Broken Angels

Chapter SEVEN
Like a lot of cities that owe their existence to a spaceport, Landfall had no real centre. Instead it sprawled haphazardly across a broad semi-desert plain in the southern hemisphere where the original colony barges had touched down a century ago. Each corporation holding stock in the venture had simply built its own landing field somewhere on the plain and surrounded it with a ring of ancillary structures. In time those rings had spread outwards, met each other and eventually merged into a warren of acentric conurbation with only the vaguest of overall planning to link it all together. Secondary investors moved in, renting or buying space from the primaries and carving themselves niches in both the market and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Meanwhile, other cities arose elsewhere on the globe, but the Export Quarantine clause in the Charter ensured that all the wealth generated by Sanction IVs archaeological industries had at some point to pass through Landfall. Gorged on an unrestricted diet of artefact export, land allocation and dig licensing, the former spaceport had swelled to monstrous proportions. It now covered two-thirds of the plain and, with twelve million inhabitants, was home to almost thirty per cent of what was left of Sanction IVs total population.
It was a pit.
I walked with Schneider through badly-kept streets full of urban detritus and reddish desert sand. The air was hot and dry and the shade cast by the blocks on either side provided little respite from the high-angled rays of the sun. I could feel sweat beading on my face and soaking the hair at the back of my neck. In windows and mirror-shielded frontages along the way, our black-uniformed reflections kept pace. I was almost glad of the company. There was no one else out in the midday heat and the shimmering stillness of it was uncanny. The sand crunched audibly underfoot.
The place we were looking for wasn’t hard to find. It stuck up at the edge of the district like a burnished bronze conning tower, double the height of the surrounding blocks and utterly featureless from the outside. Like much of the architecture in Landfall, it was mirror-surfaced and the reflected sun made its edges difficult to look at directly. It wasn’t the tallest tower in Landfall, but the structure had a raw power to it that throbbed across the surrounding urban sprawl and spoke volumes about its designers.
Testing the human frame to destruction
The phrase flopped out of my memory like a corpse from a closet.
“How close you want to get?” asked Schneider nervously.
“A bit closer.”
The Khumalo sleeve, like all Carrera’s Wedge custom, had a satdata locational display wired in as standard and reckoned to be quite user-friendly when not f*cked up by the webs of jamming and counter-jamming that currently swathed most of Sanction IV. Blinked up to focus now, it gave me a mesh of streets and city blocks covering my whole left field of vision. Two tagged dots pulsed minutely on a thoroughfare.
Testing the—
I overcued the tightlock fractionally and the view dizzied up until I was looking at the top of my own head from block-top height.
“Shit.”
“What?” Beside me, Schneider had tensed up in what he obviously imagined was a stance of ninja combat readiness. Behind his sunlenses, he looked comically worried.
Testing—
“Forget it.” I scaled back up until the tower re-emerged on the edge of the display. A shortest-possible route lit up obligingly in yellow, threading us to the building through a pair of intersections. “This way.”
Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines
A couple of minutes down the yellow line, one of the streets gave onto a narrow suspension bridge over a dry canal. The bridge sloped upward slightly along its twenty-metre length to meet a raised concrete flange on the far side. Two other bridges paralleled the crossing a hundred metres down on either side, also sloping upward. The floor of the canal bore a scattering of the debris any urban area will breed—discarded domestic devices spilling circuitry from cracked casings, emptied food packages and sun-bleached knots of cloth that reminded me of machine-gunned bodies. Over it all and on the other side of this dumping ground, the tower waited.
Testing the human
Schneider hovered on the threshold of the bridge.
“You going across?”
“Yeah, and so are you. We’re partners, remember.” I shoved him lightly in the small of the back and followed up so close he’d have to go on. There was a slightly hysterical good humour brewing in me as the Envoy conditioning strove to fend off the unsubtle doses of combat prep hormones my sleeve sensed were required.
“I just don’t think this is—”
“If anything goes wrong, you can blame me.” I nudged him again. “Now come on.”
“If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dead,” he muttered morosely.
“Yeah, at least.”
We crossed, Schneider holding onto the rails as if the bridge were swaying in a high wind.
The flange on the other side turned out to be the edge of a featureless fifty-metre access plaza. We stood two metres in, looking up at the impassive face of the tower. Whether intentionally or not, whoever had built the concrete apron around the building’s base had created a perfect killing field. There was no cover in any direction and the only retreat was back along the slim, exposed bridge or a bone-shattering jump into the empty canal.
“Open ground, all around,” sang Schneider under his breath, picking up on the cadence and lyrics of the Kempist revolutionary hymn of the same name. I couldn’t blame him. I’d caught myself humming the f*cking thing a couple of times since we got into the unjammed airspace around the city—the Lapinee version was everywhere, close enough to the Kempist original to activate recall from last year. Back then, you could hear the original playing on the Rebel’s propaganda channels whenever and wherever the government jamming went down. Telling the—apparently edifying—story of a doomed platoon of volunteers holding a position against overwhelming odds for love of Joshua Kemp and his revolution, the anthem was sung against a catchy junk salsa backdrop that tended to stick in your head. Most of my men in the Northern Rim assault force could sing it by heart, and often did, to the fury of Cartel political officers, who were mostly too scared of the Wedge uniforms to make something of it.
In fact, the melody had proven so virulently memetic that even the most solidly pro-corporate citizens were unable to resist absent-mindedly humming it. This, plus a network of Cartel informers working on a commission-only basis, was enough to ensure that penal facilities all over Sanction IV were soon overflowing with musically-inclined political offenders. In view of the strain this put on policing, an expensive consulting team was called in and rapidly came up with a new set of sanitised lyrics to fit the original melody. Lapinee, a construct vocalist, was designed and launched to front the replacement song, which told the story of a young boy, orphaned in a Kempist sneak raid but then adopted by a kindly corporate bloc and brought up to realise his full potential as a top-level planetary executive.
As a ballad, it lacked the romantic blood and glory elements of the original, but since certain of the Kempist lyrics had been mirrored with malice aforethought, people generally lost track of which song was which and just sang a mangled hybrid of both, sewn together with much salsa-based humming. Any revolutionary sentiments got thoroughly scrambled in the process. The consulting team got a bonus, plus spin-off royalties from Lapinee, who was currently being plugged on all state channels. An album was in the offing.
Schneider stopped his humming. “Think they’ve got it covered?”
“Reckon so.” I nodded towards the base of the tower, where burnished doors fully five metres high apparently gave access. The massive portal was flanked by two plinths on which stood examples of abstract art each worthy of the title Eggs Collide in Symmetry or—I racked up the neurachem to be sure—Overkill Hardware Semi-deployed.
Schneider followed my gaze. “Sentries?”
I nodded. “Two slug autocannon nests and at least four separate beam weapons that I can see from here. Very tastefully done, too. You’d barely notice them in amongst all that sculpture.”
In a way, it was a good sign.

In the two weeks we’d spent in Landfall so far, I hadn’t seen much sign of the war beyond a slightly higher uniform count on the streets in the evenings and the occasional cyst of a rapid response turret on some of the taller buildings. Most of the time, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening on another planet. But if Joshua Kemp did finally manage to fight his way through to the capital, the Mandrake Corporation at least looked to be ready for him.
Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines central to the Mandrake Corporation’s current research programme. Maximum utility for ALL resources is our ultimate goal.
Mandrake had only acquired the site a decade ago. That they had built with armed insurrection in mind showed strategic thinking way in advance of any of the other corporate players at this particular table. Their corporate logo was a chopped strand of DNA afloat on a background of circuitry, their publicity material was just the right side of shrill in its aggressive, more-for-your-investment-dollar new-kid-on-the-block pitch, and their fortunes had risen sharply with the war.
Good enough.
“Think they’re looking at us now?”
I shrugged. “Always someone looking at you. Fact of life. Question is whether they noticed us.”
Schneider pulled an exasperated face. “Think they noticed us, then?”
“I doubt it. The automated systems won’t be tuned for it. War’s too far off for emergency default settings. These are friendly uniforms, and curfew isn’t till ten. We’re nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” I agreed, turning away. “So let’s go and get noticed.”
We headed back across the bridge.

“You don’t look like artists,” said the promoter as he punched in the last of our encoding sequence. Out of uniform and into nondescript civilian clothing bought that morning, we’d been calibrated the moment we walked in the door and, by the look of it, found lacking.
“We’re security,” I told him pleasantly. “She’s the artist.”
His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.
“Well.” He maximised a traffic display and studied it for a moment. “I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.”
“What, like Lapinee?”
The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.
“Don’t laugh at the majors, friend,” he said easily. “I had even a two per cent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now,” he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired. “Whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty f*cking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.”
“Are you this positive with all your clients?” I asked him.
He smiled bleakly. “I’m a realist. You pay me, I’ll shunt it. Got the best anti-screening intrusion software in Landfall to get it there in one piece. Just like the sign says. We Get You Noticed. But don’t expect me to massage your ego too, because that isn’t part of the service. Where you want this squirted, there’s too much going on to be optimistic about your chances.”
At our backs, a pair of windows were open onto the noise of the street three floors below. The air outside had cooled with the onset of evening, but the atmosphere in the promoter’s office still tasted stale. Tanya Wardani shifted impatiently.
“It’s a niche thing,” she rasped. “Can we get on with this.”
“Sure.” The promoter glanced once more at the credit screen and the payment that floated there in hard green digits. “Better fasten your launch belts. This is going to cost you at speed.”
He hit the switch. There was a brief ripple across the display and the purple torpedo vanished. I caught a glimpse of it represented on a series of helix-based transmission visuals, and then it faded, swallowed behind the wall of corporate data security systems and presumably beyond the tracking capacity of the promoter’s much-vaunted software. The green digit counters whirled into frantic, blurred eights.
“Told you,” said the promoter, shaking his head judiciously. “High-line screening systems like that, would have cost them a year’s profits just for the installation. And cutting the high line costs, my friends.”
“Evidently.” I watched our credit decay like an unprotected antimatter core and quelled a sudden desire to remove the promoter’s throat with my bare hands. It wasn’t really the money; we had plenty of that. Six million saft might have been a poor price for a Wu Morrison shuttle, but it was going to be enough for us to live like kings for the duration of our stay in Landfall.
It wasn’t the money.
It was the designer fashion war gear and the drawled theories on what to do with wartime art, the fake seen-it/been-it worldweariness, while on the other side of the equator men and women blew each other apart in the name of minor adjustments to the system that kept Landfall fed.
“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 f*ck 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 IV. 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 with which we’d been received and processed. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street and found a terrace café about twenty metres 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 AI. 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 armoured. It slunk round a corner a hundred metres up the street at ground level and crawled down towards 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 windscreen 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 metre, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disc of the termite grenade hard against the windscreen 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 ninety-five per cent of their force to the contact face, but the five per cent 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 armoured 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 whisky, 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—recognisable, 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 softcore anti-personnel 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, f*ck, man.” The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. “F*ck, f*ck.”
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 of 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, smouldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty metres 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 passers-by who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed. Immaculate.