Broken Angels (21 page)

“Well, I suppose you'd know.”

It was an admirable riposte. I didn't know if she'd been tortured in the camp—in the momentary flare of anger I hadn't cared—but she never flinched as the words came out.

“Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?”

“I told you, we're not in virtual anymore.”

“No.”

I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.

“You'll have to forgive me, Kovacs,” she said heavily. “Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know,
I know,
we didn't do it, but it's a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that's without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I'm sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.”

“You won't want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.”

“Is there something to talk about?” She didn't look around.

“Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there's not a great deal else left to work from.” I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. “I'm told there are tests we can do with bone at the cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren't going to tell us anything, either.”

That got her looking at me.

“Why?”

“Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.” I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. “And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.”

“You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?” she asked scornfully. “The vampires got them?”

“
Something
got them,” I said mildly. “They didn't die of old age. Their stacks are gone.”

“Doesn't that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn't it?”

“Not necessarily. Any civilization that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitize consciousness.”

“There's no actual evidence for that.”

“Not even common sense?”

“Common sense?” The scorn was back in her voice. “The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that
obviously
the sun goes around the Earth, just
look
at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.”

“I've heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.”

“Yeah, haven't we all,” she said shortly. “Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn't permit resleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you've proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no
right
to it.”

“In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.”

“No, it's a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there's very little hard evidence around to disprove it.”

“Do
you
believe it?”

She sighed and went back to her seat. “Of course I don't believe it. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there's more to eat at this party than the cozy little certainties human science is handing around. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that's after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living room wall.” She paused. “And it's probably upside down.”

I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the 'fab. Wardani's face twitched in an unwilling smile.

“No, I mean it,” she muttered. “You think, just because I can open this gate, that we've got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven't. You can't assume anything here. You can't think in human terms.”

“Okay, fine.” I followed her back to the center of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando—the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind—was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. “But you're the one who's beginning to sound like a vampire story now.”

“I'm just warning you.”

“Okay, I'm warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?”

“Outside my own team?” She considered. “We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artifact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.”

“You know Hand says there's no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.”

“Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.”

“Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.”

“I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk.
Another
obelisk. We'd already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.”

“And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?”

“No.” She gave me a crooked smile. “The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realized what we'd found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.”

“And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?”

“Got it in one.” She shrugged. “It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don't know if you'd understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, trashed because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.”

I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.

“It sounds familiar enough.”

“I think—” She hesitated. “—I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I'd be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.” She smiled. “I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don't remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.”

She sighed and rid herself of the smile.

“The next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we'd lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we'd be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we'd be back from the academic wilderness, of course, but only at a price. We'd be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn't too much Wycinski in the text. There'd be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy”—she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad—“on someone else's projects. We'd be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.”

“Better than not getting paid at all.”

A grimace. “If I'd wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.”

“Did the others feel that strongly?”

“In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.”

I nodded.

“Could that be who we found in the nets?”

She looked away. “I suppose so.”

“How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?”

“I don't know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified; there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Dhasanapongsakul. They were all good. But on their own? Working backward from our notes, working together?” She shook her head. “I don't
know
, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I've got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don't even know how
I'll
perform anymore.”

A memory of her beneath the waterfall flickered, unfairly, off the comment. It coiled around itself in my guts. I groped after the thread of my thoughts.

“Well, there'll be DNA files for them in the Guild archives at Landfall.”

“Yes.”

“And we can run a DNA match from the bones—”

“Yes, I
know
.”

“—but it's going to be hard to get through and access data in Landfall from here. And to be honest, I'm not sure what purpose it'll serve. I don't much care who they are. I just want to know how they ended up in that net.”

She shivered.

“If it's them . . .” she began, then stopped. “I don't want to know who it is, Kovacs. I can live without that.”

I thought about reaching for her, across the small space between our chairs, but sitting there she seemed suddenly as gaunt and folded as the thing we had come here to unlock. I couldn't see a point of contact anywhere on her body that would not make my touch seem intrusive, overtly sexual, or just ridiculous.

The moment passed. Died.

“I'm going to get some sleep,” I said, standing up. “You'd probably better do the same. Sutjiadi's going to want a crack-of-dawn start.”

She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.

I left her alone amid the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.

CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE

I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I'd taken to hold it down. There was gray light filtering through the bubblefab's dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen. . . .

Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see?

Semetaire?

I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider toweling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.

“Morning,” he frothed.

“Morning.” I propped myself upright. “What time is it?”

“Little after five.” He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. “Wouldn't be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I'm a light sleeper.”

I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.

“Fucking psycho,” I grumbled.

“Hey, he's in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.”

“Yeah, but Jiang's the only one with insomnia, it appears.” I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it manifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing-numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.

Rush/snap!

“Haiii!!”

“Right.” I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. “I'm awake now. You finished with that brush?”

Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed on a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life, and stepped into the shower niche.

Rise and shine.

•         •         •

Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clearheaded, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swiveling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the 'fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.

I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab, and sipped, watching.

“Was there something?” Jiang asked as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide-sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he'd razored the Maori sleeve's thick dark hair back to an even two centimeters all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.

“You do this every morning?”

“Yes.” The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.

“Impressive.”

“Ne
cess
ary.” Another deathblow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. “Every skill must be practiced. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a
blade
when it cuts.”

I nodded. “Hayashi.”

The patterns slowed fractionally.

“You have read him?”

“Met him once.”

Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. “You
met
Toru Hayashi?”

“I'm older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.”

“You are an Envoy?”

“Was.”

For a moment, he seemed unsure what to say. I wondered if he thought I was joking. Then he brought his arms forward, sheathed his right fist at chest height in the cup of his left hand, and bowed slightly over the grasp.

“Takeshi-san, if I offended you with my talk of fear yesterday, I apologize. I am a fool.”

“No problem. I wasn't offended. We all deal with it in different ways. You planning on breakfast?”

He pointed across the living space to where the table had been pushed back to the canvasynth wall. There was fresh fruit piled on a shallow bowl and what looked like slices of rye bread.

“Mind if I join you?”

“I would be. Honored.”

We were still eating when Schneider came back from wherever he'd been for the last twenty minutes.

“Meeting in the main 'fab,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing into the dormitory. He emerged a minute later. “Fifteen minutes. Sutjiadi seems to think everyone should be there.”

He was gone again.

Jiang was half to his feet when I put out a hand and gestured him back to his seat.

“Take it easy. He said fifteen minutes.”

“I wish to shower and change,” said Jiang, a little stiffly.

“I'll tell him you're on your way. Finish your breakfast, for Christ's sake. In a couple of days from now it'll make you sick to your stomach just to swallow food. Enjoy the flavors while you can.”

He sat back down with a strange expression on his face.

“Do you mind, Takeshi-san, if I ask you a question?”

“Why am I no longer an Envoy?” I saw the confirmation in his eyes. “Call it an ethical revelation. I was at Innenin.”

“I have read about it.”

“Hayashi again?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, well, Hayashi's account is pretty close, but he wasn't there. That's why he comes off ambiguous about the whole thing. Didn't feel fit to judge. I was there, and I'm eminently fit to judge. They fucked us. No one's too clear on whether they actually
intended
to or not, but I'm here to tell you that doesn't matter. My friends died—really died—when there was no need. That's what counts.”

“Yet, as a soldier, surely you must—”

“Jiang, I don't want to disappoint you, but I try not to think of myself as a soldier anymore. I'm trying to evolve.”

“Then what do you consider yourself?” His voice stayed polite, but his demeanor had tightened and his food was forgotten on his plate. “What have you evolved into?”

I shrugged. “Difficult to say. Something better, at any rate. A paid killer, maybe?”

The whites of his eyes flared. I sighed.

“I'm sorry if that offends you, Jiang, but it's the truth. You probably don't want to hear it; most soldiers don't. When you put on that uniform, you're saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.”

“That is
Quellism
.” He all but reared back from the table as he said it.

“Maybe. That doesn't stop it being true.” I couldn't quite work out why I was bothering with this man. Maybe it was something about his ninja calm, the way it begged to be shattered. Or maybe it was just being woken up early by his tightly controlled killing dance. “Jiang, ask yourself, what are you going to do when your superior officer orders you to plasma-bomb some hospital full of injured children?”

“There are certain actions—”

“No!” The snap in my own voice surprised me. “Soldiers don't get to make those kinds of choices. Look out the window, Jiang. Mixed in with that black stuff you see blowing around out there, there's a thin coating of fat molecules that used to be people. Men, women, children, all vaporized by some soldier under orders from some superior officer. Because they were in the way.”

“That was a Kempist action.”

“Oh,
please.
”

“I would not carry out—”

“Then you're no longer a soldier, Jiang. Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you're no longer a soldier. You're just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”

He got up.

“I am going to change,” he said coldly. “Please present my apologies to Captain Sutjiadi for the delay.”

“Sure.” I picked up a kiwi fruit from the table and bit through the skin. “See you there.”

I watched him retreat to the other dormitory, then got up from the table and wandered out into the morning, still chewing the furred bitterness of the kiwi skin amid the fruit.

Outside, the camp was coming slowly to life. On my way to the assembly 'fab I spotted Ameli Vongsavath crouched under one of the
Nagini
's support struts while Yvette Cruickshank helped her lift part of the hydraulic system clear for inspection. With Wardani bunking in her lab, the three remaining females had ended up sharing a 'fab, whether by accident or design I didn't know. None of the male team members had tried for the fourth bunk.

Cruickshank saw me and waved.

“Sleep well?” I called out.

She grinned back. “Like the fucking dead.”

Hand was waiting at the door to the assembly 'fab, the clean angles of his face freshly shaven, the chameleochrome coveralls immaculate. There was a faint tang of spice in the air that I thought might come from something on his hair. He looked so much like a net ad for officer training that I could cheerfully have shot him in the face as soon as said good morning.

“Morning.”

“Good morning, Lieutenant. How did you sleep?”

“Briefly.”

Inside, three-quarters of the space was given over to the assembly hall, the rest walled off for Hand's use. In the assembly space, a dozen memoryboard-equipped chairs had been set out in an approximate ring and Sutjiadi was busy with a map projector, spinning up a table-size central image of the beach and surroundings, punching in tags and making notes on his own chair's board. He looked up as I came in.

“Kovacs, good. If you've got no objections, I'm going to send you out on the bike with Sun this morning.”

I yawned. “Sounds like fun.”

“Yes, well, that isn't the primary purpose. I want to string a secondary ring of remotes a few kilometers back to give us a response edge, and while Sun's doing that she can't be watching her own ass. You get the turret duty. I'll have Hansen and Cruickshank start at the north end and swing inland. You and Sun go south, do the same thing.” He gave me a thin smile. “See if you can't arrange to meet somewhere in the middle.”

I nodded.

“Humor.” I took a seat and slumped in it. “You want to watch that, Sutjiadi. Stuff's addictive.”

•         •         •

Up on the seaward slopes of Dangrek's spine, the devastation at Sauberville was clearer. You could see where the fireball had blasted a cavity into the hook at the end of the peninsula and let the sea in, changing the whole shape of the coastline. Around the crater, smoke was still crawling into the sky, but from up here you could make out the myriad tiny fires that fed the flow, dull red like the beacons used to flag potential flashpoints on a political map.

Of the buildings, the city itself, there was nothing left at all.

“You've got to hand it to Kemp,” I said, mostly to the wind coming in off the sea, “he doesn't mess about with decision-making by committee. There's no bigger picture with this guy. Soon as it looks like he's losing, bam! He just calls in the angelfire.”

“Sorry?” Sun Liping was still engrossed in the innards of the sentry system we had just planted. “You talking to me?”

“Not really.”

“Then you were talking to yourself?” Her brows arched over her work. “That's a bad sign, Kovacs.”

I grunted and shifted in the gunner's saddle. The grav bike was canted at an angle on the rough grass, mounted Sunjets cranked down to maintain a level bead on the landward horizon. They twitched from time to time, motion trackers chasing the wind through the grass or maybe some small animal that had somehow managed not to die when the blast hit Sauberville.

“All right, we're done.” Sun closed up the inspection hatch and stood back, watching the turret reel drunkenly to its feet and turn to face the mountains. It firmed up as the ultravibe battery snicked out of the upper carapace, as if it suddenly recalled its purpose in life. They hydraulic system settled it into a squat that took the bulk of the body below line-of-sight for anyone coming up this particular ridge. A fair-weather sensor crept out of the armor below the gun segment and flexed in the air. The whole machine looked absurdly like a starved frog in hiding, testing the air with one especially emaciated foreleg.

I chinned the contact mike.

“Cruickshank, this is Kovacs. You paying attention?”

“Nothing but.” The Rapid Deployment commando came back laconic. “Where you at, Kovacs?”

“We have number six fed and watered. Moving on to site five. We should have line-of-sight on you soon. Make sure you keep your tags where they can be read.”

“Relax, will you? I do this for a living.”

“That didn't save you last time, did it?”

I heard her snort. “Low blow, man. Low blow. How many times you been dead anyway, Kovacs?”

“A few,” I admitted.

“So.” Her voice rose derisively. “Shut the fuck up.”

“See you soon, Cruickshank.”

“Not if I get you in my sights first. Out.”

Sun climbed aboard the bike.

“She likes you,” she said over her shoulder. “Just for your information. Ameli and I spent most of last night hearing what she'd like to do to you in a locked escape pod.”

“Good to know. You weren't sworn to secrecy, then?”

Sun fired up the motors and the windshield snipped shut around us. “I think,” she said meditatively, “the idea was that one of us would tell you as soon as possible. Her family are from the Limon Highlands back on Latimer, and from what I hear the Limon girls don't mess about when they want something plugging in.” She turned to look at me. “Her choice of words, not mine.”

I grinned.

“Of course she'll need to hurry,” Sun went on, busying herself with the controls. “In a few days none of us'll have any libido left worth talking about.”