Broken Angels tk-2

by Richard K. Morgan

  “What—” he pleaded.

  The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some hell I hadn’t heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half levelled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the shoreline beside Sutjiadi’s impromptu funeral pyre, and picked out motion at the water’s edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured—he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug’s screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.

  “Who?” he kept saying. “Who?”

  He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.

  “Lieutenant Kovacs?” His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. “Who did this?”

  “We did,” I told him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.

  I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.

  Movement from the ‘Chandra.

  I whipped about on the bug and saw a polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry rank and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug’s screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit’s gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was massive.

  The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.

  “Carrera,” he managed hoarsely. “Forward hatch.”

  I was already moving, already knowing bone-deep I was too late.

  The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three metres from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.

  Fuck you, Isaac, fuck you for a diehard motherfucker.

  I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. The locker room was as I’d left it. The female noncom’s corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.

  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 cauterises totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had got him point blank.

  Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were knelt 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 afterwards.”

  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 whisky 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,” said Wardani quietly.

  I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre 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 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?”

  “Alright,” 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 towards 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 recognised 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 metres 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 armoury crawlspace,” 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 sombrely.

  “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 metres 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. Sat 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 ploughed 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 nickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defences 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, tinselled 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. N
o 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 to 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 favour. 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.