Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

His name was Vlad Tepes, named apparently not for the vegetation but after some dimly remembered folk-hero from pre-colonial times. He was lanky and pale, wearing flesh like some cheap, young shaven-headed version of Jack Soul Brasil that they’d thrown out at prototype stage. Flesh that something told me was his own, his first sleeve, in which case he wasn’t much older than Isa had been. There were acne scars on his cheeks that he fingered occasionally and he trembled from head to foot with tetrameth overload. He overgestured and laughed too much, and at some point in his young life he’d had the bone of his skull opened at the temples and filled with jagged lightning-flash sections of purple-black alloy cement. The stuff glinted in the low light aboard the pirate vessel as he moved about and when you looked at him head on, it gave his face a faintly demonic aspect which was obviously what was intended. The men and women around him on the bridge gave ground with alacrity to his jerky, meth-driven motion, and respect read out in their eyes as they watched him.

The radical surgery aside, he reminded me of Segesvar and myself at that age, so much that it ached.

The vessel, perhaps predictably, rejoiced in the name Impaler, and it ran due west at speed, trampling imperiously through obstacles smaller and less armoured skimmers would have needed to go around.

“Got to,” Vlad informed us succinctly as something crunched under the armoured skirt. “Everyone’s been looking for you on the Strip, and not very well is my guess, ‘cause they didn’t find you, did they. Hah! Anyway, wasted a fuck of a lot of time that way and my clients, they seem pushed temporally, if you know what I mean.”

On the identity of the clients, he remained steadfastly closemouthed, which, on that much meth, is no mean feat.

“Look, be there soon, anyway,” he jittered, face twitching. “Why worry?”

In this at least, he was telling the truth. Barely an hour after we’d been taken aboard, Impaler slowed and drifted cautiously broadside towards a decayed ruin of a baling station in the middle of nowhere. The pirate’s coms officer ran a series of scrambled interrogation protocols and whoever was inside the ruined station had a machine that knew the code. The coms woman looked up and nodded. Vlad stood glitter-eyed before his instrument displays and snapped instructions like insults. Impaler picked up a little lateral speed again, fired grapple lines into the evercrete dock pilings with a series of splintering smacks and then cranked itself in tight. Green lights and a gangplank extended.

“Let’s go then, come on.” He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honour guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed, chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris, and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarised windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.

Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still …

I remembered the voyage aboard the Angelfire Flirt, the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.

And then everything came tumbling down.

“Hello Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?”

Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.

“Didn’t see that one coming, huh?” he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?”

“Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?” He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. “Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there too.”

I felt Jad bristle at my back.

“She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.”

He shrugged and nodded at my newly-acquired pirate friends. “Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.”

It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.

“That was a joke,” he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.

“Yeah, I guessed.” Jad wandered past me to the windows and peered out at the moored bulk of the Impaler. “So Micky, Tak, Kovacs, whoever the fuck you are at the moment. Want to introduce me to your friend?”

“Uh, yeah. Tod, this is Jadwiga. As you obviously already know, she’s from deCom. Jad, Todor Murakami, colleague of mine from, uh, the old days.”

“I’m an Envoy,” Murakami supplied casually.

To her credit, Jad barely blinked. She took the hand he offered with a slightly incredulous smile, then propped herself against the outward lean of the tower windows and folded her arms.

Murakami took the hint.

“So what’s all this about?”

I nodded. “We can start there.”

“I think you can probably guess.”

“I think you can probably drop the elicitation and just tell me.”

He grinned and touched a trigger finger to his temple. “Sorry, force of habit. Alright, look. Here’s my problem. According to sources, seems you’ve got a little revolutionary momentum up here, maybe enough to seriously rock the First Families’ boat.”

“Sources?”

Another grin. No ground given up. “That’s right. Sources.”

“I didn’t know you guys were deployed here.”

“We’re not.” A little of his Envoy cool slipped from him, as if by the admission he’d lost some kind of vital access to it. He scowled. “Like I said, this is pro bono. Damage limitation. You know as well as I do, we can’t afford a neoQuellist uprising.”

“Yeah?” This time, I was the one grinning. “Who’s we, Tod? The Protectorate? The Harlan family? Some other bunch of super-rich fucks?”

He gestured irritably. “I’m talking about all of us, Tak. You really think that’s what this planet needs, another Unsettlement. Another war?”

“Takes two sides to run a war, Tod. If the First Families wanted to accept the neoQuellist agenda, institute reforms, well.” I spread my hands. “Then I can’t see there’d be any need for an uprising at all. Maybe you should be talking to them.”

A frown. “Why are you talking like this, Tak? Don’t tell me you’re buying into this shit.”

I paused. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What kind of fucked political philosophy is that?”

“It isn’t a philosophy at all, Tod. It’s just a feeling that maybe we’ve all had enough. That maybe it’s time to burn these motherfuckers down.”