Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

“And I suppose I’m not—”

“Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?”

“Around here?” she looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. “It feels out of place.”

You can’t do this,” said Wardani quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre of the gate-space, and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

“Tanya, we’ve seen this thing withstand weapons that…” I searched for adequate words. “That I for one don’t understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you. Look at you.”

I looked down at controls on the firing board. “I’m good for a couple more days.”

“Yeah—in a hospital bed. Do you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you’re in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.”

“Rubbish. You’re forgetting the tetrameth.”

“Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?”

“Long enough.” I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. “What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?”

“Kovacs.” She waited until I looked at her. “Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I’ll get the gate closed.”

“Tanya, why didn’t you shoot me with the stunner?”

Silence.

“Tanya?”

“Alright,” she said violently. “ Piss your fucking life away out there. See if I care.”

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

“I,” she dropped her gaze. “I panicked.”

“That, Tanya, is bullshit. I’ve seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn’t been any of them. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

“Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?”

“Well enough.”

She snorted. “Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge people?”

“People like Schneider, you mean?” I shrugged. “He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don’t you. He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.”

“Oh, you’re feeling proud of yourself, is that it?” She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up towards us. “Think you’ve achieved something here, do you?”

“You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?”

“No!”

“It’s not a problem, Tanya.” I shrugged again. “The only thing I can’t work out is why I didn’t die. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I, I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.”

“Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn’t. That, and why I woke up so fast.”

“Maybe,” she said, not looking at me, “You don’t have whatever is inside the rest of us.”

“Hoy, Kovacs.”

We both shifted to look down the beach again.

“Kovacs. Look what I found.”

It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.

“I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Who is it?”

I rustled up a dry chuckle. “Survivor type. Look.”

Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we’d met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognised me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of metres away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.

“Knew it!” He cackled out loud. “Knew you’d do it. Got files on you, I knew you would. I heard you. Heard you, but I didn’t say.”

“Found him in the armoury crawlspace,” said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. “Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.”

“ Heard you, saw you,” said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. “Got files on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs. Knew you’d do it.”

“Did you,” I said sombrely.

“ Heard you, saw you, but I didn’t say.”

“Yeah, well that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It’s in the directives.” I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five metres behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.

“ Knew you’d do it,” he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.

“Did you get the impeller?” I asked Vongsavath.

I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren’t shielded and I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.

Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes—it wouldn’t permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.

Then why are you sitting here, Tak ?

Suit’ll soak it up .

But it was a little more than that. Sat astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn’t that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.

Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the ‘meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to —

Or maybe you’re just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the Mivtsemdi all over again .

Shall we just get on with it ?

The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow enough to be visible, breached the gate-space with a faint sucking sound and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn’t think it worth mentioning.

Nice to be right, huh ?

Not that it matters much now anyway .

I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and ploughed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.