Broken Angels

“I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said, I’m. Not. Going to kill you.” I shrugged. “Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don’t get to be a corporate hero that easy.”

I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.

“Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a one-time special offer. Answer the question, now, while you’ve still got the chance.”

“Or what?” Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume thin, but rising.

I shrugged.

“Or I’ll leave you here.”

“What?”

“I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometres of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.”

He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.

“You’re in a Casualty ID&A system. Runs off a battlefield powerpack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.”

I sat back again. Let it sink into him.

“Or you can answer my questions. One-time offer. What’s it going to be?”

The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.

“You had your chance.”

I got almost to the door before he cracked.

“Alright!” There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. “Alright, you got it. You got it.”

I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.

“I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop man. I’ll tell you.”

Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.

“Hand?”

He nodded jerkily.

“Matthias Hand?”

He looked up, something broken in his face. “I got your word?”

“For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.”

“Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.”

“He’s your controller?” I frowned. “A divisional exec?”

“He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the Chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.”

“Why?”

“How the fuck would I know?”

“Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?”

He hesitated. “They say it was Hand.”

“How long’s he been with Mandrake?”

“I don’t know.” He saw the expression on my face. “I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.”

“What’s his rep?”

“Tough. You don’t cross him.”

“Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.”

“It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R&D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—”

“Company what?”

“Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.”

“But it didn’t.”

Deng shook his head. “Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.”

“All that voodoo shit,” I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand were ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. “So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?”

Deng shrugged. “That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cartel by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.”

“Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—”

Falling.

Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.

“You OK, Kovacs?”

Schneider.

I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.

“Kovacs?” This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-moulded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.

“Well?” Wardani drew back a little. “Don’t just sit there gri

“Enough,” I said. “I think we’re ready to deal now.”

PART II: COMMERCIAL CONSIDERATIONS

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

QUELLCRIST FALCONER

Things I Should Have Learnt By Now

Vol II