Broken Angels

“The war might have ended, for one thing.”

“The war might be over next year, Takeshi. Then Roespinoedji’s going to move on his investment, and when that happens, I want to be here.”

“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trust him any more than Hand. Now you want to work for him?”

“We, uh,” she looked at her hands again. “We talked about it this morning. He’s willing to hide me until things have calmed down. Get me a new sleeve.” She smiled a little sheepishly. “Guild Masters are thin on the ground since the war kicked in. I guess I’m part of his investment.”

“Guess so.” Even while the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t work out why I was trying so hard to talk her out of this. “You know that won’t help much if the Wedge come looking for you, don’t you?”

“Is that likely?”

“It could ha—” I sighed. “No, not really. Carrera’s probably backed up somewhere in a sneak station, but it’ll be a while before they realise that he’s dead. While longer before they sort the authorisation to sleeve the back-up copy. And even if he does get out to Dangrek, there’s nobody left to tell him what happened there.”

She shivered and looked away.

“It had to be done, Tanya. We had to cover our traces. You of all people should know that.”

“What?” Her eyes flicked back in my direction.

“I said. You of all people should know that.” I kept her gaze. “It’s what you did last time around. Isn’t it.”

She looked away again, convulsively. Smoke curled up off her cigarette and was snatched away by the breeze. I leaned into the silence between us.

“It doesn’t much matter now. You don’t have the skills to sink us between here and Latimer, and once we’re there you’ll never see me again. Would. Never have seen me again. And now you’re not coming with us. But like I said, I’m curious.”

She moved her arm as if it wasn’t co

“How long have you known?”

“Known?” I thought about it. “Honestly, I think I’ve known from the day we pulled you out of the camp. Nothing I could lock down, but I knew there was a problem. Someone tried to bust you out before we came. The camp commandant let that slip, in between fits of drooling.”

“Sounds unusually animated, for him.” She drew more smoke, hissed it out between her teeth.

“Yeah, well. Then of course there were your friends down on the rec deck at Mandrake. Now that one I really should have spotted on the launch pad. I mean, it’s only the oldest whore’s trick in the book. Lead the mark up a darkened alley by his dick, and hand him over to your pimp.”

She flinched. I forced a grin.

“Sorry. Figure of speech. I just feel kind of stupid. Tell me, was that gun-to-your-head stuff just tinsel, or were they serious?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “They were revolutionary guard cadres. Kemp’s hard men. They took out Deng when he came sniffing around after them. Really dead, stack torched and body sold off for spares. They told me that while we were waiting for you. Maybe to scare me, I don’t know. They probably would have shot me sooner than let me go again.”

“Yeah, they convinced the fuck out of me as well. But you still called them in, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said it to herself, as if discovering the truth for the first time. “I did.”

“Care to tell me why?”

She made a tiny motion, something that might have been her head shaking, or just a shiver.

“OK. Want to tell me how?”

She got herself back together, looked at me. “Coded signal. I set it up while you and Jan were out casing Mandrake. Told them to wait on my signal, then placed a call from my room in the tower when I was sure we were definitely going to Dangrek.” A smile crossed her face, but her voice could have been a machine’s. “I ordered underwear. From a catalogue. Locational code in the numbers. Basic stuff.”

I nodded. “Were you always a Kempist?”

She shifted impatiently. “I’m not from here, Kovacs. I don’t have any political, I don’t have any right to a political stance here.” She shot me an angry look. “But for Christ’s sake, Kovacs. It’s their fucking planet, isn’t it?”

“That sounds pretty much like a political stance to me.”

“Yeah, must be really nice not to have any beliefs.” She smoked some more, and I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. “I envy you your smug sanctimonious fucking detachment.”

“Well, it’s not hard to come by, Tanya.” I tried to curb the defensiveness in my voice. “Try working local military adviser to Joshua Kemp while Indigo City comes apart in civil riots around you. Remember those cuddly little inhib systems Carrera unloaded on us? First time I saw those in use on Sanction IV? Kemp’s guardsmen were using them on protesting artefact merchants in Indigo City, a year before the war kicked in. Maxed up, continuous discharge. No mercy for the exploitative classes. You get pretty detached after the first few street cleanups.”

“So you changed sides.” It was the same scorn I’d heard in her voice that night in the bar, the night she drove Schneider away.

“Well, not immediately. I thought about assassinating Kemp for a while, but it didn’t seem worth it. Some family member would have stepped in, some fucking cadre. And by then, the war was looking pretty meltable anyway. And like Quell says, these things need to run their hormonal course.”

“Is that how you survive it?” she whispered.

“Tanya. I have been trying to leave ever since.”

“I,” she shuddered. “I’ve watched you, Kovacs. I watched you in Landfall, in that firefight at the promoter’s offices, in the Mandrake Tower, the beach at Dangrek with your own men. I, I envied you what you have. How you live with yourself.”

I took brief refuge in my whisky coffee. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I can’t.” A helpless, fending gesture. “I can’t get them out of my head. Dhasanapongsakul, Aribowo, the rest of them. Most of them, I didn’t even see die, but they. Keep.” She swallowed hard. “How did you know?”

“You want to give me a cigarette now?”

She handed over the pack, wordlessly. I busied myself with lighting and inhaling, to no noticeable benefit. My system was so bombed on damage and Roespinoedji’s drugs, I would have been amazed if there had been. It was the thin comfort of habit, not much more.

“Envoy intuition doesn’t work like that,” I said slowly. “Like I said, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t want to take it on board. You uh, you make a good impression, Tanya Wardani. At some level, I didn’t want to believe it was you. Even when you sabotaged the hold—”

She started. “Vongsavath said—”

“Yeah, I know. She still thinks it was Schneider. I haven’t told her any different. I was pretty much convinced it was Schneider myself after he ran out on us. Like I said, I didn’t want to think it might be you. When the Schneider angle showed up, I went after it like a heatseeker. There was a moment in the docking bay when I worked him out. You know what I felt? I was relieved. I had my solution and I didn’t have to think about who else might be involved any more. So much for detachment, huh.”

She said nothing.

“But there were a whole stack of reasons why Schneider couldn’t be the whole story. And the Envoy conditioning just went on racking them up ‘til there was too much to ignore any more.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this.” I reached into a pocket and shook out a portable datastack. The membrane settled on the table and motes of light evolved in the projected datacoil. “Clean that space off for me.”

She looked at me curiously, then leaned forward and lobbed the display motes up to the top left-hand corner of the coil. The gesture echoed back in my head, the hours of watching her work in the screens of her own monitors. I nodded and smiled.