Broken Angels

It was love. Perfect passion compatibility, trapped, distilled and amped up almost beyond bearing.

“You knock out the baffles?” she asked me, a little breathlessly, after.

“Of course. You think I want to go through all this and still come out swilling full of semen and sex hormones?”

“Go through?” She lifted her head from the sand, outraged.

I gri

“Fucking—”

“Look—”

I fended off the fistful of sand with one arm and pushed her into the surf. She went over backwards, laughing. I stood up in a ludicrous Micky Nozawa fighting stance, while she picked herself up. Something out of Siren Fist Demons.

“Don’t try to lay your profane hands on me, woman.”

“Looks to me like you want to have hands laid on you,” she said, shaking back her hair and pointing.

It was true. The sight of the system magic-enhanced body, beaded with water, had the signals flickering through my nerve endings again, and my glans was already filling up with blood like a ripening plum in time-lapse fast-forward sequence.

I gave up the guard, and glanced around the construct. “You know, off the rack or not, this is some good shit, Tanya.”

“Last year’s CyberSex Down seal of approval, apparently.” She shrugged. “I took a chance. You want to try the water again? Or, apparently there’s this waterfall thing back through the trees.”

“Sounds good to me.”

On the way past the front line of palms with their huge phallic trunks lifting like dinosaur necks off the sand, I scooped up a newly fallen coconut. The crabs scattered with comic speed, scuttling for burrows in the sand from which they poked cautious eyestalks. I turned the coconut over in my hands. It had landed with a small chunk already torn out of the green shell, exposing soft, rubbery flesh beneath. Nice touch. I punctured the i

Another nice touch.

The forest floor beyond was conveniently clear of sharp debris and insects. Water poured and splashed somewhere with attention-grabbing clarity. An obvious path led through the palm trunks towards the sound. We walked, hand in hand, beneath rainforest foliage filled with brightly-coloured birds and small monkeys making suspiciously harmonic noises.

The waterfall was a two-tier affair, pouring down in a long plume into a wide basin, then tumbling through rocks and rapids to another smaller pool where the drop was less. I arrived slightly ahead of her and stood on wet rocks at the edge of the second pool, arms akimbo, looking down. I repressed a grin. The moment was cleared for her to push me in, trembling with the potential.

Nothing.

I turned to look at her, and saw she was trembling slightly.

“Hoy, Tanya.” I took her face between my hands. “Are you OK? What’s the matter?”

But I knew what the motherfucking matter was.

Because Envoy techniques or not, healing is a complex, creeping process, and it’ll glitch on you as soon as your back’s turned.

The motherfucking camp.

The low-key arousal fled, leaching out of my system like saliva from a mouthful of lemon. The fury sheeted up through me.

The motherfucking war.

If I’d had Isaac Carrera and Joshua Kemp there, in the middle of all that edenic beauty, I’d have torn their entrails out with my bare hands, knotted them together and kicked them into the pool to drown.

Can’t drown in this water, sneered the part of me that would never shut down, the smug Envoy control. You can breathe in this water.

Maybe men like Kemp and Carrera couldn’t.

Yeah, right.

So instead, I caught Tanya Wardani around the waist, and crushed her against me, and jumped for us both.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I came out of it with an alkaline smell in my nostrils and my belly sticky with fresh semen. My balls ached as if they’d been kicked. Over my head, the display had cleared to standby. A time-check pulsed in one corner. I’d been under less than two minutes, real time.

I sat up groggily.

“Fuck. Me.” I cleared my throat, and looked around. Fresh self-moistening towelling hung from a roll behind the automould, presumably with just this in mind. I tore off a handful and wiped myself down, still trying to blink the virtuality out of my eyes.

We’d fucked in the waterfall pool, languid underwater once Wardani’s trembling had passed.

We’d fucked again on the beach.

We’d fucked back up on the loading deck, a last-chance-grabbed-at-leaving sort of thing.

I tore off more towel, wiped my face and rubbed at my eyes. I dressed slowly, stowed the smart gun, wincing as it prodded down from my waistband into my tender groin. I found a mirror on the wall of the chamber and peered into it, trying to sort out what had happened to me in there.

Envoy psychoglue.

I’d used it on Wardani without really thinking about it, and now she was up and walking around. That was what I’d wanted. The dependency whiplash was an almost inevitable side-effect, but so what? It was the kind of thing that didn’t much matter in the usual Envoy run of things—as likely as not you were in combat with other things to worry about, often you’d moved on by the time it became a problem the subject had to deal with. What didn’t generally happen was the kind of restorative purging Wardani had prescribed for herself and then gone after.

I couldn’t predict how that would work.

I’d never known it to happen before. Never even seen it before.

I couldn’t work out what she’d made me feel in turn.

And I wasn’t learning anything new looking at myself in the mirror.

I built a shrug and a grin, and walked out of the chamber into the pre-dawn gloom among the stilled machines. Wardani was waiting outside, by one of the open-rig webs and

Not alone.

The thought jarred through my soggy nervous system, painfully sluggish, and then the unmistakeable spike-and-ring configuration at the projection end of a Sunjet was pushed against the back of my neck.

“You want to avoid any sudden moves, chum.” It was a strange accent, an equatorial twang to it even through the voiceprint distorter. “Or you and your girlfriend here are going to be wearing no heads.”

A professional hand snaked round my waist, plucked the Kalashnikov from its resting place and tossed it away across the room. I heard the muffled clunk as it hit the carpeted floor and slid.

Try to pinpoint it.

Equatorial accent.

Kempists.

I looked over at Wardani, her oddly limp-hanging arms, and the figure who held a smaller hand blaster to her nape. He was dressed in the form-fitting black of a stealth assault suit and masked with clear plastic that moved in random waves over his face, distorting the features continually, except for two little watchful blue-tinted windows over the eyes.

There was a pack on his back that had to carry whatever intrusion hardware they’d used to get in here. Had to be a biosigns imaging set, counterfeed code sampler and securisys sandbagger in there, minimum.

High fucking tech.

“You guys are so dead,” I said, trying for amused calm.

“Extra fu

Play for time.

“Who sent you guys?”

“See,” said the spokesman, voice squelching in and out of focus. “It’s rigged this way. Her we want, you’re just carbon walking. Limit that mouth, maybe we lift you too, just for tidiness. Keep gritting me, I’ll make a mess just to see your Envoy grey cells fly. Am I coming through?”