Woken Furies (51 page)

I fell, and dragged him down.

It wasn’t far to fall. The sides of the pen sloped the same way as the fight pits, and the fallen walkway had jammed itself halfway down the evercrete wall, almost on an even keel. I hit the meshed metal and Segesvar landed on top of me. I lost the air in my lungs. The walkway juddered and scraped down another half a meter. Below us, the panther went crazy, flailing at the rail, trying to tear it down to the floor of the pen. It could smell the blood streaming from my broken nose.

Segesvar squirmed around, fury still in his eyes. I threw a punch. He smothered it. Snarling monosyllables through gritted teeth, he got his injured arm across my throat and leaned on it. It ripped a cry out of him, but he never eased the pressure for a moment. The panther slammed into the side of the fallen gantry, blasting the stink of its breath through the mesh at my side. I saw one raging eye, obliterated by sparks as the talons tore at the metal. It shrilled and slobbered at us like something insane.

Maybe it was.

I kicked and flailed, but Segesvar had me locked down. Nearly two centuries of street violence stored up, he didn’t lose this kind of fight. He glared down at me and the hate fed him strength to beat the pain of the shard-blast damage in his arm. I got one arm free and tried again to punch him in the throat, but he had that covered, too. An elbow block and my fingers barely grazed the side of his face. Then he held my arm locked there and settled his weight harder onto the injured arm that was choking me.

I raised my head and bit through the jacket into the shredded flesh of his forearm. Blood welled up in the cloth and filled my mouth. He screamed, and punched me in the side of the head with his other arm. The pressure on my throat began to tell—I couldn’t breathe anymore. The panther battered at the metal gantrywork, and it shifted. I slipped fractionally sideways.

Used the shift.

Forced my open palm and fingers flat against the side of his face. Dragged downward hard.

The gecko-gene spines bit and gripped the skin. Where the pads at the tips and the base of my fingers pressed hardest, Segesvar’s face tore open. Street-fighter instinct had screwed his eyes shut as I grabbed him, but it did no good. The grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball, and tugged it out on the optic nerve. He screamed, gut deep. A sudden spray of blood squirted red against the gray of the rain, splattered warm on my face. He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood. I yelled and came after him, hooking a punch into the undamaged side of his face that threw him staggering sideways against the walkway rail.

He sprawled there for a second, left hand raised dizzily to block me, right fist curled tight despite the damage the arm had taken.

And the swamp panther took him down.

There and gone. It was a blur of mane and mantle, forelimb slash and beakgape. Its claws hooked into him at shoulder height and hauled him down off the walkway like a rag doll. He screamed once, and then I heard a single, savage crunch as the beak snapped closed. I didn’t see, but it probably bit him in half there and then.

For what must have been a full minute I stood swaying on the canted walkway, listening to the sound of flesh being torn apart and swallowed, bones being snapped. Finally, I staggered to the rail and made myself look.

I was too late. Nothing in the carnage around the feeding panther looked like it had ever been remotely associated with a human body.

Rain was already sluicing the worst of the blood away.

• • •

Swamp panthers aren’t very bright. Fed, this one showed little or no interest in my continuing existence over its head. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Rapsodia, couldn’t see it, and so set about getting out of the pen. With the multiple fractures
Impaler
’s arrival had put in the evercrete wall, it wasn’t too difficult. I used the widest crack for leverage, jammed in my feet, and hauled myself up hand-over-hand. With the exception of a bad scare when a chunk of evercrete came away in my hand at the top, it was a swift and uneventful climb. On the way up, something in the Eishundo system gradually stopped my nose bleeding.

I stood at the top and listened for the sounds of battle. Heard nothing above the storm, and even that seemed quieter. The fighting was either done or down to skulk-and-stalk. Apparently I’d underestimated Vlad and his crew.

Yeah, or the
haiduci.

Time to find out which.

I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge, and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me, as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much anymore about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt. We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet, and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously leveled.

I found the others half a dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor; the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognized but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amid the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped around, leveled the blaster, and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head around the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

“Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?”

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.

“Beats me. Looks like we got here too late. You know them?”

“Where’s Murakami?”

He gestured back the way he’d come. “Over the far side, up on the parking dock. He sent me to find you, case you needed help. Fighting’s mostly done, you know. Just mopping up and some good old piracy to do now.” He grinned again. “Time to get paid. Come on, this way.”

Numbly, I followed him. We crossed the wet bunker, through corridors marked with the signs of recent battle, blaster-charred walls and ugly splashes of shattered human tissue, the odd sprawled corpse and once an absurdly well-dressed middle-age man sitting on the floor staring in catatonic disbelief at his shattered legs sticking straight out in front of him. He must have been flushed from the casino or the brothel when the raid started, must have fled down into the bunker complex and gotten caught in the crossfire. As we reached him, he raised both arms weakly toward us, and Vlad shot him with the plasmafrag. We left him with steam curling up from the massive hole through his chest and climbed up an access ladder into the body of the old baling station.

Out on the parking dock, there was similar carnage. Crumpled bodies were strewn across the wharf and in among the moored skimmers. Here and there, small flames burned where blaster fire had found something more readily flammable than human flesh and bone. Smoke drifted through the rain. The wind was definitely dying down.

Murakami was by the water, knelt beside a slumped Virginia Vidaura and talking urgently to her. One hand cradled the side of her face. A couple of Vlad’s pirates stood around, arguing amiably, with their weapons slung over their shoulders. They were all drenched but apparently unharmed.

Across the forward carapace of a green-painted Expansemobile moored nearby, Anton’s body.

He lay head-down, eyes frozen open, rainbow command-head hair trailing down almost to the water. There was a hole you could have put your head through where his chest and stomach had been. It looked as if Jad had gotten him dead-center from behind with the shard blaster’s focus dialed up to tight. The blaster itself lay discarded on the dock amid pools of blood. Of Jad, there was no sign.

Murakami saw us coming and let go of Vidaura’s face. He picked up the shard blaster and held it out to me in both hands. The magazine was ejected, the breech clear. It had been fired empty, then discarded. He shook his head.

“We’ve looked for her, but there’s nothing. Col here says he thinks he saw her go into the water. Shot from the wall up there. Could be she was only winged but in this shit.” He gestured at the weather. “No way to tell till we sweep for bodies. Storm’s moving out westward, dying off. We can look then.”

I stared down at Virginia Vidaura. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but she looked to be semi-conscious, head lolling. I turned back to Murakami.

“What the fuck is—”

And the shard blaster butt came up and hit me in the head.

• • •

White fire, disbelief. A brand-new nosebleed.

Wha—

I staggered, gaped, fell down.

Murakami stood over me. He tossed the shard blaster away and pulled a neat little stunner from his belt.

“Sorry, Tak.”

Shot me with it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

At the end of a very long, darkened corridor, there’s a woman waiting for me. I’m trying to hurry, but my clothes are waterlogged and heavy, and the corridor itself is canted at an angle and almost knee deep in viscous stuff that I’d think was congealing blood except it stinks of belaweed. I flounder forward on the submerged, tilted floor, but the open doorway doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Got a problem, sam?

I crank the neurachem, but something’s wrong with the bioware because what I can see is like an ultradistant sniperscope image. I only have to twitch and it dances about all over the place, hurting my eyes when they try to keep focus. Half the time the woman is Vlad’s well-endowed pirate comrade, stripped to the waist and bent over the modules of unfamiliar equipment on the floor of her cabin. Long, large breasts hanging like fruit—I can feel the roof of my mouth aching to suck in one of the blunt, darkened nipples. Then, just when I think I’ve got a grip on the view, it slides away and becomes a tiny kitchen with hand-painted blinds that block out the Kossuth sunlight. There’s a woman there, too, also stripped to the waist, but it isn’t the same one because I know her.

The scope wobbles again. My eyes stray to the hardware on the floor. Matte-gray impact-resistant casings, lustrous black disks where datacoils will spring up when activated. The logo on each module is inscribed in ideographic characters that I recognize, though I don’t currently have a reading knowledge of either Hun Home or Earth Chinese. tseng psychographics. It’s a name I’ve seen around battlefields and psychosurgical recovery units in the recent past, a new name. A new star in the rarefied constellation of military brand names, a name and a brand that only very well-funded organizations can afford.

What you got there?

Kalashnikov electromag. One of the guys down the corridor loaned it to me.

Wonder where he stole it from.

Who says it had to be stolen?

I do. These guys are pirates.

Abruptly, my palm is full of the rounded, voluptuous weight of the Kalashnikov butt. It gleams up at me in the low light of the corridor, and it’s begging to be squeezed.

Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No methhead pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun.

I thrash forward another couple of steps as an awful sense of my own failure to grasp the facts soaks into me. It’s as if I’m sucking up the viscous stuff in the corridor through taproots in my legs and waterlogged boots, and I know that when I’m full it’s going to clog me to a violent stop.

And then I’ll swell and explode with it, like a bag of blood squeezed too hard.

You come in here again, boy, and I’ll crush you till you fucking pop.

I feel my own eyes widen with shock. I peer through the sniperscope again and this time it’s not the woman with the hardware, and it’s not the cabin aboard
Impaler.

It’s the kitchen.

And it’s my mother.

She’s standing, one foot in a bowl of soapy water, and leaning over to swab her leg with a blob of cheap farm-cultured hygisponge. She’s wearing a thigh-length wraparound weed gatherer’s skirt that’s split down one side and she’s naked to the waist, and she’s young, younger than I can normally remember her. Her breasts hang long and smooth, like fruit, and my mouth aches with a trace memory of tasting them. She looks sideways and down at me then, and smiles.

And he slams into the room from another door that fleeting recall tells me leads out onto the wharf. Slams into the room, and slams into her like something elemental.

You cunt, you conniving fucking cunt.

With the shock of it, again, my eyes crank, and I’m suddenly standing at the threshold. The sniperscope veil is gone, this is now and real. It takes me the first three blows to move. Backhander with full swing, it’s a blow we’ve all had from him at one time or another, but this time he’s really letting go—she’s catapulted back across the kitchen into the table and falls, she gets up and he punches her down again and there’s blood, bright from her nose in a stray beam of sunlight through the blind, she struggles to get up, from the floor this time, and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out toward me, over the threshold, over my bare feet, and then it’s as if a ghost of myself stays at the door while the rest of me runs into the room and tries to get between them.

I’m small, probably not much more than five, and he’s drunk so the blow falls inaccurately. But it’s enough to knock me back out the door. Then he comes and stands over me, hands braced clumsily on his knees, breathing heavily through a slack mouth.

You come in here again boy, and I’ll crush you till you fucking pop.

He doesn’t even bother to close the door as he goes back to her.

But as I sit there in a useless heap, beginning to cry, she reaches out across the floor and shoves at the doorjamb with her hand, so it swings closed on what’s about to happen.

Then only the sound of blows, and the closed door receding.

I flounder through the canted corridor, chasing the door as the last light squeezes through the crack, and the weeping in my throat modulates upward
toward a ripwing scream. A tidal rage is rising in me, and I’m growing with it, I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door, I’ll get there before he finally walks out on us all, disappears out of our lives and I’ll
make
him disappear, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands
are
weapons, and the viscous slop is draining away and I hit the door like a swamp panther, but it makes no difference, it’s been closed too long, it’s solid and the impact reverberates through me like a stunblast and—

Oh, yeah. Stunblast.

So it’s not a door it’s—

—the dockside, and my face was crushed against it, sticky in a little pool of spittle and blood where I’d apparently bitten my tongue as I went down. It’s not an uncommon outcome with stunners.

I coughed and choked on a throatful of mucus. Spat it out, took a rapid damage inventory, and wished I hadn’t. My whole body was a jarring assemblage of trembling and ache from the stunblast. Nausea clawed at my bowels and the pit of my stomach; my head felt light and filled with starry air. The side of my face throbbed where the rifle butt had hit me. I lay for a moment getting it all back under some kind of control, then peeled my face away from the dock and heaved my neck up like a seal. It was a short, abortive movement. My hands were locked behind my back with some kind of webbing, and I couldn’t see much above ankle height. Warm throb of active bioweld around my wrists. It gave so as not to maim hands held cuffed for long periods, it would dissolve like warm wax when you poured the right enzyme on it, but you could no more wriggle out of it than you could pull your own fingers off.

Pressure on my pocket brought home an expected truth. They’d taken the Tebbit knife. I was unarmed.

I retched and brought up the thin leavings of an empty stomach. Fell back and tried hard not to get my face in it. I could hear blaster fire from a long way off and, faintly, what sounded like laughter.

A pair of boots splashed past in the wet. Stopped and came back.

“He’s coming right back around,” someone said, and whistled. “Tough little motherfucker. Hey, Vidaura, did you say you trained this guy?”

No reply. I heaved up again and succeeded in rolling onto my side. Blinked dazedly up at the form standing over me. Vlad Tepes looked down out of a clearing sky that had almost given up on rain. The look on his face was serious and admiring, and he stood absolutely still as he watched me. No trace of his former methhead twitchiness to be seen.

“Good performance,” I croaked at him.

“Liked it, huh?” He grinned. “Had you fooled, right?”

I ran my tongue around my teeth and spat out some blood mingled with vomit. “Yeah, I thought Murakami had to be fucking cracked to use you. So what happened to the original Vlad?”

“Ah well.” He made a wry face. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know. How many more of you are there? Apart from your gorgeous-breasted psychosurgical specialist, that is.”

He laughed easily. “Yeah, she said she caught you looking. Beautiful piece of meat, isn’t it? You know, the last thing Liebeck wore before that was a Limon cable athlete’s sleeve. Flat as a board. A year down the line and she still can’t make up her mind if she’s pleased or pissed off about the change.”

“Limon, huh? Limon, Latimer.”

“That’s right.”

“Home of cutting-edge deCom.”

He grinned. “All starting to make sense, is it?”

It isn’t easy to shrug when you’re cuffed behind your back and flat to the floor. I did my best. “I saw the Tseng gear in her cabin.”

“Damn, so you
weren’t
looking at her tits.”

“No, I was,” I admitted. “But you know how it is. Nothing peripheral is ever lost.”

“That is the fucking truth.”

“Mallory.”

We both looked toward the shout. Todor Murakami was striding along the dock from the direction of the wet bunker. He was unarmed apart from the Kalashnikov at his hip and the knife on his chest. Soft rain fell around him with a sparkle in it from the brightening sky.

“Our renegade’s sitting up and spitting,” said Mallory, gesturing at me.

“Good. Now, since you’re the only one who can get that crew of yours to do anything in a coordinated fashion, why don’t you go and sort them out. There are still bodies at the brothel end with stacks intact, I saw them on my way through. There may even be living witnesses hiding down there for all I know. I want a final sweep, no one left alive, and I want every stack melted to slag.” Murakami gestured disgustedly. “Jesus fuck, they’re
pirates,
you’d think they could manage that. Instead of which, most of them are playing at setting the panthers loose and using them for target practice. Just listen to it.”

The blaster fire was still in the air, long undisciplined bursts laced with excited shouting and laughter. Mallory shrugged.

“So where’s Tomaselli?”

“Still setting up the gear with Liebeck. And Wang’s waiting for you on the bridge, trying to make sure no one gets eaten by accident. It’s your boat, Vlad. Go get them to stop fucking about, and when they’ve finished the sweep, bring
Impaler
around to this side for loading.”

“All right.” Like a ripple over water, Mallory adopted the Vlad persona and started to pick twitchily at his acne scars. He nodded down at me. “See you soon as I see you, eh, Kovacs. Soon as.”

I watched him to the corner of the station wall and around it, out of sight. Flicked my gaze back to Murakami, who was still staring away toward the sounds of the postop merriment.

“Fucking amateurs,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“So,” I said bleakly. “You’re deployed after all.”

“Got it in
one.
” As he spoke, Murakami crouched and hauled me up into an ungainly sitting position with a grunt. “Don’t hold it against me, huh? Not like I could have told you last night and appealed to your sense of nostalgia for help, is it?”

I looked around from my new vantage point and saw Virginia Vidaura, slumped against a mooring post, arms bound back. There was a long darkening bruise across her face, and her eye had swollen. She looked dully at me, and then away. There were tears smeared in the dirt and sweat on her face. No sign of Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve, dead or alive.

“So instead you played me for a sucker.”

He shrugged. “Work with the tools to hand, you know.”

“How many of you are there? Not the whole crew, apparently.”

“No.” He smiled faintly. “Just five. Mallory there. Liebeck, whom I understand you’ve met, sort of. Two others, Tomaselli and Wang, and me.”

I nodded. “Covert deployment strength. I should have known there was no way you’d be just hanging around Millsport on furlough. How long have you been on the ground?”

“Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.”

“Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.”

“Not really.” Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. “They’re not overly perceptive, these methhead guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag.” He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. “Bye-bye head, bye-bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after. Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!” Murakami slapped fist into palm. “That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and resleeve in a hotel bathroom.”

Sourcetown.

“You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?”

“Among others.” Another shrug. “The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.”

“Hence Tanaseda.”

“Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the
haiduci,
well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate no-table-manners version of the same disease. By the way, did you get your pal Segesvar? Forgot to ask before I dented you out there.”

“Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.”

Murakami chuckled. “Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?”

I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse. “What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?”