Broken Angels (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

In the end, they kept me under for a week.

I didn't miss much. Below me, the clouds roiled and tore across the face of Sanction IV's northern hemisphere, pouring rain on the men and women killing each other beneath. The construct visited the house regularly and kept me abreast of the more interesting details. Kemp's allies offworld tried and failed to break the Protectorate blockade, at the cost of a brace of IP transports. A flight of smarter-than-average marauder bombs got through from somewhere unspecified and vaporized a Protectorate dreadnought. Government forces in the tropics held their positions, while in the northeast the Wedge and other mercenary units lost ground to Kemp's elite Presidential Guard. Evenfall continued to smolder.

Like I said, I didn't miss much.

When I awoke in the resleeving chamber, I was suffused in a head-to-foot glow of well-being. Mostly, that was chemical: Military hospitals shoot their convalescent sleeves full of feelgood stuff just before download. It's their equivalent of a welcome-home party, and it makes you feel like you could win this motherfucking war
single-handed
if they'd only let you up and at the bad guys. Useful effect, obviously. But what I also had, swimming alongside this patriot's cocktail, was the simple pleasure of being intact and installed with a full set of functioning limbs and organs.

Until I talked to the doctor, that is.

“We pulled you out early,” she told me, the rage she'd exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. “On orders from Wedge Command. It seems there isn't time for you to recover from your wounds fully.”

“I feel fine.”

“Of course you do. You're dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you're going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.”

I blinked. “I didn't know they were spraying that stuff.”

“No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.” She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. “We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you'd probably make a full recovery. As it is . . .” She shrugged. “Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck's sake.”

I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital's axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them I knew.

“Hey, Lieutenant!”

Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid-regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

“You made it out, Lieutenant! Way to go!”

He turned about in the crowd.

“Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.”

Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fiber. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

“Lieutenant. We thought—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs!”

Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

“Good to see you, Lieutenant! See, we're all on the mend. The Three Ninety-one Platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.”

Carrera's Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

“Man, we tanked them, didn't we?” said Munharto, gesturing flipperlike with his one remaining limb. “Seen the milflash yesterday.”

Kwok's microcam swiveled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

“You taking the new Three Ninety-one, sir?”

“I don't—”

“Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It's the lieutenant.”

I stayed off the axial deck after that.

•         •         •

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers' convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said,
for fuck's sake.
Not much point in looking after yourself if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

“Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

It took me a moment to place him. People's faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides, we'd both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I'd gotten shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he'd been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

“Thank you. I'm, ah, Jan Schneider.” He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. “I really appreciate you not ah, not—”

“Forget it. I had.”

“Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.” I stirred impatiently. “Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—”

“Look, Schneider, I don't really care.” I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. “All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now, if you repeat that, I'll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?”

He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulturelike. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the vision port and the planet it showed.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Exactly what?”

Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.

“Exactly what I've been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I'd like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war not only alive but rich—richer than you can possibly imagine.”

“I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?”

I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. “Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he's going to lose and—”

“Politics.” Schneider waved a hand dismissively. “This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I'm talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single-figure percentage of their annual profits to own.”

I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he'd scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and gotten medical attention that—at a progovernment estimate—half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have
something
, and right now
anything
that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.

I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.

“All right.”

“You're in?”

“I'm listening,” I said mildly. “Whether or not I'm in depends on what I hear.”

Schneider sucked in his cheeks. “I'm not sure we can proceed on that basis, Lieutenant. I need—”

“You need me. That's obvious, or we wouldn't be having this conversation. Now, shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?”

There was a taut silence, into which Schneider's grin leaked like blood.

“Well,” he said at last. “I see I've misjudged you. The records don't cover this, ah, aspect of your character.”

“Any records you've been able to access about me won't give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.”

I watched it sink in, wondering if he'd scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they're not famous for their charitable natures. What I'd been wasn't a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You're supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.

But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn't show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.

“The Es, huh? When did you serve?”

“A while ago. Why?”

“You at Innenin?”

His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I were falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.

I closed my eyes briefly.

“Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?”

Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.

“Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?”

Oh well.
I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I'd picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tight-wired for this kind of lost-civilization-and-buried-technotreasure bullshit.

It's the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilization, and people still haven't worked out that the artifacts our extinct planetary neighbors left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we've been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.

This success, plus the scattered ruins and artifacts we've found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas, and cult beliefs. In the time I've spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I've heard most of them. In some places you've got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up designed by the U.N. to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travelers from our own future. Then there's a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we're the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we've attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilization is still out there somewhere. My own personal favorite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilization.

In the end it comes down to the same thing. They're gone, and we're just picking up the pieces.

Schneider grinned. “You think I'm nuts, don't you? Living something out of a kid's holo?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, just hear me out.” He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. “See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us. Not like us physically; I mean, we assume their civilization had the same cultural bases as ours.”

Cultural bases?
This didn't sound like Schneider talking. This was something he'd been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.

“That means we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centers of habitation. Cities, they figure. We're nearly two light-years out from the main Latimer system—that's two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins—but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they're doing and comes rushing across.”

“I'd say rushing was an exaggeration.”

At sublight speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer's binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.