Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”

I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”

“But it doesn’t solve anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”

“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.

“I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?”

Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.

“Only when I’m killing them.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”

“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”

She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.

She turned away without a word.

The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face, I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.

Sanctified solo assassins.

I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark.

They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.

So far.

I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins, you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to.

You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matt, low-profile pirate skimmers amidst the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.

Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly-kept façades and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon.

A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.

I found him well before evening.

It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defences of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board hire place called The Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.

“Sure, he checked in about a week back,” the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. “I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, got a real balance about him too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.” She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound.

“Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?”

“Surfers everywhere,” I agreed.

“So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?”

“Well.” I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. “It’s actually some thing I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.”

That appealed to her. She grinned and got up. “Sure, we can do that.”

She left the boards and came round to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia and fished it out.

“There you go.”

She took the little black device curiously. “That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?”

“No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight.”

“Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amidst the dust on ledge 74.

“Actually,” I said with feigned abruptness. “Can I get a room?”

She turned back, surprised. “Well, uh, sure …”

“Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.”

“Sure, no problem.” She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinised it for a moment and then gave me the grin again. “If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.”

“That’s very kind,” I said. “Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.”

Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.

“So you don’t want me to give him this?”

“Not any more thanks.” I smiled at her. “I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.”

Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive supplier warehouses.