Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

“So does he remember you mewling and crawling in a back alley with your fucking thigh ripped open, Rad? Does he fucking remember that?”

“Yeah, he does. But you know what?” Segesvar’s voice scaled upward.

Must have hit a nerve. “He just doesn’t break my balls about it all the fucking time. And he doesn’t milk it to take fucking liberties with my finances.”

A little closer. I pitched my own voice amused.

“Yeah, and he’s plugged you in with the First Families too. Which is what this is really about, right? You’ve sold out to a bunch of fucking aristos, Rad. Just like the fucking yakuza. You’ll be moving to Millsport next.”

“Hey, fuck you Kovacs!”

The fury came accompanied by another blaster bolt, but it was nowhere close. I grinned in the rain and dialled the Rapsodia up to maximum dispersal. Pressed myself up out of the water. Cranked the neurachem.

“And I’m the one who’s forgotten where he’s from? Come on, Rad. You’ll be wearing a slit-eyed sleeve before you know it.”

Close enough.

“Hey fuck—”

I rose to my feet and hurled myself forward. His voice cued me in, neurachem vision did the rest. I spotted him crouched at the far side of one of the feeding pens, part shielded by the steel mesh side of a bridging walkway. The Rapsodia spewed monomol fragments from my fist as I ran round the oval walkway of the fight pit. No time for better aim, just have to hope that—

He yelped and I saw him stagger, clutching at an arm. Savage joy coursed through me, peeled my lips back from my teeth. I fired again and he either collapsed or dived for cover. I leapt the rail between the gallery I was on and the feeding pen beyond. Nearly tripped—didn’t. Swayed back on balance and made a split-second decision. I couldn’t go round on the wall. If Segesvar was still alive, he’d be back on his feet in the time it took, he’d cook me with the blaster. The walkway was a straight sprint, half a dozen metres across the top of the pen. I hit it running.

The metal beneath my feet tilted sickeningly.

Down in the pen, something leapt and snarled. The sea-and-rotting flesh stink of the panther’s breath came boiling up at me.

Later, I would have time to understand: the feeding pen had taken a glancing blow from Impaler’s arrival and the evercrete on the side where Segesvar waited had fractured open. That end of the walkway hung by nothing more than bolts ripped halfway loose of their mountings. And somehow, from some similar damage elsewhere in the pen complex, one of the swamp panthers was out.

I was still two metres out from the end of the walkway when the bolts tore all the way out. Eishundo reflex threw me forward. I lost the Rapsodia, grabbed at the edge of the pen with both hands. The walkway dropped out from under me. My palms closed on rain-drenched evercrete.

One hand slipped. The gekko grip in the other held me up. Somewhere below me, the swamp panther struck sparks from the fallen gantry with its talons, then fell back with a shrill howl. I scrabbled for purchase with my other hand.

Segesvar’s head appeared over the lip of the pen wall. He was pale and there was blood soaking through the right arm of his jacket, but he grinned when he saw me.

“Well, fucking well,” he said, almost conversationally. “My old self righteous fucking friend Takeshi Kovacs.”

I heaved sideways desperately. Got a heel hooked over the edge of the pen. Segesvar saw it and limped closer.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, and kicked my foot away. I swung out again, barely retaining grip with both hands. He stood above me and stared down for a moment. Then he looked away across the fight pits, and nodded with vague satisfaction. The rain hammered down around us.

“So for once I’m looking down on you.”

I panted. “Oh, fuck off.”

“You know that panther down there might even be one of your religious friends. That’d be ironic, eh?”

“Just get on with it, Rad. You’re a sell-out piece of shit and nothing you do here is going to prove any different.”

“That’s right, Takeshi. Take the fucking moral high ground.” His face contorted, and for a moment I thought he was going to kick my hands away there and then. “Like you always do. Oh, Radul’s a fucking criminal, Radul can’t handle himself, I had to save Radul’s fucking life once. You been doing it since you slimed Yvonna away from me, and you never fucking change?”

I gaped up at him in the rain, the drop below me almost forgotten. Spat water out of my mouth.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You know fucking well what I’m talking about! Watanabe’s that summer, Yvonna Vasarely, with the green eyes.”

Memory flared with the name. Hirata’s Reef, the long-limbed silhouette above me. A sea-wet, salt-tasting body on damp rubber suits.

Hang on tight.

“I.” I shook my head numbly. “I thought she was called Eva.”

“You see, you fucking see.” It came seething up out of him like pus, like poison contained too long. His face distorted with rage. “You didn’t give a shit about her, she was just another nameless fuck for you.”

For long moments, my past swept back over me like surf. The Eishundo sleeve took over and I hung in a lit tunnel of kaleidoscope images from that summer. Out on the deck at Watanabe’s. The heat, pressing down from a leaden sky. Scant breeze across the Expanse, not enough to stir the heavy mirrored windchimes. Flesh slick with sweat beneath clothing, beaded with it where you could see. Languid talk and laughter, the acrid aroma of seahemp on the air. The green-eyed girl.

“That’s two hundred fucking years ago, Rad. And you weren’t even talking to her most of the time. You were snorting meth out of Malgazorta Bukovski’s cleavage, as per fucking usual.”

“I didn’t know how to. She was.” He locked up. “I fucking cared about her, you cunt.”

At first I couldn’t identify the noise that came out of me. It could have been a choked cough with the rain that forced its way down my throat every time I opened my mouth. It felt a little like a sob, a tiny wrenching sense of something coming loose inside. A slippage, a loss.

But it wasn’t.

It was laughter.

It came up through me after the first spluttering cough like warmth, demanding space in my chest and a way out. It blew the water out of my mouth, and I couldn’t stop it.

“Stop laughing, you fuck.”

I couldn’t stop. I giggled. Fresh energy curled up my arms with the unlooked-for hilarity, into my gekko hands, new tensile strength down the length of every finger.

“You stupid bastard, Rad. She was Newpest money, she wasn’t ever going to waste herself on street like us. She went off to study in Millsport that autumn and I never saw her again. She told me I’d never see her again. Said not to get hung up about it, we’d had fun but it wasn’t our lives.”

Barely conscious of what I was doing, I found I’d started to heave myself up to the lip of the pen while he stared at me. The hard evercrete edge of it against my chest. Panting as I talked. “You really think. You’d ever have got near someone like that, Rad? Thought she’d have your. Babies, and sit on Spekny Wharf with the other gang wives? Waiting for you to come home. Fried from Watanabe’s at dawn? I mean.” Between grunts, the laughter came bubbling up again. “How fucking desperate would a woman, any woman, have to be for that?”

“Fuck you!” he screamed, and kicked me in the face.

I suppose I knew it was coming. I was certainly pushing him hard enough. But it all seemed suddenly very distant and unimportant alongside the glittery bright images of that summer. And anyway, it was the Eishundo sleeve, not me.