Read Online Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

I’d probably have suffered a screaming mental collapse months ago. And combat memories weren’t what I wanted to look at right now.
    I made myself lie back again and relax into the day. The morning sun was already beginning to build toward semitropical midday heat, and the rock was warm to the touch. Between my half-closed eyelids, light moved the way it had in the lochside convalescent virtuality. I let myself drift.
    Time passed unused.
    My phone hummed quietly to itself. I reached down without opening my eyes and squeezed it active. Noted the increased weight of heat on my body, the light drenching of sweat on my legs.
    â€œReady to roll,” said Schneider’s voice. “You still up on that rock?”
    I sat up unwillingly. “Yeah. You make the call yet?”
    â€œAll cleared. That mothballed scrambler uplink you stole? Beautiful. Crystal clear. They’re waiting on us.”
    â€œBe right down.”
    Inside my head, the same residue. The dream had not gone.
    Something coming up.
    I stowed the thought with the phone and started downward.
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    Archaeology is a messy science.
    You’d think, with all the high-tech advances of the past few centuries, that we’d have the practice of robbing graves down to a fine art by now. After all, we can pick up the telltale traces of Martian civilization across interplanetary distances these days. Satellite surveys and remote sensing let us map their buried cities through meters of solid rock or hundreds of meters of sea, and we’ve even built machines that can make educated guesses about the more inscrutable remnants of what they left behind. With nearly half a millennium of practice, we really ought to be getting good at this stuff.
    But the fact is, no matter how subtle your detection science is, once you’ve found something you’ve still got to dig it up. And with the vast capital investment the corporates have made in the race to understand the Martians, the digging is usually done with about as much subtlety as a crew night out in Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. There are finds to be made and dividends to be paid, and the fact that there are—apparently—no Martians around to object to the environmental damage doesn’t help. The corporates swing in, rip the locks off the vacated worlds, and stand back while the Archaeologue Guild swarm all over the fixtures. And when the primary sites have been exhausted, no one usually bothers to tidy up.
    You get places like Dig 27.
    Hardly the most imaginative name for a town, but there was a certain amount of accuracy in the choice. Dig 27 had sprung up around the excavation of the same name, served for fifty years as dormitory, cafeteria, and leisure complex for the archaeologue workforce, and was now in steep decline as the seams of xenoculture ore panned out to the dregs. The original dighead was a gaunt centipedal skeleton, straddling the skyline on stilled retrieval belts and awkwardly bent support struts as we flew in from the east. The town started beneath the drooping tail of the structure and spread from it in sporadic and uncertain clumps like an unenthusiastic concrete fungus. Buildings rarely heaved themselves above five stories, and many of those that had were rather obviously derelict, as if the effort of upward growth had exhausted them beyond the ability to sustain internal life.
    Schneider banked around the skull end of the stalled dighead, flattened out, and floated down toward a piece of wasteground between three listing pylons that presumably delineated Dig 27’s landing field. Dust boiled up from the badly kept ferrocrete as we hovered, and I saw jagged cracks blown naked by our landing brakes. Over the comset, a senile navigation beacon husked a request for identification. Schneider ignored it, knocked over the primaries, and climbed from his seat with a