Broken Angels

“Interesting habit. Most of us flatten down to the surface. More final, more satisfying I guess. But you’re different. You tidy upward.”

“Wycinski. It’s his.”

“That where you picked it up?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Probably.”

“You’re not Wycinski, are you?”

It startled a short laugh out of her. “No, I’m not. I worked with him at Bradbury, and on Nkrumah’s Land, but I’m half his age. Why would you think something like that?”

“Nothing. Just crossed my mind. You know, that cybersex virtuality. There was a lot of male tendency in what you did to yourself. Just wondered, you know. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a man?”

She smiled at me. “Wrong, Takeshi. Wrong way round. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a woman.”

For just a moment, something warm sparked between us, already fading as it came into being. Her smile washed away.

“So you were saying?”

I pointed at the datacoil. “That’s the pattern you leave after shutdown. That’s the pattern you left in the cabin datacoil on board the trawler. Presumably after you slammed the gate on Dhasanapongsakul and his colleagues, after you took out the two on the trawler and dumped them in the nets. I saw it the morning after the party. Didn’t notice at the time, but like I said that’s Envoys for you. Just go on acquiring little scraps of data until it means something.”

She was staring intently at the datacoil, but I still spotted the tremor go through her when I said Dhasanapongsakul’s name.

“There were other scraps, once I started to look. The corrosion grenades in the hold. Sure, it took Schneider to shut down the onboard monitors on the Nagini, but you were fucking him. Old flame, in fact. I don’t suppose you had any harder time talking him into it than you did in getting me down to the rec deck at Mandrake. It didn’t fit at first, because you were pushing so hard to get the claim buoy aboard. Why go to the trouble of trying to put the buoys out of commission in the first place, then work so hard to get the remaining one placed.”

She nodded jerkily. Most of her was still dealing with Dhasanapongsakul. I was talking into a vacuum.

“Didn’t make sense, that is, until I thought about what else had been put out of commission. Not the buoys. The ID&A sets. You trashed them all. Because that way no one was going to be able to put Dhasanapongsakul and the rest into virtual and find out what had happened to them. Of course, eventually we’d get them back to Landfall and find out. But then. You didn’t plan for us to make it back, did you?”

That got her back to me. A haggard stare across wreathed smoke.

“You know when I worked most of this out?” I sucked in my own smoke hard. “On the swim back to the gate. See, I was pretty much convinced it’d be closed by the time I got there. Wasn’t quite sure why I thought that at first, but it sort of fell into place. They’d gone through the gate, and the gate had closed on them. Why would that happen, and how did poor old Dhasanapongsakul end up on the wrong side wearing a T-shirt. Then I remembered the waterfall.”

She blinked.

“The waterfall?”

“Yeah, any normal human being, post-coital, would have shoved me in the back into that pool and then laughed. We both would have. Instead, you started crying.” I examined the end of my cigarette as if it interested me. “You stood at the gate with Dhasanapongsakul, and you pushed him through. And then you slammed it shut. It doesn’t take two hours to shut that gate, does it, Tanya?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Were you already thinking you might have to do the same thing to me? Then, at the waterfall?”

“I.” She shook her head. “Don’t know.”

“How did you kill the two on the trawler?”

“Stu

She looked at me defiantly.

“I didn’t really believe that. I’m an archaeologue, I know how…” She was silent for a few moments. “I couldn’t even have opened it again myself in time to save them. It was just. The gate. What it meant. Sitting there on the trawler, knowing they were just the other side of that. Thing, suffocating. Millions of kilometres away in the sky above my head and still right there in the cavern. So close. Like something huge, waiting for me.”

I nodded. Back on the beach at Dangrek, I’d told Wardani and Vongsavath about the corpses I’d found sealed in the substance of the Martian vessel while Carrera and I hunted each other across the hull. But I never told either of them about my last half hour inside the ship, the things I’d seen and heard as I stumbled back out to the echoing desolation of the docking bay with Carrera’s impeller frame on my shoulders, the things I’d felt swimming beside me all the way back to the gate. After a while, my vision had narrowed down to that faint blur of light orbiting out in the blackness, and I didn’t want to look round for fear of what I might see, what might be hunched there, offering me its taloned hand. I just dived for the light, scarcely able to believe it was still there, terrified that at any moment it would slam shut and leave me locked out in the dark.

Tetrameth hallucination, I told myself later, and that was just going to have to do.

“So why didn’t you take the trawler?”

She shook her head again and stubbed out her cigarette.

“I panicked. I was cutting the stacks out of the two in the nets, and I just.” She shivered. “It was like something was staring at me. I dumped them back in the water, threw the stacks out to sea as far as I could. Then I just ran away. Didn’t even try to blow the cavern or cover my tracks. Walked all the way into Sauberville.” Her voice changed in some way I couldn’t define. “I got a ride with this guy in a ground car the last couple of klicks. Young guy with a couple of kids he was bringing back from a grav-gliding trip. I guess they’re all dead now.”

“Yes.”

“I. Sauberville wasn’t far enough. I ran south. I was in the Bootkinaree hinterlands when the Protectorate signed the accords. Cartel forces picked me up from a refugee column. Dumped me in the camp with the rest of them. At the time, it seemed almost like justice.”

She fumbled out a fresh cigarette and fitted it in her mouth. Her gaze slanted my way.

“That make you laugh?”

“No.” I drained my coffee. “Point of interest, though. What you were doing around Bootkinaree? Why not head back for Indigo City? You being a Kempist sympathiser and all.”

She grimaced. “I don’t think the Kempists would have been pleased to see me, Takeshi. I’d just killed their entire expedition. Would have been a little hard to explain.”

“Kempists?”

“Yeah.” There was a gritted amusement in her tone now. “Who’d you think bankrolled that trip? Vacuum gear, drilling and construction equipment, the analogue units and the dataprocessing system for the gate. Come on, Takeshi. We were on the edge of a war. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Who’d you think went in and wiped the gate from the Landfall archive?”

“Like I said,” I muttered. “I didn’t want to think about it. So it was a Kempist gig. So why’d you waste them?”

“I don’t know,” she gestured. “It seemed like. I don’t know, Kovacs.”

“Fair enough.” I crushed out my cigarette, resisted the temptation to take another, then took it anyway. I watched her and waited.

“It.” She stopped. Shook her head. Started again, enunciating with exasperated care. “I thought I was on their side. It made sense. We all agreed. In Kemp’s hands the ship would be a bargaining chip the Cartel couldn’t ignore. It could win the war for us. Bloodlessly.”