Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!” Murakami slapped fist into palm.

“That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and re-sleeve in a hotel bathroom.”

Sourcetown.

“You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?”

“Among others.” Another shrug. “The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.”

“Hence Tanaseda.”

“Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the haiduci, well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate no-table-manners version of the same disease. By the way, did you get your pal Segesvar? Forgot to ask before I dented you out there.”

“Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.”

Murakami chuckled. “Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?”

I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse.

“What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?”

“Ah—no, not yet.”

I opened my eyes again, surprised.

“He’s still walking around somewhere?”

Murakami made an embarrassed gesture. “Apparently. Looks like you were hard to kill, even at that age. We’ll get him, though.”

“Will you,” I said sombrely.

“Yeah, we will. With Aiura down, he’s got no handler, nowhere to run. And sure as fucking lightspeed no one else in the First Families is going to want to pick up where she left off. Not if they want the Protectorate to stay home and let them keep their oligarch toys.”

“Or,” I said casually, “you could just kill me now you’ve got me, then let him come in and cut a deal.”

Murakami frowned. “That’s not funny, Tak.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. He’s still calling himself an Envoy, you know. He’d probably jump at the chance to get back in the Corps if you offered.”

“I don’t fucking care.” There was anger in his tone now. “I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.”

“Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.”

“My life’s easy enough,” he growled. “Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.”

“You get a stack out of Aiura?”

“Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. “You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.”

He grinned unpleasantly. “Everybody cracks in the end, Tak. You know that. Virtual interrogation, it’s crack or go insane, and these days we can even bring them back from that.” The grin faded out to something harder and no less unpleasant. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Our beloved leader-in perpetuity Konrad will never know what we do or don’t get out of her. He’ll just assume the worst and cringe to heel. Or I’ll call in an assault force, torch Rila Crags around him and then feed him and his whole fucking family to the EMP.”

I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. “You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.” Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. “Is it?”

“Sorry?” But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been running for about four years, which ties in rather too neatly with the start of the Mecsek initiative. You’re not here for the Quellists, you’re here to keep an eye on the deCom technology.”

The grin crept out. “Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.”

“The orbitals?” I blinked at him. “What have the orbitals got to do with it?”

“At the moment, nothing. And that’s the way we’d like it to stay. But with deCom tech, there’s just no way to be sure of that any more.”

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the numbness. “Wha—? Why?”

“Because,” he said seriously. “The fucking stuff appears to work.”

They brought Sylvie Oshima’s body out of the baling station on a bulky grey grav sled with Tseng markings and a curving plastic shield to keep the rain off. Liebeck steered the sled with a hand-held remote, and another woman I assumed was Tomaselli brought up the rear with a shoulder borne monitor system, also Tseng-logo’d. I’d managed to lever myself to my feet as they came out, and oddly Murakami seemed content to let me stay that way. We stood side by side in silence, like mourners at some premillennial funeral procession, watching the grav bed and its burden arrive. Looking down at Oshima’s face, I remembered the ornate stone garden at the top of Rila Crags, the stretcher there, and it struck me that, for the crucible of a new revolutionary era, this woman was spending a lot of time strapped unconscious to conveyances for invalids. This time, under the transparent cover, her eyes were open but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. If it hadn’t been for the vital signs display on a built in screen beside her head, you could have believed you were looking at a corpse.

You are, Tak. You’re looking at the corpse of the Quellist revolution there. This was all they had, and with Koi and the others gone, there’s no one going to bring it back to life.

It wasn’t really a shock that Murakami had executed Koi, Brasil and Tres, I’d been expecting it at some level from the moment I woke up. I’d seen it in Virginia Vidaura’s face as she slumped against the mooring post; when she spat out the words, it was no more than confirmation. And when Murakami nodded matter-of-factly and showed me the fistful of freshly excised cortical stacks, all I had was the sickening sensation of staring into a mirror at some kind of terminal damage to myself.

“Come on, Tak.” He’d stuffed the stacks back in a pocket of his stealth suit and wiped his hands together dismissively, grimacing. “I had no choice, you can see that. I already told you we can’t afford a rerun of the Unsettlement. Not least because these guys were always going to lose, and then the Protectorate boot comes down, and who wants that?”

Virginia Vidaura spat at him. It was a good effort, considering she was still slumped against the mooring post three or four metres away.

Murakami sighed.

“Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.”