Broken Angels

It really would have been easier to just sleep through it, but Carrera was no worse a judge of human nature than any of the other carrion birds gathered about the paralysed body of Sanction IV. Like all vessels with potential to escape the war, the battlewagon is grudgingly equipped with a single emergency cryocap for the pilot. It isn’t even a very good one—most of Vongsavath’s time away is taken up with the de- and refrosting time required by the overcomplex cryosystems. That Hun Home bureaucrat is an elaborate joke on Sun Liping’s part, suggested and then written into the format when Vongsavath returned one evening spitting curses at the inefficiency of the cryocap’s processor.

Vongsavath exaggerates, of course, the way you do about minor a

I mentioned that comment to her a couple of days ago as we lay floating on our backs in the long aquamarine swells out beyond the headland, eyes slitted against the sun overhead. She could barely remember saying it. Everything that happened on Sanction IV is already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. In the afterlife, you lose track of time, it seems, or maybe you just no longer have the need or desire to keep track. Any one of us could find out from the virtuality datahead how long we’ve been gone, when exactly we’ll arrive, but it seems none of us want to. We prefer to keep it vague. Back on Sanction IV, we know, years have already passed, but exactly how many seems—and probably is—irrelevant. The war may already be over, the peace already being fought over. Or it may not. It’s hard to make it matter more than that. The living do not touch us here.

For the most part, anyway.

Occasionally, though, I wonder what Tanya Wardani might be doing by now. I wonder if she is already out on the edges of the Sanction system somewhere, turning the face of some new sleeve tired and intent as she pores over the glyph locks on a Martian dreadnought. I wonder how many other deadwired hulks there are spi

Even more occasionally, I turn my mind to what I have to do when we do get to Latimer, but the detail seems unreal. The Quellists will want a report. They’ll want to know why I couldn’t twist Kemp closer to their designs for the whole Latimer sector, why I changed sides at the critical moment, and worst of all, why I left things no better aligned than they were when they needlecast me in. It’s probably not what they had in mind when they hired me.

I’ll make something up.

I don’t have a sleeve right now, but that’s a minor inconvenience. I’ve got a half-share in twenty million UN dollars banked in Latimer City, a small gang of hardened spec ops friends, one of whom boasts blood co

These are my priorities when I get back from the dead. Anyone who has a problem with them can line right up.

In some ways, I’m looking forward to the end of the month.

This afterlife shit is overrated.