Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

Briefly, my mind fled back to the Corps and Virginia Vidaura. The rage after Innenin. It was the last time I’d really belonged to anything, well over a century gone. I’d felt twinges of the same thing after, the fresh growth of comradeship and united purpose—and I’d ripped it up by the roots every time. That shit will get you killed. Get you used.

“So,” I said, brutally casual. “Now you’ve tracked me down. Now you know. What are you going to do about it?”

She wiped tears from her face with hard strokes that were almost blows.

“I want to see her,” she said.

Jad had a small, battered skimmer she’d hired in Kem Point. It was parked under harsh security lighting on a rental ramp at the back of the hostel.

We went out to it, collecting a cheery wave from the girl on reception, who seemed to have derived a touching delight from her role in our successful reunion. Jad coded the locks on the sliding roof, clambered behind the wheel and spun us rapidly out into the dark of the Expanse. As the glimmer of lights from the Strip shrank behind us, she tore off the beard again and gave me the wheel while she stripped off her robes.

“Yeah, why wrap yourself up like that?” I asked her. “What was the point?”

She shrugged. “Cover. I figured I had the yak looking for me at least, and I still didn’t know what your end was, who you were playing for. Best to stay cloaked. Everywhere you go, people tend to leave the Beards alone.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, even the cops.” She lifted the ochre surplice over her head.

“Funny stuff, religion. No one wants to talk to a priest.”

“Especially one that might declare you an enemy of God for the way you cut your hair.”

“Well, yeah, that too I guess. Anyway, I got some novelty shop in Kem Point to make up the stuff, told them it was for a beach party. And you know what, it works. No one talks to me. Plus.” She freed herself from the rest of the robes with accustomed ease and jabbed a thumb at the mimintkiller shard gun strapped under her arm. “Makes great cover for the hardware.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“You lugged that fucking cannon all the way down here? What were you planning to do, splatter me across the Expanse with it?”

She gave me a sober look. Under the straps of the holster, her deCom T-shirt was printed with the words Caution: Smart Meat Weapon System.

“Maybe,” she said, and turned away to stow her disguise at the back of the tiny cabin.

Navigating the Expanse at night isn’t much fun when you’re driving a rental with the radar capacity of child’s toy. Both Jad and I were Newpest natives, and we’d seen enough skimmer wrecks growing up to throttle back and take it slow. It didn’t help that Hotei was still down and mounting cloud shrouded Daikoku at the horizon. There was a commercial traffic lane for the tourist buses, illuminum marker buoys marching off into the weed-fragrant night, but it wasn’t much help. Segesvar’s place was a long way off the standard routes. Within half an hour the buoys had faded out of sight and we were alone with the scant coppery light of a high-flung, speeding Marikanon.

“Peaceful out here,” Jad said, as if making the discovery for the first time.

I grunted and wheeled us left as the skimmer’s lights picked out a sprawl of tepes root ahead. The outermost branches scraped loudly on the metal of the skirt as we passed. Jad winced.

“Maybe we should have waited for morning.”

I shrugged. “Go back if you like.”

“No, I think—”

The radar blipped.

We both looked at the console, then at each other. The reported presence blipped again, louder.

“Maybe a bale freighter,” I said.

“Maybe.” But there was a hardened deCom dislike in her face as she watched the signal build.

I killed the forward drives and waited as the skimmer coasted to a gentle halt on the murmur of lift stabilisers. The scent of weed pressed inward. I stood up and leaned on the edge of the opened roof panels. Faintly, along with the smells of the Expanse, the breeze carried the sound of motors approaching.

I dropped back into the body of the cockpit.

“Jad, I think you’d better take the artillery and get up near the tail. Just in case.”

She nodded curtly and gestured for me to give her some space. I backed up and she swung herself effortlessly up onto the roof, then freed the shard blaster from its webbing holster. She glanced down at me.

“Fire control?”

I thought for a moment, then pumped the stabilisers. The murmuring of the lift system rose to a sustained growl, then sank back.

“Like that. You hear that, you shoot up everything in sight.”

“ ‘kay.”

Her feet scuffed on the superstructure, heading aft. I stood up again and watched as she settled into the cover of the skimmer’s tail assembly, then turned my attention back to the closing signal. The radar set was a bare minimum insurance necessity installation and it gave no detail beyond the steadily increasing blotch on the screen. But a couple of minutes later I didn’t need it. The gaunt, turreted silhouette rose on the horizon, came ploughing towards us and might as well have had an illuminum sign pasted on its prow.

Pirate.

Not dissimilar to a compact ocean-going hoverloader, it ran no navigation lights at all. It sat long and low on the surface of the Expanse, but bulked with crude plate armouring and weapons pods custom-welded to the original structure. I cranked neurachem vision and got the vague sense of figures moving about in low red lighting behind the glass panels at the nose, but no activity near the guns. As the vessel loomed and turned broadside to me, I saw lateral scrape marks in the metal of the skirt. Legacy of all the engagements that had ended in hull-to-hull boarding assault.

A spotlight snapped on and panned across me, then switched back and held. I held up my hand against the glare. Neurachem squeezed a view of silhouettes in a snub conning tower atop the pirate’s forward cabin. A young male voice, cranked tense with chemicals, floated across the soupy water.

“You Kovacs?”

“I’m Serendipity. What do you want?”

A dry, mirthless cackle. “Serendipity. Well, I just guess you fucking are. Serendipitous to the max from where I’m standing.”

“I asked you a question.”

“What do I want. Heard you. Well, what I want, first and foremost, I want your slim pal back there at the stern to stand down and put her hardware away. We’ve got her on infrared anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to turn her into panther feed with the vibe gun, but then you’d be upset, right?”

I said nothing.

“See, and you upset gets me nowhere. Supposed to keep you happy, Kovacs. Bring you along, but keep you happy. So your pal stands down, I’m happy, no need for fireworks and gore, you’re happy, you come along with me, people I work for are happy, they treat me right, I get even happier. Know what that’s called, Kovacs? That’s a virtuous circle.”

“Want to tell me who the people you work for are?”

“Well, yeah, I want to, obviously, but there’s just no way I can, see. Under contract, not a word to pass my lips about that shit ‘til you’re at the table and doing the something for you, something for me boogie. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to take all of this on trust.”

Or be blasted apart trying to leave.

I sighed and turned to the stern.

“Come on out, Jad.”

There was a long pause, and then she emerged from the shadows of the tail assembly, shard blaster hanging at her side. I still had the neurachem up, and the look on her face said she’d rather have fought it out.

“That’s much better,” called the pirate cheerfully. “Now we’re all friends.”