Broken Angels (35 page)

. . . time slowing down . . .

I stared at the screens.

We need to get out of here.

“Kovacs?”

“We need to—”

I felt the words moth their way out between dry lips, as if someone else were using the sleeve against my will, and then they stopped.

From the attacker came the real attack at last.

It burst from the leading surfaces of the vessel like something alive. An amorphous, turbulent dark-body blob of something spat out at us like congealed hatred. On secondary screens you could see how it tore up the fabric of space around it and left a wake of outraged reality behind. It didn't take much to guess what we were looking at.

Hyperspace weaponry.

Experia fantasy stuff. And the sick wet dream of every naval commander in the Protectorate.

The ship, the Martian ship—and only now I grasped with instinctive Envoy-intuited knowledge that the other was
not
Martian, looked nothing like—pulsed in a way that sent nausea rolling through my guts and set every tooth in my head instantly on edge. I staggered and went down on one knee.

Something vomited into the space ahead of the attack. Something boiled and flexed and split wide open with a vaguely sensed detonation. I felt a recoil tremor go throbbing through the hull around me, a disquiet that went deeper than simple real-space vibration.

On the screen, the dark-body projectile shattered apart, flinging out oddly sticky-looking particles of itself. I saw the outside shield fluoresce, shudder, and go out like a blown candle flame.

The ship screamed.

There was no other way to describe it. It was a rolling, modulating cry that seemed to emanate from the air around us. It was a sound so massive, it made the shriek of the
Nagini
's ultravibe battery seem almost tolerable. But where the ultravibe blast had rammed and battered at my hearing, this sound sliced and passed through as effortlessly as a laser scalpel. I knew, even as I made the movement, that clapping hands over my ears would have no effect.

I did it anyway.

The scream rose, held, and finally rolled away across the platform, replaced by a less agonizing pastiche of fluting alert sounds from the datasystems and a splinter-thin fading echo from—

I whipped around.

—from the songspires.

This time there could be no doubt. Softly, like wind sawing over a worn stone edge, the songspires had collected the ship's scream and were playing it back to each other in skewed cadences that could almost have been music.

It was the carrier wave.

Overhead, something seemed to whisper response. Looking up, I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the dome.

Outside, the shields came back on.

“Fuck,” said Hand, getting to his feet. “What was th—”

“Shut up.” I stared across at the place I thought I'd seen the shadow, but the loss of the starscape background had drowned it in pearlish light. A little to the left, one of the Martian corpses gazed down at me from amid the radiance of the datasystem. The sobbing of the songspires murmured on, tugging at something in the pit of my stomach.

And then, again, the gut-deep, sickening pulse and the thrum through the deck underfoot.

“We're returning fire,” said Sun.

On screen, another dark-body mass, hawked out of some battery deep in the belly of the Martian vessel, spat at the closing attacker. This time the recoil went on longer.

“This is incredible,” said Hand. “Unbelievable.”

“Believe it,” I told him tonelessly. The sense of impending disaster had not gone with the decaying echo of the last attack. If anything, it was stronger. I tried to summon the Envoy intuition through layers of weariness and dizzying nausea.

“Incoming,” called Vongsavath. “Block your ears.”

This time, the alien ship's missile got a lot closer before the Martian defense net caught and shredded it. The shock waves from the blast drove us all to the ground. It felt as if the whole ship had been twisted around us like a wrung-out cloth. Sun threw up. The outside shield went down and stayed down.

Braced for the ship to scream again, I heard instead a long, low keening that scraped talons along the tendons of my arms and around my rib cage. The songspires trapped it and fed it back, higher now, no longer a fading echo but a field emanation in its own right.

I heard someone hiss behind me and turned to see Wardani staring up in disbelief. I followed her gaze and saw the same shadow flitting clearly across the upper regions of the datadisplay.

“What . . .” It was Hand, voice fading out as another patch of darkness flapped across from the left and seemed to dance briefly with the first.

By then I knew, and oddly my first thought was that Hand, of all people, ought not to have been surprised, that he ought to have gotten it first.

The first shadow dipped and swooped around the corpse of the Martian.

I looked for Wardani, found her eyes and the numb disbelief there.

“No,” she whispered, little more than mouthing the word. “It can't be.”

But it was.

They came from all sides of the dome, at first in ones and twos, sliding up the crystalline curve and peeling off into sudden full three-dimensional existence, shaken loose with each convulsive distortion that their ship suffered as the battle raged outside. They peeled off and swooped down to floor level, then soared up again and settled to circling the central structure. They didn't seem to be aware of us in any way that mattered, but none of them touched us. Overhead, their passage had no effect on the datadisplay system other than a slight rippling as they banked, and some of them seemed even to pass occasionally through the substance of the dome and out into hard space. More came funneling up through the tube that had first led us to the platform, packing into a flying space that was already becoming crowded.

The sound they made was the same keening the ship had begun earlier, the same dirge that the songspires now gave out from the floor, the same carrier wave I'd picked up on the comset. Traces of the cherry-and-mustard odor wafted through the air, but tinged now with something else, something scorched and old.

Hyperspatial distortion broke and burst in the space outside, the shields came back on, tinged a new, violet color, and the ship's hull was awash with recoil as its batteries launched repeatedly at the other vessel. I was beyond caring. All feeling of physical discomfort was gone, frozen away to a single tightness in my chest and a growing pressure behind my eyes. The platform seemed to have expanded massively around me, and the rest of the company were now too far out across the vast flattened space to be relevant.

I was abruptly aware that I was weeping myself, a dry sobbing in the small spaces of my sinuses.

“Kovacs!”

I turned, feeling as if I were thigh deep in a torrent of icy water, and saw Hand, jacket pocket flapped back, raising his stunner.

The distance, I later reckoned, was less than five meters but it seemed to take forever to cross it. I waded forward, blocked the weapon arm at a pressure point, and smashed an elbow strike into his face. He howled and went down, stunner skittering away across the platform. I dropped after him, looking through blurred vision for his throat. One weak arm fended me off. He was screaming something.

My right hand stiffened into the killing blade. Neurachem worked to focus my eyes through blurring.

“—all die, you fucking—”

I drew back for the blow. He was sobbing now.

Blurring.

Water in my eyes.

I wiped a hand across them, blinked, and saw his face. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. The sobbing barely made words.

“What?” My hand loosened and I belted him hard across the face. “What did you say?”

He gulped. Drew breath.

“Shoot me. Shoot us all. Use the stunner.
Kovacs. This is what killed the others.
”

And I realized my own face was soaked in tears, my eyes filled with them. I could feel the weeping in my swollen throat, the same ache that the songspires had reflected back, not from the ship, I knew suddenly, but from her millennia-departed crew. The knife running through me was the grief of the Martians, an alien pain stored here in ways that made no sense outside folktales around a campfire out on Mitcham's Point, a frozen, unhuman hurt in my chest and the pit of my stomach that would not be dismissed, and a not-quite-tuned note in my ears that I knew when it got here would crack me open like a raw egg.

Vaguely, I felt the rip and warp of another dark-body near miss. The flocking shadows above my head swirled and shrieked, beating upward against the dome.

“Do it, Kovacs!”

I staggered upright. Found my own stunner, and fired it into Hand. Looked for the others.

Deprez, with his hands at his temples, swaying like a tree in a gale. Sun, apparently sinking to her knees. Sutjiadi between the two of them, unclear in the shimmering perspectives of my own tears. Wardani, Vongsavath . . .

Too far, too far off in the density of light and keening pain.

The Envoy conditioning scrabbled after perspective, shut down the flood of emotion that the weeping around me had unlocked. Distance closed. My senses reeled back in.

The wailing of the gathered shadows intensified as I overrode my own psychic defenses and dimmer switches. I was breathing it in like Guerlain Twenty, corroding some containment system inside that lay beyond analytical physiology. I felt the damage come on, swelling to bursting point.

I threw up the stunner and started firing.

Deprez. Down.

Sutjiadi, spinning as the assassin fell at his side, disbelief on his face.

Down.

Beyond him, Sun Liping kneeling, eyes clamped tightly shut, sidearm lifting to her own face. Systems analysis. Last resort. She'd worked it out, just didn't have a stunner. Didn't know anyone else did, either.

I staggered forward, yelling at her. Inaudible in the storm of grief. The blaster snugged under her chin. I snapped off a shot with the stunner, missed. Got closer.

The blaster detonated. It ripped up through her chin on narrow beam and flashed a sword of pale flame out the top of her head before the blowback circuit cut in and killed the beam. She toppled sideways, steam curling from her mouth and eyes.

Something clicked in my throat. A tiny increment of loss welling up and dripping into the ocean of grief the songspires were singing me. My mouth opened, maybe to scream some of the pain out, but there was too much to pass. It locked soundless in my throat.

Vongsavath stumbled into me from the side. I spun and grabbed her. Her face was wide-eyed with shock, drenched in tears. I tried to push her away, to give her some distance on the stunblast, but she clung to me, moaning deep in her throat.

The bolt convulsed her and she dropped on top of Sun's corpse.

Wardani stood on the other side of both of them, staring at me.

Another dark-body blast. The winged shadows above us screamed and wept and I felt something tearing inside me.

“No,” said Wardani.

“Cometary,” I shouted at her across the shrieking. “It has to pass, we just—”

Then something really did tear, somewhere, and I dropped to the deck, curled around the pain, gaping like a gaffed bottleback with the immensity of it.

Sun—dead by her own hand for the
second fucking time
.

Jiang—smeared pulp on the docking bay floor. Stack gone.

Cruickshank, ripped apart, stack gone. Hansen ditto. The count unreeled, speed review across time, thrashing like a snake in its death throes.

The stink of the camp I'd pulled Wardani out of, children starving under robot guns and the governance of a burned-out wirehead excuse for a human being.

The hospital ship, limping interim space between killing fields.

The platoon, pack members torn apart around me by smart shrapnel.

Two years of slaughter on Sanction Four.

Before that, the Corps.

Innenin, Jimmy de Soto, and the others, minds gnawed hollow by the Rawling virus.

Before that, other worlds. Other pain, most of it not mine. Death and Envoy deceit.

Before that, Harlan's World and the gradual emotional maiming of childhood in the Newpest slums. The lifesaving leap into the cheerful brutality of the Protectorate marines. Days of enforcement.

Strung-out lives, lived in the sludge of human misery. Pain suppressed, packed down,
stored
for an inventory that never came.

Overhead the Martians circled and screamed their grief. I could feel my own scream building, welling up inside, and knew it was going to rip me apart coming out.

And then discharge.

And then the dark.

I tumbled into it, thankful, hoping that the ghosts of the unavenged dead might pass me in the darkness unseeing.

CHAPTER THIRTY–FIVE

It's cold down by the shoreline, and there's a storm coming in. Black flecks of fallout mingle with flurries of dirty snow, and the wind lifts splatters of spray off the rumpled sea. Reluctant waves dump themselves on sand turned muddy green beneath the glowering sky. I hunch my shoulders inside my jacket, hands jammed into pockets, face closed like a fist against the weather.

Farther up the curve of the beach, a fire casts orange-red light at the sky. A solitary figure sits on the landward side of the flames, huddled in a blanket. Though I don't want to, I start in that direction. Whatever else, the fire looks warm, and there's nowhere else to go.

The gate is closed.

That sounds wrong, something I know, for some reason, isn't true.

Still . . .

As I get closer, my disquiet grows. The huddled figure doesn't move or acknowledge my approach. Before I was worried that it might be someone hostile, but now that misgiving shrivels up to make space for the fear that this is someone I know, and that they're dead—

Like everyone else I know.

Behind the figure at the fire, I see there's a structure rising from the sand, a huge skeletal cross with something bound loosely to it. The driving wind and the needle-thin sleet it carries won't let me look up far enough to see clearly what the object is.

The wind is keening now, like something I once heard and was afraid of.

I reach the fire and feel the blast of warmth across my face. I take my hands from my pockets and hold them out.

The figure stirs. I try not to notice. I don't want this.

“Ah—the penitent.”

Semetaire. The sardonic tone has gone; maybe he thinks he doesn't need it anymore. Instead there's something approaching compassion. The magnanimous warmth of someone who's won a game whose outcome they never had that much doubt about.

“I'm sorry?”

He laughs. “Very droll. Why don't you kneel at the fire, it's warmer that way.”

“I'm not that cold,” I say, shivering, and risk a look at his face. His eyes glitter in the firelight. He knows.

“It's taken you a long time to get here, Wedge Wolf,” he says kindly. “We can wait a little longer.”

I stare through my splayed fingers at the flames. “What do you want from me, Semetaire?”

“Oh, come, now. What do I want? You know what I want.” He shrugs off the blanket and rises gracefully to his feet. He is taller than I remember, elegantly menacing in his ragged black coat. He fits the top hat on his head at a rakish angle. “I want the same as all the others.”

“And what's that?” I nod up at the thing crucified behind him.

“That?” For the first time, he seems off balance. A little embarrassed, maybe. “That's, well. Let's say that's an alternative. An alternative for you, that is, but I really don't think you want to—“

I look up at the looming structure, and suddenly it's easier to see through the wind and sleet and fallout.

It's me.

Pinned in place with swathes of netting, dead gray flesh pressing into the spaces between the cord, body sagging away from the rigid structure of the scaffold, head sunk forward on the neck. The gulls have been at my face. The eye sockets are empty and the cheeks tattered. Bone shows through in patches across my forehead.

It must, I think distantly, be cold up there.

“I did warn you.” A trace of the old mockery is creeping back into his voice. He's getting impatient. “It's an alternative, but I think you'll agree it's a lot more comfortable down here by the fire. And there is this.”

He opens one gnarled hand and shows me the cortical stack, fresh blood and tissue still clinging to it in specks. I slap a hand to the back of my neck and find a ragged hole there, a gaping space at the base of my skull into which my fingers slip with horrifying ease. Through on the other side of the damage, I can feel the slick, spongy weight of my own cerebral tissue.

“See,” he says, almost regretfully.

I pull my fingers loose again. “Where did you get that, Semetaire?”

“Oh, these are not hard to come by. Especially on Sanction Four.”

“You got Cruickshank's?” I ask him, with a sudden surge of hope.

He hesitates fractionally. “But of course. They all come to me, sooner or later.” He nods to himself. “Sooner or later.”

The repetition sounds forced. Like he's trying to convince. I feel the hope die down again, guttering out.

“Later, then,” I tell him, holding my hands out to the fire one more time. The wind buffets at my back.

“What are you talking about?” The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there's a strange comfort to the way it hurts.

“I'm going now. There's nothing for me here.”

“Go?” His voice turns abruptly ugly. He holds up the stack between thumb and forefinger, red glinting in the firelight. “You're not going anywhere, my wolf pack puppy. You're staying here with me. We've got some accounts to process.”

This time, I'm the one who laughs.

“Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.”

“You. Will.” One hand reaching crooked across the fire for me. “Stay.”

And the Kalashnikov is in my hand, the gun heavy with a full clip of antipersonnel rounds. Well, wouldn't you know it.

“Got to go,” I say. “I'll tell Hand you said hello.”

He looms, grasping, eyes gleaming.

I level the gun.

“You were warned, Semetaire.”

I shoot into the space below the hat brim. Three shots, tight-spaced.

It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three meters beyond the fire. I wait for a moment to see if he'll get up, but he's gone. The flames dampen down visibly with his departure.

I look up and see that the cruciform structure is empty, whatever that means. I remember the dead face it held up before and squat by the fire, warming myself until it gutters down to embers.

In the glowing ash, I spot the cortical stack, burned clean and metallic shiny amid the last charred fragments of wood. I reach in among the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.

It scorches a little, but that's okay.

I stow it and the Kalashnikov, thrust my rapidly chilling hands back into the pockets of my jacket, and straighten up, looking around.

It's cold, but somewhere there's got to be a way off this fucking beach.