Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

“Yeah,” she snapped. “And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.”

Murakami shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.”

“And why is it gone?” Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. “You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.”

Murakami made an exasperated gesture. “Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.”

“That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.” But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. “Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.”

Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

“Yeah, thing is, Virginia,” he said when she’d finished, “they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me—you trained me, in fact—to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.

“Fucking Mecsek,” Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. “If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.”

“Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?”

He nodded glumly. “Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.”

“Thought that was what you wanted,” Virginia Vidaura said faintly. “Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?”

He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.

“What’s this about making history, Tod?” I asked tonelessly. “What’s going on with deCom?”

He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before.

He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.

“What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.”

Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.

“Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,” I said mildly.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. “What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.” He choked a laugh. “And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.”

I felt suddenly like sitting down again. The trembling from the stunblast came rolling back over me, up from the guts and through my head, leaving it light. I swallowed the nausea and tried to think straight over a clamour of suddenly recalled detail. Sylvie’s Slipins in laconic, murderous action against the scorpion gun cluster.

Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.

Yeah. And besides which, we want the flicking land.

Orr and his wrecking bar, stood over the dysfunctional karakuri in the tunnel under Drava. So we going to switch it off or what?

DeCom bravado aboard Guns for Guevara, vaguely amusing for its ludicrous presumption, until you gave it a context that might mean something.

Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.

Yeah, count me in. Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.

Oh fuck.

“You really think she could do that,” I asked numbly. “You think she’s capable of talking to the orbitals?”

He bared his teeth. It was anything but a grin. “Tak, for all I know she already has been talking to them. We’ve got her sedated right now, and the Tseng gear is monitoring her for transmissions, that’s part of the brief, but there’s no telling what she’s already done.”

“And if she starts?”

He shrugged and looked away. “Then I’ve got my orders.”

“Oh, great. Very constructive.”

“Tak, what fucking choice do we have?” Desperation edged his voice. “You know the weird shit that’s been going down in New Hok. Mimints doing things they’re not supposed to, mimints built to specs no one remembers from the Unsettlement. Everyone thinks that’s some kind of machine evolution, basic nanotech all grown up, but what if it’s not? What if it’s deCom that’s triggering this? What if the orbitals are waking up because they’ve got a whiff of the command software, and they’re doing something to the mimints in response? That stuff was designed to appeal to Martian machine systems, as near as we understand them, and the word out of Latimer is that it works. So why wouldn’t it work here?”

I stared at Sylvie Oshima and Jad’s voice echoed back through my head.

—all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post Lyamon—

—handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other—