Broken Angels (3 page)

“Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?”

I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn't appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.

“So then,” he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, “you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first-come, first-served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.”

“For a percentage.”

“Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests et cetera et cetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centers of habitation, and that's what they all did.”

“How do you know all this, Schneider? You're not an archaeologue.”

He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake's scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent's teeth was the inscription
SANCTION IP PILOT'S GUILD,
and the whole design was wreathed with the words
THE GROUND IS FOR DEAD PEOPLE.
It looked almost new.

I shrugged. “Nice work. And?”

“I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast northwest of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—”

“Scratchers?”

Schneider blinked. “Yeah. What about it?”

“This isn't my planet,” I said patiently. “I'm just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?”

“Oh. You know, kids.” He gestured, perplexed. “Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.”

“Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn't?”

“What?” He blinked again.

“Who wasn't a Scratcher? You said,
They were mostly Scratchers, but—
But who?”

Schneider looked resentful. He didn't like me breaking up his flow.

“They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don't buy the conventional wisdom.”

“Or turn up too late to get a better stake.”

“Yeah.” For some reason he didn't like that crack, either. “Sometimes. Point is, we—they—found something.”

“Found what?”

“A Martian starship.” Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. “Intact.”

“Crap.”

“Yes, we did.”

I sighed again. “You're asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship—no sorry,
star
ship—and the news about this somehow hasn't gotten around? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?”

Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

“I didn't say we dug it up, I said we
found
it. Kovacs, it's the size of a fucking asteroid and it's out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.”

“A gate?” Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. “You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?”

“Kovacs, it's a
gate
.” Schneider spoke as if to a small child. “We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It's like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.”

“Into the ship?” Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human beings in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

“No.” He shook his head. “Not into the ship, no. The gate's focused on a point about two kilometers out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.”

“Or a shuttle.” I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. “What were you flying?”

He grimaced. “Piece-of-shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn't fit through the portal space.”

“What?” I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. “Wouldn't fit?”

“Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,” Schneider said morosely. “Wasn't for that particular little logistic, I wouldn't be in this fucking war now. I'd be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole program.”

“No one had a spacesuit?”

“What for?” Schneider spread his hands. “It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was
allowed
offworld 'cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on-site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?”

“Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn't fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn't figure it'd be suitable?”

“Come on, Kovacs. What's suitable compensation for finding something like this?”

I shrugged. “Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.”

Schneider skinned me a tight grin. “You don't think we could have handled selling to the corporates?”

“I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on whom you were dealing with.”

“So who would you have gone to?”

I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. “That's not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well”—I offered him a small smile of my own—“I'm still listening. What happened next?”

Schneider's laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.

“What happened?” He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans' gazes were snagged back to the performance. “What happened? This war is what fucking happened.”

CHAPTER THREE

Somewhere, a baby was crying.

For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I'd been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren't functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.

“Hot here.”

Schneider had shut down the shuttle's drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat, and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer wafted to me on the scant breeze: The shuttle's landing field had blown sheets of wastepaper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.

A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.

“Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera's Wedge,” I said briskly. “This is Corporal Schneider. We're here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation.”

The sergeant frowned. “I wasn't informed of this.”

“I'm informing you now, Sergeant.”

In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely known on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate's unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came to tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant's throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and -women starving in their bubblefabs.

“I'll have to see some authorization.”

I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn't been difficult to obtain. In a planetwide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers latitudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I'd had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about southeast of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.

“Will that be sufficient, Sergeant?”

He pored over the printout, as if he were hoping the authorization flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience that was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby's crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of there.

The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. “You'll have to see the commandant,” he said woodenly. “These people are all under government supervision.”

I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.

“Right.” I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. “Let's go talk to the commandant, then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won't take long.”

The commandant's office was in a double-story 'fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early-millennium gargoyles, and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the 'fab, and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly, and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.

Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a molded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens, and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways-slumped figure behind the desk.

“Commandant?”

The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom, and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armor but wasn't. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist-and-forearm section was set with half a dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.

I stood in front of the desk and saluted.

“Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera's Wedge,” I said softly.

“Well.” The commandant struggled upright in his chair. “Perhaps you'd like more light in here, Lieutenant. I like the dark, but then”—he chuckled behind closed lips—“I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.”

He groped across the keyboard, and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine-featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.

“Is that better?” The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. “I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.” The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. “A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, Lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?”

My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.

“I'd like to have your full attention, Commandant.”

For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical to look at the jacked-in cable.

“Oh,” he whispered. “This.”

Abruptly, he lurched around to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.

“Get out.”

The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn't much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them pulling the door shut gently behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.

“Down to a trickle, I assure you,” he said, gesturing at the still-winking light. “Probably couldn't survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I'd probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.” He made an obvious effort. “So what, may I ask, do Carrera's Wedge want with me? We've nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I'm referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.” Another gesture, this time turned outward to the bank of monitors. “The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I've tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn't very far along yet—”

“I haven't come for your supplies, Commandant.”

“Ah, then it's a reckoning, is it? Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel's scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?” The idea seemed to amuse him. “Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?”

I shook my head.

“I'm here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.”

“Ah yes, the archaeologue.”

A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorization on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.

“Some problem, Commandant?” I asked quietly.

He lowered the arm and leaned on his elbow, wagging the authorization to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.

“What do you want her for?” he asked, equally softly. “Little Tanya the Scratcher. What's she to the Wedge?”

I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn't be difficult to do—I'd probably only be cheating the wire by a few months—but there was the sergeant outside the door, and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn't know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.

“That, Commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?”

But he didn't look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered while wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn't going to give.

Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.

Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.

For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.

“Sergeant,” he bellowed hoarsely.

The door opened.

“Sergeant, get Wardani out of 'fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant's shuttle.”

The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.

“Thank you, Commandant.” I added my own salute, collected the authorization hardcopy from the desk, and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.

“Popular woman,” he said.

I looked back. “What?”

“Wardani.” He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. “You're not the first.”

“Not the first what?”

“Less than three months ago.” As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. “We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they're in, in these parts.” His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. “Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.”

I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant's desk and cradled his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon bumping the roof of a room where the party has long since burned itself out.

“Lieutenant?”

The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.

“Lieutenant?”

“Coming.” I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.

Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.

“Problem?”

“No. Get rid of these kids.”

Schneider raised an eyebrow at me and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory-form toys from behind each child's ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoebalike, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched openmouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.