Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

Deprez stepped past me, knelt to check his handiwork and then withdrew the knife. There was a clean economy of motion in his movements that belied the state of his radiation-blasted cells.

He stood up and caught me looking at him.

“Something?”

I nodded at the corpse he’d just made. “Not bad for a dying man, Luc.”

He shrugged. “Tetrameth. Maori sleeve. I have been worse equipped.”

I dumped the interface gun on the table, picked up a pair of helmet frames and tossed one to him. “You done this before?”

“No. I’m not a spaceman.”

“OK. Put this on. Hold the struts, don’t smudge the faceplate.” I gathered boot bases and breathing sets at tetrameth speed. “The air intake fits through here, like this. The pack straps over your chest.”

“We don’t nee—”

“I know, but it’s quicker this way. And it means you can keep the faceplate down. Might save your life. Now stamp down on the boot bases, they’ll stick in place. I’ve got to power this thing up.”

The shower systems were set into the wall next to the hatch. I got one unit running, then nodded at Deprez to follow me, and went through into the shower section. The hatch cycled closed behind us, and I caught the thick solvent odour of the polalloy pouring in the confined space. The operational unit’s lamps flashed orange in the low light surroundings, glinting off the dozens of twisting threads of polalloy where they ran down from the shower heads and spread like oil on the angled floor of the cubicle.

I stepped in.

It’s an eerie feeling the first time you do it, like being buried alive in mud. The polalloy lands on you in a thin coating that quickly builds to a sliding sludge. It masses on the dome of cross-netting at the top of the helmet frame, then topples and pours down around your head, stinging your throat and nostrils even through your locked breathing. Molecular repulsion keeps it off the surface of the faceplate, but the rest of the helmet is sheathed in twenty seconds. The rest of your body, right down to the boot bases, takes about half as long again. You try to keep it away from open wounds or raw flesh; it stings before it dries.

fffffffuuuuck

It’s airtight, watertight, utterly sealed, and it’ll stop a high-velocity slug like battlewagon armour. At a distance, it even reflects Sunjet fire.

I stepped down and felt through the polalloy for the breathing set controls. Thumbed the vent control. Air hissed under my jaw, filling the suit and popping it loose around my body. I killed the air and chinned the faceplate control. The plate hinged silently up.

“Now you. Don’t forget to hold your breath.”

Somewhere outside, Sutjiadi was still screaming. The tetrameth scratched at me. I almost yanked Deprez out of the shower, punched the air supply and watched as his suit popped.

“OK, that’s it.” I dialled down to intake standard. “Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit’s malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern.”

The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

“Try to stay alive, Luc.”

I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night—five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok’s hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she’d never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn’t identify.

Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

They spotted me at twenty metres—I wasn’t hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.

“Lieutenant?”

I shot her first. A single shot, in through the opened faceplate. The detonating plasma core blew the helmet apart as I ran forward.

— aching throatful of wolf loyalty, rubbed raw —

The second suit was moving when I got to him, a single leap in the mob suit and a mid-air kick that slammed him back against the carapace of the bug. He bounced off, one hand reaching to slap his faceplate closed. I grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired down into his yelling mouth.

Something hammered me in the chest, threw me on my back in the sand. I saw an unsuited figure stalking towards me, hand gun flung out. The interface gun dragged my arm up a handsbreadth and I shot his legs out from under him. Finally, a scream to compete with Sutjiadi, and time running out. I chinned my faceplate closed and flexed my legs. The mob suit threw me to my feet again. A Sunjet blast lashed the sand where I had been. I tracked round and snapped off a shot. The Sunjet wielder spun about with the impact and red glinting fragments of spine exploded out of his back as the shell detonated.

The last one tried to close with me, blocking my gun arm upward and stamping down at my knee. Against an unarmoured man, it was a good move, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The edge of his foot bounced off the mob suit and he staggered. I twisted and snapped out a roundhouse kick with all the balanced force the suit would give me.

It broke his back.

Something banged off the front of the bug. I looked down the beach and saw figures spilling from the makeshift amphitheatre, weapons levelling. I snapped a shot off in reflex, then got a grip on my ‘meth-scrambled thought processes and straddled the bug.

The systems awoke at a slap to the ignition pad—lights and dataflow in the hooded and heavily armoured instrument panels. I powered up, lifted a quarter-turn about to face the advancing Wedge, selected weaponry and—

— howl, howl, HOWL —

some kind of snarling grin made it to my face as the launchers cut loose.

Explosives aren’t good for much in vacuum combat. No shockwave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.

The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub shells into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-sized razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.

It was the weapon that ripped 391 platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok’s eyes, Eddie Munharto’s limbs, and my shoulder.

Two months ? Why does it feel like another lifetime ?