Broken Angels

Chapter FORTY-ONE
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 f*cking 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. “F*cking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a f*cked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve f*cked 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 f*cking 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.
“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 f*cking 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 motherf*cker.
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 f*ck, 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.
“What’s the matter, Isaac? You sulking?”
He made a noise in his throat. “You’re a piece of shit, Kovacs. You’ve sold out your comrades like a tower dweller. Murdered them for credit.”
“I thought that’s what we were about, Isaac. Murder for credit.”
“Don’t give me your f*cking Quellisms, Kovacs. Not with a hundred Wedge personnel dead and blown apart back there. Not with the blood of Tony Loemanako and Kwok Yuen Yee on your hands. You are the murderer. They were soldiers.”
A tiny stinging in my throat and eyes at the names.
Lock it down.
“They slaughtered sort of easily for soldiers.”
“F*ck you, Kovacs.”
“Whatever.” I reached out for the approaching curve of the hull architecture where a small bubble formed a rounded spur on one side of the main structure. Behind my outstretched arms, the rest of my body shifted into a dead stop posture. A momentary sense of panic sweated through me at the sudden thought that the hull might be contact-mined in some way—
Oh well. Can’t think of everything.
—and then my gloved hands came to rest on the curving surface and I stopped moving. The Sunjet bumped gently off my shoulder. I risked a rapid glance through the gull-winged space where the two bubble forms intersected. Ducked back. Envoy recall built me a picture and mapped it against memory.
It was the docking bay, centred at the bottom of the same three-hundred-metre dimple and set about with bubbled hillocks that were themselves distorted by other smaller swellings rising haphazardly from their flanks. Loemanako’s squad must have left a locater beacon, because there was no other way Carrera could have found the place this fast on a hull nearly thirty klicks across and sixty long. I looked at the suit receiver display again, but the only channel showing was the one Carrera’s slightly hoarse breathing came through on. No big surprise; he would have killed the broadcast as soon as he got set up. No point in telegraphing his ambush point to anyone else.
So where the f*ck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.
I eased myself painstakingly back to a viewing position and started scanning the globular landscape below me a degree at a time. All I needed was a single careless move. Just one.
From Isaac Carrera, decorated VacCom commander, survivor of half a thousand vacuum combat engagements and victor in most. A careless move. Sure, Tak. Coming right up.
“You know, I wonder, Kovacs.” His voice was calm again. He’d cranked his anger back under control. Under the circumstances, the last thing I needed. “What kind of deal did Hand offer you?”
Scan, search. Keep him talking.
“More than you’re paying me, Isaac.”
“I think you’re forgetting our rather excellent healthcare cover.”
“Nope. Just trying to avoid needing it again.”
Scan, search.
“Was it so bad, fighting for the Wedge? You were guaranteed re-sleeving at all times, and it’s not as if a man of your training was ever likely to suffer real death.”
“Three of my team would have to disagree with you, there, Isaac. If they weren’t already really f*cking dead, that is.”
A slight hesitation. “Your team?”
I grimaced. “Jiang Jianping got turned into soup by an ultravibe blast, the nanobes took Hansen and Cruicksha—”
“Your tea—”
“I heard what you f*cking said the first time, Isaac.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I merely wonder—”
“Training’s got f*cking nothing to do with it, and you know it. You can go sell that f*cking song to Lapinee. Machines and luck, that’s what kills you or keeps you alive on Sanction IV.”
Scan, search, find that motherf*cker.
And calm down.
“Sanction IV and any other conflict,” Carrera said quietly. “You of all people should know that. It’s the nature of the game. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have dealt yourself in. The Wedge isn’t a conscript army.”
“Isaac, the whole f*cking planet has been conscripted into this war. No one’s got any choice any more. You’re going to be involved, you might as well have the big guns. That’s a Quellism for you, in case you wondered.”
He grunted. “Sounds like common sense to me. Didn’t that bitch ever say anything original.”
There. My ‘methed-out nerves jumped with it. Right there.
The slim edge of something built by human technology, stark angular outline caught by flarelight among the curves at the base of a bubble outcrop. One side of an impeller set frame. I settled the Sunjet into place and lined up on the target. Drawled response.
“She wasn’t a philosopher, Isaac. She was a soldier.”
“She was a terrorist.”
“We quibble over terms.”
I triggered the Sunjet. Fire lanced across the concave arena and splashed off the outline. Something exploded visibly off the hull, in fragments. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.
Breathing.
It was the only thing that warned me. The papery whisper of breath at the bottom of the suit receiver. The suppressed sound of effort.
Fu—
Something invisible shattered and shed light over my head. Something no more visible spanged off my faceplate, leaving a tiny glowing V of chipped glass. I felt other tiny impacts off my suit.
Grenade!
Instinct had me already spinning to the right. Later, I realised why. It was the quickest route between Carrera’s position and mine, working round the rim of hull architecture that ringed the docking bay. A single third of the circle, and Carrera had crept round it while he talked to me. Shed of the impellers that had decoyed me and would in any case telltale his movement, he’d dragged and shoved himself from handhold to boot purchase point, all the way round. He’d used anger to disguise the stress in his voice as he worked, held down his breathing elsewhere, and at some point he judged close enough, he’d lain still and waited for me to give myself away with the Sunjet. And with the experience of decades in vacuum combat, he’d hit me with the one weapon that wouldn’t show up.
Exemplary, really.
He came at me across fifty metres of space like a flying version of Semetaire on the beach, arms reaching. The Sunjet sprouted recognisably from his right fist, a Philips squeeze launcher from his left. Though there was no way to detect it, I knew the second electromag-accelerated grenade was already in flight between us.
I jammed the impellers to life and backflipped. The hull vanished from view, then hinged back in from the top as I spiralled away. The grenade, deflected by the wash from the impeller drives as I flipped, exploded and sewed space with shrapnel. I felt shards of the stuff bang through one leg and foot, sudden numbing impacts and then traceries of pain through the flesh like biofilaments slicing. My ears popped painfully as suit pressure dropped. The polalloy socked inward at a dozen other points, but it held.
I tumbled up and over the bubble outcrop, a sprawling target in the flarelight, hull and bearings spinning around me. The pain in my ears eased as the polalloy congealed across the damage. No time to look for Carrera. I trimmed the impeller thrust, then dived once more for the globular landscape stretching below me. Sunjet fire flashed around me.
I hit the hull a glancing blow, used the impact to change trajectories and saw another Sunjet blast scythe past on the left. I caught a glimpse of Carrera as he adhered briefly to a rounded surface back up the slope of the dimple. I already knew the next move. From there, he’d push off with a single well-controlled kick and ride the simple linear velocity down towards me, firing as he came. At some point he’d get close enough to punch molten holes through the suit that the polalloy could not congeal over.
I bounced off another bubble. More idiot tumbling. More near-miss Sunjet fire. I trimmed the impellers again, tried for a line that would take me into the shadow of the outcrop, and cut off the thrust. My hands groped after something to hold and caught on one of the bas relief scroll effects I’d spotted earlier. I killed my motion and twisted round to look for Carrera.
No sign. I was out of line of sight.
I turned back and crept gratefully further around the bubble outcrop. Another curl of bas relief offered itself and I reached down—
Oh, shit.
I was holding the wing of a Martian.
Shock held me unstirring for a second. Time enough for me to think this was some kind of carving in the hull surface, time enough to know at some deep level that it wasn’t.
The Martian had died screaming. The wings were flung back, sunk into the hull surface for most of their width, protruding only at the curled extremities and where their muscled webbing rose up under the arched spine of the creature. The head was twisted in agony, beak gaping open, eyes glaring like comet-tailed orbs of washed jet. One clawed limb lifted talons above the hull surface. The whole corpse was sheathed in the material of the hull it had flailed against, drowning there.
I shifted my gaze and looked out across the surface ahead of me, the scattered scrawl of raised detail, and knew finally what I was looking at. The hull around the docking-bay dimple—all of it, the whole bubbling expanse—was a mass grave, a spider’s web trap for thousands upon thousands of Martians who had all died entombed in whatever substances had run and foamed and burst here when—
When what?
The shape of the catastrophe was outside anything I could envisage. I could not imagine the weapons that would do this, the circumstances of this conflict between two civilisations as far ahead of humanity’s scavenger-built little empire as we were from the gulls whose bodies had clogged the water around Sauberville. I could not see how it could happen. I could only see the results. I could only see the dead.
Nothing ever changes. A hundred and fifty light years from home and the same shit just keeps going down.
Got to be some kind of universal f*cking constant.
The grenade bounced off another hull-drowned Martian ten metres away, careened up and exploded. I rolled away from the blast. A brief pummelling over my back and one searing penetration under my shoulder. Pressure drop like a knife through my eardrums. I screamed.
F*ck this.
I fired the impellers and burst out of the cover of the bubble outcrop, not knowing what I was going to do until I did it. Carrera’s gliding figure showed up less than fifty metres off. I saw Sunjet fire, turned on my back and dived directly at the docking-bay mouth. Carrera’s voice trailed me, almost amused.
“Where do you think you’re going, Kovacs?”
Something exploded at my back and the impeller thrust cut out. Scorching heat across my back. Carrera and his f*cking VacCom skills. But with the residual velocity, and well, maybe a little spirit realm luck cadged off the vengeful ghost of Hand—he shot you after all, Matt, you did curse the f*cker—just to grease the palm of whatever fate…
I ploughed through the atmosphere baffles of the docking bay at a slewed angle, found gravity beneath me and battered into one of the stacked fat-snake containing walls, bounced off with the sudden shock of weight from the grav field and crashed to the deck, trailing wings of smoke and flame from the wrecked impeller frame.
For a long moment, I lay still in the cavernous quiet of the bay.
Then, from somewhere, I heard a curious bubbling sound in my helmet. It took me several seconds to realise I was laughing.
Get up, Takeshi.
Oh, come on…
He can kill you just as dead in here, Tak. Get UP.
I reached out and tried to prop myself up. Wrong arm—the broken elbow joint bent soggily inside the mob suit. Pain ran up and down the abused muscles and tendons. I rolled away, gasping and tried with the other arm. Better. The mob suit wheezed a little, something definitely awry in the works here, but it got me up. Now get rid of the wreckage on my back. The emergency release still worked, sort of. I hauled myself clear, the Sunjet caught in the frame and would not tug loose on the tether line. I yanked at it for a senseless moment, then unseamed the tether instead and bent to free the weapon from the other side.
“Alri…vacs.” Carrera’s voice, trampled out by the interference from the interior structure. “If… tha… ay…ant it.”
He was coming in after me.
The Sunjet stuck.
Leave it!
And fight him with a pistol? In polalloy?
Weapons are an extension screamed an exasperated Virginia Vidaura, in my head—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. Leave it!
‘kay, Virginia. I sniggered a little. Whatever you say.
I lurched away towards the lintel-braced exit from the bay, drawing the interface pistol from its pouch. Wedge equipment was crated and stacked across the bay. The locater beacon, dumped unceremoniously, still powered at standby, the way Carrera had presumably left it. A nearby crate cracked open, sections of a disassembled Philips launcher protruding. Haste written into the details of the scene, but it was a soldierly haste. Controlled speed. Combat competence, a man at his trade. Carrera was in his element.
Get the f*ck out of here, Tak.
Into the next chamber. Martian machines stirred, bristled and then sloped sullenly away from me, muttering to themselves. I limped past them, following the painted arrows, no, don’t f*cking follow the arrows. I ducked left at the next opportunity and plunged along a corridor the expedition had not taken before. A machine snuffled after me a few paces, then went back.
I thought I heard the sound of motion behind and above me. A jerked glance up into the shadowed space overhead. Ludicrous.
Get a grip, Tak. It’s the ‘meth. You did too much and now you’re hallucinating.
More chambers, intersecting curves one into another and always the space above. I stopped myself rigidly from looking up. The pain from the grenade shards in my leg and shoulder was beginning to seep up through the chemical armour of the tetrameth, waking echoes in my ruined left hand and the shattered joint in my right elbow. The furious energy I’d felt earlier had decayed to a jumpy sense of speed and vibrating riffs of inexplicable amusement that threatened to emerge as giggling.
In that state, I backed through into a tight, closed chamber, turned about and came face to face with my last Martian.
This time, the mummified wing membranes were folded down around the skeletal frame, and the whole thing was crouched on a low roost bar. The long skull drooped forward over the chest, hiding the light gland. The eyes were closed.
It lifted its beak and looked up at me.
No. It f*cking didn’t.
I shook my head, crept closer to the corpse and stared at it. From somewhere, an impulse arose to caress the long bone ridge on the back of the skull.
“I’ll just sit here for a while,” I promised, stifling another giggle. “Quietly. Just a couple of hours, that’s all I need.”
I lowered myself to the floor on my uninjured arm, leaned against the sloping wall behind us, clutching the interface gun like a charm. My body was a warm twisting together of limp ropes inside the cage of the mob suit, a faintly quivering assemblage of soft tissue with no more will to animate its exoskeleton. My gaze slipped up into the gloomy space at the top of the chamber and for a while I thought I saw pale wings beating there, trying to escape the imprisoning curve. At some point, though, I spotted the fact that they were in my head, because I could feel their paper-thin texture brushing around the inner surface of my skull, scraping minutely but painfully at the insides of my eyeballs and obscuring my vision by degrees, pale to dark, pale to dark, pale to dark, to dark, to dark—
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. F*cking 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 f*cking 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.