Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

He doesn’t even bother to close the door as he goes back to her.

But as I sit there in a useless heap, beginning to cry, she reaches out across the floor and shoves at the doorjamb with her hand, so it swings closed on what’s about to happen.

Then only the sound of blows, and the closed door receding.

I flounder through the canted corridor, chasing the door as the last light squeezes through the crack, and the weeping in my throat modulates upward towards a ripwing scream. A tidal rage is rising in me, and I’m growing with it,

I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door,

I’ll get there before he finally walks out on us all, disappears out of our lives and

I’ll make him disappear, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons, and the viscous slop is draining away and I hit the door like a swamp panther, but it makes no difference, it’s been closed too long, it’s solid and the impact reverberates through me like a stunblast and—

Oh, yeah. Stunblast.

So it’s not a door it’s—

—the dockside, and my face was crushed against it, sticky in a little pool of spittle and blood where I’d apparently bitten my tongue as I went down.

It’s not an uncommon outcome with stunners.

I coughed and choked on a throatful of mucus. Spat it out, took a rapid damage inventory and wished I hadn’t. My whole body was a jarring assemblage of trembling and ache from the stunblast. Nausea clawed at my bowels and the pit of my stomach, my head felt light and filled with starry air. The side of my face throbbed where the rifle butt had hit me. I lay for a moment getting it all back under some kind of control, then peeled my face away from the dock and heaved my neck up like a seal. It was a short, abortive movement. My hands were locked behind my back with some kind of webbing, and I couldn’t see much above ankle height.

Warm throb of active bioweld around my wrists. It gave so as not to maim hands held cuffed for long periods, it would dissolve like warm wax when you poured the right enzyme on it, but you could no more wriggle out of it than you could pull your own fingers off.

Pressure on my pocket brought home an expected truth. They’d taken the Tebbit knife. I was unarmed.

I retched and brought up the thin leavings of an empty stomach. Fell back and tried hard not to get my face in it. I could hear blaster fire from a long way off, and, faintly, what sounded like laughter.

A pair of boots splashed past in the wet. Stopped and came back.

“He’s coming right back round,” someone said, and whistled. “Tough little motherfucker. Hey, Vidaura, did you say you trained this guy?”

No reply. I heaved up again and succeeded in rolling onto my side.

Blinked dazedly up at the form standing over me. Vlad Tepes looked down out of a clearing sky that had almost given up on rain. The look on his face was serious and admiring, and he stood absolutely still as he watched me.

No trace of his former meth-head twitchiness to be seen.

“Good performance,” I croaked at him.

“Liked it, huh?” He grinned. “Had you fooled, right?”

I ran my tongue around my teeth and spat out some blood mingled with vomit. “Yeah, I thought Murakami had to be fucking cracked to use you. So what happened to the original Vlad?”

“Ah, well.” He made a wry face. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know. How many more of you are there? Apart from your gorgeous-breasted psychosurgical specialist, that is.”

He laughed easily. “Yeah, she said she caught you looking. Beautiful piece of meat, isn’t it. You know, the last thing Liebeck wore before that was a Limon cable athlete’s sleeve. Flat as a board. A year down the line and she still can’t make up her mind if she’s pleased or pissed off about the change.”

“Limon, huh? Limon, Latimer.”

“That’s right.”

“Home of cutting-edge deCom.”

He grinned. “All starting to make sense, is it?”

It isn’t easy to shrug when you’re cuffed behind your back and flat to the floor. I did my best. “I saw the Tseng gear in her cabin.”

“Damn, so you weren’t looking at her tits.”

“No, I was,” I admitted. “But you know how it is. Nothing peripheral is ever lost.”

“That is the racking truth.”

“Mallory.”

We both looked towards the shout. Todor Murakami was striding along the dock from the direction of the wet bunker. He was unarmed apart from the Kalashnikov at his hip and the knife on his chest. Soft rain fell around him with a sparkle in it from the brightening sky.

“Our renegade’s sitting up and spitting,” said Mallory, gesturing at me.

“Good. Now, since you’re the only one who can get that crew of yours to do anything in a co-ordinated fashion, why don’t you go and sort them out. There are still bodies at the brothel end with stacks intact, I saw them on my way through. There may even be living witnesses hiding down there for all I know. I want a final sweep, no one left alive, and I want every stack melted to slag.” Murakami gestured disgustedly. “Jesus fuck, they’re pirates, you’d think they could manage that. Instead of which, most of them are playing at setting the panthers loose and using them for target practice. Just listen to it.”

The blasterfire was still in the air, long, undisciplined bursts laced with excited shouting and laughter. Mallory shrugged.

“So where’s Tomaselli?”

“Still setting up the gear with Liebeck. And Wang’s waiting for you on the bridge, trying to make sure no one gets eaten by accident. It’s your boat, Vlad. Go get them to stop racking about, and when they’ve finished the sweep, bring Impaler round to this side for loading.”

“Alright.” Like a ripple over water, Mallory adopted the Vlad persona and started to pick twitchily at his acne scars. He nodded down at me. “See you soon as I see you, eh, Kovacs. Soon as.”

I watched him to the corner of the station wall and round it, out of sight.

Flicked my gaze back to Murakami, who was still staring away towards the sounds of the post-op merriment.

“Fucking amateurs,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“So,” I said bleakly. “You’re deployed after all.”

“Got it in one.” As he spoke, Murakami crouched and hauled me up into an ungainly sitting position with a grunt. “Don’t hold it against me, huh? Not like I could have told you last night and appealed to your sense of nostalgia for help, is it?”

I looked around from my new vantage point and saw Virginia Vidaura, slumped against a mooring post, arms bound back. There was a long darkening bruise across her face, and her eye had swollen. She looked dully at me, and then away. There were tears smeared in the dirt and sweat on her face. No sign of Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve, dead or alive.

“So instead you played me for a sucker.”

He shrugged. “Work with the tools to hand, you know.”

“How many of you are there? Not the whole crew, apparently.”

“No,” he smiled faintly. “Just five. Mallory there, Liebeck, who I understand you’ve met, sort of. Two others, Tomaselli and Wang, and me.”

I nodded. “Covert deployment strength. I should have known there was no way you’d be just hanging around Millsport on furlough. How long have you been on the ground?”

“Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.”

“Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.”

“Not really.” Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. “They’re not overly perceptive, these meth-head guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag.” He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. “Bye bye head, bye bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after.