Broken Angels (26 page)

“These are banned,” observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.

“Spoils of war.” Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, then hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn't been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.

“All right,”
she said, commandeering the bottle from me. “
Now
we're running interference.”

I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.

“This was a quiet party until you turned up.”

“Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?”

The cigar smoke bit. “So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?”

“Armory supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn't steal anything, we have an arrangement. He's meeting me in the gun room”—she shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display—“in about an hour from now. So.
Were
you two old dogs comparing kills?”

I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.

“No.”

“That's good.” She plumed smoke skyward. “I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless assholes. I mean, Samedi's sake, it's not like killing people is
hard
. We've all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.”

“And refining your technique, of course.”

“You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?”

I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.

“You're from Limon, yes?” Deprez asked.

“Highlander, born and bred. Why?”

“You must have had some dealings with Carrefour, then.”

Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. “Those fuckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of 'twenty-eight. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn't work, burning villages.”

Deprez threw me a glance.

I said it. “Hand's ex-Carrefour.”

“Doesn't show.” She blew smoke. “Fuck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings till it's time for worship. You know, for all the shit they pile on Kemp—” She hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. “—at least he won't have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City; I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.”

“Well, God,” Deprez said dryly. “You know, that's a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp's.”

“I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.”

I snorted.

“Hey.” Schneider pushed his way into the ring. “Come on, I heard that, too. What was that Quell said?
Spit on the tyrant God if the fucker tries to call you to account
? Something like that?”

“Kemp's no fucking Quellist,” said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. “Right, Kovacs?”

“It's questionable. He borrows from it.” I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my rib cage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider's direction. “And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.”

That caused a minor storm.

“Oh, come
on
—”

“What?”

“It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi's sake.”

“Schneider, she never died.”

“Now
there
,” Deprez said ironically, “is an article of faith.”

Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.

“All right, she never died
that we know of
. She just disappeared. But you don't get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.”

“Maybe it was a valediction.”

“Maybe it was bullshit.” I stood up, unsteadily. “You want the quote, I'll give you the quote.”

“Yeahhh!!”

“All right!!”

They scooted back to give me room.

I cleared my throat. “
I have no excuses,
she said. This is from the
Campaign Diaries
, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, fucked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan's World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said,
I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don't call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.
That's exactly what she said.”

Applause, like startled birds across the deck.

I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.

“Give us a poem,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” jeered Schneider. “A war poem.”

Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok, and Munharto, gathered around, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.

Where were my excuses?

“I never learned her poetry,” I lied, and walked away along the ship's rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it were clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.

“Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.” It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. “No joke if you're from the H World, huh?”

“It isn't that.”

“No?”

“Nah. She was a fucking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death single-handed than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.”

“Impressive.”

I looked at her and couldn't stop myself smiling. I shook my head. “Oh, Cruickshank,
Cruickshank.
”

“What?”

“You're going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you're standing on my side of the interface.”

“Yeah, right, old man.”

I shook my head again, but couldn't seem to shake the grin loose. “Suit yourself.”

“Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.”

“Gosh, almost a whole decade.”

“I'm twenty-two, Kovacs.” She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black-and-starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn't match the smile. “Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That's out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal's flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.”

“Dead at twenty-two.” It came out harsher than I'd meant.

Cruickshank drew a slow breath. “Man, you are in a
shitty
mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I'm back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I'm a big girl, Kovacs, so how 'bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.”

I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realization that she was right than anything else.

“Whatever you say. Big girl.”

“Yeah, I saw you looking.” She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out toward the beach. “So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?”

Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.

“I don't know, Cruickshank. I'm not convinced this is the time and place.”

“Gate got you spooked, huh?”

“That wasn't what I meant.”

She waved it away. “Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?”

“Well, she did before, by all accounts.”

“Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.”

“Well, I guess that's military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it sometime.”

“Back off, Kovacs.” There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. “We don't work the camps, man. That's government levy. Strictly homegrown.”

Riding the updraft. “Cruickshank, you don't know a
fucking
thing.”

She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.

“Well, uh, I
know
what they say about Carrera's Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy,
by all accounts.
So maybe you want to make sure you're clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?”

She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.

“Sorry.”

“Skip it.” But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.

“No, really. I'm sorry. This place is killing me.”

An unwilling smile curled her lip.

“I mean it. I've been killed before, more times than you'd believe.” I shook my head. “It's just . . . it never took this long before.”

“Yeah. Plus, you're rappeling after the archaeologue, right?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is now.” She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off, and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. “I don't blame you. She's smart, she's got her head wrapped around stuff that's just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.”

She looked around.

“Surprise you, huh?”

“A little.”

“Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we've got back there, it's going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Yeah.” She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. “I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.”

She looked at me.

“Feels weird, you know. It's like I died. And now I've come back, and I have to face this moment. I don't know if it should scare me. But it doesn't. Man, I'm looking forward to it. I can't wait to see what's on the other side.”

There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.

She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.

“See you there, Kovacs,” she murmured.

I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.

Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?

Extenuating circumstances. I'm dying.

The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we'd hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.

Chemicals.

That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that fucking wolf splice again. Don't forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.

No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.

I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—

Fuck off.

I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned, and walked rapidly to the main companionway.

“Hoy, Kovacs?” It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. “Where you going, man?”

“Call of nature,” I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half a meter at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem, and lurched into the narrow space behind.

Illuminum tiles with badly fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, molded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.