Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

He pulled a face.

“You said it yourself, I’m Millsport born and bred. And the yak like to be plugged in at high level. They’ve been all over me since I came home on my first Corps furlough a hundred and whatever years ago. They think we’re old friends.”

“And are you?”

I felt the stare. Ignored it.

“I’m an Envoy, Tak,” he said finally. “You want to remember that.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m your friend.”

“I’m already sold, Tod. You don’t need to run this routine on me. I’ll take you in Segesvar’s back door on condition you help me fuck him up. Now what’s your end?”

He shrugged. “Aiura has to go down for breach of Protectorate directives. Double-sleeving an Envoy—”

“Ex-Envoy.”

“Speak for yourself. He’s never been officially discharged, even if you have. And even for keeping the copy in the first place, someone in the Harlan hierarchy has to pay. That’s erasure mandatory.”

There was an oddly ragged edge on his voice now. I looked more closely at him. The obvious truth hit home.

“You think they’ve got one of you too, don’t you?”

A wry grin. “There’s something special about you, you’d be the only one they copied? Come on, Tak. Does that make any sense? I checked the records. That intake, there were about a dozen of us recruited from Harlan’s World. Whoever decided on this brilliant little piece of insurance back then, they would have copied us all. We need Aiura alive long enough to tell us where in the Harlan datastacks we can find them.”

“Alright. What else?”

“You know what else,” he said quietly.

I went back to watching the Expanse. “I’m not going to help you slaughter Brasil and the others, Tod.”

“I’m not asking you to. For Virginia’s sake alone, I’ll try to avoid that. But someone has to pay the Bugs’ bill. Tak, they murdered Mitzi Harlan on the streets of Millsport!”

“Big loss. Across the globe, skullwalk editors weep.”

“Alright,” he said grimly. “They also killed fuck knows how many other incidental victims in the process. Law enforcement. Innocent bystanders. I’ve got the latitude to seal this operation up afterwards, marked regime unrest stabilised, no need for further deployment. But I’ve got to show scapegoats, or the Corps auditors are going to be all over it like livewire. You know that, you know how it works. Someone has to pay.”

“Or be seen to.”

“Or be seen to. But it needn’t be Virginia.”

“Ex-Envoy heads planetary rebellion. No, I can see how that wouldn’t play too well with the Corps’ public relations people.”

He stopped. Stared at me with sudden hostility.

“Is that really what you think of me?”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “No. I’m sorry.”

“I’m doing my best to nail this shut with a minimum of pain to people who matter, Tak. And you’re not helping.”

“I know.”

“I need someone for Mitzi Harlan’s murder, and I need a ringleader. Someone who’ll play well as the evil genius behind all this shit. Maybe a couple of others to bulk up the arrest list.”

If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.

Koi’s words in the beached and stalled-out hoverloader on Vchira Beach. The words and the flicker of passion around his face as he spoke them, the passion, perhaps, of a martyr who had missed his moment once before and did not intend to again.

Koi, ex-Black Brigade.

But Sierra Tres had said much the same thing while we hid in the channels and fallen ruins of Eltevedtem. And Brasil’s demeanour said it for him, all the time. Maybe what they all wanted was martyrdom in a cause older and greater and weightier than themselves.

I pushed my thoughts aside, derailed them before they could get where they were going.

“And Sylvie Oshima?” I asked.

“Well.” Another shrug. “As I understand it, she’s been contaminated by something from the Uncleared zones. So allowing we can salvage her from the firefight, we have her cleansed and then hand her back her life. Does that sound reasonable?”

“It sounds untenable.”

I remembered Sylvie talking about the command software aboard Guns for Guevara. No matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. If Koi could fight and die for a ghost, who knew what the neoQuellists would make of Sylvie Oshima, even after her headgear was wiped.

“Is it?”

“Come on, Tod. She’s iconic. Whatever is or isn’t inside her, she could be the focus for a whole new neoQuellist wave. The First Families will want her liquidated on principle.”

Murakami grinned fiercely.

“What the First Families want, and what they get from me are going to be two radically different things, Tak.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He slurred it, for mockery. “Because if they don’t cooperate fully, I’ll promise them an Envoy deployment at assault strength.”

“And if they call your bluff?”

“Tak, I’m an Envoy. Brutalising planetary regimes is what we do. They’ll fold like a fucking deck chair, and you know it. They’re going to be so fucking grateful for the escape clause, they’d have their own children queuing up to tongue my arse clean if I asked.”

I looked at him then, and for just a moment it was as if a door had blown open on my Envoy past. He stood there, still grinning in the glare from the Angier spots, and he could have been me. And I remembered what it had really been like. It wasn’t the belonging that came flooding back to me this time, it was the brutal power of Corps enablement. The liberating savagery that rose out of a bone-deep knowledge that you were feared.

That you were whispered of across the Settled Worlds and that even in the corridors of governance on Earth, the power brokers grew quiet at your name. It was a rush that came on like branded-supply tetrameth. Men and women who might wreck or simply remove from the balance sheet a hundred thousand lives with a gesture, those men and women could be taught fear again, and the instrument of that lesson was the Envoy Corps.

Was you.

I forced an answering smile.

“You’re charming, Tod. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

“Nope.”

And, out of nowhere, the smile stopped being forced. I laughed and it seemed to shake something loose inside me.

“Alright. Talk to me, you bastard. How do we do this?”

He gave me the clownish raised brows again. “I was hoping you’d tell me. You’re the one with the floorplans.”

“Yeah, I meant what’s our assault strength. You’re not planning to use—”

Murakami jerked a thumb at the bulk of Impaler.

“Our spiky-minded friends there? I certainly am.”

“Fuck, Tod, they’re a bunch of meth-head kids. The haiduci are going to shred them.”

He gestured dismissively. “Work with the tools to hand, Tak. You know how it is. They’re young and angry and cranked up on meth, just looking for someone to take it out on. They’ll keep Segesvar occupied long enough for us to get in and do the real damage.”

I glanced at my watch. “You planning to do this tonight?”

“Dawn tomorrow. We’re waiting on Aiura, and according to Tanaseda, she won’t get in until the early hours. Oh yeah.” He tipped his head back and nodded at the sky. “And there’s the weather.”

I followed his gaze. Thick, dark battlements of cloud were piled up overhead, toppling steadily westward across a fragmentary, orange-tinged sky where Hotei’s light still struggled to make itself felt. Daikoku had long ago drowned in a muffled glow on the horizon. And now that I noticed, there was a fresh breeze across the Expanse that carried the unmistakable smell of the sea.