Broken Angels

I turned to Hand.

“Why don’t you tell them who deployed the OPERN system? Tell them why.”

He just looked at me.

“Alright. I’ll tell them.” I looked round at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. “Our sponsor here has a few home-grown enemies back in Landfall who’d quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn’t. So far that hasn’t worked, but back in Landfall they don’t know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we’ll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?”

Hand nodded.

“And the Wedge code?” asked Sutjiadi. “That counts for nothing?”

More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.

“What Wedge co—”

“Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—”

“How come we didn’t—”

“Shut up, all of you.” To my amazement, they did. “Wedge command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren’t made aware of it because,” I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab, “you didn’t need to know. You didn’t matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?”

He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.

“Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,” he said with the measure of a lecturer. “Whoever deployed the OPERN system nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same cha

Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. “You’re Wedge, Kovacs. I don’t believe they will murder one of their own. They’re not known for it.”

I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.

“Unfortunately,” I said. “Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand’s enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It’ll short-circuit any influence I have.”

“You could not bluff? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.”

I nodded. “I might try that. But the odds aren’t good, and there is an easier way.”

That cut across the low babble of dispute.

Deprez inclined his head. “And that is?”

“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we’re home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we’ve found, Hand’s pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we’re dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.”

It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all fucking looking at me.

Please, not this again.

“The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.”

The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They’d come round. They’d come round because they’d see what Hand and I already knew. They’d see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn’t see it that way—

I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.

Anyone who didn’t see it that way, I’d shoot.

For someone whose speciality was machine systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the Nagini up to less than fifty metres off the cave entrance. With the forward re-entry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.

It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun’s cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.

It was a sound like the world splintering apart.

I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn’t space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn’t feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disco

I kept seeing Cruickshank die.

Twenty-three minutes.

The ultravibe shut down.

The gate emerged from the devastation and billowing dust like a tree through a blizzard. Wardani had told me it wouldn’t be harmed by any weapon she knew of, but Sun had still programmed the Nagini’s weapon systems to cease fire as soon as they had visual. Now, as the dust clouds began to drift away, I saw the tangled remnants of the archaeologue’s equipment, torn and flung apart by the final seconds of the ultravibe blast. It was hard to believe the dense integrity of the artefact bulking above the debris.

A tiny feather of awe brushed down my spine, a sudden recollection of what I was looking at. Sutjiadi’s words came back to me.

We do not belong here. We are not ready.

I shrugged it off.

“Kovacs?” From the sound of Ameli Vongsavath’s voice over the induction rig, I wasn’t the only one with the elder civilisation jitters.

“Here.”

“I’m closing the deck hatches. Stand clear.”

The machine-gun mounts slid smoothly backward into the body of the deck and the hatches lowered, shutting out the light. A moment later, the interior lighting flickered on, cold.

“Some movement.” Sun said warningly. She was on the general cha

There was a slight jolt as Vongsavath shifted the Nagini up a few more metres. I steadied myself against the bulkhead and, despite myself, looked down at the deck under my feet.

“No, it’s not under us.” It was as if Sun had been watching me. “It’s, I think it’s going for the gate.”

“Fuck, Hand. How much of this thing is there?” Deprez asked.

I could almost see the Mandrake exec’s shrug.

“I’m not aware of any limits on the OPERN system’s growth potential. It may have spread under the whole beach for all I know.”

“I think that’s unlikely,” said Sun, with the calm of a lab technician in mid-experiment. “The remote sensing would have found something that large. And besides, it has not consumed the other sentry robots, which it would if it were spreading laterally. I suspect it opened a gap in our perimeter and then flowed through in linear—”

“Look,” said Jiang. “It’s there.”

On the screen over my head, I saw the arms of the thing emerge from the rubble-strewn ground around the gate. Maybe it had already tried to come up under the foundation and failed. The cables were a good two metres from the nearest edge of the plinth when they struck.