Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turned from men and women into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those further off just died in sudden pieces.

The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air, and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field.

There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.

I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.

Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.

“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.”