Richard Morgan - Broken Angels

She’d be alright.

It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.

It felt like a scab coming off.

“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.

“Yeah?”

“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”

She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.

“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”

“Right.”

Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.

The Angin Chandra’s Virtue blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She’s already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualise, but even that’s pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she’ll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She’s not a deep space vessel, she’s not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she’ll get where she’s going in her own time.

Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji’s contractors have done us proud. There’s a shoreline in wind- and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water’s edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sunblasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five metres of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicoloured fish down there, in amongst the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortification.

The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there’s enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoration and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.

During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evenings, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you’re going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn’t any night sky you’d see from the pilot deck of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue right now—one of the contractors told me they’ve drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.

As afterlives go, it’s not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect—not nearly restricted enough entry for one thing—but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the Tanya Wardani are locked into. If the Chandra’s deserted decks and corridors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it’s an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.

But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them are interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.

Sutjiadi didn’t make it either. His stack was the only one I didn’t turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn’t know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all of our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.

Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they re-sleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I’m buying.

Sutjiadi.

Cruickshank.

Hansen.

Jiang.

Some would say we got off lightly.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whisky, I almost agree.

Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly-dressed construct modelled after a Hun Home Settlement Years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She’s rarely gone more than half an hour.

Of course in real time, that’s a couple of days. Roespinoedji’s contractors slowed the onboard virtuality down for us, about as far as it would go. It must have been some kind of a first for them—most clients want virtual time running at tens or hundreds of times reality standard. But then most people don’t have a decade and more with nothing better to do than sit around. We’re living out the eleven year transit in here at about a hundred times the speed it’s really passing. Weeks on the ‘ Chandra ’s shadow-crewed bridge pass in hours for us. We’ll be back in the Latimer system by the end of the month.

It really would have been easier to just sleep through it, but Carrera was no worse a judge of human nature than any of the other carrion birds gathered about the paralysed body of Sanction IV. Like all vessels with potential to escape the war, the battlewagon is grudgingly equipped with a single emergency cryocap for the pilot. It isn’t even a very good one—most of Vongsavath’s time away is taken up with the de- and refrosting time required by the overcomplex cryosystems. That Hun Home bureaucrat is an elaborate joke on Sun Liping’s part, suggested and then written into the format when Vongsavath returned one evening spitting curses at the inefficiency of the cryocap’s processor.

Vongsavath exaggerates, of course, the way you do about minor annoyances when life is so close to perfect in its major aspects. Most of the time she’s not gone long enough for her coffee to get cold, and the systems checks she performs on the pilot deck have so far proved one hundred per cent superfluous. Nuhanovic guidance systems. Like Sun once said, in the hull of the Martian ship, they don’t build the stuff any better than this.

I mentioned that comment to her a couple of days ago as we lay floating on our backs in the long aquamarine swells out beyond the headland, eyes slitted against the sun overhead. She could barely remember saying it. Everything that happened on Sanction IV is already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. In the afterlife, you lose track of time, it seems, or maybe you just no longer have the need or desire to keep track. Any one of us could find out from the virtuality datahead how long we’ve been gone, when exactly we’ll arrive, but it seems none of us want to. We prefer to keep it vague. Back on Sanction IV, we know, years have already passed, but exactly how many seems—and probably is—irrelevant. The war may already be over, the peace already being fought over. Or it may not. It’s hard to make it matter more than that. The living do not touch us here.