Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

He frowned. “I can’t allow that. Sorry.”

“So why don’t you just call down the wrath of the Envoys and stop wasting time?”

“Because I don’t fucking want the Corps here.” There was a sudden, brief desperation in his face as he spoke. “I’m from here, Tak. This is my home. You think I want to see the World turned into another Adoracion? Another Sharya?”

“Very noble of you.” Jad shifted against the canted windows, came forward to the table and poked at the datacoil. Purple and red sparked around her fingers where they broke the field. “So what’s the battleplan, Mister Qualms?”

His eyes flickered between the two of us, came to rest on me. I shrugged.

“It’s a fair question, Tod.”

He hesitated for a moment. It made me think of the moment I’d had to unpin my own numbed fingers from the cable beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura. He was letting go of a lifetime of Envoy commitment here, and my own lapsed membership of the Corps wasn’t much in the way of a justification.

Finally, he grunted and spread his hands.

“Okay. Here’s the newsflash.” He pointed at me. “Your pal Segesvar has sold you out.”

I blinked. Then: “No fucking way.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Haiduci dues, right? He owes you. Thing is, Tak, you got to ask yourself which of you he thinks he owes.”

Oh shit.

He saw it hit me and nodded again. “Yeah, I know all about that too. See, Takeshi Kovacs saved Segesvar’s life a couple of centuries ago, objective time. But that’s something both copies of you did. Old Radul’s got a debt alright, but he apparently sees no reason to discharge it more than the once. And your younger, fresher self has just cut a deal on that very basis. Segesvar’s men took most of your beach party revolutionaries early this morning. Would have got you, Vidaura and the deCom woman too, if you hadn’t all taken off on some crack-of-dawn errand to the Strip.”

“And now?” The last stubborn fragments of clinging hope. Scour them out, and face the facts with features carved out of stone. “They’ve got Vidaura and the others now?”

“Yes, they took them on their return. They’re holding everyone until Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka can arrive with a clean-up squad. Had you gone back with the others, you’d be sharing a locked room with them now. So.” A rapidly flexed smile, a raised brow. “Looks like you owe me a favour.”

I let the fury come aboard, like deep breath, like a swelling. Let it rage through me, then tamped it carefully down like a half-smoked seahemp cigar, saved for later. Lock it down, think.

“How come you know all this, Tod?”

He gestured, self-deprecating. “Like I said, I live here. Pays to keep the wires humming. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is. Who’s your fucking source, Tod?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I shrugged. “Then I can’t help you.”

“You’re just going to let it all go? Segesvar sells you out, he gets to walk away? Your friends from the beach get to die? Come on, Tak.”

I shook my head. “I’m tired of fighting other people’s battles for them. Brasil and friends got themselves into this, they can get themselves out. And Segesvar will keep. I’ll get to him later.”

“And Vidaura?”

“What about her?”

“She trained us, Tak.”

“Yeah, us. Get on and save her yourself.”

If you weren’t an Envoy, you would have missed it. It was less than a flicker, some millimetric shift in stance, maybe not even that. But Murakami slumped.

“I can’t do it on my own,” he said quietly. “I don’t know the inside of Segesvar’s place, and without that I’d need an Envoy platoon to take it.”

“Then call in the Corps.”

“You know what that would do to—”

“Then tell me who your flicking source is.”

“Yeah,” said Jad sardonically, in the quiet that followed. “Or just ask him to come in from next door.”

She caught my eye and nodded at a closed drop-hatch in the back of the tower room. I took a step towards it and Murakami could barely hold himself back from the blocking move he wanted to make. He glared at Jad.

“Sorry,” she said, and tapped her head with a forefinger. “Dataflow alert. Pretty standard wincefish hardware. Your friend in there is using a phone, and he’s moving about a lot. Pacing nervously would be my guess.”

I grinned at Murakami. “Well, Tod. Your call.”

The tension lasted a couple of seconds more, then he sighed and gestured me forward.

“Go ahead. You would have worked it out sooner or later anyway.”

I went to the drop-hatch, found the panel and thumbed it. The machinery grumbled to itself somewhere deep in the building. The hatch cranked upward in juddery, hesitant increments. I leaned into the space it left.

“Good evening. So which one of you’s the snitch?”

Four faces turned towards me, and as soon as I saw them, four severely dressed figures in black, the pieces thumped into place in my head like the sound of the drop-hatch reaching the end of its recess. Three were muscle, two men and and a woman and the skin on their faces all had a shiny plastic elasticity where their facial tattooing had been sprayed over. It was a short-term, daily option that wouldn’t stand much professional scrutiny.

But deep as they were into haiduci turf, it probably would save them from having to fight pitched battles on every Newpest street corner.

The fourth, the one holding the phone, was older but unmistakable by demeanour alone. I nodded my understanding.

“Tanaseda, I presume. Well, well.”

He bowed slightly. It went with the package, the same groomed, old school manners and look. He wore no facial skin decoration because at the levels he’d attained, he would be a frequent visitor in First Family enclaves that would frown on it. But you could still see the honour scars where they had been removed without benefit of modern surgical technique. His grey streaked black hair was bound back tightly in a short ponytail, the better to reveal the scarring across the forehead and accentuate the long bones of the face. The eyes beneath the brow were brown and hard like polished stones. The careful smile he gave me was the same one he would bestow upon death if and when it came for him.

“Kovacs-san.”

“So what’s your end of this, sam?” The muscle bristled collectively at my disrespect. I ignored it, glanced back at Murakami instead. “I take it you know he wants me Really Dead, as slowly and unpleasantly as possible.”

Murakami locked gazes with the yakuza senior.

“That can be resolved,” he murmured. “Is this not so, Tanaseda-san?”

Tanaseda bowed again. “It has come to my notice that though you were involved in the death of Hirayasu Yukio, you were not wholly to blame.”

“So?” I shrugged to displace the rising anger, because the only way he could have heard that little snippet was through virtual interrogation of Orr or Kiyoka or Lazlo, after my younger self helped him kill them.

“Doesn’t usually cut much ice with you people, who’s really to blame or not.”

The woman in his entourage made a tiny growling sound deep in her throat. Tanaseda cut it with a tiny motion of his hand at his side, but the gaze he bent on me belied the calm in his tone.

“It has also become clear to me that you are in possession of Hirayasu Yukio’s cortical storage device.”

“Ah.”

“Is this so?”

“Well, if you think I’m going to let you search me for it, you can—”

“Tak.” Murakami’s voice came out lazy, but it wasn’t. “Behave. Do you have Hirayasu’s stack or not?”

I paused on the hinge of the moment, more than half of me hoping they might try to strongarm it. The man on Tanaseda’s left twitched and I smiled at him. But they were too well-trained.