Broken Angels (42 page)

I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.

Fuck.

Well, it figures.
I shut down the shower system absently.
What did you expect, that he'd be easy to kill?

I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.

•         •         •

Deprez died while I was gone.

When I got back to him, he'd given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood—at close range, a Sunjet cauterizes totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had gotten him point-blank.

Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were kneeling in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn't in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in passing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.

“Tanya.”

She heard it in my voice. “What now?”

“It's a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?”

“Right.” She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. “There's a shutdown procedure that doesn't require encoding, yes. How did you know?”

I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn't usually work this way. “Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterward.”

Her voice lowered. “Yes.”

“This shutdown. How long will it take?”

“I—
Fuck,
Kovacs. I don't know. A couple of hours. Why?”

“Carrera isn't dead.”

She coughed up a fractured laugh. “What?”

“You see that big fucking hole in Luc.” The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. “Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy, and is by now on the other side of the fucking gate. That clear enough for you?”

“Then why don't you leave him there?”

“Because if I do—” I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the 'meth surge. “If I do, he'll swim up while you're trying to close the gate and he'll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead.
Very
shortly.”

“Then why don't we just get the fuck out of here right now?” asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the
Angin Chandra's Virtue
. “In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. Fuck it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months.”

I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.

“No. We have to close the gate.”

Vongsavath threw up her hands. “What the fuck for? Who care—”

“Stow it, Ameli.” I flexed the suit upright again. “Tell the truth, I don't think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I'm afraid we're going to have to do this the hard way.”

And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.

I wasn't sure if that was the 'meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whiskey on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn't seem to matter that much.

Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.

“You going on the bug?” she asked. “Or do you want an impeller frame?”

“We'll need both.”

“Yeah?” She looked suddenly interested. “How come? Do you want me—”

“The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty-kiloton yield. I'm going to fire that motherfucker across and see if we can't fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won't. He'll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I'll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that”—I shrugged—“it's a fair fight.”

“And I suppose I'm not—”

“Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?”

“Around here?” She looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. “It feels out of place.”

CHAPTER FORTY–ONE

“You can't do this,” Wardani said quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward toward the center of the gate space and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

“Tanya, we've seen this thing withstand weapons that . . .” I searched for adequate words. “That I for one don't understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?”

“I don't mean that. I mean you. Look at you.”

I looked down at the controls on the firing board. “I'm good for a couple more days.”

“Yeah—in a hospital bed. Do
you
really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you're in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.”

“Rubbish. You're forgetting the tetrameth.”

“Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?”

“Long enough.” I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. “What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?”

“Kovacs.” She waited until I looked at her. “Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I'll get the gate closed.”

“Tanya, why didn't you shoot me with the stunner?”

Silence.

“Tanya?”

“All right,” she said violently. “
Piss
your fucking life away out there. See if I care.”

“That wasn't what I asked you.”

“I—” She dropped her gaze. “I panicked.”

“That, Tanya, is bullshit. I've seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn't been any of them. I don't think you know the meaning of the word.”

“Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?”

“Well enough.”

She snorted. “Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I'll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You've fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to
judge
people?”

“People like Schneider, you mean?” I shrugged. “He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don't you? He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.”

“Oh, you're feeling proud of yourself, is that it?” She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up toward us. “Think you've achieved something here, do you?”

“You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?”

“No!”

“It's not a problem, Tanya.” I shrugged again. “The only thing I can't work out is why I
didn't
die. I don't suppose you've got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.”

“I don't know. I—I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.”

“Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn't. That, and why I woke up so fast.”

“Maybe,” she said, not looking at me, “you don't have whatever is inside the rest of us.”

“Hoy, Kovacs.”

We both shifted to look down the beach again.

“Kovacs. Look what I found.”

It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.

“I don't fucking believe it.”

“Who is it?”

I rustled up a dry chuckle. “Survivor type. Look.”

Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we'd met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits, and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognized me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of meters away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.

“Knew it!” He cackled out loud. “Knew you'd do it. Got
files
on you, I knew you would. I
heard
you.
Heard
you, but I didn't say.”

“Found him in the armory crawl space,” said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. “Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.”

“
Heard
you,
saw
you,” said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. “Got
files
on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs.
Knew
you'd do it.”

“Did you,” I said somberly.

“
Heard
you,
saw
you, but I didn't say.”

“Yeah, well, that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It's in the directives.” I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five meters behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.

“
Knew
you'd do it,” he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.

“Did you get the impeller?” I asked Vongsavath.

•         •         •

I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren't shielded and I didn't want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.

Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes: It wouldn't permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.

Then why are you sitting here, Tak?

Suit'll soak it up.

But it was a little more than that. Sitting astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn't that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.

Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the 'meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to—

Or maybe you're just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the
Mivtsemdi
all over again.

Shall we just get on with it?

The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow enough to be visible, breached the gate space with a faint sucking sound, and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn't think it worth mentioning.

Nice to be right, huh?

Not that it matters much now anyway.

I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and plowed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.

“Two hours, you said, Tanya.”

She ignored me. She hadn't spoken since I shot Lamont.

“Well.” I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. “Whatever you've got to do, start doing it now.”

“What if you're not back in time?” objected Vongsavath.

I grinned. “Don't be stupid. If I can't waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I'm not coming back. You know that.”

Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.

Through the gate. Look—easy as falling.

My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.

Here we fucking go again.

Carrera made his play.

Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened, and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems flickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defenses the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinseled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.

By then, I was too busy to watch.

I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.

Not yet.

The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn't have one of those at hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug's drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line, and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera's next move.

Come on, you motherfucker.

Ah-ah. You're expecting, Tak.

We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

Thanks, Virginia.

Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn't have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn't suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.

I hadn't had time to find and install the Wedge's battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn't, either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako's team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched—there wouldn't be much.

You hope.

The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favor. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.

There.

Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.

I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point, and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera's missile homing in on the bug.

I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward toward the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn't see me, and by the time he could . . .

Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.

Not yet. Not—

Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometer now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he'd have to deal with, and while he was doing that I'd get close.

I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.

Space erupted in light around me.

For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.

Flare. You stupid fuck, he's lit you up.

I snapped on the impellers and whirled away sideways. Sunjet fire chased me from a rampart on the hull over my head. On one spin, I managed to get off returning fire. Three sputtering seconds, but Carrera's beam shut off. I fled for the roof, got some piece of hull architecture between me and Carrera's position, then reversed the impeller drive and braked to slow drift. Blood hammered in my temples.

Did I get him?

Proximity to the hull forced recoding of my surroundings. The alien-sculpted architecture of the vessel overhead was suddenly the surface of a planetoid and I was head-down five meters over it. The flare burned steadily a hundred meters out, casting twisted shadows past the chunk of hull architecture I was floating behind. Weird detail scarred the surfaces around me, curls and scrapings of structure like scrawlings in bas-relief, glyphs on a monumental scale.