Broken Angels, Page 38

  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.

  PART FIVE

  DIVIDED LOYALTIES

  Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to o
ffer 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.”