Broken Angels

“No. First he tells us how long we’ve got before Carrera comes through the gate. We need to be ready.”

Deprez shrugged. “Knowing this, are we not already ready?”

“Not for the Wedge.”

Wardani crossed wordlessly to where Sun stood and snatched the medipack from its fibregrip holster on the other woman’s chest. “Give me that. If you uniformed fucks won’t do it, I will.”

She knelt at Schneider’s side and opened the pack, spilling the entire contents across the floor as she searched for the wraps.

“The green tabbed envelopes,” said Sun helplessly. “There.”

“Thank you,” Wardani gritted. She spared me a single glance. “What are you going to do now, Kovacs? Cripple me too?”

“He would have sold us all out, Tanya. He has already.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know he somehow managed to survive two weeks aboard a restricted access hospital without any legitimate documentation. I know he managed to get into the officers’ wards without a pass.”

Her face contorted. “Fuck you, Kovacs. When we were digging at Dangrek, he bluffed us a nine-week municipal power grant from the Sauberville authorities. With no fucking documentation.”

Hand cleared his throat.

“I would have thought—”

And the ship lit up around us.

It sheeted through the space under the dome, fragments of suddenly erupting light swelling to solid blocks of translucent colour spun around the central structure. Sparkling discharge spat through the air between the colours, lines of power shaken out like storm-torn sails ripped loose of rigging. Trailing fountains of the stuff poured down from the upper levels of expanding rotating light, splashing off the deck and awakening a deeper glow within the translucent surface where they hit. Above, the stars blotted out. At the centre, the mummified corpses of the Martians disappeared, shrouded in the evolving gale of radiance. There was a sound to it all, but less heard than felt through my light-soaked skin, a building thrum and quiver in the air that felt like the adrenalin rush at the start of combat.

Vongsavath touched my arm.

“Look outside,” she said urgently. For all she was at my side, it felt as if she was yelling through a howling wind. “Look at the gate!”

I tipped my head back and threw the neurachem into seeing through the swirling currents of light to the crystal roof. At first, I couldn’t understand what Vongsavath was talking about. I couldn’t find the gate, and guessed it had to be somewhere on the other side of the ship, completing another orbit. Then I zeroed in on a vague blotch of grey, too dim to be…

And then I understood.

The storm of light and power raging around us was not confined to the air under the dome. Space around the Martian vessel was also seething to life. The stars had faded to dimly-seen gleamings through a curtain of something that stood hazed and shivering, kilometres beyond the orbit of the gate.

“It’s a screen,” said Vongsavath with certainty. “We’re under attack.”

Over our heads, the storm was settling. Motes of shadow swam in the light now, here scattering to corners like shoals of startled silverfry seen in negative, elsewhere exploding in slow tumbling motion to take up station on a hundred different levels around the re-emerging corpses of the two Martians. Sequenced splinters of flashing colour flickered at the corners of attenuated fields in shades of pearl and grey. The overall thrumming subsided and the ship began to talk to itself in more de

“This is—” My mind spun back to the narrow trawler cabin, the softly awake spiral of the datacoil, the motes of data swept to the top corner. “This is a datasystem?”

“Well spotted.” Tanya Wardani stalked under the trailing skirts of radiance and pointed up to the pattern of shadow and light gathered around the two corpses. There was a peculiar exultation on her face. “A little more extensive than your average desktop holo, isn’t it. I imagine those two have the primary con. Shame they’re not in any state to use it, but then I also imagine the ship is capable of looking after itself.”

“That depends on what’s coming,” said Vongsavath grimly. “Check out the upper screens. The grey background.”

I followed her arm. High up, near the curve of the dome a pearl surface ten metres across displayed a milky version of the starscape now dimmed by the shield outside.

Something moved there, shark-slim and angular against the stars.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Deprez.

“Can’t you guess?” Wardani was almost shivering with the strength of whatever was slopping around inside her. She stood centre stage to us all. “Look up. Listen to the ship. She’s telling you what it is.”

The Martian datasystem was still talking, in no language anyone was equipped to understand, but with an urgency that required no translator. The splintered lights—technoglyph numerals jolted through me, almost as knowledge; it’s a countdown—flashed over like digit counters tracking a missile. Querulous shrieks fluted up and down an unhuman scale.

“Incoming,” said Vongsavath, hypnotised. “We’re getting ready to engage with something out there. Automated battle systems.”

The Nagini—

I whipped around.

“Schneider,” I bellowed.

But Schneider was gone.

“Deprez,” I yelled it back over my shoulder, already on my way across the platform. “Jiang. He’s going for the Nagini.”

The ninja was with me by the time I reached the downward spiral pipe, Deprez a couple of steps behind. Both men hefted Sunjets, stocks folded back for easy handling. At the bottom of the pipe I thought I heard the clatter of someone falling, and a shriek of pain. I felt a brief snarl of wolf go through me.

Prey!

We ran, slithering and stumbling on the steep downward incline until we hit bottom and the empty, cherry-flashed expanse of the first chamber. There was blood smeared on the floor where Schneider had fallen. I knelt beside it and felt my lips draw back from my teeth. I got up and looked at my two companions.

“He won’t be moving that fast. Don’t kill him if you can avoid it. We still need to know about Carrera.”

“Kovacs!!”

It was Hand’s voice from up the pipe, bawling with repressed fury. Deprez dropped me a taut grin. I shook my head and sprinted for the exit to the next chamber.

Hunt!

It isn’t easy ru

Check functionality.

Thanks, Virginia.

Around us the ship quivered and shook to wakefulness. We ran through corridors that pulsed with sequenced rings of the purple light I’d seen splash off the edge of the gate when it opened. In one chamber, one of the spine-backed machines moved to intercept us, facings awake with technoglyph display and cluttering softly. I fetched up short, smart guns leaping to my hands, Deprez and Jiang flanking me. The impasse held for a long moment and then the machine slouched aside, muttering.

We exchanged glances. Beyond the tortured panting in my chest and the thudding in my temples, I found my mouth had bent itself into a smile.

“Come on.”

A dozen chambers and corridors further on, Schneider proved smarter than I’d expected. As Jiang and I burst into the open of a bubble, Sunjet fire spat and crackled from the far exit. I felt the sting of a near miss across my cheek and then the ninja at my elbow had floored me with a sideways flung arm. The next blast lashed where I had been. Jiang hit, rolled and joined me on the floor, face up, looking at a smouldering cuff with mild distaste.