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 any more. 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 grey 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 eyesockets 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 IV.”
“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 that 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 hatbrim. Three shots, tight-spaced.
It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three metres 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, burnt clean and metallic shiny amidst the last charred fragments of wood, I reach in amongst the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.
It scorches a little, but that’s OK.
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 V: 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 realised where I was.
The red glow was a head-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 UN.
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 391 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 honour 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 backwards. 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. “Alright, 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 Mitchell 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 non-reflective 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 armoured chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.
It was good to see her again.
The beach, now 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 scorchmarks 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 whisky, 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 vaporised camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few metres 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 towards 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 anti-rad 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 post-combat 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 anti-rad 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 to 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.
&nbs
p; “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 IV? 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 anti-rad, 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—”
Broken Angels tk-2 Page 38