Broken Angels

Chapter FIVE
The fire threw leaping shadows, making her face into a camouflage mask of light and dark. It was a face that might have been handsome before the camp swallowed her, but the rigours of political internment had left it a gaunt catalogue of bones and hollows. The eyes were hooded, the cheeks sunken. Deep inside the wells of her gaze, firelight glittered on fixed pupils. Stray hair fell across her forehead like straw. One of my cigarettes slanted between her lips, unlit.
“You don’t want to smoke that?” I asked after a while.
It was like talking on a bad satellite link—a two-second delay before the glitter in her eyes shifted upward to focus on my face. Her voice ghosted out, rusty with disuse.
“What?”
“The cigarette. Site Sevens, best I could get outside Landfall.” I handed the packet across to her and she fumbled it, turning it over a couple of times before she found the ignition patch and touched it to the end of the cigarette in her mouth, Most of the smoke escaped and was carried away on the soft breeze, but she took some down and grimaced as it bit.
“Thanks,” she said quietly, and held the packet in cupped hands, looking down at it as if it were a small animal she had rescued from drowning. I smoked the rest of my own cigarette in silence, gaze flickering along the treeline above the beach. It was a programmed wariness, not based on any real perception of danger, the Envoy analogue of a relaxed man beating time to music with his fingers. In the Envoys you’re aware of potential hazards in the surroundings, the way most people are aware that things will fall out of their hands if they let them go. The programming goes in at the same instinctual level. You don’t let down your guard ever, any more than a normal human being would absent-mindedly let go of a filled glass in mid-air.
“You’ve done something to me.”
It was the same low voice she had used to thank me for the cigarette, but when I dropped my gaze from the trees to look at her, something had kindled in her eyes, She was not asking me a question. “I can feel it,” she said, touching the side of her head with splayed fingers. “Here. It’s like. Opening.”
I nodded, feeling cautiously for the right words. On most worlds I’ve visited, going into someone’s head uninvited is a serious moral offence, and only government agencies get away with it on a regular basis. There was no reason to assume the Latimer sector, Sanction IV or Tanya Wardani would be any different. Envoy co-option techniques make rather brutal use of the deep wells of psychosexual energy that drive humans at a genetic level. Properly mined, the matrix of animal strength on tap in those places will speed up psychic healing by whole orders of magnitude. You start with light hypnosis, move into quick-fix personality engagement and thence to close bodily contact that only misses definition as sexual foreplay on a technicality. A gentle, hypnotically induced orgasm usually secures the bonding process, but at the final stage with Wardani, something had made me pull back. The whole process was uncomfortably close to a sexual assault as it was.
On the other hand, I needed Wardani in one psychic piece, and under normal circumstances that would have taken months, maybe years, to achieve. We didn’t have that kind of time.
“It’s a technique,” I offered tentatively “A healing system. I used to be an Envoy.”
She drew on her cigarette. “I thought the Envoys were supposed to be killing machines.”
“That’s what the Protectorate wants you to think. Keeps the colonies scared at a gut level. The truth is a lot more complex, and ultimately it’s a lot more scary, when you think it through.” I shrugged. “Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.”
“Really? And what are those?”
I felt the conversation gathering itself for flight, and leaned forward to the heat of the fire.
“Sharya. Adoracion. The big bad high-tech Envoys, riding in on hypercast beams and decanting into state-of-the-art biotech sleeves to crush all resistance. We used to do that too, of course, but what most people don’t realise is that our five most successful deployments ever were all covert diplomatic postings, with barely any bloodshed at all. Regime engineering. We came and went, and no one even realised we’d been there.”
“You sound proud of it.”
“I’m not.”
She looked at me steadily. “Hence the ‘used to’?”
“Something like that.”
“So how does one stop being an Envoy?” I was wrong. This wasn’t conversation. Tanya Wardani was sounding me out. “Did you resign? Or did they throw you out?”
I smiled faintly. “I’d really rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”
“You’d rather not talk about it?” Her voice never rose, but it splintered into sibilant shards of rage. “Goddamn you, Kovacs. Who do you think you are? You come to this planet with your f*cking weapons of mass destruction and your profession-of-violence airs, and you think you’re going to play the injured-child-inside with me. F*ck you and your pain. I nearly died in that camp, I watched other women and children die. I don’t f*cking care what you went through. You answer me. Why aren’t you with the Envoys any more?”
The fire crackled to itself. I sought out an ember in its depths and watched it for a while. I saw the laser light again, playing against the mud and Jimmy de Soto’s ruined face. I’d been to this place in my mind countless times before, but it never got any better. Some idiot once said that time heals all wounds, but they didn’t have Envoys back when that was written down. Envoy conditioning carries with it total recall, and when they discharge you, you don’t get to give it back.
“Have you heard of Innenin?” I asked her.
“Of course.” It was unlikely she hadn’t—the Protectorate doesn’t get its nose bloodied very often, and when it happens the news travels, even across interstellar distances. “You were there?”
I nodded.
“I heard everybody died in the viral strike.”
“Not quite. Everybody in the second wave died. They deployed the virus too late to get the initial beachhead, but some of it leaked over through the communications net and that fried most of the rest of us. I was lucky. My comlink was down.”
“You lost friends?”
“Yes.”
“And you resigned?”
I shook my head. “I was invalided out. Psych-profiled unfit for Envoy duties.”
“I thought you said your comlink—”
“The virus didn’t get me; the aftermath did.” I spoke slowly, trying to keep a lock on the remembered bitterness. “There was a Court of Enquiry—you must have heard about that too.”
“They indicted the High Command, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, for about ten minutes. Indictment quashed. That’s roughly when I became unfit for Envoy duties. You might say I had a crisis of faith.”
“Very touching.” She sounded abruptly tired, the previous anger too much for her to sustain. “Pity it didn’t last, eh?”
“I don’t work for the Protectorate any more, Tanya.”
Wardani gestured. “That uniform you’re wearing says otherwise.”
“This uniform,” I fingered the black material with distaste, “is strictly a temporary thing.”
“I don’t think so, Kovacs.”
“Schneider’s wearing it too,” I pointed out.
“Schneider…” The word gusted out of her doubtfully. She obviously still knew him as Mendel. “Schneider is an a*shole.”
I glanced down the beach to where Schneider was banging about in the shuttle with what seemed like an inordinate degree of noise. The techniques I’d used to bring Wardani’s psyche back to the surface hadn’t gone down well with him, and he’d liked it even less when I’d told him to give us some time alone by the fire.
“Really? I thought you and he…”
“Well.” She considered the fire for a while. “He’s an attractive a*shole.”
“Did you know him before the dig?”
She shook her head. “Nobody knew anybody before the dig. You just get assigned, and hope for the best.”
“You got assigned to the Dangrek coast?” I asked casually.
“No.” She drew in her shoulders as if against cold. “I’m a Guild Master. I could have got work on the Plains digs if I’d wanted to. I chose Dangrek. The rest of the team were assigned Scratchers. They didn’t buy my reasons, but they were all young and enthusiastic. I guess even a dig with an eccentric’s better than no dig at all.”
“And what were your reasons?”
There was a long pause, which I spent cursing myself silently for the slip. The question had been genuine—most of my knowledge of the Archaeologue Guild was gleaned from popular digests of their history and occasional successes. I had never met a Guild Master before, and what Schneider had to say about the dig was obviously a filtered version of Wardani’s pillow talk, stepped on by his own lack of deeper knowledge. I wanted the full story. But if there was one thing that Tanya Wardani had seen a surplus of during her internment, it was probably interrogation. The tiny increment of incisiveness in my voice must have hit her like a marauder bomb.
I was marshalling something to fill the silence, when she broke it for me, in a voice that only missed being steady by a micron.
“You’re after the ship? Mende—” She started again. “Schneider told you about it?”
“Yeah, but he was kind of vague. Did you know it was going to be there?”
“Not specifically. But it made sense; it had to happen sooner or later. Have you ever read Wycinski?”
“Heard of him. Hub theory, right?”
She allowed herself a thin smile. “Hub theory isn’t Wycinski’s; it just owes him everything. What Wycinski said, among others at the time, is that everything we’ve discovered about the Martians so far points to a much more atomistic society than our own. You know—winged and carnivorous, originally from airborne predator stock, almost no cultural traces of pack behaviour.” The words started to flow—conversational patterns fading out as the lecturer in her tuned in unconsciously. “That suggests the need for a much broader personal domain than humans require and a general lack of sociability. Think of them as birds of prey if you like. Solitary and aggressive. That they built cities at all is evidence that they managed at least in part to overcome the genetic legacy, maybe in the same way humans have got a halfway lock on the xenophobic tendencies that pack behaviour has given us. Where Wycinski differs from most of the experts is in his belief that this tendency would only be repressed to the extent that it was sufficiently desirable to group together, and that with the rise of technology it would be reversible. You still with me?”
“Just don’t speed up.”
In fact, I wasn’t having a problem, and some of this more basic stuff I’d heard before in one form or another. But Wardani was relaxing visibly as she talked, and the longer that went on the better chance there was of her recovery remaining stable. Even during the brief moments it had taken her to launch into the lecture, she had grown more animated, hands gesturing, face intent rather than distant. A fraction at a time, Tanya Wardani was reclaiming herself.
“You mentioned hub theory, that’s a bullshit spin-off; f*cking Carter and Bogdanovich whoring off the back of Wycinski’s work on Martian cartography. See, one of the things about Martian maps is, there are no common centres. No matter where the archaeologue teams went on Mars, they always found themselves at the centre of the maps they dug up. Every settlement put itself slap in the middle of its own maps, always the biggest blob, regardless of actual size or apparent function. Wycinski argued that this shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it tied in with what we’d already surmised about the way Martian minds worked. To any Martian drawing a map, the most important point on that map was bound to be where the map maker was located at the time of drawing. All Carter and Bogdanovich did was to apply that rationale to the astrogation charts. If every Martian city considered itself the centre of a planetary map, then every colonised world would in turn consider itself the centre of the Martian hegemony. Therefore, the fact that Mars was marked big and dead centre on all these charts meant nothing in objective terms. Mars might easily be a recently colonised backwater, and the real hub of Martian culture could be literally any other speck on the chart.” She pulled a disdainful face. “That’s hub theory.”
“You don’t sound too convinced.”
Wardani plumed smoke into the night. “I’m not. Like Wycinski said at the time, so f*cking what? Carter and Bogdanovich completely missed the point. By accepting the validity of what Wycinski said about Martian spatial perceptions, they should have also seen that the whole concept of hegemony was probably outside Martian terms of reference.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah.” The thin smile again, more forced this time. “That’s where it started to get political. Wycinski went on record with that, saying that wherever the Martian race had originated, there was no reason to suppose that the mother world would be accorded any more importance in the scheme of things than quote absolutely essential in matters of basic factual education unquote.”
“Mummy, where do we come from? That sort of thing.”
“That sort of thing exactly. You might point it out on the map, that’s where we all came from once, but since where we are now is far more important in real, day-to-day terms, that’s about as far as the mother world homage would ever get.”
“I don’t suppose Wycinski ever thought to disown this view of things as intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman, did he?”
Wardani gave me a sharp look. “How much do you really know about the Guild, Kovacs?”
I held up finger and thumb a modest span apart. “Sorry, I just like to show off. I’m from Harlan’s World. Minoru and Gretzky went to trial about the time I got into my teens. I was in a gang. Standard proof of how antisocial you were was to carve air graffiti about the trial in a public place. We all had the transcripts by heart. Intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman came up a lot in Gretzky’s recantation. Seemed like it was the standard Guild statement for keeping your research grants intact.”
She lowered her gaze. “It was, for a while. And no, Wycinski wouldn’t play that tune. He loved the Martians, he admired them, and he said so in public. That’s why you only hear about him in connection with f*cking hub theory. They pulled his funding, suppressed most of his findings and gave it all to Carter and Bogdanovich to run with. And what a blowjob those two whores gave in return. The UN commission voted a seven per cent increase in the Protectorate strategic budget the same year, all based on paranoid fantasies of a Martian overculture somewhere out there waiting to jump us.”
“Neat.”
“Yeah, and totally impossible to disprove. All the astrogation charts we’ve recovered on other worlds bear out Wycinski’s finding—each world centres itself on the map the way Mars did, and that single fact is used to scare the UN into keeping a high strategic budget and a tight military presence across the whole Protectorate. No one wants to hear about what Wycinski’s research really means, and anybody who talks too loud about it, or tries to apply the findings in research of their own is either defunded overnight or ridiculed, which in the end comes to the same thing.”
She flicked her cigarette into the fire and watched it flare up.
“That what happened to you?” I asked.
“Not quite.”
There was a palpable click to the last syllable, like a lock turning. Behind me, I could hear Schneider coming up the beach, his checklist for the shuttle or maybe just his patience exhausted. I shrugged.
“Talk about it later, you want to.”
“Maybe. How about you tell me what all that macho high-G manoeuvre bullshit was today?”
I glanced up at Schneider as he joined us beside the fire. “Hear that? Complaint about the in-flight entertainment.”
“F*cking passengers,” Schneider grunted, picking up the clowning cue flawlessly as he lowered himself to the sand. “Nothing ever changes.”
“You going to tell her, or shall I?”
“Was your idea. Got a Seven?”
Wardani held up the packet, then tossed them into Schneider’s grasp. She turned back to me. “Well?”
“The Dangrek coast,” I said slowly, “whatever its archaeological merits may have been, is part of the Northern Rim territories and the Northern Rim has been designated by Carrera’s Wedge as one of nine primary objectives in winning the war. And judging from the amount of organic damage going on up there at the moment, the Kempists have come to the same conclusion.”
“So?”
“So, mounting an archaeological expedition while Kemp and the Wedge are up there fighting for territorial dominance isn’t my idea of smart. We have to get the fighting diverted.”
“Diverted?” The disbelief in her voice was gratifying to hear. I played to it, shrugging again.
“Diverted, or postponed. Whatever works. The point is, we need help. And the only place we’re going to get help of that order is from the corporates. We’re going to Landfall, and since I’m supposed to be on active service, Schneider’s a Kempist deserter, you’re a prisoner-of-war and this is a stolen shuttle, we need to shed a little heat before we do that. Satellite coverage of our little run-in with the smart mines back there will read like they took us down. A search of the seabed will show up pieces of wreckage compatible with that. Allowing that no one looks at the evidence too closely, we’ll be filed as missing presumed vaporised, which suits me fine.”
“You think they’ll let it go at that?”
“Well, it’s a war. People getting killed shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.” I picked a stray length of wood out of the fire and started tracing a rough continental map in the sand. “Oh, they may wonder what I was doing down here when I’m supposed to be taking up a command on the Rim, but that’s the kind of detail that gets sifted in the aftermath of a conflict. Right now, Carrera’s Wedge are spread pretty thin in the north and Kemp’s forces are still pushing them towards the mountains. They’ve got the Presidential Guard coming in on this flank,” I prodded at the sand with my makeshift pointer, “And sea-launched air strikes from Kemp’s iceberg fleet over here. Carrera’s got a few more important things to worry about than the exact manner of my demise.”
“And you really think the Cartel are going to put all that on hold just for you?” Tanya Wardani swung her burning gaze from my face to Schneider’s. “You didn’t really buy into this, did you, Jan?”
Schneider made a small gesture with one hand. “Just listen to the man, Tanya. He’s jacked into the machine, he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Yeah, right.” The intense, hectic eyes snapped back to me. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for getting me out of the camp, because I am. I don’t think you can imagine quite how grateful I am. But now I’m out, I’d quite like to live. This, this plan, is all bullshit. You’re just going to get us all killed, either in Landfall by corporate samurai or caught in the crossfire at Dangrek. They aren’t going to—”
“You’re right,” I said patiently, and she shut up, surprised. “To a point, you’re right. The major corporates, the ones in the Cartel, they wouldn’t give this scheme a second glance. They can murder us, stick you into virtual interrogation until you tell them what they want to know and then just keep the whole thing under wraps until this war is over and they’ve won.”
“If they win.”
“They will,” I told her. “They always do, one way or the other. But we aren’t going to the majors. We’ve got to be smarter than that.”
I paused and poked at the fire, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how Schneider craned forward with tension. Without Tanya Wardani aboard, the whole thing was dead in the water and we all knew it.
The sea whispered itself up on the beach and back. Something popped and crackled in the depths of the fire.
“Alright.” She moved slightly, like someone bedridden shifting to a less aching posture. “Go on. I’m listening.”
Relief gusted out of Schneider audibly. I nodded.
“This is what we do. We target one corporate operator in particular, one of the smaller, hungrier ones. Might take a while to sound out, but it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we’ve got the target, we make them an offer they can’t refuse. A one-time only, limited period, bargain basement, satisfaction guaranteed purchase.”
I saw the way she exchanged glances with Schneider. Maybe it was all the monetary imagery that made her look to him.
“Small and hungry as you like, Kovacs, you’re still talking about a corporate player.” Her eyes locked onto mine. “Planetary wealth. And murder and virtual interrogation are hardly expensive. How do you propose to undercut that option?”
“Simple. We scare them.”
“You scare them.” She looked at me for a moment, and then coughed out a small, unwilling laugh. “Kovacs, they should have you on disc. You’re perfect post-trauma entertainment. So, tell me. You’re going to scare a corporate block. What with, slasher puppets?”
I felt a genuine smile twitch at my own lips. “Something like that.”