Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan Read Free Book Online

though who’d thinned their numbers out so much was a mystery to me. From what I’d read in the reports, there’d been nothing in these waters but fishing boats since the war began. The seabed was littered with them.
    I acquired the lead mine and killed it almost casually. As I watched, the first torpedoes erupted from the other six and rose through the water toward us.
    â€œThey’re on us.”
    â€œSeen them,” Schneider said laconically, and the shuttle flinched into an evasive curve. I peppered the sea with micros on autoseek.
    Smart mine
is a misnomer. They’re actually pretty stupid. It stands to reason: They’re built for such a narrow range of activity it isn’t advisable to program in much intellect. They attach themselves to the seabed with a claw for launch stability, and they wait for something to pass overhead. Some can dig themselves deep enough to hide from spectroscanners; some camouflage themselves as seabed wreckage. Essentially, they’re a static weapon. On the move, they can still fight but their accuracy suffers.
    Better yet, their minds have a dogmatic either-or target acquisition system that tags everything surface or airborne before it fires on it. Against air traffic it uses surface-to-air micros, against shipping the torpedoes. The torpedoes can convert to missile mode at a pinch, shedding their propulsion systems at surface level and using crude thrusters to get aloft, but they’re
slow
.
    At nearly surface level and throttled back almost to hovering, we’d been made out as a ship. The torpedoes came up for air in our shadow, found nothing, and the autoseek micros destroyed them while they were still trying to shrug off their underwater drives. Meanwhile, the spread of micros I’d launched sought and destroyed two—no, wait, three—of the mines. At this rate—
    MALFUNCTION.
    MALFUNCTION.
    MALFUNCTION.
    The fail light pulsed in the upper left field of my vision, detail scrolling down. I had no time to read it. The fire controls were dead in my hands, jammed solid, the next two micros unarmed in their launch cradles.
Fucking mothballed U.N. surplus
flashing through my mind like a falling meteor. I slammed the emergency autorepair option. The shuttle’s rudimentary troubleshooter brain leapt down into the jammed circuits. No time. It could take whole minutes to fix. The remaining three mines launched surface to air at us.
    â€œSch—”
    Schneider, whatever his other failings, was a good flier. He flung the shuttle on its tail before the syllable was out of my mouth. My head snapped back against the seat as we leapt into the sky, trailing a swarm of surface-to-air missiles.
    â€œI’m jammed.”
    â€œI know,” he said tautly.
    â€œTinsel them,” I yelled, competing with the proximity alerts that screamed in my ears. The altitude numerals flashed over the kilometer mark.
    â€œOn it.”
    The shuttle boomed with the tinsel bombs’ launch. They detonated two seconds in our wake, sowing the sky with tiny electronic appetizers. The surface-to-air fire spent itself among the decoys. On the weapons board at the side of my vision, a cleared light flashed green, and as if to prove the point the launcher executed its last jammed command and launched the two waiting micros into the targetless space ahead of us. Beside me, Schneider whooped and spun the shuttle about. With the high-maneuver fields belatedly compensating, I felt the turn slop through my guts like choppy water and had time to hope that Tanya Wardani hadn’t eaten recently.
    We hung for an instant on the wings of the shuttle’s AG fields, then Schneider killed the lift and we plunged a steep line back toward the surface of the sea. From the water, a second wave of missiles rose to meet us.
    â€œTinsel!!”
    The bomb racks banged open again. Sighting on the three undamaged mines below, I emptied the shuttle’s magazines and hoped,