Broken Angels Read Online Free PDF

militia.
    â€œGet out.”
    The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them pulling the door shut gently behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.
    â€œDown to a trickle, I assure you,” he said, gesturing at the still-winking light. “Probably couldn’t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.” He made an obvious effort. “So what, may I ask, do Carrera’s Wedge want with me? We’ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I’m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.” Another gesture, this time turned outward to the bank of monitors. “The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I’ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn’t very far along yet—”
    â€œI haven’t come for your supplies, Commandant.”
    â€œAh, then it’s a reckoning, is it? Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel’s scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?” The idea seemed to amuse him. “Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œI’m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.”
    â€œAh yes, the archaeologue.”
    A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorization on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.
    â€œSome problem, Commandant?” I asked quietly.
    He lowered the arm and leaned on his elbow, wagging the authorization to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.
    â€œWhat do you want her for?” he asked, equally softly. “Little Tanya the Scratcher. What’s she to the Wedge?”
    I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn’t be difficult to do—I’d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months—but there was the sergeant outside the door, and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn’t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.
    â€œThat, Commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?”
    But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered while wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.
    Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.
    Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.
    For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence,