Broken Angels (29 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY–EIGHT

It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device's ability to do the job.

“Look,” Hansen said irritably as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. “It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it's patterned the trace, there's nothing short of a dark-body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there's no problem.”

“That isn't impossible,” Hand told him. “Run the mass detector backup again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.”

Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-meter buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the
Nagini
's hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body, and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.

“All ready for the Big Deep,” he said.

With the launch cradle assembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping's help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then around in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it, and yawned.

“Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?” he asked.

I checked my retinal time display, where I'd synchronized a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy's nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.

“Oh for Samedi's sake,” said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. “Well, don't just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me—”

She ripped apart.

I was closest, already turning to answer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upward in a careless back-and-forth scribble, and tossed the pieces skyward in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of Total Body gymnast's trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.

I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word
no
, torn loose of its meaning.

Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.

I could see

Yells from the
Nagini
.

the thing

Someone cut loose with a blaster.

that did it.

Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of half a dozen, pale gray and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.

They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.

The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen walked past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.

“Get back!”
I screamed at him.
“Get the fuck back!”

The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.

Too late.

Hansen must have thought he was up against armoring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He'd spread his beam to beat the latter and was about to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporizes.

The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted, and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to glass in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.

I walked in, firing.

The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometer precision.

Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

I emptied both guns.

They spat out their magazines and gaped open eagerly. I pounded the butts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun butts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chef's knife.

I emptied again.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank's head looking up at me.

It had fallen faceup on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide-open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she were going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

I dropped my arms.

The bar.

My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me.

In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side.

“Get me a corrosion grenade,” I said, and my voice was unrecognizable in my own ears.

•         •         •

The
Nagini
hovered three meters above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the
Nagini
's holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand's insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor panels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of—

Stop that.

Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half a dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation-and-deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser-sealed at the neck, and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human-shaped.

Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalized anything nonorganic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank's weapons, either.

I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping's microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

“Take a look.” Sun glanced around at me and cleared her throat. “It's what you said.”

“Then I don't need to look.”

“You're saying these are the nanobes?” asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. “Not—”

“The gate isn't even fucking open, Sutjiadi.” I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

Sun peered again into the microscope's screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.

“It's an interlocking configuration,” she said. “But the components don't actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It's like a, I don't know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nanobe generates a portion of the field, and that's what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just passes through it. It might vaporize a few individual nanobes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that's not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing's organic.”

Hand looked down at me curiously. “You knew this?”

I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.

I made an effort to hold it down.

“I worked it out. In the firefight.” I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me, too. “Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don't work, because we've already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They've evolved to beat it, and now they've got conferred immunity to beam weapons.”

“And the ultravibe?” Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.

She shook her head. “I've passed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nanobes resonate inside the field, but it doesn't damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam.”

“Solid ammunition's the only thing that works,” Hand said thoughtfully.

“Yeah, and not for much longer.” I got up to leave. “Give them some time, they'll evolve past that, too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later.”

“Where are you going, Kovacs?”

“If I were you, Hand, I'd get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they're likely to start growing longer arms.”

I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch from his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank's Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three meters below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.

I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.

Cruickshank flickered through my head. Grinning, focused on a task, smoking, in the throes of orgasm, shredded into the sky—

Stop that.

I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.

“Kovacs.” He crouched to my level and started again. “Kovacs, I am sorry. She was a fine sol—”

The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backward with the shock.

“Shut
up,
Jiang.” I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. “You say one more
fucking
word and I'll paint Luc with your brains.”

I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung on to it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.

One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.

CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE

Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There'd been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.

From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn't muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.

Did I not tell you there was work for me here?

I closed my eyes.

Where is my antipersonnel round, Wedge Wolf? Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it?

I don't—

Are you looking for me now?

I don't do that shit no more.

Laughter, like the gravel of cortical stacks pouring from a scoop.

“Kovacs?”

I looked up. It was Luc Deprez.

“I think you had better come upstairs,” he said.

Over our heads, the noise seemed to have quieted down.

•         •         •

“We are
not
,” Hand said quietly, looking around the cabin, “I repeat,
not
leaving here without staking a Mandrake claim on the other side of that gate. Read the terms of your contracts. The phrasing
every available avenue of opportunity
is paramount and omnipresent. Whatever Captain Sutjiadi orders you to do now, you will be executed and returned to the soul dumps if we leave without exploring those avenues. Am I making myself clear?”

“No, you're not,” shouted Ameli Vongsavath through the connecting hatch from the cockpit. “Because the only avenue I can see is carrying a fucked marker buoy up the beach by hand and trying to throw it bodily through the gate on the off chance it might still work. That doesn't sound to me like an opportunity for anything except suicide. These things take your stack.”

“We can scan for the nanobes—” But angry voices trampled Hand down. He raised his hands over his head in exasperation. Sutjiadi snapped for quiet, and got it.

“We are soldiers.” Jiang spoke unexpectedly into the sudden lull. “Not Kempist conscripts. This is not a fighting chance.”

He looked around, seeming to have surprised himself as much as anyone else.

“When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,” Hand said, “you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That's what I'm buying from you now.”

Jiang looked at him with open disdain. “I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.”

“Oh, Damballah.” Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. “What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think
paid
for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for
me
. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.”

“Hand.” I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the center of the cabin. “I think your sales technique's flagging. Why don't you give it a rest?”

“Kovacs, I am not—”

“Sit down.” The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.

Faces turned expectantly in my direction.

Not this again.

“We're not going anywhere,” I said. “We can't. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can't. Not until we've placed the buoy.”

I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.

I turned to Hand.

“Why don't you tell them who deployed the OPERN System? Tell them why.”

He just looked at me.

“All right.
I'll
tell them.” I looked around at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. “Our sponsor here has a few homegrown enemies back in Landfall who'd quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn't. So far that hasn't worked, but back in Landfall they don't know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we'll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?”

Hand nodded.

“And the Wedge code?” asked Sutjiadi. “That counts for nothing?”

More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.

“What Wedge co—”

“Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—”

“How come we didn't—”

“Shut up, all of you.” To my amazement, they did. “Wedge Command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren't made aware of it because”—I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab—“you didn't need to know. You didn't matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?”

He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.

“Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,” he said with the measure of a lecturer. “Whoever deployed the OPERN System nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same channels will provide them with the authorization codes Isaac Carrera operates under. The Wedge are the most likely candidates to shoot us down.”

Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. “You're Wedge, Kovacs. I don't believe they will murder one of their own. They're not known for it.”

I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.

“Unfortunately,” I said, “Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand's enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It'll short-circuit any influence I have.”

“You could not bluff? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.”

I nodded. “I might try that. But the odds aren't good, and there is an easier way.”

That cut across the low babble of dispute.

Deprez inclined his head. “And that is?”

“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we're home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we've found, Hand's pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we're dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.”

It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all
fucking
looking at me.

Please, not this again.

“The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate, and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.”

The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They'd come around. They'd come around because they'd see what Hand and I already knew. They'd see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn't see it that way—

I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.

Anyone who didn't see it that way, I'd shoot.

•         •         •

For someone whose specialty was machine systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the
Nagini
up to less than fifty meters off the cave entrance. With the forward reentry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.

It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun's cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.

It was a sound like the world splintering apart.

I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn't space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn't feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disconnected at the images, rock changing color with shocking vividness as it crazed and shattered under pressures of plate tectonic magnitude, then the rushing collapse of the shards as they hurried downward, turned to dense clouds of powder before they could escape the ultravibe beams probing back and forth in the debris. I could feel a vague discomfort in the pit of my stomach from the backwash. Sun was firing on low intensity, and shielding in the weapons pod kept the worst of the ultravibe blast damped down aboard the
Nagini
. But still the shrill scream of the beam and the pittering screeches of the tortured rock clawed their way in through the two open hatches and screwed into my ears like surgery.

I kept seeing Cruickshank die.

Twenty-three minutes.

The ultravibe shut down.

The gate emerged from the devastation and billowing dust like a tree through a blizzard. Wardani had told me it wouldn't be harmed by any weapon she knew of, but Sun had still programmed the
Nagini
's weapons systems to cease fire as soon as they had visual. Now, as the dust clouds began to drift away, I saw the tangled remnants of the archaeologue's equipment, torn and flung apart by the final seconds of the ultravibe blast. It was hard to believe the dense integrity of the artifact bulking above the debris.

A tiny feather of awe brushed down my spine, a sudden recollection of what I was looking at. Sutjiadi's words came back to me.

We do not belong here. We are not
ready.

I shrugged it off.

“Kovacs?” From the sound of Ameli Vongsavath's voice over the induction rig, I wasn't the only one with the elder-civilization jitters.

“Here.”

“I'm closing the deck hatches. Stand clear.”

The machine-gun mounts slid smoothly backward into the body of the deck and the hatches lowered, shutting out the light. A moment later, the interior lighting flickered on, cold.

“Some movement,” Sun said warningly. She was on the general channel, and I heard the succession of sharp indrawn breaths from the rest of the crew.

There was a slight jolt as Vongsavath shifted the
Nagini
up a few more meters. I steadied myself against the bulkhead and, despite myself, looked down at the deck under my feet.

“No, it's not under us.” It was as if Sun had been watching me. “It's . . . I think it's going for the gate.”

“Fuck, Hand. How much of this thing is there?” Deprez asked.

I could almost see the Mandrake exec's shrug.

“I'm not aware of any limits on the OPERN System's growth potential. It may have spread under the whole beach, for all I know.”

“I think that's unlikely,” said Sun, with the calm of a lab technician in midexperiment. “The remote sensing would have found something that large. And besides, it has not consumed the other sentry robots, which it would if it were spreading laterally. I suspect it opened a gap in our perimeter and then flowed through in linear—”

“Look,” said Jiang. “It's there.”

On the screen over my head, I saw the arms of the thing emerge from the rubble-strewn ground around the gate. Maybe it had already tried to come up under the foundation and failed. The cables were a good two meters from the nearest edge of the plinth when they struck.

“Here we fucking go,” said Schneider.

“No, wait.” This was Wardani, a soft gleam in her voice that could almost have been pride. “Wait and see.”

The cables seemed to be having trouble getting a grip on the material the gate was made of. They lashed down, then slid off as if oiled. I watched the process repeat itself half a dozen times, and then drew a sharp breath as another, longer arm erupted from the sand, flailed upward half a dozen meters, and wrapped around the lower slopes of the spire. If the same limb had come up under the
Nagini
, it could have dragged us out of the sky comfortably.

The new cable flexed and tightened.

And disintegrated.

At first, I thought Sun had disregarded my instructions and opened fire again with the ultravibe. Then recollection caught up. The nanobes were immune to vibe weapons.

The other cables were gone as well.

“Sun? What the fuck happened?”

“I am attempting to ascertain exactly that.” Sun's machine associations were starting to leak into her speech patterns.

“It turned it off,” Wardani said simply.

“Turned what off?” asked Deprez.

And now I could hear the smile in the archaeologue's voice. “The nanobes exist in an electromagnetic envelope. That's what binds them together. The gate just turned off the field.”

“Sun?”

“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct. I can detect no electromagnetic activity anywhere near the artifact. And no motion.”

The faint hiss of static on the induction rig as everyone digested the confirmation. Then Deprez's voice, thoughtful.

“And we're supposed to fly through that thing?”

•         •         •

Considering what had gone before and what was to come on the other side, zero hour at the gate was remarkably undramatic. At two and a half minutes to zero, the dripping blobs of ultraviolet we'd seen through Wardani's filigree screen became slowly visible as liquid purple lines playing up and down along the outer edges of the spire. In the daylight, the display was no more impressive than a landing beacon by dawn light.