Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

My left hand lashed out. Grabbed his leg round the calf as it swung back from the kick. Blood gouted from my nose. The gekko grip locked. I yanked back savagely and he did a ridiculous little one-legged jig at the edge of the pen. He looked down at me, face working.

I fell, and dragged him down.

It wasn’t far to fall. The sides of the pen sloped the same way as the fight pits and the fallen walkway had jammed itself halfway down the evercrete wall, almost on an even keel. I hit the meshed metal and Segesvar landed on top of me. I lost the air in my lungs. The walkway juddered and scraped down another half metre. Below us, the panther went crazy, flailing at the rail, trying to tear it down to the floor of the pen. It could smell the blood streaming from my broken nose.

Segesvar squirmed around, fury still in his eyes. I threw a punch. He smothered it. Snarling monosyllables through gritted teeth, he got his injured arm across my throat and leaned on it. It ripped a cry out of him, but he never eased the pressure for a moment. The panther slammed into the side of the fallen gantry, blasting the stink of its breath through the mesh at my side. I saw one raging eye, obliterated by sparks as the talons tore at the metal. It shrilled and slobbered at us like something insane.

Maybe it was.

I kicked and flailed, but Segesvar had me locked down. Nearly two centuries of street violence stored up, he didn’t lose this kind of fight. He glared down at me and the hate fed him strength to beat the pain of the shardblast damage in his arm. I got one arm free and tried again to punch him in the throat, but he had that covered too. An elbow block and my fingers barely grazed the side of his face. Then he held my arm locked there and settled his weight harder onto the injured arm that was choking me.

I raised my head and bit through the jacket into the shredded flesh of his forearm. Blood welled up in the cloth and filled my mouth. He screamed, and punched me in the side of the head with his other arm. The pressure on my throat began to tell—I couldn’t breathe any more. The panther battered at the metal gantrywork, and it shifted. I slipped fractionally sideways.

Used the shift.

Forced my open palm and fingers flat against the side of his face.

Dragged downward hard.

The gekko gene spines bit and gripped the skin. Where the pads at the tips and the base of my fingers pressed hardest, Segesvar’s face tore open.

Street-fighter instinct had screwed his eyes shut as I grabbed him, but it did no good. The grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve. He screamed, gut deep. A sudden spray of blood squirted red against the grey of the rain, splattered warm on my face. He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood. I yelled and came after him, hooked a punch into the undamaged side of his face that threw him staggering sideways against the walkway rail.

He sprawled there for a second, left hand raised dizzily to block me, right fist curled tight despite the damage the arm had taken.

And the swamp panther took him down.

There and gone. It was a blur of mane and mantle, forelimb slash and beakgape. Its claws hooked into him at shoulder height and hauled him down off the walkway like a rag doll. He screamed once, and then I heard a single, savage crunch as the beak snapped closed. I didn’t see, but it probably bit him in half there and then.

For what must have been a full minute I stood swaying on the canted walkway, listening to the sound of flesh being torn apart and swallowed, bones being snapped. Finally, I staggered to the rail and made myself look.

I was too late. Nothing in the carnage around the feeding panther looked like it had ever been remotely associated with a human body.

Rain was already sluicing the worst of the blood away.

Swamp panthers aren’t very bright. Fed, this one showed little or no interest in my continuing existence over its head. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Rapsodia, couldn’t see it and so set about getting out of the pen. With the multiple fractures Impaler’s arrival had put in the evercrete wall, it wasn’t too difficult. I used the widest crack for leverage, jammed in my feet and hauled myself up hand over hand. With the exception of a bad scare when a chunk of evercrete came away in my hand at the top, it was a swift and uneventful climb. On the way up, something in the Eishundo system gradually stopped my nose bleeding.

I stood at the top and listened for the sounds of battle. Heard nothing above the storm, and even that seemed quieter. The fighting was either done, or down to skulk-and-stalk. Apparently I’d underestimated Vlad and his crew.

Yeah, or the haiduci.

Time to find out which.

I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much any more about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt.

We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously levelled.

I found the others a half dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor, the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognised but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amidst the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped round, levelled the blaster and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head round the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

“Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?”

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.

“Beats me. Looks like we got here too late. You know them?”

“Where’s Murakami?”

He gestured back the way he’d come. “Over the far side, up on the parking dock. He sent me to find you, case you needed help. Fighting’s mostly done, you know. Just mopping up and some good old piracy to do now.” He grinned again. “Time to get paid. Come on, this way.”