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

you’re aware of potential hazards in the surroundings the way most people are aware that things will fall out of their hands if they let them go. The programming goes in at the same instinctual level. You don’t let down your guard, ever, any more than a normal human being would absentmindedly let go of a filled glass in midair.
    â€œYou’ve done something to me.”
    It was the same low voice she had used to thank me for the cigarette, but when I dropped my gaze from the trees to look at her, something had kindled in her eyes. She was not asking me a question. “I can feel it,” she said, touching the side of her head with splayed fingers. “Here. It’s like. Opening.”
    I nodded, feeling cautiously for the right words. On most worlds I’ve visited, going into someone’s head uninvited is a serious moral offense, and only government agencies get away with it on a regular basis. There was no reason to assume the Latimer sector, Sanction IV, or Tanya Wardani would be any different. Envoy co-option techniques make rather brutal use of the deep wells of psychosexual energy that drive humans at a genetic level. Properly mined, the matrix of animal strength on tap in those places will speed up psychic healing by whole orders of magnitude. You start with light hypnosis, move into quick-fix personality engagement, and thence to close bodily contact that only misses definition as sexual foreplay on a technicality. A gentle, hypnotically induced orgasm usually secures the bonding process, but at the final stage with Wardani, something had made me pull back. The whole process was uncomfortably close to a sexual assault as it was.
    On the other hand, I needed Wardani in one psychic piece, and under normal circumstances that would have taken months, maybe years, to achieve. We didn’t have that kind of time.
    â€œIt’s a technique,” I offered tentatively. “A healing system. I used to be an Envoy.”
    She drew on her cigarette. “I thought the Envoys were supposed to be killing machines.”
    â€œThat’s what the Protectorate wants you to think. Keeps the colonies scared at a gut level. The truth is a lot more complex, and ultimately it’s a lot more scary, when you think it through.” I shrugged. “Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.”
    â€œReally? And what are those?”
    I felt the conversation gathering itself for flight, and leaned forward to the heat of the fire.
    â€œSharya. Adoracion. The big bad high-tech Envoys, riding in on hypercast beams and decanting into state-of-the-art biotech sleeves to crush all resistance. We used to do that, too, of course, but what most people don’t realize is that our five most successful deployments ever were all covert diplomatic postings, with barely any bloodshed at all. Regime engineering. We came and went, and no one even realized we’d been there.”
    â€œYou sound proud of it.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    She looked at me steadily. “Hence the
used to
?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œSo how does one stop being an Envoy?” I was wrong. This wasn’t conversation. Tanya Wardani was sounding me out. “Did you resign? Or did they throw you out?”
    I smiled faintly. “I’d really rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”
    â€œYou’d rather not talk about it?” Her voice never rose, but it splintered into sibilant shards of rage. “Goddamn you, Kovacs. Who do you think you are? You come to this planet with your fucking weapons of mass destruction and your profession-of-violence airs, and you think you’re going to play the injured-child-inside with me. Fuck you and your pain. I nearly died in that camp. I watched other women and children die. I don’t fucking care what you went through. You answer me.