Woken Furies (7 page)

CHAPTER SIX

It took a day and a night to get to Drava.

From about midway across the Andrassy Sea,
Guns for Guevara
ran throttled back, sensor net spread as wide as it would go, weapons systems at standby. The official line from the Mecsek government was that the mimints had all been designed for a land war and so had no way of getting off New Hok. On the ground, deCom crews reported seeing machines there were no descriptors for in the Military Machine Intelligence archive, which suggested at least some of the weaponry still prowling the continent had found ways to evolve beyond its original program parameters. The whispered word was that experimental nanotech had run wild. The official line said nanotech systems were too crude and too poorly understood at the time of the Unsettlement to have been deployed as weapons. The whispered word was dismissed as antigovernment scaremongering, the official line was derided everyplace you could find intelligent conversation. Without satellite cover or aerial support, there was no way to prove the thing either way. Myth and misinformation reigned.

Welcome to Harlan’s World.

“Hard to believe,” muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometers up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. “Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.”

Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armored spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side. Overhead, the sky was an unpromising gray in all directions.

Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. “Anytime you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.”

“Yeah, count me in,” said Kiyoka. “Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.”

It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analog of the fifty-meter bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars. No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all
human
scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a lance of angelfire.

Lazlo blew on his hands. “They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.”

“Oh man, here we go again.” Kiyoka rolled her eyes.

“There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,” said Lazlo doggedly. “Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—”

Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.

“—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches
them
when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens
all the time,
man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—”

“I did hear that one,” said Sylvie irritably. “Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.”

“Skipper, they
said
that, sure. They
would
say that.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

“Las, old son.” Orr dropped a heavy arm around the lead wincefish’s shoulders. “If it’d been angelfire, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. You know that. And you know damned well there’s a fucking hole in the coverage down around the equator big enough to drive a whole fleet of colony barges through if you do the math right. Now, why don’t you give the conspiracy shit a rest and check out the scenery you dragged us all up here to see.”

It was an impressive enough sight. Drava, in its day, was both trade gateway and naval port for the whole New Hokkaido hinterland. The waterfront saw shipping from every major city on the planet, and the sprawl of architecture behind the docks reached back a dozen kilometers into the foothills to provide homes for almost five million people. At the height of its commercial powers, Drava rivaled Millsport for wealth and sophistication, and the navy garrison was one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere.

Now we cruised past rows of smashed-in Settlement-years warehouses, containers and cranes tumbled across the docks like children’s toys and merchant vessels sunk at anchor end-to-end. There were lurid chemical stains on the water around us, and the only living things in view were a miserable-looking clutch of ripwings flapping about on the canted, corrugated roof of a warehouse. One of them flung back its neck and uttered a clattering challenge as we went past, but you could tell its heart wasn’t in it.

“Want to watch out for those,” said Kiyoka grimly. “They don’t look like much but they’re smart. Most places on this coast they’ve already polished off the cormorants and the gulls, and they’ve been known to attack humans, too.”

I shrugged. “Well, it’s their planet.”

The deCom beachhead fortifications came into view. Hundreds of meters of razor-edged livewire crawling restlessly about inside its patrol parameters, jagged rows of crouched spider blocks on the ground and robot sentries perched brooding on the surrounding rooftops. In the water, a couple of automated mini subs poked conning towers above the surface, bracketing the curve of the estuary. Surveillance kites flew at intervals, tethered to crane stacks and a communications mast in the heart of the beachhead.

Guns for Guevara
cut power and drifted in broadside between the two subs. On the dockside, a few figures paused in what they were doing, and voices floated across the closing gap to the new arrivals. Most of the work was done by machines, silently. Beachhead security interrogated the hoverloader’s navigational intelligence and gave clearance. The autograpple system talked to the sockets on the dock, agreed trajectory, and fired home. Cables cranked tight and pulled the vessel in. An articulated boarding corridor flexed itself awake and nuzzled up to the dockside loading hatch. Buoyancy antigrav kicked over to mooring levels with a shiver. Doors unlatched.

“Time to go,” said Lazlo, and disappeared below like a rat down a hole. Orr made an obscene gesture in his wake.

“What you bring us up here in the first place for, you’re in such a fucking hurry to get off?”

An indistinct answer floated back up. Feet clattered on the companionway.

“Ah, let him go,” said Kiyoka. “No one rolls till we talk to Kurumaya anyway. There’ll be a queue around the ’fab.”

Orr looked at Sylvie. “What are we going to do about Jad?”

“Leave her here.” The command head was gazing out at the ugly gray bubblefab settlement with a curiously rapt expression on her face. Hard to believe it was the view—maybe she was listening to the machine systems talk, senses open and lost in the wash of transmission traffic. She snapped out of it abruptly and turned to face her crew. “We’ve got the cabins till noon. No point in moving her till we know what we’re doing.”

“And the hardware?”

Sylvie shrugged. “Same applies. I’m not carting that lot around Drava all day while we wait for Kurumaya to give us a slot.”

“Think he’ll ramp us again?”

“After last time? Somehow I doubt it.”

Belowdecks, the narrow corridors were plugged up with jostling deComs, carry-on gear slung across shoulders or portered on heads. Cabin doors stood folded open, occupants within rationalizing baggage prior to launching themselves into the crush. Boisterous shouts ricocheted back and forth over heads and angled cases. Motion was sludgily forward and port, toward the debarkation hatch. We threaded ourselves into the crowd and crept along with it, Orr in the lead. I hung back, protecting my wounded ribs as much as I could. Occasional jolts got through. I rode it with gritted teeth.

What seemed like a long time later, we spilled out the end of the debarkation corridor and stood amid the bubblefabs. The deCom swarm drifted ahead of us, through the ’fabs and toward the center mast. Partway there, Lazlo sat waiting for us on a gutted plastic packing crate. He was grinning.

“What kept you?”

Orr feinted at him with a growl. Sylvie sighed.

“At least tell me you got a queue chip.”

Lazlo opened his hand with the solemnity of a conjuror and presented a little fragment of black crystal on his palm. The number fifty-seven resolved itself from a blurred point of light inside. A string of muttered curses smoked off Sylvie and her companions at the sight.

“Yeah, it’ll be a while.” Lazlo shrugged. “Leftovers from yesterday. They’re still assigning the backlog. I heard something serious went down inside the Cleared Zone last night. We may as well eat.”

He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap molded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out toward us, pungent enough to trigger even the meager taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.

“Misos and rice all around?” asked Lazlo.

Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.

“Hey. On me, this.”

“Thanks.”

“No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.”

“Well, there was a lot going on.”

“Yeah. You want anything else?”

There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own, and tossed it onto the counter.

“So you got tagged.”

“Yeah. Ribs.”

“Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?”

“No. Before that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Busy man.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” I tore a dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve, and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.

The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering. Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-years jazz.

Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place—old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualized. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.

“This is old,” I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.

Lazlo grunted. “Welcome to New Hok.”

Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.

“You like this stuff, huh?” Kiyoka asked me through a mouthful of rice.

“Stuff like it. I don’t recognize—”

“Dizzy Csango and Great Laughing Mushroom,” said Orr unexpectedly. “ ‘Down the Ecliptic.’ But it’s a cover of a Blackman Taku float, originally. Taku never would have let the violin in the front door.”

I shot the giant a strange look.

“Don’t listen to him,” Sylvie told me, scratching idly under her hair. “You go back to early Taku and Ide stuff, they’ve got that gypsy twang scribbled all over the place. They only phased it out for
Millsport Sessions.
”

“That isn’t—”

“Hey, Sylvie!” A youngish-looking command head with hair static-stacked straight up paused at the table. There was a tray of coffees balanced on his left hand and a thick coil of livecable slung over his right shoulder, twitching restlessly. “You guys back already?”

Sylvie grinned. “Hey Oishii. Miss me?”

Oishii made a mock-bow. The tray on his splayed fingers never shifted. “As ever. More than can be said for Kurumaya-san. You plan on seeing him today?”

“You don’t?”

“Nah, we’re not going out. Kasha caught some counterint splash last night, it’ll be a couple of days before she’s up and about. We’re kicking back.” Oishii shrugged. “ ’S paid for. Contingency funding.”

“Fucking
contingency
fund?” Orr sat up. “What happened here yesterday?”

“You guys don’t know?” Oishii looked around the table, eyes wide. “About last night. You didn’t hear?”

“No,” said Sylvie patiently. “Which is why we’re asking you.”

“Oh, okay. I thought everyone would know by now. We’ve got a co-op cluster on the prowl. Inside the Cleared Zone. Last night it started putting together artillery. Self-propelled gun, a big one. Scorpion chassis. Kurumaya had to scramble everybody before we got shelled.”

“Is there anything left?” asked Orr.

“They don’t know. We took down the primary assemblers along with the gun, but a lot of the smaller stuff scattered. Drones, secondaries, shit like that. Someone said they saw karakuri.”

“Oh crab
shit,
” Kiyoka snorted.