Broken Angels

The second novel in the Takeshi Kovacs series is set in a far-future universe where human consciousness can be digitally stored in cortical stacks implanted at the base of the skull, allowing individuals to survive physical death and be "resleeved" into new bodies. Takeshi Kovacs, a former operative of the elite Envoy Corps, a Protectorate force trained in psychological conditioning and rapid adaptation, now serves as a lieutenant in Carrera's Wedge, a feared mercenary unit fighting on the corporate Cartel's side in a civil war on Sanction IV. The war pits the planet's government and corporate backers against the revolutionary forces of Joshua Kemp.

Severely wounded in combat, Kovacs is evacuated to an orbital hospital. There he meets Jan Schneider, a man posing as a Wedge soldier who claims that an archaeological team on the Dangrek coast discovered a Martian gate, a piece of alien technology that opens onto a point in deep space near an intact Martian starship. The Martians are a long-extinct civilization whose remnants are scattered across human-settled space. Tanya Wardani, the dig's site regulator, is an archaeologue holding the senior rank of Guild Master. She is needed to reopen the gate but is imprisoned in a government internment camp.

Kovacs secures Wardani's release using genuine Wedge authorization framed as an interrogation requisition. At the camp, Wardani is emaciated and psychologically devastated. The three flee in a stolen shuttle, staging their deaths by fighting through a minefield and leaving debris on the seabed. On a remote beach, Kovacs uses Envoy psychodynamic techniques to accelerate Wardani's recovery. He outlines his plan: They will coerce the Mandrake Corporation, a smaller but aggressive corporate player, into a partnership rather than risk being murdered for the discovery.

After selling the shuttle to Djoko Roespinoedji, a black-market entrepreneur occupying a child's body in the declining town of Dig 27, the trio travels to Landfall, the planet's capital. They provoke Mandrake by transmitting a data package about their discovery into its corporate systems. When Mandrake sends a tactical squad to seize them, Kovacs ambushes and kills the operatives, then interrogates the squad leader's cortical stack in virtual to learn the name of their controller: Matthias Hand, head of Mandrake's Acquisitions Division and rumored to be an ex-hougan, or priest, of the Carrefour Brotherhood, a voodoo-like religious order.

Kovacs demands twenty million U.N. dollars, passage offworld via needlecast (the technology for transmitting digitized consciousness across interstellar distances), and new sleeves. He backs these demands with time-locked data launches set to broadcast the discovery if Mandrake fails to cooperate. Hand accepts. Under charter law, ownership requires physically placing a claim buoy near the artifact, so Hand assembles a spec ops team.

From the Soul Market, a bazaar where cortical stacks from battlefield dead are traded by weight, Kovacs and Hand select a team: demolitions expert Ole Hansen, commando Yvette Cruickshank, covert operative Jiang Jianping, combat pilot Ameli Vongsavath, assassin Luc Deprez, systems specialist Sun Liping, and captain Markus Sutjiadi, wanted for killing a Wedge officer. Kovacs gives Sutjiadi command. The recruits are resleeved into radiation-resistant Maori combat clones because the expedition's path has been cleared by the nuclear destruction of Sauberville, a city of 120,000, which Hand secretly arranged by feeding military misinformation to Kemp's forces.

The team deploys aboard the assault ship Nagini to the irradiated Dangrek peninsula, where they find evidence of a previous fatal expedition, including stackless corpses on a nearby trawler. Inside a cave, they encounter the Martian gate: a gaunt structure of dense black alloy. Hand reveals that rival Mandrake executives deployed the OPERN System, an experimental nanotech that evolves its own combat responses, to prevent his return. Sabotage from within the team destroys backup equipment, including antiradiation drugs and one of two claim buoys.

As radiation sickness worsens, the nanobes evolve through engagements with perimeter defenses, ultimately forming barbed cables bound by electromagnetic fields. These cables erupt from the sand and kill Cruickshank and Hansen, consuming their cortical stacks. Beam weapons pass through without effect; only solid ammunition works. The gate opens on schedule, and the team flies the Nagini through.

They emerge far from Sanction IV's sun to discover the Martian vessel, 53 kilometers long and dwarfing anything humanity has built. Its interior contains bubble-shaped chambers, dormant machines, songspires (Martian mineral growths that sing when touched by air currents), and mummified Martian corpses. They recover bodies of Wardani's former colleagues near the docking portal, some suited and some not, all dead from exposure. Schneider reveals himself as a Wedge infiltrator, steals the Nagini, and kills Jiang with the ship's ultravibe, a high-frequency beam weapon. Kovacs reveals he mined the fuel cells; Schneider vaporizes upon reentering planetary gravity.

An ancient automated battle then activates the ship's defenses as a non-Martian warship approaches on a cometary orbit, a cycle repeating roughly every 1,200 years. The songspires amplify a keening scream, and spectral traces of the dead Martian crew manifest as shadows whose millennia-old grief overwhelms anyone present with unbearable sorrow. This is what killed Wardani's original team: They chose to die outside the ship rather than endure the experience. Kovacs stuns most of the crew, but Sun shoots herself before he can reach her, and Wardani refuses. Kovacs collapses under the psychic assault.

Isaac Carrera, the Wedge's founder and commander, retrieves the survivors with his forces. On the beach, Carrera kills Hand, paid by Hand's corporate rivals, and reveals that Hand arranged the Sauberville nuclear strike. Carrera deploys neural inhibitor remotes, spider-like devices that attach to the spine and punish hostile intent with incapacitating bites, to subdue the team. He sentences Sutjiadi to ritual execution by anatomizer, an automated device that flays and dismembers its victim over a full day.

At dawn, as Sutjiadi's screams fill the camp, Kovacs tears a biofilament from his arm to short-circuit his inhibitor. He kills his former noncom Tony Loemanako, arms himself, and with Deprez launches a devastating assault on the Wedge forces using a captured armored vehicle's shrapnel launchers. Deprez dies in the fighting. Carrera escapes through the gate, and Kovacs pursues. Their vacuum combat aboard the Martian ship ends when Kovacs tackles Carrera into a mummified Martian corpse whose corrosive alkaline powder dissolves Carrera's lungs and face through his opened faceplate.

Back on Sanction IV, Kovacs sells the claim buoy's broadcast remote to Roespinoedji. He confronts Wardani: She killed her original team by shutting the gate on them after they discovered the ship was a warship and began planning planetary bombardment for the Kempist revolution. Wardani confirms this and chooses to stay on Sanction IV, waiting to participate in the ship's eventual exploration.

Their discovery overturns centuries of accepted theory: The Martians were at war not with each other but with an entirely different alien civilization, suggesting the galaxy is far more dangerous than humanity assumed. Kovacs names the starship the Tanya Wardani and departs aboard a captured Wedge battlewagon with Vongsavath and the surviving team's stored stacks, living in a virtual environment during an eleven-year transit to the Latimer system. Sutjiadi's stack, when tested, produces only insanity from the anatomizer's trauma; Kovacs commits to paying for psychosurgery. In the closing pages, Kovacs reveals he was covertly working for the Quellists, a revolutionary political movement, throughout the conflict, and reflects on the ancient wreckage of an interstellar war far beyond human comprehension, drifting unseen in the crowded skies.