Woken Furies (3 page)

The last thing he wanted to do was upset his patrons.

The last thing I wanted to do was ride a hoverloader back to Millsport in this sleeve.

“Plex, I’m booked out of here on the
Saffron Queen.
That’s four hours away. Going to refund me my ticket?”

“We’ll flicker it, Tak.” His voice was pleading. “There’s another ’loader out to EmPee tomorrow evening. I’ve got stuff, I mean Yukio’s guys—”

“—use my fucking
name,
man,” yelped the yakuza.

“They can flicker you to the evening ride, no one’s ever going to know.” The pleading gaze turned on Yukio. “Right? You’ll do that, right?”

I added a stare of my own. “Right? Seeing as how you’re fucking up my exit plans currently?”

“You already fucked up your exit, Kovacs.” The yakuza was frowning, head-shaking. Playing at
sempai
with mannerisms and a clip-on solemnity he’d probably copied directly from his own
sempai
not too far back in his apprenticeship. “Do you know how much heat you’ve got out there looking for you right now? The cops have put in sniffer squads all over uptown, and my guess is they’ll be all over the ’loader dock inside an hour. The whole TPD is out to play. Not to mention our bearded stormtrooper friends from the citadel. Fuck, man, you think you could have left a little
more
blood up there.”

“I asked you a question. I didn’t ask for a critique. You going to flicker me to the next departure or not?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved it away. “Consider it fucking done. What you don’t appreciate, Kovacs, is that some people have got serious business to transact. You come up here and stir up local law enforcement with your mindless violence, they’re liable to get all enthusiastic and go busting people we
need.
”

“Need for what?”

“None of your fucking business.” The
sempai
impression skidded off and he was pure Millsport street again. “You just keep your fucking head down for the next five or six hours and try not to kill anyone else.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll call you.”

I shook my head. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Better than.” His voice climbed. “Who the
fuck
do you think you’re talking to, Kovacs?”

I measured the distance, the time it would take me to get to him. The pain it would cost. I ladled out the words that would push him. “Who am I talking to? I’m talking to a whiff-wired
chimpira,
a fucking street punk up here from Millsport and off the leash from his
sempai,
and it’s getting old, Yukio. Give me your fucking phone—I want to talk to someone with authority.”

The rage detonated. Eyes flaring wide, hand reaching for whatever he had inside the suit jacket. Way too late.

I hit him.

Across the space between us, unfolding attacks from my uninjured side. Sideways into throat and knee. He went down choking. I grabbed an arm, twisted it, and laid the Tebbit knife across his palm, held so he could see.

“That’s a bioware blade,” I told him tightly. “Adoracion Hemorrhagic Fever. I cut you with this and every blood vessel in your body ruptures inside three minutes.
Is that what you want?
”

He heaved against my grip, whooped after breath. I pressed down with the blade, and saw the panic in his eyes.

“It isn’t a good way to die, Yukio.
Phone.
”

He pawed at his jacket and the phone tipped out, skittered on the evercrete. I leaned close enough to be sure it wasn’t a weapon, then toed it back toward his free hand. He fumbled it up, breath still coming in hoarse jags through his rapidly bruising throat.

“Good. Now punch up someone who can help, then give it to me.”

He thumbed the display a couple of times and offered the phone to me, face pleading the way Plex’s had a couple of minutes earlier. I fixed him with my eyes for a long moment, trading on the notorious immobility of cheap synth features, then let go of his locked-out arm, took the phone, and stepped back out of reach. He rolled over away from me, still clutching his throat. I put the phone to my ear.

“Who is this?” asked an urbane male voice in Japanese.

“My name is Kovacs.” I followed the language shift automatically. “Your
chimpira
Yukio and I are having a conflict of interest that I thought you might like to resolve.”

A frigid silence.

“That’s sometime tonight I’d like you to resolve it,” I said gently.

There was a hiss of indrawn breath at the other end of the line. “Kovacssan, you are making a mistake.”

“Really?”

“It would be unwise to involve us in your affairs.”

“I’m not the one doing the involving. Currently I’m standing in a warehouse looking at an empty space where some equipment of mine used to be. I have it on pretty good authority the reason it’s gone is that you took it.”

More silence. Conversations with the yakuza are invariably punctuated with long pauses, during which you’re supposed to reflect and listen carefully to what’s not being said.

I wasn’t in the mood for it. My wound ached.

“I’m told you’ll be finished in about six hours. I can live with that. But I want your word that at the end of that time the equipment will be back here and in working order, ready for me to use. I want your word.”

“Hirayasu Yukio is the person to—”

“Yukio is a
chimp.
Let us deal honestly with each other in this. Yukio’s only job here is to make sure I don’t slaughter our mutual service provider. Which, incidentally, is something he’s not doing well. I was already short on patience when I arrived, and I don’t expect to replenish my stock anytime soon. I’m not interested in Yukio. I want
your
word.”

“And if I do not give it?”

“Then a couple of your front offices are going to end up looking like the inside of the citadel tonight. You can have
my
word on that.”

Quiet. Then: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.”

“Oh
please.
What are you, making speeches? I thought I was dealing at executive level. Am I going to have to do some damage here?”

Another kind of silence. The voice on the other end of the line seemed to have thought of something else.

“Is Hirayasu Yukio harmed?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” I looked down coldly at the yakuza. He’d mastered breathing again and was beginning to sit up. Beads of sweat gleamed at the borders of his tattoo. “But all that can change. It’s in your hands.”

“Very well.” Barely a handful of seconds before the response. By yakuza standards, it was unseemly haste. “My name is Tanaseda. You have my word, Kovacs-san, that the equipment you require will be in place and available to you at the time you specify. In addition, you will be paid for your trouble.”

“Thank you. That—”

“I have not finished. You further have my word that if you commit any acts of violence against my personnel, I shall issue a global writ for your capture and subsequent execution. I am talking about a very unpleasant Real Death. Is that understood?”

“It seems fair. But I think you’d better tell the
chimp
to behave himself. He seems to have delusions of competence.”

“Let me speak to him.”

Yukio Hirayasu was sitting by now, hunched over on the evercrete, wheezing breathily. I hissed at him and tossed him the phone. He caught it awkwardly, one-handed, still massaging his throat with the other.

“Your
sempai
wants a word.”

He glared up at me out of tear-smeared, hating eyes, but he put the phone to his ear. Compressed Japanese syllables trickled out of it, like someone riffing on a ruptured gas cylinder. He stiffened, and his head lowered. His answers ran bitten off and monosyllabic. The word
yes
featured a lot. One thing you’ve got to hand to the yakuza—they do discipline in the ranks like no one else.

The one-sided conversation ended and Yukio held the phone out to me, not meeting my eye. I took it.

“This matter is resolved,” said Tanaseda in my ear. “Please arrange to be elsewhere for the remainder of the night. You may return six hours from now when the equipment and your compensation will both be waiting for you. We will not speak again. This. Confusion. Has been most regrettable.”

He didn’t sound that upset.

“You recommend a good place for breakfast?” I asked.

Silence. A polite static backdrop. I weighed the phone in my palm for a moment, then tossed it back to Yukio.

“So.” I looked from the yakuza to Plex and back. “Either of
you
recommend a good place for breakfast?”

CHAPTER TWO

Before Leonid Mecsek unleashed his beneficence on the struggling economies of the Saffron Archipelago, Tekitomura scraped a seasonal living out of big-game bottleback charters for rich sportsmen across from Millsport or the Ohrid Isles, and the harvest of webjellies for their internal oils. Bioluminescence made these latter easiest to catch at night, but the sweeper crews that did it tended not to stay out for more than a couple of hours at a time. Longer and the webjellies’ gossamer-fine stinging aerials got plastered so thick over clothing and onboard surfaces that you could lose serious productivity to toxin inhalation and skin burns. All night long, the sweepers came in so that crew and decks could be hosed clean with cheap biosolvent. Behind the Angier lamp glare of the hosing station, a short parade of bars and eating houses stayed open until dawn.

Plex, spilling apologies like a leaky bucket, walked me down through the warehouse district to the wharf and into an unwindowed place called Tokyo Crow. It wasn’t very different from a low-end Millsport skipper’s bar—mural sketches of Ebisu and Elmo on the stained walls, interspersed with the standard votive plaques inscribed in kanji or Amanglic Roman:
CALM SEAS, PLEASE, AND FULL NETS
. Monitors up behind the mirrorwood bar, giving out local weather coverage, orbital behavior patterns, and global breaking news. The inevitable holoporn on a broad projection base at the end of the room. Sweeper crew members lined the bar and knotted around the tables, faces blurred weary. It was a thin crowd, mostly male, mostly unhappy.

“I’ll get these,” said Plex hurriedly, as we entered.

“Too fucking right, you will.”

He gave me a sheepish look. “Um. Yeah. What do you want, then?”

“Whatever passes for whiskey around here. Cask strength. Something I’ll be able to taste through the flavor circuits in this fucking sleeve.”

He sloped off to the bar, and I found a corner table out of habit. Views to the door and across the clientele. I lowered myself into a seat, wincing at the movement in my blaster-raked ribs.

What a fucking mess.

Not really.
I touched the stacks through the fabric of my coat pocket.
I got what I came for.

Any special reason you couldn’t just cut their throats while they slept?

They needed to know. They needed to see it coming.

Plex came back from the bar, bearing glasses and a tray of tired-looking sushi. He seemed unaccountably pleased with himself.

“Look, Tak. You don’t need to worry about those sniffer squads. In a synth sleeve—”

I looked at him. “Yes. I know.”

“And, well, you know. It’s only six hours.”

“And all of tomorrow until the ’loader ships out.” I hooked my glass. “I really think you’d better just shut up, Plex.”

He did. After a couple of brooding minutes, I discovered I didn’t want that, either. I was jumpy in my synthetic skin, twitching like a meth comedown, uncomfortable with who I physically was. I needed distraction.

“You know Yukio long?”

He looked up, sulkily. “I thought you wanted—”

“Yeah. Sorry. I got shot tonight, and it hasn’t put me in a great mood. I was just—”

“You were
shot
?”

“Plex.”
I leaned intently across the table. “Do you want to keep your
fucking
voice down.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I mean.” I gestured helplessly. “How the fuck do you stay in business, man? You’re supposed to be a criminal, for Christ’s sake.”

“It wasn’t my choice,” he said stiffly.

“No? How’s that work, then? They got some kind of conscription for it up here?”

“Very funny. I suppose you
chose
the military, did you? At seventeen fucking standard years old?”

I shrugged. “I made a choice, yeah. Military or the gangs. I put on a uniform. It paid better than the criminal stuff I was already doing.”

“Well, I was never
in
a gang.” He knocked back a chunk of his drink. “The yakuza made sure of that. Too much danger of corrupting their investment. I went to the right tutors, spent time in the right social circles, learned to walk the walk, talk the talk, and then they plucked me like a fucking cherry.”

His gaze beached on the scarred wood of the tabletop.

“I remember my father,” he said bitterly. “The day I got access to the family datastacks. Right after my coming-of-age party, the next morning. I was still hung over, still fried, and Tanaseda and Kadar and Hirayasu in his office like fucking vampires. He cried that day.”

“
That
Hirayasu?”

He shook his head. “That’s the son. Yukio. You want to know how long I’ve known Yukio? We grew up together. Fell asleep together in the same kanji classes, got wrecked on the same
take,
dated the same girls. He left for Millsport about the time I started my DH/biotech practicals, came back a year later wearing that fucking stupid suit.” He looked up. “You think I like living out my father’s debts?”

It didn’t seem to need an answer. And I didn’t want to listen to any more of this stuff. I sipped some more of the cask-strength whiskey, wondering what the bite would be like in a sleeve with real taste buds. I gestured with the glass. “So how come they needed your de- and regear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.”

He shrugged. “Some kind of fuckup. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Seawater in the gel feeds.”

“Organized crime, huh.”

There was a resentful envy in the way he stared at me. “You don’t have any family, do you?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” That was a little harsh, but he didn’t need to know the close truth. Feed him something else. “I’ve been away.”

“In the store?”

I shook my head. “Offworld.”

“Offworld? Where’d you go?” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, barely held back by the ghost of breeding. The Glimmer system has no habitable planets apart from Harlan’s World. Tentative terraforming down the plane of the ecliptic on Glimmer V won’t yield useful results for another century. Offworld for a Harlanite means a stellar-range needlecast, shrugging off your physical self and resleeving somewhere light-years distant under an alien sun. It’s all very romantic, and in the public consciousness known needlecast riders are accorded a celebrity status somewhat akin to pilots back on Earth during the days of intrasystem spaceflight.

The fact that, unlike pilots, these latter-day celebrities don’t actually have to
do
anything to travel the hypercaster, the fact that in many cases they have no actual skills or stature other than their hypercast fame itself, doesn’t seem to impede their triumphant conquest of the public imagination. Old Earth is the real jackpot destination, of course, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go, so long as you come back. It’s a favorite boost technique for fading experia stars and out-of-favor Millsport courtesans. If you can just somehow scrape up the cost of the ’cast, you’re more or less guaranteed years of well-paid coverage in the skullwalk magazines.

That, of course, doesn’t apply to Envoys. We just used to go silently, crush the odd planetary uprising, topple the odd regime, and then plug in something UN-compliant that worked. Slaughter and suppression across the stars, for the greater good—
naturally
—of a unified Protectorate.

I don’t do that anymore.

“Did you go to Earth?”

“Among other places.” I smiled at a memory that was getting on for a century out of date. “Earth’s a shithole, Plex. Static fucking society, hyper-rich immortal overclass, cowed masses.”

He shrugged and poked morosely at the sushi with his chopsticks. “Sounds just like this place.”

“Yeah.” I sipped some more whiskey. There were a lot of subtle differences between Harlan’s World and what I’d seen on Earth, but I couldn’t be bothered to lay them out right now. “Now you come to mention it.”

“So what are you. Oh
fuck
!”

For a moment I thought he was just fumbling the bottleback sushi. Shaky feedback on the holed synth sleeve, or maybe just shaky close-to-dawn weariness on me. It took me whole seconds to look up, track his gaze to the bar and the door, make sense of what was there.

The woman seemed unremarkable at first glance—slim and competent looking, in gray coveralls and a nondescript padded jacket, unexpectedly long hair, face pale to washed out. A little too sharp-edged for sweeper crew, maybe. Then you noticed the way she stood, booted feet set slightly apart, hands pressed flat to the mirrorwood bar, face tipped forward, body preternaturally immobile. Then your eyes went back to that hair and—

Framed in the doorway not five meters off her flank, a group of senior-caste New Revelation priests stood frigidly surveying the clientele. They must have spotted the woman about the same time I spotted them.

“Oh,
shit
fuck!”

“Plex, shut up.” I murmured it through closed teeth and stilled lips. “They don’t know my face.”

“But she’s—”

“Just. Wait.”

The spiritual well-being gang advanced into the room. Nine of them, all told. Cartoon patriarch beards and close-shaven skulls, grim-faced and intent. Three officiators, the colors of the evangelical elect draped blackly across their dull ocher robes and the bioware scopes worn like an ancient pirate patch across one eye. They were locked in on the woman at the bar, bending her way like gulls on a downdraft. Across the room, her uncovered hair must have been a beacon of provocation.

Whether they were out combing the streets for me was immaterial. I’d gone masked into the citadel, synth-sleeved. I had no signature.

But rampant across the Saffron Archipelago, dripping down onto the northern reaches of the next landmass like venom from a ruptured webjelly and now, they told me, taking root in odd little pockets as far south as Millsport itself, the Knights of the New Revelation brandished their freshly regenerated gynophobia with an enthusiasm of which their Earth-bound Islamo-Christian ancestors would have been proud. A woman alone in a bar was bad enough, a woman uncovered far worse, but
this
—

“Plex,” I said quietly. “On second thoughts, I think you’d maybe better get out of here.”

“Tak, listen—”

I dialed the hallucinogen grenade up to maximum delay, fused it, and let it roll gently away under the table. Plex heard it go and made a tiny yelping noise.

“Go on,” I said.

The lead officiator reached the bar. He stood half a meter away from the woman, maybe waiting for her to cringe.

She ignored him. Ignored, for that matter, everything farther off than the bar surface under her hands and, it dawned on me, the face she could see reflected there.

I eased unhurriedly to my feet.

“Tak, it isn’t
worth
it, man. You don’t know wha—”

“I said go, Plex.” Drifting into it now, into the gathering fury like an abandoned skiff on the edge of the maelstrom. “You don’t want to play this screen.”

The officiator got tired of being ignored.

“Woman,” he barked. “You will cover yourself.”

“Why,” she enunciated back with bitten clarity, “don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.”

There was an almost comical pause. The nearest barflies jerked around on a collective look that gaped
did she really say
—

Somewhere, someone guffawed.

The blow was already swinging in. A gnarled, loose-fingered backhander that by rights should have catapulted the woman off the bar and onto the floor in a little heap. Instead—

The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funneling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.

A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.

Mistake.

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles, and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the color of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.

I reached in, yanked back a beard, and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dream-like. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Sarah.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye-to-eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimeters apart for what seemed like minutes before the realization of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.

Sarah—

“It’s
him
!”

Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.

“It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!”

With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.