Broken Angels (36 page)

PART FIVE

DIVIDED LOYALTIES

Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever.
Face the facts. Then
act.

QUELLCRIST FALCONER
Speech before the assault on Millsport

         

CHAPTER THIRTY–SIX

Night sky starscape, piercingly clear.

I looked at it dully for a while, watching a peculiarly fragmented red glow creep up over it from the left edge of my vision, then retreat again.

This ought to mean something to you, Tak.

Like some kind of code, webbed into the way the glow shattered across the rim of my vision, something designed in the way it levered itself up and then sank down again by fractions.

Like glyphs. Like numerals.

And then it did mean something to me, and I felt a cold wave of sweat break across my entire body as I realized where I was.

The red glow was a heads-up display, printing out across the bowl of the spacesuit faceplate I was lying trapped beneath.

This is no fucking night sky, Tak.

I was outside.

And then the weight of recall, of personality and past, came crashing in on me like a micrometeorite punching through the thin seal of transparency that was keeping my life in.

I flailed my arms and found I couldn't move from the wrists up. My fingers groped around a rigid framework under my back, the faint thrum of a motor system. I reached around, twisting my head.

“Hey, he's coming out of it.”

It was a familiar voice, even through the thin metallic straining of the suit's comsystem. Someone else chuckled tinnily.

“Are you fucking surprised, man?”

Proximity sense gave me movement at my right side. Above me, I saw another helmet lean in, faceplate darkened to an impenetrable black.

“Hey, Lieutenant.” Another voice I knew. “You just won me fifty bucks U.N. I told these fucking suitfarts you'd pull through faster than anyone else.”

“Tony?” I managed faintly.

“Hey, no cerebral damage, either. Key another one in for Three Ninety-one Platoon, guys. We are
fucking
immortal.”

•         •         •

They brought us back from the Martian dreadnought like a vacuum commando funeral procession. Seven bodies on powered stretchers, four assault bugs, and a twenty-five-strong honor guard in full hard-space combat rig. Carrera had been taking no chances when he finally deployed to the other side of the gate.

Tony Loemanako took us back through in immaculate style, as if Martian gate-beachheads were something he'd been doing all his professional life. He sent two bugs through first, followed with the stretchers and infantry, commandos peeling off in matched pairs on left and right, and closed it out with the last two bugs retreating through backward. Suit, stretcher, and bug drives all powered up to full grav-lift hover the second they hit Sanction IV's gravity field, and when they grounded a couple of seconds after that, it was unified, on a single raise-and-clench command from Loemanako's suited fist.

Carrera's Wedge.

Propped up on the stretcher to the extent that the webbing allowed, I watched the whole thing and tried to damp down the sense of pride and belonging the wolf gene splice wanted me to feel.

“Welcome to base camp, Lieutenant,” said Loemanako, dropping his fist to knock gently on my suit's breastplate. “You're going to be fine now. Everything's going to be fine.”

His voice lifted in the comsystem. “All right, people, let's move. Mitchell and Kwok, stay suited and keep two of the bugs at standby. The rest of you, hit the shower—we're done swimming for now. Tan, Sabyrov, and Munharto, I want you back here in fifteen, wear what you like but tooled up to keep Kwok and Munharto company. Everyone else, stand down. Chandra Control, could we get some medical attention down here
today
, please.”

Laughter, rattling through the comset. There was a general loosening of stance around me, visible even through the bulk of vacuum combat gear and the nonreflective black polalloy suits beneath. Weapons went away, folded down, disconnected, or simply sheathed. The bug riders climbed off their mounts with the precision of mechanical dolls and followed the general flow of suited bodies away down the beach. Waiting for them at water's edge, the Wedge battlewagon
Angin Chandra's Virtue
bulked on assault landing claws like some prehistoric cross between crocodile and turtle. Her heavily armored chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.

It was good to see her again.

The beach, now that I came to look at it, was a mess. In every direction as far as my limited vision could make out, the sand was torn up and furrowed around the shallow crater of fused glass the
Nagini
had made when she blew. The blast had taken the bubblefabs with it, leaving nothing but scorch marks and a sparse few fragments of metal that professional pride told me could not possibly be part of the assault ship itself. The
Nagini
had airburst, and the explosion would have consumed every molecule of her structure instantaneously. If the ground was for dead people, Schneider had certainly won clear of the crowd. Most of him was probably still up in the stratosphere, dissipating.

What you're good at, Tak.

The blast seemed to have sunk the trawler, too. Twisting my head, I could just make out the stern and heat-mangled superstructure jutting above the water. Memory flickered brightly through my head—Luc Deprez and a bottle of cheap whiskey, junk politics and government-banned cigars, Cruickshank leaning over me in—

Don't do this, Tak.

The Wedge had put up a few items of their own to replace the vaporized camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few meters off the crater on the left, and down by the snout of the battlewagon I picked out the sealed square cabin and the bulk pressure tanks of the polalloy shower unit. The returning vacuum commandos shucked their heavier items of weaponry on adjacent tent-canopied racks and filed in through the rinse hatch.

From the
Chandra
came a file of Wedge uniforms with the white shoulder flash of the medical unit. They gathered around the stretchers, powered them up, and shunted us off toward one of the bubblefabs. Loemanako touched me on the arm as my stretcher lifted.

“See you later, Lieutenant. I'll drop by once they got you shelled. Got to go and rinse now.”

“Yeah, thanks, Tony.”

“Good to see you again, sir.”

In the bubblefab, the medics got us unstrapped and then unsuited, working with brisk, clinical efficiency. By virtue of being conscious, I was a little easier to unpack than the others, but there wasn't much in it. I'd been without the antirad dosing for too long and just bending or lifting each limb took major efforts of will. When they finally got me out of the suit and onto a bed, it was as much as I could do to answer the questions the medic put to me as he ran a series of standard postcombat checks on my sleeve. I managed to keep my eyes jacked half open while he did it, and watched past his shoulder as they ran the same tests on the others. Sun, who was pretty obviously beyond immediate repair, they dumped unceremoniously in a corner.

“So will I live, Doc?” I mumbled at one point.

“Not in this sleeve.” Prepping an antirad cocktail hypospray as he talked. “But I can keep you going for a while longer, I think. Save you having to talk to the old man in virtual.”

“What does he want, a debriefing?”

“I guess.”

“Well, you'd better jack me up with something so I don't fall asleep on him. Got any 'meth?”

“I'm not convinced that's a good idea right now, Lieutenant.”

That merited a laugh, dredged up dry from somewhere. “Yeah, you're right. That stuff'll ruin my health.”

In the end I had to pull rank on him to get the tetrameth, but he jacked me. I was more or less functional when Carrera walked in.

“Lieutenant Kovacs.”

“Isaac.”

The grin broke across his scarred face like sunrise on crags. He shook his head. “You motherfucker, Kovacs. Do you know how many men I've had deployed across this hemisphere looking for you?”

“Probably no more than you can spare.” I propped myself up a little more on the bed. “Were you getting worried?”

“I think you stretched the terms of your commission worse than a squad bitch's asshole, lieutenant. AWOL two months on a datastack posting.
Gone after something that might be worth this whole fucking war. Back later.
That's a little vague.”

“Accurate, though.”

“Is it?” He seated himself on the edge of the bed, chameleochrome coveralls shifting to match the quilt pattern. The recent scar tissue across forehead and cheek tugged as he frowned. “Is it a warship?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Deployable?”

I considered. “Dependent on the archaeologue support you've got at hand, I'd say yes, probably.”

“And how's your current archaeologue support?”

I glanced across the open space of the bubblefab to where Tanya Wardani lay curled up under a sheet-thin insulating quilt. Like the rest of the
Nagini
gang survivors, she'd been lightly sedated. The medic who did it had said she was stable, but not likely to live much longer than me.

“Wasted.” I started coughing, couldn't easily stop. Carrera waited it out. Handed me a wipe when I finished. I gestured weakly as I cleaned my mouth. “Just like the rest of us. How's yours?”

“We have no archaeologue aboard currently, unless you count Sandor Mitchell.”

“I don't. That's a man with a hobby, not an archaeologue. How come you didn't come Scratcher-equipped, Isaac?”
Schneider must have told you what you were buying into.
I weighed it up, split-second, and decided not to give up that particular piece of information yet. I didn't know what value it held, if any, but when you're down to your last harpoon clip, you don't go firing at fins. “You must have had some idea what you were buying into here.”

He shook his head.

“Corporate backers, Takeshi. Tower-dweller scum. You get no more air from people like that than you absolutely need to get aboard. All I knew until today was that Hand was into something big, and if the Wedge brought back a piece of it, it'd be made worth our while.”

“Yeah, but they gave you the codes to the nanobe system. Something more valuable than that? On Sanction Four? Come on, Isaac, you must have guessed what it was.”

He shrugged. “They named figures, that's all. That's how the Wedge works, you know that. Which reminds me. That's Hand over by the door, right? The slim one.”

I nodded. Carrera wandered over and looked intently at the sleeping exec.

“Yeah. Missing some weight off the pix I've got on stack.” He paced the makeshift ward, glancing left and right at the other beds and the corpse in the corner. Through the 'meth rush and the weariness, I felt an old caution go itching along my nerves. “Course, that's not surprising, the rad count around here. I'm surprised any of you are still up and walking around.”

“We're not,” I pointed out.

“Right.” His smile was pained. “Jesus, Takeshi. Why didn't you hold back a couple of days? Could have halved your dosage. I've got everybody on standard antirad, we'll all walk out of here with no worse than headaches.”

“Not my call.”

“No, I don't suppose it was. Who's the inactive?”

“Sun Liping.” It hurt more to look at her than I'd expected. Wolf pack allegiances are a slippery thing, it seems. “Systems officer.”

He grunted. “The others?”

“Ameli Vongsavath, pilot officer.” I pointed them out with a cocked finger and thumb. “Tanya Wardani, archaeologue, Jiang Jianping, Luc Deprez, both stealth ops.”

“I see.” Carrera frowned again and nodded in Vongsavath's direction. “So if that's your pilot, who was flying the assault launch when she blew?”

“Guy called Schneider. He's the one put me onto this whole gig in the first place. Fucking civilian pilot. He got rattled when the fireworks started out there. Took the ship, trashed Hansen, the guy we left on picket, with the ultravibe, and then just blew hatches, left us to—”

“He went alone?”

“Yeah, unless you want to count the riders in the corpse locker. We lost two bodies to the nanobes before we went through. And we found another six on the other side. Oh, yeah, and two more drowned in the trawler nets. Archaeologue team from back before the war, looks like.”

He wasn't listening, just waiting until I stopped.

“Yvette Cruickshank, Markus Sutjiadi. Those were the members of your team the nanobe system took out?”

“Yeah.” I tried for mild surprise. “You got a crew list? Jesus, these Tower-dwellers of yours cut some mean corporate security.”

He shook his head. “Not really. These Tower-dwellers are from the same Tower as your friend over there. Rivals for promotion, in fact. Like I said, scum.” There was a curious lack of venom in his voice as he said it, an absent tone that seemed to my Envoy antennae to carry with it a tinge of relief. “I don't suppose you recovered stacks for any of the nanobe victims?”

“No, why?”

“Doesn't matter. I didn't really think you would. My clients tell me the system goes after any built components. Cannibalizes them.”

“Yeah, that's what we guessed, too.” I spread my hands. “Isaac, even if we had recovered stacks, they'd have been vaporized with just about everything else aboard the
Nagini
.”