Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

And a thin, rising whine like grief.

“Wake up, Kovacs.”

The voice was gentle, and there was something nudging at my hand. My eyes seemed to be gummed shut. I lifted one arm and my hand bumped off the smooth curve of the faceplate.

“Wake up.” Less gentle now. A tiny jag of adrenalin went eeling along my nerves at the change in tone. I blinked hard and focused. The Martian was still there— no shit, Tak —but my view of the corpse was blocked by the figure in the polalloy suit that stood a safe three or four metres out of reach, Sunjet carried at a wary angle.

The nudging at my hand recommenced. I tipped the helmet and looked down. One of the Martian machines was stroking at my glove with an array of delicate-looking receptors. I shoved it away, and it backed up chittering a couple of places, then came sniffing back undeterred.

Carrera laughed. It rang too loud in the helmet receiver. I felt as if the fluttering wings had somehow hollowed out my head so that my whole skull wasn’t much less delicate than the mummified remains I was sharing the chamber with.

“That’s right. Fucking thing led me to you, can you believe that? Really helpful little beastie.”

At that point, I laughed too. It seemed the only thing appropriate to the moment. The Wedge commander joined in. He held up the interface gun in his left hand, and laughed louder.

“Were you going to kill me with this?”

“Doubt it.”

We both stopped laughing. His faceplate hinged up and he looked down at me out of a face gone slightly haggard around the eyes. I guessed even the short time he’d spent tracking me through the Martian architecture hadn’t been a lot of fun.

I flexed my palm, once, on the off-chance that Loemanako’s gun might not have been personally coded, that any Wedge palm plate might be able to call it. Carrera caught the move and shook his head. He tossed the weapon into my lap.

“Unloaded anyway. Hold on to it if you like—some men go better that way, holding a gun tight. Seems to help at the end. Substitute for something, I guess. Mother’s hand. Your dick. You want to stand up to die?”

“No,” I said softly.

“Open your helmet?”

“What for?”

“Just giving you the option.”

“Isaac—” I cleared my throat of what felt like a web of rusted wire. Words scraped through. It seemed suddenly very important to say them. “Isaac, I’m sorry.”

You will be

It flared through me like tears up behind my eyes. Like the wolf-weeping loss that Loemanako’s and Kwok’s deaths had brought up through my throat.

“Good,” he said simply. “But a little late.”

“Have you seen what’s behind you, Isaac?”

“Yeah. Impressive, but very dead. No ghosts that I’ve seen.” He waited. “Do you have anything else to say?”

I shook my head. He raised the Sunjet.

“This is for my murdered men,” he said.

“ Look at the fucking thing.” I screamed, every increment of Envoy intonation pushed into it and for just a fraction of a second his head shifted. I came up off the floor, flexing in the mob suit, hurling the interface gun into the space below his hinged-up faceplate and diving at him low.

Miserly shavings of luck, a tetrameth crash and my fading grip on Envoy combat poise. It was all I had left and I took it all across the space between us, teeth bared. When the Sunjet crackled, it hit where I’d been. Maybe it was the shouted distraction, shifting his focus, maybe the gun hurtling towards his face, maybe just this same tired general sense that it was all over.

He staggered backwards as I hit him, and I trapped the Sunjet between our bodies. He slid into a combat judo block that would have thrown an unarmoured man off his hip. I hung on with the stolen strength of Loemanako’s suit. Another two stumbling backsteps and we both smashed into the mummified Martian corpse together. The frame tipped and collapsed. We tumbled over it like clowns, staggering to get up as we slipped. The corpse disintegrated. Powder burst of pale orange in the air around us.

I’m sorry .

You will be, if the skin crumbles .

Faceplate up, panting, Carrera must have sucked in a lungful of the stuff. More settled on his eyes and the exposed skin of his face.

The first yell as he felt it eating in.

Then the screams.

He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then, the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.

He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.

I’m sorry .

I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.

When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.

“That’s wonderful,” he breathed. “The stuff of epics.”

“Stop that,” I told him.

“No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.”

“Well,” I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. “You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the fucking thing.”

“You may laugh.” There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. “But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?”

I poured my glass half full of whisky again. “Kemp manages.”

“Oh, that’s politics , Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu—” he snapped his fingers. “Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?”

“Communitarianism.”

“Yes, that.” He shook his head sagely. “That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savour? Where’s the blood and adrenalin?”

I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.

Pity they didn’t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.

I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.

“Plenty of blood out there at the moment,” I observed.

“Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.”