Broken Angels

A moan in the fibres of the hull. The songspires across the platform seemed to gust sympathy at a level on the edge of hearing.

A vague unease coiled through me. Something was wrong.

I looked up at the screens and watched the attacking systems wiped out once again by the defence net. It all seemed to be taking place that little bit closer in this time.

“You did all decide, while I was gone, that we were safe here, right?”

“We did the maths, Kovacs.” Vongsavath nodded inclusively at Sun and Wardani. The systems officer inclined her head. Wardani just stared holes in me. “Looks like our friend out there hooks up with us about once every twelve hundred years. And given the dating on most of the ruins on Sanction IV, that means this engagement has been fought about a hundred times already with no result.”

But still the feeling. Envoy senses, cranked up to snapping, and feeling something not right, something so far wrong, in fact, I could almost smell the scorching.

…sobbing carrier wave…

…songspires…

…time slowing down…

I stared at the screens.

We need to get out of here.

“Kovacs?”

“We need to—”

I felt the words moth their way out between dry lips, as if someone else was using the sleeve against my will, and then they stopped.

From the attacker, came the real attack at last.

It burst from the leading surfaces of the vessel like something alive. An amorphous, turbulent dark-body blob of something spat out at us like congealed hatred. On secondary screens you could see how it tore up the fabric of space around it and left a wake of outraged reality behind. It didn’t take much to guess what we were looking at.

Hyperspace weaponry.

Experia fantasy stuff. And the sick wet dream of every naval commander in the Protectorate.

The ship, the Martian ship—and only now I grasped with instinctive Envoy-intuited knowledge that the other was not Martian, looked nothing like—pulsed in a way that sent nausea rolling through my guts and set every tooth in my head instantly on edge. I staggered and went down on one knee.

Something vomited into the space ahead of the attack. Something boiled and flexed and split wide open with a vaguely sensed detonation. I felt a recoil tremor go throbbing through the hull around me, a disquiet that went deeper than simple real-space vibration.

On the screen, the dark-body projectile shattered apart, flinging out oddly sticky-looking particles of itself. I saw the outside shield fluoresce, shudder and go out like a blown candle flame.

The ship screamed.

There was no other way to describe it. It was a rolling, modulating cry that seemed to emanate from the air around us. It was a sound so massive, it made the shriek of the Nagini’s ultravibe battery seem almost tolerable. But where the ultravibe blast had rammed and battered at my hearing, this sound sliced and passed through as effortlessly as a laser scalpel. I knew, even as I made the movement, that clapping hands over my ears would have no effect.

I did it anyway.

The scream rose, held and finally rolled away across the platform, replaced by a less agonising pastiche of fluting alert sounds from the datasystems and a splinter-thin fading echo from—

I whipped around.

—from the songspires.

This time there could be no doubt. Softly, like wind sawing over a worn stone edge, the songspires had collected the ship’s scream and were playing it back to each other in skewed cadences that could almost have been music.

It was the carrier wave.

Overhead, something seemed to whisper response. Looking up, I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the dome.

Outside, the shields came back on.

“Fuck,” said Hand, getting to his feet. “What was th—”

“Shut up.” I stared across at the place I thought I’d seen the shadow but the loss of the starscape background had drowned it in pearlish light. A little to the left, one of the Martian corpses gazed down at me from amidst the radiance of the datasystem. The sobbing of the songspires murmured on, tugging at something in the pit of my stomach.

And then, again, the gut-deep, sickening pulse and the thrum through the deck underfoot.

“We’re returning fire,” said Sun.

On screen, another dark-body mass, hawked out of some battery deep in the belly of the Martian vessel, spat at the closing attacker. This time the recoil went on longer.

“This is incredible,” said Hand. “Unbelievable.”

“Believe it,” I told him tonelessly. The sense of impending disaster had not gone with the decaying echo of the last attack. If anything, it was stronger. I tried to summon the Envoy intuition through layers of weariness and dizzying nausea.

“Incoming,” called Vongsavath. “Block your ears.”

This time, the alien ship’s missile got a lot closer before the Martian defence net caught and shredded it. The Shockwaves from the blast drove us all to the ground. It felt as if the whole ship had been twisted around us like a wrung out cloth. Sun threw up. The outside shield went down and stayed down.

Braced for the ship to scream again, I heard instead a long, low keening that scraped talons along the tendons of my arms and around my ribcage. The songspires trapped it and fed it back, higher now, no longer a fading echo but a field emanation in its own right.

I heard someone hiss behind me, and turned to see Wardani, staring up in disbelief. I followed her gaze and saw the same shadow flitting clearly across the upper regions of the data display.

“What…” It was Hand, voice fading out as another patch of darkness flapped across from the left and seemed to dance briefly with the first.

By then I knew, and oddly my first thought was that Hand, of all people, ought not to have been surprised, that he ought to have got it first.

The first shadow dipped and swooped around the corpse of the Martian.

I looked for Wardani, found her eyes and the numb disbelief there.

“No,” she whispered, little more than mouthing the word. “It can’t be.”

But it was.

They came from all sides of the dome, at first in ones and twos, sliding up the crystalline curve and peeling off into sudden full three-dimensional existence, shaken loose with each convulsive distortion that their ship suffered as the battle raged outside. They peeled off and swooped down to floor level, then soared up again and settled to circling the central structure. They didn’t seem to be aware of us in any way that mattered, but none of them touched us. Overhead, their passage had no effect on the datadisplay system other than a slight rippling as they banked, and some of them seemed even to pass occasionally through the substance of the dome and out into hard space. More came fu

The sound they made was the same keening the ship had begun earlier, the same dirge that the songspires now gave out from the floor, the same carrier wave I’d picked up on the comset. Traces of the cherry-and-mustard odour wafted through the air, but tinged now with something else, something scorched and old.

Hyperspatial distortion broke and burst in the space outside, the shields came back on, tinged a new, violet colour and the ship’s hull was awash with recoil as its batteries launched repeatedly at the other vessel. I was beyond caring. All feeling of physical discomfort was gone, frozen away to a single tightness in my chest and a growing pressure behind my eyes. The platform seemed to have expanded massively around me and the rest of the company were now too far out across the vast flattened space to be relevant.

I was abruptly aware that I was weeping myself, a dry sobbing in the small spaces of my sinuses.