Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

Numbly, I followed him. We crossed the wet bunker, through corridors marked with the signs of recent battle, blaster-charred walls and ugly splashes of shattered human tissue, the odd sprawled corpse and once an absurdly well-dressed middle-aged man sitting on the floor staring in catatonic disbelief at his shattered legs sticking straight out in front of him. He must have been flushed from the casino or the brothel when the raid started, must have fled down into the bunker complex and got caught in the crossfire. As we reached him, he raised both arms weakly towards us, and Vlad shot him with the plasmafrag. We left him with steam curling up from the massive hole through his chest and climbed up an access ladder into the body of the old baling station.

Out on the parking dock, there was similar carnage. Crumpled bodies were strewn across the wharf and in amongst the moored skimmers. Here and there, small flames burned where blasterfire had found something more readily flammable than human flesh and bone. Smoke drifted through the rain. The wind was definitely dying down.

Murakami was by the water, knelt beside a slumped Virginia Vidaura and talking urgently to her. One hand cradled the side of her face. A couple of Vlad’s pirates stood around, arguing amiably, with their weapons slung over their shoulders. They were all drenched, but apparently unharmed.

Across the forward carapace of a green-painted Expansemobile moored nearby, Anton’s body.

He lay head down, eyes frozen open, rainbow command-head hair trailing down almost to the water. There was a hole you could have put your head through where his chest and stomach had been. It looked as if Jad had got him dead centre from behind with the shard blaster’s focus dialled up to tight. The blaster itself lay discarded on the dock amidst pools of blood. Of Jad, there was no sign.

Murakami saw us coming and let go of Vidaura’s face. He picked up the shard blaster and held it out to me in both hands. The magazine was ejected, the breech clear. It had been fired empty, then discarded. He shook his head.

“We’ve looked for her, but there’s nothing. Col here says he thinks he saw her go into the water. Shot from the wall up there. Could be she was only winged but in this shit.” He gestured at the weather. “No way to tell ‘til we sweep for bodies. Storm’s moving out westward, dying off. We can look then.”

I stared down at Virginia Vidaura. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but she looked to be semi-conscious, head lolling. I turned back to Murakami.

“What the fuck is—”

And the shard blaster butt came up and hit me in the head.

White fire, disbelief. A brand new nosebleed.

Who—

I staggered, gaped, fell down.

Murakami stood over me. He tossed the shard blaster away and pulled a neat little stunner from his belt.

“Sorry, Tak.”

Shot me with it.

At the end of a very long, darkened corridor, there’s a woman waiting for me. I’m trying to hurry, but my clothes are waterlogged and heavy, and the corridor itself is canted at an angle and almost knee-deep in viscous stuff that I’d think was congealing blood except it stinks of belaweed. I flounder forward on the submerged, tilted floor, but the open doorway doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Got a problem, sam?

I crank the neurachem, but something’s wrong with the bioware because what I can see is like an ultradistant sniperscope image. I only have to twitch and it dances about all over the place, hurting my eyes when they try to keep focus. Half the time the woman is Vlad’s well-endowed pirate comrade, stripped to the waist and bent over the modules of unfamiliar equipment on the floor of her cabin. Long, large breasts hanging like fruit—I can feel the roof of my mouth aching to suck in one of the blunt, darkened nipples. Then, just when I think I’ve got a grip on the view, it slides away and becomes a tiny kitchen with handpainted blinds that block out the Kossuth sunlight. There’s a woman there too, also stripped to the waist, but it isn’t the same one because I know her.

The scope wobbles again. My eyes stray to the hardware on the floor. Matt grey impact-resistant casings, lustrous black discs where datacoils will spring up when activated. The logo on each module is inscribed in ideographic characters that I recognise, though I don’t currently have a reading knowledge of either Hun Home or Earth Chinese. Tseng Psychographics. It’s a name I’ve seen around battlefields and psychosurgical recovery units in the recent past, a new name. A new star in the rarified constellation of military brand names, a name and a brand that only very well-funded organisations can afford.

What you got there?

Kalashnikov electromag. One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.

Wonder where he stole it from.

Who says it had to be stolen?

I do. These guys are pirates.

Abruptly, my palm is full of the rounded, voluptuous weight of the Kalashnikov butt. It gleams up at me in the low light of the corridor, and it’s begging to be squeezed.

Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No meth-head pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun.

I thrash forward another couple of steps, as an awful sense of my own failure to grasp the facts soaks into me. It’s as if I’m sucking up the viscous stuff in the corridor through tap roots in my legs and waterlogged boots, and I know that when I’m full it’s going to clog me to a violent stop.

And then I’ll swell and explode with it, like a bag of blood squeezed too hard.

You come in here again, boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.

I feel my own eyes widen with shock. I peer through the sniperscope again and this time it’s not the woman with the hardware, and it’s not the cabin aboard Impaler.

It’s the kitchen.

And it’s my mother.

She’s standing, one foot in a bowl of soapy water, and leaning over to swab her leg with a blob of cheap farm-cultured hygisponge. She’s wearing a thigh-length wrap-around weed-gatherer’s skirt that’s split down one side and she’s naked to the waist, and she’s young, younger than I can normally remember her. Her breasts hang long and smooth, like fruit, and my mouth aches with a trace memory of tasting them. She looks sideways and down at me then, and smiles.

And he slams into the room from another door that fleeting recall tells me leads out onto the wharf. Slams into the room, and slams into her like something elemental.

You cunt, you conniving fucking cunt.

With the shock of it, again, my eyes crank, and I’m suddenly standing at the threshold. The sniperscope veil is gone, this is now and real. It takes me the first three blows to move. Backhander with full swing, it’s a blow we’ve all had from him at one time or another, but this time he’s really letting go—she’s catapulted back across the kitchen into the table and falls, she gets up and he punches her down again and there’s blood, bright from her nose in a stray beam of sunlight through the blind, she struggles to get up, from the floor this time, and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me, over the threshold, over my bare feet, and then it’s as if a ghost of myself stays at the door while the rest of me runs into the room and tries to get between them.

I’m small, probably not much more than five, and he’s drunk so the blow falls inaccurately. But it’s enough to knock me back out the door. Then he comes and stands over me, hands braced clumsily on his knees, breathing heavily through a slack mouth.

You come in here again boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.