Broken Angels (7 page)

“Is he here now?”

“I would hardly have invited you here if he was. He left only last week.” The boy leered, unnerving to watch on a face that young. “Satisfied, you might say, with what he found here.”

I found myself smiling. I couldn't help it.

“I think we've come to the right place.”

“Well that will depend on what you came for,” said Roespinoedji, glancing at Schneider. “Jan was far from explicit. But come. Even in Dig Twenty-seven there are more congenial places than this to discuss business.”

He led us back to the little group of waiting militiamen and made a sharp clucking sound with his tongue. The figure who had been carrying him before stooped awkwardly and picked him up. Behind me, I heard Tanya Wardani's breath catch slightly as she saw what had been done to the man.

It was by no means the worst thing I'd ever seen happen to a human being—wasn't in fact even the worst I'd seen recently; still, there was something eerie about the ruined head and the silvery alloy cement that had been used to patch it together. If I'd had to guess, I would have said this sleeve had been struck by flying shrapnel. Any kind of deliberate, directional weapon just wouldn't have left you anything to work with. But someone somewhere had taken the trouble to repair the dead man's skull, seal up the remaining gaps with resin, and replace the eyeballs with photoreceptors that sat in the gutted sockets like cyclopic silver spiders waiting for prey. Then, presumably, they'd coaxed enough life back into the brainstem to operate the body's vegetative systems and basic motor functions, and maybe respond to a few programmed commands.

Back before I got shot up on the Rim, I'd had a Wedge noncom working with me whose Afro-Caribbean sleeve was actually his own. One night, waiting out a satellite bombardment in the ruins of some kind of temple, he'd told me one of the myths his people, in chains, had taken across an ocean on Earth, and later, in the hope of a new beginning, across the gulfs of the Martian astrogation charts to the world that would later become known as Latimer. It was a story of magicians and the slaves they made of bodies raised from the dead. I forget what name he gave to these creatures in the story, but I know he would have seen one in the thing that held Djoko Roespinoedji in its arms.

“Do you like it?” The boy, cuddled up obscenely close to the ravaged head, had been watching me.

“Not much, no.”

“Well, aesthetically, of course . . .” The boy let his voice trail off delicately. “But with judicious use of bandaging, and some suitably ragged clothing for me, we should make a truly pitiful ensemble. The wounded and the innocent, fleeing from the ruins of their shattered lives—ideal camouflage, really, should things become extreme.”

“Same old Djoko.” Schneider came up and nudged me. “Like I told you. Always one step ahead of the action.”

I shrugged. “I've known refugee columns get gunned down just for target practice.”

“Oh, I'm aware of that. Our friend here was a tactical marine before he met his unfortunate end. Still quite a lot of ingrained reflex left in the cortex, or wherever it is they store that kind of thing.” The boy winked at me. “I'm a businessman, not a technician. I had a software firm in Landfall knock what was left into usable shape. Look.”

The child's hand disappeared into his jacket, and the dead man snatched a long-barrel blaster from the scabbard across his back. It was very fast. The photoreceptors whirred audibly in their sockets, scanning left to right. Roespinoedji grinned broadly and his hand emerged clutching the remote. A thumb shifted, and the blaster was returned smoothly to its sheath. The arm supporting the boy had not shifted an inch.

“So you see,” the boy piped cheerfully, “where pity cannot be mined, less subtle options are always available. But really, I'm optimistic. You'd be surprised how many soldiers still find it difficult to shoot small children, even in these troubled times. Now, enough chatter: Shall we eat?”

Roespinoedji had the top floor and penthouse of a raddled warehouse block not far off touching distance from the tail of the dighead. We left all but two of the militia escort outside in the street and picked our way through cool gloom to where an industrial elevator stood in one corner. The animated dead man dragged the cage door aside with one hand. Metallic echoes chased around the empty space over our heads.

“I can remember,” the boy said as we rose toward the roof, “when all this was stacked with grade-one artifacts, crated and tagged for airlift to Landfall. The inventory crews used to work shifts around the clock. The dighead never stopped; you could hear it running day and night under all the other sounds. Like a heartbeat.”

“Is that what you used to do?” asked Wardani. “Stack artifacts?”

I saw Schneider smile to himself in the gloom.

“When I was younger,” said Roespinoedji, self-mocking. “But I was involved in a more . . . organizational capacity, shall we say?”

The elevator passed through the roof of the storage area and clanged to a halt in suddenly bright light. Sunlight strained through fabric-curtained windows into a reception lounge screened from the rest of the floor by amber-painted internal walls. Through the elevator cage I saw kaleidoscopic designs on carpets, dark wood flooring, and long, low sofas arranged around what I took to be a small, internally lit swimming pool. Then, as we stepped out, I saw that the floor recess held not water but a wide horizontal video screen on which a woman appeared to be singing. In two corners of the lounge, the image was duplicated in a more viewable format on two vertical stacks of more reasonable-size screens. The far wall held a long table on which someone had laid out enough food and drink for a platoon.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Roespinoedji as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. “I'll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.”

The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognizable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit “Open Ground” that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic suborgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.

Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up stations near the elevator, shrugged, and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there.

“Told you,” Schneider said to me. “If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He's interfaced with every player in Landfall.”

“You mean he was jacked in before the war.”

Schneider shook his head. “Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn't still jacked into the machine.”

“If he's jacked into the machine,” I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, “how come he's living in this shithole town?”

“Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now,
that's
a shithole.”

Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn't.

“Let's wait,” I said softly. “It's only polite.”

He snorted. “What do you think, he's going to poison us? What for? There's no angle in it.”

But he left the food alone.

The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitized, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, Rebel operations neutralized.

Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they'd stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.

“Ivanna and Kas,” he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. “My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn't you say? Or two. Now—” He snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself on an adjacent sofa. “—to business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?”

“You're not eating?” I asked him.

“Oh.” He smiled and gestured at his two companions. “Well, they are, and I'm really very fond of both of them.”

Schneider looked embarrassed.

“No?” Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. “There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?”

“We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.” Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. “Knockdown price.”

“Indeed?”

“Yeah—call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-seventy, very little wear and no previous owner of record.”

Roespinoedji smiled. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Check it if you like.” Schneider swallowed his mouthful. “The datacore's wiped cleaner than your tax records. Six-hundred-thousand-klick range. Universal config, hard space, suborbital, submarine. Handles like a whorehouse harpy.”

“Yes, I seem to remember the seventies were impressive. Or was it you who told me that, Jan?” The boy stroked his beardless chin in a gesture that clearly belonged to a previous sleeve. “Never mind. This knockdown bargain comes armed, I assume.”

Schneider nodded, chewing. “Micromissile turret, nose-mounted. Plus evasion systems. Full autodefensive software, very nice package.”

I coughed on a pastry.

The two women drifted over to the sofa where Roespinoedji sat and arranged themselves in decorative symmetry on either side of him. Neither of them had said a word or made a sound that I could detect since they walked in. The woman on Roespinoedji's left began to feed him from her plate. He leaned back against her and eyed me speculatively while he chewed what she gave him.

“All right,” he said finally. “Six million.”

“U.N.?” asked Schneider, and Roespinoedji laughed out loud.

“Saft. Six million saft.”

The Standard Archaeological Find Token, created back when the Sanction government was still little more than a global claims administrator, and now an unpopular global currency whose performance against the Latimer franc it had replaced was reminiscent of a swamp panther trying to climb a fricfree-treated dock ramp. There were currently about 230 saft to the Protectorate (U.N.) dollar.

Schneider was aghast, his haggler's soul outraged. “You cannot be serious, Djoko. Even six million U.N. is only about half what it's worth. It's a Wu Morrison, man.”

“Does it have cryocaps?”

“Uhhh . . . no.”

“So what the fuck use is it to me, Jan?” Roespinoedji asked without heat. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right, and she passed him a wineglass without a word. “Look, at this precise moment the only use anyone outside the military has for a space rig is as a means of lifting out of here, beating the blockade, and getting back to Latimer. That six-hundred-thousand-kilometer range can be modified by someone who knows what they're doing, and the Wu Morrisons have goodish guidance systems, I know, but at the speed you'll get out of an ISN-seventy, especially backyard-customized, it's still the best part of three decades back to Latimer. You need cryocapsules for that.” He held up a hand to forestall Schneider's protest. “And I don't know anyone,
anyone,
who can get cryocaps. Not for cunt nor credit. The Landfall Cartel know what they're about, Jan, and they've got it all welded shut. No one gets out of here alive—not until the war's over. That's the deal.”

“You can always sell to the Kempists,” I said. “They're pretty desperate for the hardware; they'll pay.”

Roespinoedji nodded. “Yes, Mr. Kovacs, they will pay, and they'll pay in saft. Because it's all they've got. Your friends in the Wedge have seen to that.”

“Not
my
friends. I'm just wearing this.”

“Rather well, though.”

I shrugged.

“What about ten?” Schneider said hopefully. “Kemp's paying five times that for reconditioned suborbitals.”

Roespinoedji sighed. “Yes, and in the meantime I have to hide it somewhere, and pay off anyone who sees it. It's not a dune scooter, you know. Then I have to make contact with the Kempists, which as you may be aware carries a mandatory erasure penalty these days. I have to arrange a covert meeting—oh, and with armed backup in case these toy revolutionaries decide to requisition my merchandise instead of paying up. Which they often do if you don't come heavy. Look at the logistics, Jan. I'm doing you a favor, just taking it off your hands. Who else were you going to go to?”

“Eight—”

“Six is fine,” I cut in swiftly. “And we appreciate the favor. But how about you sweeten our end with a ride into Landfall and a little free information? Just to show we're all friends.”

The boy's gaze sharpened and he glanced toward Tanya Wardani.

“Free information, eh?” He raised his eyebrows, twice in quick succession, clownishly. “Of course there's really no such thing, you know. But just to show we're all friends. What do you want to know?”