Read Broken Angels for Free Online

chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?”
    It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring at the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.
    â€œHere she comes,” said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms, and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.
    Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes, either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgment.
    She swayed, stumbled, and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.
    â€œTanya Wardani,” said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar-code strips and a scanner. “I’ll need your ID for the release.”
    I cocked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impassively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.
    â€œLieutenant.”
    â€œYes, what is it?” Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.
    â€œWill she be coming back?”
    I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.
    â€œNo, Sergeant,” I said, as if to a small child. “She won’t be coming back. She’s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her.”
    I closed the hatch.
    But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.
    He didn’t even bother to shield his face from the dust.

CHAPTER FOUR
    We flew west from the camp on grav effect, over a mixture of desert scrub and blots of darker vegetation where the planet’s flora had managed to get a lock on shallow-running aquifers. About twenty minutes later we picked up the coast and headed out to sea over waters that Wedge military intelligence said were infested with Kempist smart mines. Schneider kept our speed down, subsonic the whole time. Easy to track.
    I spent the early part of the flight in the main cabin, ostensibly going through a current affairs datastack that the shuttle was pulling down from one of Carrera’s command satellites, but in reality watching Tanya Wardani with an Envoy-tuned eye. She sat slumped in the seat farthest from the hatch and hence closest to the right-side viewports, forehead resting against the glass. Her eyes were open, but whether she was focusing on the ground below was hard to tell. I didn’t try to speak to her: I’d seen the same mask on a thousand other faces this year, and I knew she wasn’t coming out from behind it until she was ready, which might be never. Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. Lately, they’ve been calling it War Shock Syndrome, an all-encompassing term that bleakly but rather neatly