Broken Angels

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

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Authors: Richard K. Morgan
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lacking.
    â€œWe’re security,” I told him pleasantly. “She’s the artist.”
    His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.
    â€œWell.” He maximized a traffic display and studied it for a moment. “I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.”
    â€œWhat, like Lapinee?”
    The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair, and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.
    â€œDon’t laugh at the majors, friend,” he said easily. “I had even a two percent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now”—he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired—“whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty fucking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.”
    â€œAre you this positive with all your clients?” I asked him.
    He smiled bleakly. “I’m a realist. You pay me, I’ll shunt it. Got the best antiscreening intrusion software in Landfall to get it there in one piece. Just like the sign says. We Get You Noticed. But don’t expect me to massage your ego, too, because that isn’t part of the service. Where you want this squirted, there’s too much going on to be optimistic about your chances.”
    At our backs, a pair of windows were open onto the noise of the street three floors below. The air outside had cooled with the onset of evening, but the atmosphere in the promoter’s office still tasted stale. Tanya Wardani shifted impatiently.
    â€œIt’s a niche thing,” she rasped. “Can we get on with this?”
    â€œSure.” The promoter glanced once more at the credit screen and the payment that floated there in hard green digits. “Better fasten your launch belts. This is going to cost you at speed.”
    He hit the switch. There was a brief ripple across the display and the purple torpedo vanished. I caught a glimpse of it represented on a series of helix-based transmission visuals, and then it faded, swallowed behind the wall of corporate data security systems and presumably beyond the tracking capacity of the promoter’s much-vaunted software. The green digit counters whirled into frantic, blurred eights.
    â€œTold you,” said the promoter, shaking his head judiciously. “High-line screening systems like that would have cost them a year’s profits just for the installation. And cutting the high line costs, my friends.”
    â€œEvidently.” I watched our credit decay like an unprotected antimatter core and quelled a sudden desire to remove the promoter’s throat with my bare hands. It wasn’t really the money; we had plenty of that. Six million saft might have been a poor price for a Wu Morrison shuttle, but it was going to be enough for us to live like kings for the duration of our stay in Landfall.
    It wasn’t the money.
    It was the designer fashion war gear and the drawled theories on what to do with wartime art, the fake seen-it/been-it world-weariness, while on the other side of the equator men and women blew each other apart

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