Broken Angels (9 page)

“That's it.” The promoter played a brisk drumroll across his console with both hands. “Gone home, near as I can tell. Time for you boys and girls to do the same.”

“Near as you can tell,” said Schneider. “What the fuck is that?”

He got the bleak smile again. “Hey. Read your contract. To the best of our ability, we deliver. And that's to the best of anyone else's ability on Sanction Four. You bought state of the art, you didn't buy any guarantees.”

He ejected our eviscerated credit chip from the machine and tossed it onto the table in front of Tanya Wardani, who pocketed it, deadpan.

“So how long do we wait?” she asked through a yawn.

“What am I, clairvoyant?” The promoter sighed. “Could be quick, like a couple of days, could be a month or more. All depends on the demo, and I didn't see that. I'm just the mailman. Could be never. Go home, I'll mail you.”

We left, seen out with the same studied disinterest that we'd been received and processed with. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street, and found a terrace café about twenty meters up from the promoter's garish third-floor display holo. This close to curfew, it was almost deserted. We dumped our bags under a table and ordered short coffees.

“How long?” Wardani asked again.

“Thirty minutes.” I shrugged. “Depends on their A.I. Forty-five, the outside.”

I still hadn't finished my coffee when they came.

The cruiser was an unobtrusive brown utility vehicle, ostensibly bulky and underpowered but to a tutored eye very obviously armored. It slunk around a corner a hundred meters up the street at ground level and crawled down toward the promoter's building.

“Here we go,” I murmured, wisps of Khumalo neurachem flickering into life up and down my body. “Stay here, both of you.”

I stood up unhurriedly and drifted across the street, hands in pockets, head cocked at a rubbernecker's angle. Ahead of me the cruiser floated to a curb-hugging halt outside the promoter's door and a side hatch hinged up. I watched as five coverall-clad figures climbed out and then vanished into the building with a telltale economy of motion. The hatch folded back down.

I picked up speed fractionally as I made my way among the hurrying last-minute shoppers on the pavement, and my left hand closed around the thing in my pocket.

The cruiser's windshield was solid-looking and almost opaque. Behind it, my neurachem-aided vision could just distinguish two figures in the seats and the hint of another body bulking behind them, braced upright to peer out. I glanced sideways at a shop frontage, closing the last of the gap up to the front of the cruiser.

And time.

Less than half a meter, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disk of the termite grenade hard against the windshield and stepped immediately aside and past.

Crack!

With termite grenades you've got to get out of the way quickly. The new ones are designed to deliver all their shrapnel and better than 95 percent of their force to the contact face, but the 5 percent that comes out on the opposite side will still make a mess of you if you stand in the way.

The cruiser shuddered from end to end. Contained within the armored body, the sound of the explosion was reduced to a muffled crump. I ducked in through the door to the promoter's building and went up the stairs at a run.

(At the first-floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.)

They'd posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren't expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs—
splash of blood and paler tissue in clots across the wall in front of him
—made the landing before he'd hit the ground, and then erupted around the corner of the promoter's office door.

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning . . .

Splinters of vision . . .

The promoter tries to rise from his seat where two of them have him pinned and tilted back. One arm thrashes free and points in my direction.

“That's hi—”

The goon nearest the door, turning . . .

Cut him down. Three-shot burst, left-handed.

Blood splatters the air—I twist, neurachem hyperswift, to avoid it.

The squad leader—recognizable, somehow. Taller, more presence, something, yelling, “What the fu—”

Body shots. Chest and weapon arm, get that firing hand
wrecked
.

The right-hand Kalashnikov spurts flame and soft-cored antipersonnel slugs.

Two left, trying to shrug themselves free of the half-pinioned, flailing promoter, to clear weapons that . . .

Both hands now—head, body, anywhere.

The Kalashnikovs bark like excited dogs.

Bodies jerking, tumbling . . .

And done.

Silence slammed down in the tiny office. The promoter cowered under the body of one of his slain captors. Somewhere, something sparked and shorted out in the console—damage from one of my slugs that had gone wide or through. I could hear voices out on the landing.

I knelt beside the wreckage of the lead goon's corpse and set down the smart guns. Beneath my jacket, I tugged the vibroknife from its sheath in the small of my back and activated the motor. With my free hand I pressed down hard on the dead man's spine and started cutting.

“Ah,
fuck,
man.” The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. “Fuck,
fuck
.”

I looked up at him.

“Shut up, this isn't easy.”

He ducked down again.

After a couple of false starts, the vibroknife took and sliced down through the spinal column a few vertebrae below the point where it met the base of the skull. I steadied the skull against the floor with one knee, then pressed down again and started a new incision. The knife slipped and slithered again on the curve of the bone.

“Shit.”

The voices out on the landing were growing in number and, it seemed, creeping closer. I stopped what I was doing, picked up one of the Kalashnikovs left-handed, and fired a brace of shots out the doorway into the wall opposite. The voices departed in a stampede of feet on stairs.

Back to the knife. I managed to get the point lodged, cut through the bone, and then used the blade to lever the severed section of spine up out of the surrounding flesh and muscle. Messy, but there wasn't a lot of time. I stuffed the severed bone into a pocket, wiped my hands on a clean portion of the dead man's tunic, and sheathed the knife. Then I picked up the smart guns and went cautiously to the door.

Quiet.

As I was leaving, I glanced back at the promoter. He was staring at me as if I'd just sprouted a reef demon's fangs.

“Go home,” I told him. “They'll be back. Near as I can tell.”

I made it down the three flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though I could feel eyes peering from other doors on the landings I passed. Outside, I scanned the street in both directions, stowed the Kalashnikovs, and slipped away, past the hot, smoldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty meters in both directions, and the frontages on either side of the wreck had all cranked down their security blinds. A crowd was gathering on the other side of the street, but no one seemed to know what exactly to do. The few passersby who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed. Immaculate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nobody said much on the way to the hotel.

We did most of it on foot, doubling back through covered ways and malls to blind any satellite eyes the Mandrake Corporation might have access to. Breathless work, weighed down with the carryall bags. Twenty minutes of this found us under the broad eaves of a refrigerated storage facility, where I waved a transport pager at the sky and eventually succeeded in flagging down a cab. We climbed in without leaving the cover of the eaves and sank back into the seats without a word.

“It is my duty to inform you,” the machine told us prissily, “that in seventeen minutes you will be in breach of curfew.”

“Better get us home quick, then,” I said, and gave it the address.

“Estimated trajectory time nine minutes. Please insert payment.”

I nodded at Schneider, who produced an unused credit chip and fed it to the slot. The cab chittered and we lifted smoothly into a night sky almost devoid of traffic before sliding off westward. I rolled my head sideways on the back of the seat and watched the lights of the city pass beneath us for a while, mentally backtracking to see how well we'd covered ourselves.

When I rolled my head back again, I caught Tanya Wardani staring straight at me. She didn't look away.

I went back to watching the lights until we started to fall back toward them.

The hotel was well chosen, the cheapest of a row built under a commercial freight overpass and used almost exclusively by prostitutes and wireheads. The desk clerk was sleeved in a cheap Syntheta sleeve whose silicoflesh was showing signs of wear around the knuckles and had a very obvious reupholstering graft halfway up the right arm. The desk was heavily stained in a number of places and nubbed every ten centimeters along its outer edge with shield generators. In the corners of the dimly lit lobby, empty-faced women and boys flickered about wanly, like flames almost out.

The desk clerk's logo-scribbled eyes passed over us like a damp cloth.

“Ten saft an hour, fifty deposit up front. Shower and screen access is another fifty.”

“We want it for the night,” Schneider told him. “Curfew just came down, case you hadn't noticed.”

The clerk stayed expressionless, but then maybe that was the sleeve. Syntheta have been known to skimp on the smaller facial nerve-muscle interfaces.

“Then that'll be eighty saft, plus fifty deposit. Shower and screen fifty extra.”

“No discount for long-stay guests?”

His eyes switched to me, and one hand disappeared below the counter. I felt the neurachem surge, still jumpy after the firefight.

“You want the room or not?”

“We want it,” said Schneider with a warning glance at me. “You got a chipreader?”

“That's ten percent extra.” He seemed to search his memory for something. “Handling surcharge.”

“Fine.”

The clerk propped himself to his feet, disappointed, and went to fetch the reader from a room in back.

“Cash,” murmured Wardani. “We should have thought of that.”

Schneider shrugged. “Can't think of everything. When was the last time you paid for something without a chip?”

She shook her head. I thought back briefly to a time three decades gone and a place light-years distant where for a while I'd used tactile currency instead of credit. I'd even gotten used to the quaint plastified notes with their ornate designs and holographic panels. But that was on Earth, and Earth is a place straight out of a precolonial-period experia flick. For a while there I'd even thought I was in love and, motivated by love and hate in about equal proportions, I'd done some stupid things. A part of me had died on Earth.

Another planet, another sleeve.

I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.

Thoughts for a brothel lobby. Ye Gods.

The desk clerk came back, read one of Schneider's chips, and banged a scarred plastic key card on the counter.

“Through the back and down the stairs. Fourth level. I've activated the shower and screen till curfew break. You want any of it longer, you'll need to come up and pay again.” The silicoflesh face flexed in what was probably supposed to be a grin. He shouldn't have bothered. “Rooms are all soundproofed. Do what you like.”

The corridor and steel-frame stairwell were, if anything, worse lit than the lobby. In places the illuminum tiles were peeling off the walls and ceiling. Elsewhere they had just gone out. The stair rail was painted luminous but that, too, was fading, coming off microns at a time with every hand that gripped and slid along the metal.

We passed a scattering of whores on the stairs, most with customers in tow. Little bubbles of fake hilarity floated around them, tinkling. Business seemed to be brisk. I spotted a couple of uniforms among the clientele, and what looked like a Cartel political officer leaned on the second-level landing rail, smoking pensively. No one gave us a second glance.

The room was long and low-ceilinged with a quickmold resin cornice-and-pillar effect epoxied onto the raw concrete walls, the whole then painted in violent primary red. About halfway down, two bedshelves jutted out from opposing walls with half a meter of space between their adjacent sides. The second bed had plastic chains molded into the four corners of the shelf. At the far end of the room stood a self-contained shower stall wide enough to take three bodies at a time, should the occasion so require. Opposite each bed was a wide screen with a menu display glowing on a pale pink background.

I looked around, puffed a single breath out into blood-warm air, and then stooped to the carryall at my feet.

“Make sure that door's secured.”

I pulled the sweeper unit out of the bag and waved it around the room. Three bugs showed up in the ceiling, one above each bed and one in the shower. Very imaginative. Schneider snapped a Wedge-standard limpet neutralizer onto the ceiling next to each one. They'd get into the bugs' memories, pull out whatever had been stored there over the last couple of hours, and then recycle it endlessly. The better models will even scan the content and then generate plausible improvised scenes from stock, but I didn't think that was going to be necessary here. The desk clerk had not given the impression that he was fronting a high-security operation.

“Where do you want this stuff?” Schneider asked Wardani, unpacking one of the other carryalls onto the first bedshelf.

“Right there is fine,” she said. “Here, I'll do it. It's, um, complicated.”

Schneider raised an eyebrow. “Right. Fine. I'll just watch.”

Complicated or not, it took the archaeologue only about ten minutes to assemble her equipment. When she was done, she took a pair of modified EV goggles from the flaccid skin of the empty carryall and settled them over her head. She turned to me.

“You want to give me that?”

I reached into my jacket and produced the segment of spine. There were still fresh streaks of gore clinging to the tiny bumps and crannies of the bone, but she took it without apparent revulsion and dumped it into the top of the artifact scrubber she'd just finished snapping together. A pale violet light sprang up under the glass hood. Schneider and I watched fascinated as she jacked the goggles into one side of the machine, picked up the connected handset, and settled cross-legged to work. From within the machine came tiny crackling sounds.

“Working all right?” I asked.

She grunted.

“How long is this going to take?”

“Longer, if you keep asking me stupid questions,” she said without looking away from what she was doing. “Don't you have anything else to do?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Schneider grinning.

By the time we'd put together the other machine, Wardani was almost done. I peered over her shoulder into the purple glow and saw what remained of the spinal segment. Most of it was gone, and the final pieces of vertebrae were being eaten away from the tiny metal cylinder of the cortical stack. I was fixated. It wasn't the first time I'd seen a cortical stack removed from a dead spine, but it had to be among the most elegant versions of the operation I'd ever witnessed. The bone retreated, vanishing one minute increment at a time as Tanya Wardani cut it away with her tools, and the stack casing emerged scrubbed clean of surrounding tissue and shiny as new tin.

“I do know what I'm doing, Kovacs,” Wardani said, voice slow and absent with concentration. “Compared to scrubbing the accretion off Martian circuitboards, this is like sandblasting.”

“I don't doubt it. I was just admiring your handiwork.”

She did look up then, sharply, pushing the goggles up on her forehead to see if I was laughing at her. When she saw I wasn't, she lowered the goggles again, made a couple of adjustments to something on the handset, then sat back. The violet light went out.

“It's done.” She reached into the machine and removed the stack, holding it between thumb and forefinger. “Incidentally, this isn't great equipment. In fact it's the sort of thing Scratchers buy for their thesis work. The sensors are pretty crude. I'm going to need a lot better than this up on the Rim.”

“Don't worry.” I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. “If this works out, they'll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we're going to assume he is. That means we've got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a Casualty ID and A, but cranked up we'll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.”

“What are you going to do to him?” This was Wardani, looking unhappy.

I reached for the skullcap. “Nothing. There isn't time. I'm just going to talk to him.”

“Talk?” There was a strange light in her eyes.

“Sometimes,” I told her, “that's all it takes.”

•         •         •

It was a rough ride in.

Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn't have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn't appear until after I'd bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren't ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we'd liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.

I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late-afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to, a single-story wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision, and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an A.I. with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock, and that's probably exactly what it was.

Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

Time to Identify and Assess.

It's in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn't very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth resleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource, and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren't worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Bar coding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it's chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield, and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.

Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for resleeving. How you die—fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony, or numb—is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So, too, does your resleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Resleeve Syndrome, which I'd seen the year before in a once-too-often-retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They'd downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn't want anymore.

Oops.

The point is, there's no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind's black box is about as safe as it's possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn't up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand, and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.