Broken Angels

Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT
There was no less reason for adrenalin to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shrivelled my sleeve’s capacity to deliver combat chemicals. The inhibitors reacted accordingly. I felt the nerve snap go through me, but it was a mild numbness, a fizzing that only dropped me to one knee.
The Maori sleeves were readier for a fight and so they took it harder. Deprez and Sutjiadi staggered and crashed into the sand as if shot with stunners. Vongsavath managed to control her fall, and rolled to the ground on her side, eyes wide.
Tanya Wardani just stood there looking dazed.
“Thank you gentlemen.” It was Carrera, calling up to the noncoms manning the mortar. “Exemplary grouping.”
Neural inhib remotes. State-of-the-art public order tech. Only cleared colonial embargo a couple of years ago. In my capacity as a local military adviser, I’d had the shiny new system demonstrated to me on crowds in Indigo City. I’d just never been on the receiving end before now.
Chill, an enthusiastic young public order corporal had told me with a grin. That’s all you need to do. ‘Course, that’s extra funny in a riot situation. This shit lands on you, you’re just going to get more ‘dreened up, means they just go on biting you, maybe even stop your heart in the end. Have to be f*cking Zen-rigged to break the spiral, and you know what, we’re short on Zen riot activists this season.
I held the Envoy calm like a crystal, wiped my mind of consequence and got up. The spiders clung and flexed a little as I moved, but they didn’t bite again.
“Shit, lieutenant, you’re coated. They must like you.”
Loemanako stood grinning at me from within a circle of clear sand, while surplus inhibitor units crawled around on the outer edge of the field his clean tag must be throwing down. A little to his right, Carrera moved in a similar pool of immunity. I glanced around and saw the other Wedge officers, untouched and watching.
Neat. Very f*cking neat.
Behind them, political officer Lamont capered and pointed at us, jabbering.
Oh well. Who could blame him.
“Yes, I think we’d better get you brushed off,” said Carrera. “I’m sorry for the shock, Lieutenant Kovacs, but there was no other comfortable way to detain this criminal.”
He was pointing at Sutjiadi.
Actually, Carrera, you could have just sedated everybody in the ward ‘fab. But that wouldn’t have been dramatic enough, and where transgressors against the Wedge are concerned, the men do like their stylised drama, don’t they?
I felt a brief chill run along my spine, chasing the thought.
And tamped it down quick, before it could become the fear or anger that would wake up the coat of spiders I wore.
I went for weary-laconic.
“What the f*ck are you talking about, Isaac?”
“This man,” Carrera’s voice was pitched to carry. “May have misrepresented himself to you as Jiang Jianping. His real name is Markus Sutjiadi, and he is wanted for crimes against Wedge personnel.”
“Yeah.” Loemanako lost his grin. “F*cker wasted Lieutenant Veutin, and his platoon sergeant.”
“Veutin?” I looked back at Carrera. “Thought he was down around Bootkinaree.”
“Yes, he was.” The Wedge commander was staring down at Sutjiadi’s crumpled form. For a moment I thought he was going to shoot him there and then with the blaster. “Until this piece of shit cut insubordinate and finished up feeding Veutin his own Sunjet. Killed Veutin really dead. Stack gone. Sergeant Bradwell went the same way when she tried to stop it. And two more of my men got their sleeves carved apart before someone locked this motherf*cker down.”
“No one gets away with that,” said Loemanako sombrely. “Right, lieutenant? No local yokel takes down Wedge personnel and walks away from it. Shithead’s for the anatomiser.”
“Is this true?” I asked Carrera, for appearances’ sake.
He met my gaze and nodded. “Eye-witnesses. It’s open and shut.”
Sutjiadi stirred at his feet like something stamped on.
They cleaned the spiders off me with a deactivator broom, and then dumped them into a storage canister. Carrera handed me a tag and the approaching tide of unoccupied inhibitors fell back as I snapped it on.
“About that debriefing,” he said, and gestured me aboard the ‘Chandra.
Behind me, my colleagues were led back to the bubblefab, stumbling as feeble adrenalin jags of resistance set off new ripples of bites from their new neural jailers. In the post-performance space we’d all left, the noncoms who’d fired the mortar went around with untamped canisters, gathering up the still crawling units that hadn’t managed to find a home.
Sutjiadi caught my eye again as he was leaving. Imperceptibly, he shook his head.
He needn’t have worried. I was barely up to climbing the entry ramp into the battlewagon’s belly, let alone taking on Carrera in empty-handed combat. I clung to the remaining fragments of the tetrameth lift and followed the Wedge commander along tight, equipment-racked corridors, up a hand rung-lined gravchute and into the confines of what appeared to be his personal quarters.
“Sit down, lieutenant. If you can find the space.”
The cabin was cramped but meticulously tidy. A powered-down grav bed rested on the floor in one corner, under a desk that hinged out from the bulkhead. The work surface held a compact datacoil, a neat stack of bookchips and a pot-bellied statue that looked like Hun Home art. A second table occupied the other end of the narrow space, studded with projector gear. Two holos floated near the ceiling at angles that allowed viewing from the bed. One showed a spectacular image of Adoracion from high orbit, sunrise just breaking across the green and orange rim. The other was a family group, Carrera and a handsome olive-skinned woman, arms possessively encompassing the shoulders of three variously aged children. The Wedge commander looked happy, but the sleeve in the holo was older than the one he was wearing now.
I found a spartan metal desk chair beside the projector table. Carrera watched me sit down and then leaned against the desk, arms folded.
“Been home recently?” I asked, nodding at the orbital holo.
His gaze stayed on my face. “It’s been a while. Kovacs, you knew damn well that Sutjiadi was wanted by the Wedge, didn’t you.”
“I still don’t know he is Sutjiadi. Hand sold him to me as Jiang. What makes you so sure?”
He almost smiled. “Nice try. My tower-dweller friends gave me gene codes for the combat sleeves. That plus the sleeving data from the Mandrake stack. They were quite keen for me to know that Hand had a war criminal working for him. Added incentive, I imagine they saw it as. Grist to the deal.”
“War criminal.” I looked elaborately around the cabin. “That’s an interesting choice of terminology. For someone who oversaw the Decatur Pacification, I mean.”
“Sutjiadi murdered one of my officers. An officer he was supposed to be taking orders from. Under any combat convention I know of, that’s a crime.”
“An officer? Veutin?” I couldn’t quite work out why I was arguing, unless it was out of a general sense of inertia. “Come on, would you take orders from Dog Veutin?”
“Happily, I don’t have to. But his platoon did, and they were fanatically loyal, all of them. Veutin was a good soldier.”
“They called him Dog for a reason, Isaac.”
“We are not engaged in a pop—”
“—ularity contest.” I sketched a smile of my own. “That line’s getting a little old. Veutin was a f*cking a*shole, and you know it. If this Sutjiadi torched him, he probably had a good reason.”
“Reasons do not make you right, Lieutenant Kovacs.” There was a sudden softness in Carrera’s tone that said I’d overstepped the line. “Every graft-wrapped pimp on Plaza de los Caidos has a reason for every whore’s face they carve up, but that doesn’t make it right. Joshua Kemp has reasons for what he does and from his point of view they might even be good ones. That doesn’t make him right.”
“You want to watch what you’re saying, Isaac. That sort of relativism could get you arrested.”
“I doubt it. You’ve seen Lamont.”
“Yeah.”
Silence ebbed and flowed around us.
“So,” I said finally. “You’re going to put Sutjiadi under the anatomiser.”
“Do I have a choice?”
I just looked at him.
“We are the Wedge, lieutenant. You know what that means.” There was the slightest tug of urgency in his tone now. I don’t know who he was trying to convince. “You were sworn in, just like everyone else. You know the codes. We stand for unity in the face of chaos, and everyone has to know that. Those we deal with have to know that we are not to be f*cked with. We need that fear, if we’re going to operate effectively. And my soldiers have to know that that fear is an absolute. That it will be enforced. Without that, we fall apart.”
I closed my eyes. “Whatever.”
“I’m not requiring you to watch it.”
“I doubt there’ll be enough seats.”
Behind my closed eyelids, I heard him move. When I looked, he was leaning over me, hands braced on the edges of the projector table, face harsh with anger.
“You’re going to shut up now, Kovacs. You’re going to stand down that attitude.” If he was looking for resistance, he couldn’t have seen any in my face. He backed off a half metre, straightened up. “I won’t let you piss away your commission like this. You’re a capable officer, lieutenant. You inspire loyalty in the men you lead, and you understand combat.”
“Thanks.”
“You can laugh, but I know you. It’s a fact.”
“It’s the biotech, Isaac. Wolf gene pack dynamics, serotonin shutout and Envoy psychosis to pilot the whole f*cking shambles. A dog could do what I’ve done for the Wedge. Dog f*cking Veutin, for example.”
“Yes.” A shrug as he settled himself on the edge of the desk again. “You and Veutin are, were, very similar in profile. I have the psychosurgeon assessments on file here, if you don’t believe me. Same Kemmerich gradient, same IQ, same lack of generalisable empathy range. To the untutored eye, you could be the same man.”
“Yeah, except he’s dead. Even to the untutored eye, that’s got to stand out.”
“Well, maybe not quite the same lack of empathy, then. The Envoys gave you enough diplomatic training not to underestimate men like Sutjiadi. You would have handled him better.”
“So Sutjiadi’s crime was he got underestimated? Seems as good a reason as any to torture a man to death, I suppose.”
He stopped and stared at me. “Lieutenant Kovacs, I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Sutjiadi’s execution is not under discussion here. He murdered my soldiers, and at dawn tomorrow I will exact the penalty for that crime. I may not like it—”
“How gratifyingly humane of you.”
He ignored me. “—but it needs to be done, and I will do it. And you, if you know what’s good for you, will ratify it.”
“Or else?” It wasn’t as defiant as I’d have liked, and I spoilt it at the end with a coughing fit that racked me over in the narrow chair and brought up blood-streaked phlegm. Carrera handed me a wipe.
“You were saying?”
“I said, if I won’t ratify the ghoul show, what happens to me?”
“Then I’ll inform the men that you knowingly attempted to protect Sutjiadi from Wedge justice.”
I looked around for somewhere to toss the soiled wipe. “Is that an accusation?”
“Under the table. No, there. Next to your leg. Kovacs, it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. I think you probably did, but I don’t really care one way or the other. I have to have order, and justice must be seen to be done. Fit in with that, and you can have your rank back, plus a new command. If you step out of line, you’ll be next on the slab.”
“Loemanako and Kwok won’t like that.”
“No, they won’t. But they are Wedge soldiers, and they will do as they are told for the good of the Wedge.”
“So much for inspiring loyalty.”
“Loyalty is a currency like any other. What you have earned, you can spend. And shielding a known murderer of Wedge personnel is more than you can afford. More than any of us can afford.” He leaned off the desk edge. Beneath the coveralls, Envoy scan read his stance at endgame. It was the way he always stood in the final round of sparring sessions that had gone down to the wire. The way I’d seen him stand when the government troops broke around us at Shalai Gap and Kemp’s airborne infantry swept down out of the storm-front sky like hail. There was no fallback from here. “I do not want to lose you, Kovacs, and I do not want to distress the soldiers who have followed you. But in the end, the Wedge is more than any one man within it. We cannot afford internal dissent.”
Outnumbered and outgunned and left for dead at Shalai, Carrera held position in the bombed-out streets and buildings for two hours, until the storm swept in and covered everything. Then he led a stalk-and-slaughter counteroffensive through the howling wind and street-level shreds of cloud until the airwaves crackled stiff with panicked airborne commanders ordering withdrawal. When the storm lifted, Shalai Gap was littered with the Kempist dead and the Wedge had taken less than two dozen casualties.
He leaned close again, no longer angry. His eyes searched my face.
“Am I—finally—making myself clear, lieutenant? A sacrifice is required. We may not like it, you and I, but that is the price of Wedge membership.”
I nodded.
“Then you are ready to move past this?”
“I’m dying, Isaac. About all I’m ready for right now is some sleep.”
“I understand. I won’t keep you much longer. Now.” He gestured through the datacoil and it awoke in swirls. I sighed and groped after fresh focus. “The penetration squad took an extrapolated line back from the Nagini’s angle of re-entry and fetched up pretty damn close to the same docking bay you breached. Loemanako says there were no apparent shut-out controls. So how did you get in?”
“Was already open.” I couldn’t be bothered to construct lies, guessed in any case that he’d interrogate the others soon enough. “For all we know, there are no shut-out controls.”
“On a warship?” His eyes narrowed. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Isaac, the whole ship mounts a spatial shield that stands at least two kilometres out from the hull. What the f*ck would they need with individual docking station shut out?”
“You saw that?”
“Yeah. Very much in action.”
“Hmm.” He made a couple of minor adjustments in the coil. “The sniffer units found human traces a good three or four kilometres into the interior. But they found you in an observation bubble not much more than a kilometre and a half from your entry point.”
“Well, that couldn’t have been hard. We painted the way with big f*cking illuminum arrows.”
He gave me a hard look. “Did you go walkabout in there?”
“Not me, no.” I shook my head, then regretted it as the little cabin pulsed unpleasantly in and out of focus around me. I waited it out. “Some of them did. I never found out how far they went.”
“Doesn’t sound very organised.”
“It wasn’t,” I said irritably. “I don’t know, Isaac. Try and incubate a sense of wonder, huh? Might help when you get over there.”
“So it, ah, appears.” He hesitated, and it took me a moment to realise he was embarrassed. “You, ah, you saw. Ghosts. Over there?”
I shrugged, suppressing an urge to cackle uncontrollably. “We saw something. I’m still not sure what it was. Been listening in to your guests, Isaac?”
He smiled and made an apologetic gesture. “Lamont’s habits, rubbing off on me. And since he’s lost the taste for snooping, seems a shame to let the equipment go to waste.” He prodded again at the datacoil. “The medical report says you all showed symptoms of a heavy stunblast, except you and Sun, obviously.”
“Yeah, Sun shot herself. We…” Abruptly, it seemed impossible to explain. Like trying to shoulder a massive weight unaided. The last moments in the Martian starship, wrapped in the brilliant pain and radiance of whatever her crew had left behind them. The certainty that this alien grief was going to crack us open. How did you convey that to the man who had led you behind raging gunfire to victory at Shalai Gap and a dozen other engagements? How did you get across the ice-aching diamond-bright reality of those moments?
Reality? The doubt jolted rudely.
Was it? Come to that, come to the gun barrel-and-grime reality that Isaac Carrera lived, was it real any more? Had it ever been? How much of what I remembered was hard fact?
No, look. I’ve got Envoy recall—
But had it been that bad? I looked into the datacoil, trying wearily to muster rational thought. Hand had called it, and I bought in with something not much short of panic. Hand, the hougan. Hand, the religious maniac. When else had I ever trusted him as far as I could throw him?
Why had I trusted him then?
Sun. I grabbed at the fact. Sun knew. She saw it coming and she blew her own brains out rather than face it.
Carrera was looking at me strangely.
“Yes?”
You and Sun…
“Wait a minute.” It dawned on me. “You said except Sun and me?”
“Yes. The others all show the standard electroneural trauma. Heavy blast, as I said.”
“But not me.”
“Well, no.” He looked puzzled. “You weren’t touched. Why, do you remember someone shooting you?”

When we were done, he flattened the datacoil display with one callused hand and walked me back through the empty corridors of the battlewagon and then across the night-time murmur of the camp. We didn’t talk much. He’d backed up in the face of my confusion, and let the debriefing slide. Probably he couldn’t believe he was seeing one of his pet Envoys in this state.
I was having a hard time believing it myself.
She shot you. You dropped the stunner and she shot you, then herself. She must have.
Otherwise…
I shivered.
On a clear patch of sand to the rear of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, they were erecting the scaffold for Sutjiadi’s execution. The primary support struts were already in place, sunk deep into the sand and poised to receive the tilted, runnelled butcher’s platform. Under the illumination from three Angier lamps and the environ floods from the battlewagon’s rear drop hatch, the structure was a claw of bleached bone rising from the beach. The disassembled segments of the anatomiser lay close by, like sections of a wasp someone had chopped to death.
“The war’s shifting,” said Carrera conversationally. “Kemp’s a spent force on this continent. We haven’t had an air strike in weeks. He’s using the iceberg fleet to evacuate his forces across the Wacharin straits.”
“Can’t he hold the coast there?” I asked the question on automatic, the ghost of attention from a hundred deployment briefings past.
Carrera shook his head. “Not a chance. That’s a flood plain a hundred klicks back south and east. Nowhere to dig in, and he doesn’t have the hardware to build wet bunkers. That means no long-term jamming, no net-supported weapon systems. Give me six more months and I’ll have amphibious armour harrying him off the whole coastal strip. Another year and we’ll be parking the ‘Chandra over Indigo City.”
“And then what?”
“Sorry?”
“And then what? When you’ve taken Indigo City, when Kemp’s bombed and mined and particle-blasted every worthwhile asset there is and escaped into the mountains with the real diehards, then what?”
“Well.” Carrera puffed out his cheeks. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “The usual. Holding strategy across both continents, limited police actions and scapegoating until everyone calms down. But by that time…”
“By that time we’ll be gone, right?” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Off this f*cking mudball and somewhere where they know a losing game when they see one. Give me that much good news at least.”
He looked across at me and winked. “Hun Home’s looking good. Internal power struggle, lots of palace intrigue. Just your speed.”
“Thanks.”
At the bubblefab flap, low voices filtered out into the night air. Carrera cocked his head and listened.
“Come in and join the party,” I said morosely, pushing through ahead of him. “Save you going back to Lamont’s toys.”

The three remaining members of the Mandrake expedition were gathered in seats around a low table at the end of the ward. Carrera’s security had broomed off the bulk of the inhib units and left each prisoner at detention-standard, a single inhibitor squatting like a tumour at the nape of the neck. It made everyone look peculiarly hunched, as if caught in mid-conspiracy.
They looked round as we entered the ward, reacting across a spectrum. Deprez was the least expressive; barely a muscle moved in his face. Vongsavath caught my eye and raised her brows. Wardani looked past me to where Carrera stood and spat on the quick-wipe floor.
“That’s for me, I assume,” said the Wedge commander easily.
“Share it,” suggested the archaeologue. “You seem close enough.”
Carrera smiled. “I’d advise against cranking up your hate too far, Mistress Wardani. Your little friend back there is apt to bite.”
She shook her head, wordless. One hand rose in reflex, halfway to the inhib unit, then dropped away. Maybe she’d already tried removing it. It’s not a mistake you make twice.
Carrera walked to the splatter of saliva, bent and scooped it up with one finger. He examined it closely, brought it to his nose and grimaced.
“You don’t have long, Mistress Wardani. In your place I think I’d be a little more civil to the person who’s going to advise on whether you’re re-sleeved or not.”
“I doubt that’ll be your decision.”
“Well.” The Wedge commander wiped his finger on the nearest bedsheet, “I did say ‘advise’. But then, this presupposes that you make it back to Landfall in some re-sleevable capacity. Which you might not.”
Wardani turned to me, blocking Carrera off in the process. A subtle snub that made the diplomatic strand in my conditioning want to applaud.
“Is your catamite here threatening me?”
I shook my head. “Making a point, I think.”
“Too subtle for me.” She cast a disdainful glance back at the Wedge commander. “Perhaps you’d better just shoot me in the stomach. That seems to work well. Your preferred method of civilian pacification, presumably.”
“Ah, yes. Hand.” Carrera hooked a chair from the collection around the table. He turned it back forward and straddled it. “Was he a friend of yours?”
Wardani looked at him.
“I didn’t think so. Not your sort at all.”
“That has nothing to—”
“Did you know he was responsible for the bombing of Sauberville?”
Another wordless pause. This time the archaeologue’s face sagged with shock, and suddenly I saw how very far the radiation had eaten into her.
Carrera saw it too.
“Yes, Mistress Wardani. Someone had to clear a path for your little quest, and Matthias Hand arranged for it to be our mutual friend Joshua Kemp. Oh, nothing direct of course. Military misinformation, carefully modelled and then equally carefully leaked along the right data channels. But enough to convince our resident revolutionary hero in Indigo City that Sauberville would look better as a grease stain. And that thirty-seven of my men didn’t need their eyes any more.” He flipped a glance at me. “You must have guessed, right?”
I shrugged. “Seemed likely. A little too convenient otherwise.”
Wardani’s eyes snapped sideways to mine, disbelieving.
“You see, Mistress Wardani.” Carrera got up as if his whole body ached. “I’m sure you’d like to believe I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’m just a man doing a job. Men like Matthias Hand create the wars I make my living fighting. Keep that in mind next time you feel the need to insult me.”
The archaeologue said nothing, but I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face. Carrera turned to go, then stopped.
“Oh, and Mistress Wardani, one more thing. Catamite.” He looked at the floor, as if pondering the word. “I have what many would consider a rather limited range of sexual preferences, and anal penetration doesn’t feature among them. But I see from your camp records that the same cannot be said for you.”
She made a noise. Behind it, I almost heard the creak and shift of the recovery scaffolding Envoy artifice had built inside her. The sound of damage done. I found myself, inexplicably, on my feet.
“Isaac, you—”
“You?” He was grinning like a skull as he faced me. “You, you pup. Had better sit down.”
It was nearly a command, nearly froze me in my tracks. Envoy bile rose sneering and beat it aside.
“Kovacs—” Wardani’s voice, like a cable snapping.
I met Carrera halfway, one crooked hand rising for his throat, a muddled kick emerging from the rest of my sickness-tangled stance. The big Wedge body swayed in to meet me and he blocked both attacks with brutal ease. The kick slipped away left, taking me off balance and he locked out my striking arm at the elbow, then smashed it.
It made a crunching noise in the back of my head, an empty whisky tumbler crushed underfoot in some dimly lit bar. The agony swarmed my brain, wrenched out a single short scream and then subsided under neurachem pain management. Wedge combat custom—seemed the sleeve was still good for that much. Carrera had not released his hold, and I dangled from the grip he had on my forearm like a powered-down child’s doll. I flexed my undamaged arm experimentally, and he laughed. Then he twisted hard on the shattered elbow joint, so pain rose back up like a black cloud behind my eyes, and dropped me. A casual kick to the stomach left me foetal, and not interested in anything much above ankle height.
“I’ll send the medics,” I heard him say somewhere above me. “And Mistress Wardani, I suggest you shut your mouth, or I will have some of my less sensitive men come and fill it for you. That and maybe give you a forcible reminder of what the word catamite means. Don’t test me, woman.”
There was a rustle of clothing, and then he crouched at my side. One hand gripped my jaw and turned my face upward.
“You’re going to have to get that sentimental shit out of your system if you want to work for me, Kovacs. Oh, and just in case you don’t.” He held up a curled up inhib spider in his hand. “Temporary measure, purely. Just until we’re done with Sutjiadi. We’ll all feel a lot safer this way.”
He tipped his opened palm sideways, and the inhib unit rolled off into space. To my endorphin-dulled senses, it seemed to take a long time. I got to watch with something approaching fascination as the spider unrolled its legs in mid-air and fell nailing to the floor less than a metre from my head. There it gathered itself, spun about once or twice and then scuttled towards me. It clambered up over my face, then down around to my spine. A tiny spike of ice reached down into the bone, and I felt the cable-like limbs tighten around the back of my neck.
Oh well.
“Be seeing you, Kovacs. Have a think about it.” Carrera got up and apparently left. For a while, I lay there checking the seals on the cosy blanket of numbness my sleeve’s systems had wrapped me in. Then there were hands on my body, helping me into a sitting position I had no real interest in attaining.
“Kovacs.” It was Deprez, peering into my face. “You OK, man?”
I coughed weakly. “Yeah, great.”
He propped me against the edge of the table. Wardani moved into view above and behind him. “Kovacs?”
“Uhhhhhh, sorry about that, Tanya.” I risked a searching glance at the level of control on her face. “Should have warned you not to push him. He’s not like Hand. He won’t take that shit.”
“Kovacs.” There were muscles twitching her face that might have been the first crumbling of the jerry-built recovery edifice. Or not. “What are they going to do to Sutjiadi?”
A little pool of quiet welled up in the wake of the question.
“Ritual execution,” said Vongsavath. “Right?”
I nodded.
“What does that mean?” There was an unnerving calm in Wardani’s voice. I thought I might rewrite my assumptions about her state of recovery. “Ritual execution. What are they going to do?”
I closed my eyes, summoned images from the last two years. The recollection seemed to bring a dull seeping ache up from my shattered elbow joint. When I’d had enough, I looked at her face again.
“It’s like an autosurgeon,” I said slowly. “Reprogrammed. It scans the body, maps the nervous system. Measures resilience. Then, they run a rendering programme.”
Wardani’s eyes widened a little. “Rendering?”
“It takes him apart. Flays the skin, flenses the flesh, cracks the bones.” I drew on memory. “Disembowels him, cooks his eyes in their sockets, shatters his teeth and probes the nerves.”
She made a half-formed gesture against the words she was hearing.
“It keeps him alive while it does it. If he looks like going into shock, it stops. Gives him stimulants if necessary. Gives him whatever’s necessary, apart from painkillers, obviously.”
Now it felt as if there was a fifth presence among us, crouched at my side, grinning and squeezing the shards of broken bone in my arm. I sat in my own biotech-damped pain, remembering what had happened to Sutjiadi’s predecessors while the Wedge gathered to watch like the faithful at some arcane altar to the war.
“How long does this last?” asked Deprez
“It depends. Most of the day.” The words dragged out of me. “It has to be over by nightfall. Part of the ritual. If no one stops it earlier, the machine sections and removes the skull at last light. That usually does it.” I wanted to stop talking, but it seemed no one else wanted to stop me, “Officers and noncoms have the option to call a coup de grace vote from the ranks, but you won’t get that until late afternoon, even from the ones that want it over. They can’t afford to come across softer than the rank and file. And even late, even then, I’ve seen the vote go against them.”
“Sutjiadi killed a Wedge platoon commander,” said Vongsavath. “I think there will be no mercy vote.”
“He’s weak,” Wardani said hopefully. “With the radiation poisoning—”
“No.” I flexed my right arm and a spike of pain ran up to my shoulder, even under the neurachem. “The Maori sleeves are contam combat-designed. Very high endurance.”
“But the neurache—”
I shook my head “Forget it. The machine will adjust for that, kill the pain management systems first, rip them out.”
“Then he’ll die.”
“No, he won’t,” I shouted. “It doesn’t work that way.”
No one said much after that.

A pair of medics arrived, one the man who had treated me earlier, the second a hard-faced woman I didn’t know. They checked my arm with elaborately non-committal competence. The presence of the inhib unit crouched on my nape and what it said about my status both went carefully unremarked. They used an ultravibe microset to break up the bone fragments around the shattered elbow joint, then set regrowth bios in deep, long monofilament feed lines topped off at skin level with the green marker tags and the chip that told my bone cells what to do and, more to the point, how f*cking rapidly to get it done. No slacking here. Never mind what you did back in the natural world, you’re part of a military custom operation now, soldier.
“Couple of days,” said the one I knew, peeling a rapid-dump endorphin dermal off the crook of my arm. “We’ve cleared up the ragged edges, so flexing it shouldn’t do any serious damage to the surrounding tissue. But it will hurt like f*ck, and it slows down the healing process so try to avoid it. I’ll grip-pad you so you remember.”
A couple of days. In a couple of days, I’d be lucky if this sleeve was still breathing. Recollection of the doctor aboard the orbital hospital flashed through my head. Oh, for f*ck’s sake. The absurdity of it bubbled through me and escaped as a sudden, unlooked-for grin.
“Hey, thanks. Don’t want to slow down the healing process, do we?”
He smiled back weakly, then hurriedly turned his gaze to what he was doing. The grip-pad went on tight from bicep to lower forearm, warm and comforting, and constricting.
“You part of the anatomiser crew?” I asked him.
He gave me a haunted look. “No. That’s scan-related, I don’t do it.”
“We’re done here, Martin,” said the woman abruptly. “Time to go.”
“Yeah.” But he moved slowly, unwillingly as he folded up the battlefield kitpack. I watched the contents disappearing, taped-over surgical tools and the strips of brightly coloured dermals in their tug-down sleeves
“Hey, Martin.” I nodded at the pack. “You going to leave me a few of those pinks. I was planning to sleep late, you know.”
“Uh—”
The female medic cleared her throat. “Martin, we aren’t—”
“Oh, shut the f*ck up, will you.” He turned on her with fury boiling up out of nowhere. Envoy instinct kicked me in the head. Behind his back, I reached for the pack. “You don’t rank me, Zeyneb. I’ll dispense what I f*cking like and you—”
“ ‘S OK,” I said quietly. “I got them anyway.”
Both medics fixed on me. I held up the trailing strip of endorphin dermals I’d grabbed free in my left hand. I smiled thinly.
“Don’t worry, I won’t take them all at once.”
“Maybe you should,” said the female medic. “Sir.”
“Zeyneb, I told you to shut up.” Martin gathered up the kitpack in a hurry, tightening it in his arms, cradling it. “You, uh, they’re fast-acting. No more than three at any one time. That will keep you under, whatever you h—” He swallowed. “Whatever is going on around you.”
“Thanks.”
They gathered the rest of their equipment and left. Zeyneb looked back at me from the bubblefab flap and her mouth twisted. Her voice was too low for me to catch what she said. Martin raised his arm in a cuffing gesture, and they both ducked out. I watched them go, then looked down at the strip of dermals in my clenched fist.
“That’s your solution?” asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. “Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She turned away.
“Then get down off that f*cking prayer tower and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.”
“We could—”
“We could what? We’re inhibited, we’re most of us a couple of days off death from catastrophic cell damage, and I don’t know about you, but my arm hurts. Oh, yeah, and this whole place is wired for sight and sound to the political officer’s cabin, which, I imagine, Carrera has ready access to when he wants it.” I felt a slight twinge from the thing on the nape of my neck, and realised my own anger was getting the better of my weariness. I locked it down. “I’ve done all the fighting I’m going to do, Tanya. Tomorrow we get to spend the day listening to Sutjiadi die. You deal with that any way you want. Me, I’m going to sleep through it.”
There was a searing satisfaction in throwing the words out at her, like twisting shrapnel out of a wound in your own flesh. But somewhere underneath it, I kept seeing the camp commandant, shut down in his chair, current running, the pupil of his remaining human eye bumping idly against the upper lid.
If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again. I heard the words again, whispering out of him like dying breath. So I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.
I wondered what kind of discomfort I’d need at this stage of the game. What kind of chair I’d need to be strapped into.
Somewhere there’s got to be a way off this f*cking beach.
And I wondered why the hand at the end of my injured arm was not empty.