Broken Angels

Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

Time to Identify and Assess.

It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth re-sleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Barcoding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA sca

Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for re-sleeving. How you die—fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony or numb—is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So too does your re-sleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Re-sleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want any more.

Oops.

The point is there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties, but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.

I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiselled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: Deng Zhao Jun. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.

He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realise where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.

I coughed gently.

“Good evening, Deng.”

He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.

“We were set up man, it was a fucking set-up. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—”

His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognised me.

“Yes.”

He jerked to his feet. “Who the fuck are you?”

“That’s not really important. Look—”

But it was too late, he was up and coming for me round the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.

“Look, there’s no point—”

He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and mid-level punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet, and came at me again.

This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knee and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut-deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.

“Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.” I got my breath back and lowered my voice. “Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?”

He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.

“Alright.” I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. “Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilised fashion. I want to ask you some questions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.”

I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.

“You wired for virtual trace?”

He shook his head.

“Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re ru

He stared at me. “Why should I tell you a fucking thing?”

“Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably re-sleeve you.” I leaned forward in the chair. “That’s a one-time special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.”

“If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—”

“No,” I shook my head, “Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.”

Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.

I deployed one from the manual.

“They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hardline outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.” I gestured with one open hand. “But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?”

I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.

Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.

But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.

Try it again.

“Something like that, Deng?”

“You’d better go ahead and kill me,” he said tautly.

I let the smile come out slow—

“I’m not going to kill you, Deng.”

—and waited.

As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.

All the time in the universe.

“You’re—?” he said, finally.