Broken Angels

“Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.”

She laughed, or something very like it.

“You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.”

I built another smile. “No. I’m not Wycinski, either.”

The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.

“Yeah?”

“Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.”

I looked at Wardani and sighed. “Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.”

I pocketed the phone and started down the street again. Wardani followed.

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr. I’m-Not-Wycinski?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.”

“Yes.”

The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.

She’d be alright.

It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.

It felt like a scab coming off.

“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.

“Yeah?”

“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”

She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.

“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”

“Right.”

Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.

EPILOGUE

The Angin Chandra’s Virtue blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She’s already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualise, but even that’s pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she’ll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She’s not a deep space vessel, she’s not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she’ll get where she’s going in her own time.

Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji’s contractors have done us proud. There’s a shoreline in wind- and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water’s edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sunblasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five metres of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicoloured fish down there, in amongst the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortification.

The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there’s enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoration and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.

During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evenings, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you’re going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn’t any night sky you’d see from the pilot deck of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue right now—one of the contractors told me they’ve drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.

As afterlives go, it’s not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect—not nearly restricted enough entry for one thing—but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the Tanya Wardani are locked into. If the Chandra’s deserted decks and corridors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it’s an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.

But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them are interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.

Sutjiadi didn’t make it either. His stack was the only one I didn’t turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn’t know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all of our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.

Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they re-sleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I’m buying.

Sutjiadi.

Cruickshank.

Hansen.

Jiang.

Some would say we got off lightly.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whisky, I almost agree.

Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly-dressed construct modelled after a Hun Home Settlement Years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She’s rarely gone more than half an hour.

Of course in real time, that’s a couple of days. Roespinoedji’s contractors slowed the onboard virtuality down for us, about as far as it would go. It must have been some kind of a first for them—most clients want virtual time ru