Broken Angels

Get the fuck 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 fucking 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 begi

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 fucking 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 i

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. Fucking 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 fucking 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.