Broken Angels

Roespinoedji was sold.

The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji’s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instill fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.

“It’s cool,” she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. “Why don’t you go talk to Tanya. I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.”

“To me?”

The pilot shrugged impatiently. “To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.”

“Is she still in her room?”

“She went out.” Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that constituted Dig 27’s town centre. “Go. I’ll watch these guys.”

I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the façade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.

She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn’t let go of.

“You following me?”

“Not intentionally,” I lied. “Sleep well?”

She shook her head. “I can still hear Sutjiadi.”

“Yeah.”

When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. “You going in here?”

“Are you fucking—? No. I only stopped to…” and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.

I peered at the glyphs. “Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?”

She almost smiled.

“No.” She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. “It’s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It’s sort of a grafiti as well. It says.” She stopped, shook her head again. “There’s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good shit before you go up in a populated area.”

“You’re winding me up. It doesn’t say that.”

“It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too.” She turned away. “They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell.”

The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.

“I was going to the dighead,” she said. “That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—”

“Sure. I’ll walk with you.”

She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.

“Maybe I should get one of those.”

“Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.”

We plodded up the slope.

“You sure this is going to come off?” she asked.

“What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?”

“I think he’s a fucking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.”

“Tanya,” I said gently. “It wasn’t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji’s getting the deal of the mille

“Well. You’re the Envoy.”

The café was pretty much as I remembered it, a forlorn-looking herd of moulded chairs and tables gathered in the shade cast by the massive stanchions and struts of the dighead frame. A holomenu fluoresced weakly overhead, and a muted Lapinee playlist seeped into the air from speakers hung on the structure. Martian artefacts stood about the place in no particular pattern that I could discern. We were the only customers.

A terminally bored waiter sloped out of hiding somewhere and stood at our table, looking resentful. I glanced up at the menu then back at Wardani. She shook her head.

“Just water,” she said. “And cigarettes, if you’ve got them.”

“Site Sevens or Will to Victory?”

She grimaced. “Site Sevens.”

The waiter looked at me, obviously hoping I wasn’t going to spoil his day and order some food.

“Got coffee?”

He nodded.

“Bring me some. Black, with whisky in it.”

He trudged away. I raised an eyebrow at Wardani behind his back.

“Leave him alone. Can’t be much fun working here.”

“Could be worse. He could be a conscript. Besides,” I gestured around me at the artefacts. “Look at the décor. What more could you want?”

A wan smile.

“Takeshi.” She hunched forward over the table. “When you get the virtual gear installed. I, uh, I’m not going with you.”

I nodded. Been expecting this.

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you apologising to me for?”

“You, uh. You’ve done a lot for me in the last couple of months. You got me out of the camp—”

“We pulled you out of the camp because we needed you. Remember.”

“I was angry when I said that. Not with you, but—”

“Yeah, with me. Me, Schneider, the whole fucking world in a uniform.” I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. And you were right. We got you out because we needed you. You don’t owe me anything.”

She studied her hands where they lay in her lap.

“You helped put me back together again, Takeshi. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but that Envoy recovery shit works. I’m getting better. Slowly, but it’s off that base.”

“That’s good.” I hesitated, then made myself say it. “Fact remains, I did it because I needed you. Part of the rescue package; there was no point in getting you out of the camp if we left half your soul behind.”

Her mouth twitched. “Soul?”

“Sorry, figure of speech. Too much time hanging around Hand. Look, I’ve got no problem with you bailing out. I’m kind of curious to know why, is all.”

The waiter toiled back into view at that point, and we quietened. He laid out the drinks and the cigarettes. Tanya Wardani slit the pack and offered me one across the table. I shook my head.

“I’m quitting. Those things’ll kill you.”

She laughed almost silently and fed herself one from the pack. Smoke curled up as she touched the ignition patch. The waiter left. I sipped at my whisky coffee and was pleasantly surprised. Wardani plumed smoke up into the dighead frame space.

“Why am I staying?”

“Why are you staying?”

She looked at the table top. “I can’t leave now, Takeshi. Sooner or later, what we found out there is going to get into the public domain. They’ll open the gate again. Or take an IP cruiser out there. Or both.”

“Yeah, sooner or later. But right now there’s a war in the way.”

“I can wait.”

“Why not wait on Latimer? It’s a lot safer there.”

“I can’t. You said yourself, transit time in the ‘Chandra has got to be eleven years, minimum. That’s full acceleration, without any course correction Ameli might have to do. Who knows what’s going to have happened back here in the next eleven years?”