Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan Read Free Book Online Page A

breath held back. The micros launched clean. At the same moment, Schneider threw on the grav fields again and the little vessel shuddered from end to end. The tinsel bombs, now falling faster than the crash-reversed shuttle that had launched them, exploded fractionally ahead of and below us. My virtual vision flooded with crimson sleet from the storm of decoy broadcast, and then the explosions of the surface-to-air missiles as they destroyed themselves amid it. My own micros were away, fired through the tiny window of opportunity before the tinsel blew and locked onto the mines somewhere below.
    The shuttle spiraled down behind the debris of tinsel and misled missiles. Scant moments before we hit the surface of the sea, Schneider fired one more, carefully doctored pair of tinsel bombs. They detonated just as we slipped below the waves.
    â€œWe’re under,” said Schneider.
    On my screen, the pale blue of the sea deepened as we sank, nose-down. I twisted around, searching for the mines, and found only a satisfying array of wreckage. I let out the last breath I’d drawn somewhere up in the missile-strewn sky and rolled my head back in the seat.
    â€œThat,” I said to no one in particular, “was a mess.”
    We touched bottom, stuck for a moment, and then drifted fractionally upward again. Around us, the shrapnel from the doctored tinsel bombs settled slowly to the seabed. I studied the pink fragments with care and smiled. I’d packed the last two bombs myself—less than an hour’s work the night before we came to get Wardani—but it had taken three days reconnoitering deserted battle zones and bombed-out landing fields to gather the necessary pieces of hull casing and circuitry to fill them.
    I peeled off the gunner’s mask and rubbed at my eyes.
    â€œHow far off are we?”
    Schneider did something to the instrument display. “About six hours, maintaining this buoyancy. If I help the current along with the gravs, we could do it in half that.”
    â€œYeah, and we could get blown out of the water, too. I didn’t go through the last two minutes for target practice. You keep the fields banked all the way, and use the time to figure out some way to wipe the face off this bucket.”
    Schneider gave me a mutinous look.
    â€œAnd what are you going to be doing all this time?”
    â€œRepairs,” I said shortly, heading back for Tanya Wardani.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The fire threw leaping shadows, making her face into a camouflage mask of light and dark. It was a face that might have been handsome before the camp swallowed her, but the rigors of political internment had left it a gaunt catalog of bones and hollows. The eyes were hooded, the cheeks sunken. Deep inside the wells of her gaze, firelight glittered on fixed pupils. Stray hair fell across her forehead like straw. One of my cigarettes slanted between her lips, unlit.
    â€œYou don’t want to smoke that?” I asked after a while.
    It was like talking on a bad satellite link—a two-second delay before the glitter in her eyes shifted upward to focus on my face. Her voice ghosted out, rusty with disuse.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe cigarette. Site Sevens, best I could get outside Landfall.” I handed the pack across to her and she fumbled it, turning it over a couple of times before she found the ignition patch and touched it to the end of the cigarette in her mouth. Most of the smoke escaped and was carried away on the soft breeze, but she took some down and grimaced as it bit.
    â€œThanks,” she said quietly, and held the packet in cupped hands, looking down at it as if it were a small animal she had rescued from drowning. I smoked the rest of my own cigarette in silence, gaze flickering along the tree line above the beach. It was a programmed wariness, not based on any real perception of danger, the Envoy analog of a relaxed man beating time to music with his fingers. In the Envoys