Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan Page A

in the name of minor adjustments to the system that kept Landfall fed.
    â€œThat’s it.” The promoter played a brisk drumroll across his console with both hands. “Gone home, near as I can tell. Time for you boys and girls to do the same.”
    â€œNear as you can tell,” said Schneider. “What the fuck is that?”
    He got the bleak smile again. “Hey. Read your contract. To the best of our ability, we deliver. And that’s to the best of anyone else’s ability on Sanction Four. You bought state of the art, you didn’t buy any guarantees.”
    He ejected our eviscerated credit chip from the machine and tossed it onto the table in front of Tanya Wardani, who pocketed it, deadpan.
    â€œSo how long do we wait?” she asked through a yawn.
    â€œWhat am I, clairvoyant?” The promoter sighed. “Could be quick, like a couple of days, could be a month or more. All depends on the demo, and I didn’t see that. I’m just the mailman. Could be never. Go home, I’ll mail you.”
    We left, seen out with the same studied disinterest that we’d been received and processed with. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street, and found a terrace café about twenty meters up from the promoter’s garish third-floor display holo. This close to curfew, it was almost deserted. We dumped our bags under a table and ordered short coffees.
    â€œHow long?” Wardani asked again.
    â€œThirty minutes.” I shrugged. “Depends on their A.I. Forty-five, the outside.”
    I still hadn’t finished my coffee when they came.
    The cruiser was an unobtrusive brown utility vehicle, ostensibly bulky and underpowered but to a tutored eye very obviously armored. It slunk around a corner a hundred meters up the street at ground level and crawled down toward the promoter’s building.
    â€œHere we go,” I murmured, wisps of Khumalo neurachem flickering into life up and down my body. “Stay here, both of you.”
    I stood up unhurriedly and drifted across the street, hands in pockets, head cocked at a rubbernecker’s angle. Ahead of me the cruiser floated to a curb-hugging halt outside the promoter’s door and a side hatch hinged up. I watched as five coverall-clad figures climbed out and then vanished into the building with a telltale economy of motion. The hatch folded back down.
    I picked up speed fractionally as I made my way among the hurrying last-minute shoppers on the pavement, and my left hand closed around the thing in my pocket.
    The cruiser’s windshield was solid-looking and almost opaque. Behind it, my neurachem-aided vision could just distinguish two figures in the seats and the hint of another body bulking behind them, braced upright to peer out. I glanced sideways at a shop frontage, closing the last of the gap up to the front of the cruiser.
    And time.
    Less than half a meter, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disk of the termite grenade hard against the windshield and stepped immediately aside and past.
    Crack!
    With termite grenades you’ve got to get out of the way quickly. The new ones are designed to deliver all their shrapnel and better than 95 percent of their force to the contact face, but the 5 percent that comes out on the opposite side will still make a mess of you if you stand in the way.
    The cruiser shuddered from end to end. Contained within the armored body, the sound of the explosion was reduced to a muffled crump. I ducked in through the door to the promoter’s building and went up the stairs at a run.
    (At the first-floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.)
    They’d posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren’t expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs—
splash of