Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

“Two hours, you said, Tanya.”

She ignored me. She hadn’t spoken since I shot Lamont.

“Well.” I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. “Whatever you’ve got to do, start doing it now.”

“What if you’re not back in time?” objected Vongsavath.

I grinned. “Don’t be stupid. If I can’t waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I’m not coming back. You know that.”

Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.

Through the gate. Look—easy as falling.

My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.

Here we fucking go again .

Carrera made his play.

Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems nickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defences the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinselled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.

By then, I was too busy to watch.

I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.

Not yet .

The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn’t have one of those to hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug’s drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera’s next move.

Come on you motherfucker .

Ah-ah. You’re expecting, Tak .

We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it .

Thanks, Virginia .

Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn’t have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn’t suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.

I hadn’t had time to find and install the Wedge’s battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn’t either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako’s team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched—there wouldn’t be much.

You hope .

The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favour. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.

There .

Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.

I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera’s missile homing in on the bug.

I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward towards the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn’t see me, and by the time he could…

Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.

Not yet. Not —

Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometre now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he’d have to deal with, and while he was doing that I’d get close.

I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.

Space erupted in light around me.

For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.

Flare. You stupid fuck, he’s lit you up .

I snapped on the impellers and whirled away sideways. Sunjet fire chased me from a rampart on the hull over my head. On one spin, I managed to get off returning fire. Three sputtering seconds, but Carrera’s beam shut off. I fled for the roof, got some piece of hull architecture between me and Carrera’s position, then reversed the impeller drive and braked to slow drift. Blood hammered in my temples.

Did I get him ?

Proximity to the hull forced receding of my surroundings. The alien sculpted architecture of the vessel overhead was suddenly the surface of a planetoid and I was head down five metres over it. The flare burnt steadily a hundred metres out, casting twisted shadows past the chunk of hull architecture I was floating behind. Weird detail scarred the surfaces around me, curls and scrapings of structure like scrawlings in has relief, glyphs on a monumental scale.

Did I —

“Nice evasion, Kovacs.” Carrera’s voice spoke into my ear as if he was sitting in the helmet beside me. “Not bad for a non-swimmer.”

I checked the head up displays. The suit radio was set for receive only. I nudged sideways in the helmet space and the transmit symbol glowed on. A cautious body flex put me parallel to the hull. Meanwhile…

Keep him talking .

“Who told you I was a non-swimmer?”

“Oh, yes, I was forgetting. That fiasco with Randall. But a couple of outings like that hardly make you a VacCom veteran.” He was playing for avuncular amusement, but there wasn’t much hiding the raw ugliness of the rage underneath it. “Which fact explains why it’s going to be very easy for me to kill you. That is what I’m going to do, Kovacs. I’m going to smash in your faceplate and watch your face boil out.”

“Better get on with it, then.” I scanned the solidified bubbling of hull in front of me, looking for a sniper vantage point. “Because I don’t plan to be here much longer.”

“Only came back for the view, huh. Or did you leave some holoporn with sentimental value lying around the docking bay?”

“Just keeping you out of the way while Wardani closes the gate, that’s all.”

A short pause, in which I could hear him breathing. I shortened the tether line on the Sunjet until it floated close beside my right arm, then touched the trim controls on the impeller arm and risked a half-second impulse. The straps tugged as the racked motors on my back lifted me delicately up and forward.