval, apparently.” She shrugged. “I took a chance. You want to try the water again? Or apparently there's this waterfall thing back through the trees.”

“Sounds good to me.”

On the way past the front line of palms with their huge phallic trunks lifting like dinosaur necks off the sand, I scooped up a newly fallen coconut. The crabs scattered with comic speed, scuttling for burrows in the sand from which they poked cautious eyestalks. I turned the coconut over in my hands. It had landed with a small chunk already torn out of the green shell, exposing soft, rubbery flesh beneath. Nice touch. I punctured the inner membrane with my thumb and tipped it back like a gourd. The milk inside was improbably chilled.

Another nice touch.

The forest floor beyond was conveniently clear of sharp debris and insects. Water poured and splashed somewhere with attention-grabbing clarity. An obvious path led through the palm trunks toward the sound. We walked, hand in hand, beneath rain forest foliage filled with brightly colored birds and small monkeys making suspiciously harmonic noises.

The waterfall was a two-tier affair, pouring down in a long plume into a wide basin, then tumbling through rocks and rapids to another smaller pool where the drop was less. I arrived slightly ahead of her and stood on wet rocks at the edge of the second pool, arms akimbo, looking down. I repressed a grin. The moment was cleared for her to push me in, trembling with the potential.

Nothing.

I turned to look at her, and saw she was trembling slightly.

“Hoy, Tanya.” I took her face between my hands. “Are you okay? What's the matter?”

But I knew what the
motherfucking
matter was.

Because Envoy techniques or not, healing is a complex, creeping process, and it'll glitch on you as soon as your back's turned.

The
motherfucking
camp.

The low-key arousal fled, leaching out of my system like saliva from a mouthful of lemon. The fury sheeted up through me.

The
motherfucking
war.

If I'd had Isaac Carrera and Joshua Kemp there, in the middle of all that Edenic beauty, I'd have torn their entrails out with my bare hands, knotted them together, and kicked them into the pool to drown.

Can't drown in this water,
sneered the part of me that would never shut down, the smug Envoy control.
You can breathe in this water.

Maybe men like Kemp and Carrera couldn't.

Yeah, right.

So instead, I caught Tanya Wardani around the waist, and crushed her against me, and jumped for us both.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I came out of it with an alkaline smell in my nostrils and my belly sticky with fresh semen. My balls ached as if they'd been kicked. Over my head, the display had cleared to standby. A time check pulsed in one corner. I'd been under less than two minutes, real time.

I sat up groggily.

“Fuck. Me.” I cleared my throat, and looked around. Fresh self-moistening toweling hung from a roll behind the automold, presumably with just this in mind. I tore off a handful and wiped myself down, still trying to blink the virtuality out of my eyes.

We'd fucked in the waterfall pool, languid underwater once Wardani's trembling had passed.

We'd fucked again on the beach.

We'd fucked back up on the loading deck, a last-chance-grabbed-at-leaving sort of thing.

I tore off more towel, wiped my face, and rubbed at my eyes. I dressed slowly, stowed the smart gun, wincing as it prodded down from my waistband into my tender groin. I found a mirror on the wall of the chamber and peered into it, trying to sort out what had happened to me in there.

Envoy psychoglue.

I'd used it on Wardani without really thinking about it, and now she was up and walking around. That was what I'd wanted. The dependency whiplash was an almost inevitable side effect, but so what? It was the kind of thing that didn't much matter in the usual Envoy run of things: As likely as not you were in combat with other things to worry about; often you'd moved on by the time it became a problem the subject had to deal with. What didn't generally happen was the kind of restorative purging Wardani had prescribed for herself and then gone after.

I couldn't predict how that would work.

I'd never known it to happen before. Never even
seen
it before.

I couldn't work out what she'd made me feel in turn.

And I wasn't learning anything new looking at myself in the mirror.

I built a shrug and a grin, and walked out of the chamber into the predawn gloom among the stilled machines. Wardani was waiting outside by one of the open-rig webs and

Not alone.

The thought jarred through my soggy nervous system, painfully sluggish, and then the unmistakable spike-and-ring configuration at the projection end of a Sunjet was pushed against the back of my neck.

“You want to avoid any sudden moves, chum.” It was a strange accent, an equatorial twang to it even through the voiceprint distorter. “Or you and your girlfriend here are going to be wearing no heads.”

A professional hand snaked around my waist, plucked the Kalashnikov from its resting place, and tossed it away across the room. I heard the muffled clunk as it hit the carpeted floor and slid.

Try to pinpoint it.

Equatorial accent.

Kempists.

I looked over at Wardani, her oddly limp-hanging arms, and the figure who held a smaller hand blaster to her nape. He was dressed in the formfitting black of a stealth assault suit and masked with clear plastic that moved in random waves over his face, distorting the features continually, except for two little watchful blue-tinted windows over the eyes.

There was a pack on his back that had to carry whatever intrusion hardware they'd used to get in here. Had to be a biosigns imaging set, counterfeed code sampler, and securisys sandbagger in there, minimum.

High fucking tech.

“You guys are
so
dead,” I said, trying for amused calm.

“
Extra
funny, chum.” The one who'd taken me tugged at my arm and pulled me around so I was looking down the ramping chute of the Sunjet. Same dress code, same running plastic mask. Same black pack. Two more clone-identical forms bulked behind him, watching opposite ends of the room. Their Sunjets were cradled low, deceptively casual. My enthusiasm for the odds collapsed like a set of unplugged LED dislays.

Play for time.

“Who sent you guys?”

“See,” said the spokesman, voice squelching in and out of focus. “It's rigged this way. Her we want, you're just carbon walking. Limit that mouth, maybe we lift you, too, just for tidiness. Keep gritting me, I'll make a mess just to see your Envoy gray cells fly. Am I coming through?”

I nodded, desperately trying to mop up the postcoital languor that had drenched my system. Shifting my stance slightly . . .

Aligning from memory . . .

“Good, then let's have your arms.” He dropped his left hand to his belt and produced a contact stunner. The aim of the Sunjet never wavered in the right-hand grip. The mask flexed in an approximation of a smile. “One at a time, of course.”

I raised my left arm and held it out to him. Flexed my right hand behind me, riding out the sense of impotent fury, so the palm rippled.

The little gray device came down on my wrist, charged light winking. He had to shift the Sunjet, of course, or the deadweight of my arm was going to come down on it like a club when the stunner fired . . .

Now. So low even the neurachem barely picked it out. A thin whine through the conditioned air.

The stunner fired.

Painless. Cold. A localized version of what it felt like to get shot with a beam stunner. The arm flopped like a dead fish, narrowly missing the Sunjet despite its new alignment. He twitched slightly aside, but it was a relaxed move. The mask grinned.

“That's good. Now the other one.”

I smiled and shot him—

Grav microtech—a weapons engineering breakthrough from the house of Kalashnikov.

—from the hip. Three times across the chest, hoping to drill clean through whatever armor he was wearing and into the backpack. Blood—

Across short distances, the Kalashnikov AKS91 interface gun will lift and fly direct to an implanted bioalloy home plate.

—drenched the stealth suit, tickled my face with backblown spray. He staggered, Sunjet wagging like an admonishing finger. His colleagues—

Almost silent, the generator delivers total capacity in a ten-second burst.

—hadn't worked it out yet. I fired high at the two behind him, probably hit one of them somewhere. They rolled away, grabbing cover. Return fire crackled around me, nowhere close.

I came around, dragging the numbed arm like a shoulder bag, looking for Wardani and her captor.

“Fucking don't, man, I'll—”

And shot through the writhing plastic of the mask.

The slug punched him back a clean three meters, into the spidery arms of a climbing machine, where he hung, slumped and used up.

Wardani dropped to the ground bonelessly. I threw myself down, chased by fresh Sunjet fire. We landed nose to nose.

“You okay?” I hissed.

She nodded, cheek pressed flat to the floor, shoulders twitching as she tried to move her stunned arms.

“Good. Stay there.” I flailed my own numbed limb around and searched the machine jungle for the two remaining Kempists.

No sign. Could be fucking anywhere. Waiting for a clear shot.

Fuck this.

I lined up on the crumpled form of the squad leader, on the backpack. Two shots blew it apart, fragments of hardware jumping out of the exit holes in the fabric.

Mandrake security woke up.

Lights seared. Sirens shrieked from the roof, and an insectile storm of nanocopters issued from vents in the walls. They swooped over us, blinked glass-bead eyes, and passed us by. A few meters over, a flight of them rained laser fire down amid the machines.

Screams.

An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.

Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.

The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.

Silence.

Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her but could not get upright. No upper-body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.

“Stay there. I'll be back.”

I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.

The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiraled up.

“Oh, shit.”

I ran back to the one I'd shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine's struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I'd put in the center of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.

“Fuck.”

“Kovacs.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.

I sighed. “Here we go.”

They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.

“Remain still! Raise your hands!”

I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.

“I'm not pissing about here, folks!”

“We're injured,” I called back. “Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout fail-safes. It's all over. Go wake Hand up.”

•         •         •

Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal cord with a metal stylus.

“Molecular acid canister,” he said thoughtfully. “Last year's Shorn Biotech. I didn't realize the Kempists had these yet.”

“They've got everything you've got, Hand. They've just got a lot less of it, that's all. Read your Brankovitch.
Trickledown in War-Based Markets.
”

“Yes, thank you, Kovacs.” Hand rubbed at his eyes. “I already have a doctorate in conflict investment. I don't really need the gifted-amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.”

I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.

“We were fucking,” she said.

Hand blinked.

“Oh,” he said. “Already.”

“What's that supposed t—”

“Kovacs, please. You're giving me a headache.” He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad, who was hovering nearby. “Okay, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c-two-two-one-mh. Central clearing'll let you have the codes.”

We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.

“Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,” he said. “Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.”

Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.

“Someone with wires to the inside, too,” I added somberly. “Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there's no way they got in here without help. You've got leakage.”

“Yes, so it would appear.”

“Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar the night before last?”

Wardani looked at me, alarmed.

“Someone followed us?”

I gestured at Hand. “So he says.”

“Hand?”

“Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.” He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. “It was Deng, I think.”

“Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?”

“Deng had a clone on ice,” he snapped back. “That's standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counseling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.”

“Was he? Why don't you call him?”

I was remembering what I'd said to him in the ID&A construct.
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.

Just-killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.

Hand had his audio phone open.

“Wake up Deng Zhao Jun, please.” He waited. “I see. Well, try that, then.”

I shook my head.

“That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh, Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you're throwing him back into action
on a related case
? Come on, put the phone away. He's gone. He's sold you out and skipped with the loose change.”

Hand's jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.

“Hand, I practically
told
him to do it.” I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. “Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn't give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.”

“I did not assign Deng, god
damn you, Kovacs
.” He was hanging on to his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. “And you had
no business
telling him anything. Now, shut the
fuck
up.
Yes,
yes, this is Hand.”

He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.