Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

My mind went spinning off down the avenues Murakami’s own Envoy intuition had opened for me. What if they hadn’t been fighting each other?

Or what if—

Sylvie, semi-conscious on a bunk in Drava, muttering. It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—

The woman who called herself Nadia Makita, lying in another bunk aboard Boubin Islander.

Grigori. There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.

“Those people you’ve got in your pocket,” I said quietly to Murakami. “The ones you murdered for the sake of a more stable tomorrow for us all. They all believed this was Quellcrist Falconer.”

“Well, belief is a funny thing, Tak.” He was staring away past the grav sled and there was no humour in his tone at all. “You’re an Envoy, you know that.”

“Yeah. So what do you believe?”

For a couple of moments he was silent. Then he shook his head and looked at me directly.

“What do I believe, Tak? I believe that if we’re about to decode the keys to Martian civilisation, then the Really Dead coming back to life is going to seem like a small and relatively unremarkable event.”

“You think it’s her?”

“I don’t care if it’s her. It doesn’t change a thing.”

A shout from Tomaselli. Impaler came forging round the side of Segesvar’s devastated farm like some huge thuggish cyborg elephant ray. At the risk of throwing up again, I worked the neurachem gingerly and made out Mallory standing in the conning tower with his coms officer and a couple of other pirates I didn’t recognise. I stood closer to Murakami.

“I’ve got one other question, Tod. What are you planning to do with us? Virginia and me?”

“Well.” He rubbed vigorously at his cropped hair so fine spray flew out of it. The hint of a grin surfaced, as if the return to practical topics of conversation was some kind of reunion with an old friend. “That’s a little problematic, but we’ll sort something out. Way things are these days back on Earth, they’d probably want me to bring you both in, or wipe you both out. Renegade Envoys don’t profile well under the current administration.”

I nodded wearily. “And so?”

The grin powered up. “And so fuck ‘em. You’re an Envoy, Tak. So is she. Just because you lost your clubhouse privileges, doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Just walking away from the Corps doesn’t change what you are. You think I’m going to write that off because a greasy little gang of Earth politicians are looking for scapegoats.”

I shook my head. “That’s your employers you’re talking about there, Tod.”

“Fuck that. I answer to Envoy Command. We don’t EMP our own people.” He caught his lower lip in his teeth, glanced at Virginia Vidaura and then back at me. His voice dropped to a mutter. “But I’m going to need some co-operation to swing this, Tak. She’s taking the whole thing too hard. I can’t turn her loose with that attitude. Not least because she’s likely to put a plasmafrag bolt through the back of my head as soon as I turn around.”

Impaler drifted in sideways towards an unused section of the dock.

Her grapples fired and chewed holes in the evercrete. A couple of them hit rotten patches and tugged loose as soon as they started to crank taut.

The hoverloader backed off slightly in a mound of stirred-up water and shredded belaweed. The grapples wound back and fired again.

Something behind me wailed.

At first, some stupid part of me thought it was Virginia Vidaura finally venting her pent-up grief. A fraction of a second later I caught up with the machine tone of the sound and identified it for what it was—an alarm.

Time seemed to slam to a halt. Seconds turned into ponderous slabs of perception, everything moved with the lazy calm of motion underwater.

—Liebeck, spinning away from the water’s edge, lit spliff tumbling from her open mouth, bouncing off the upper slope of her breast in a brief splutter of embers—

—Murakami, yelling at my ear, moving past me towards the grav sled—

—The monitor system built into the sled screaming, a whole rack of datacoil systems flaring to life like candles along one side of Sylvie Oshima’s suddenly twitching body—

—Sylvie’s eyes, wide open and fixed on mine as the gravity of her stare drags my own gaze in—

—The alarm, unfamiliar as the new Tseng hardware, but only one possible meaning behind it—

—And Murakami’s arm, raised, hand filled with the Kalashnikov as he clears it from his belt—

—My own yell, stretching out and blending with his as I throw myself forward to block him, hands still bound, hopelessly slow—

And then the clouds ripped open in the east, and vomited angelfire.

And the dock lit up with light and fury.

And the sky fell in.

Afterwards, it took me a while to realise I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colours seemed bleached out of the surroundings.

The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic, it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few metres out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames.

Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look round.

It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelt scorched.

I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.

“Grigori fucking Ishii,” she said, still without looking at me.

“Sylvie?”

Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.

“This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths she came in on too once I started looking.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. “I opened the way.”

“You’re losing me. Who is Grigori Ishii?”

“You really don’t remember? Kid’s history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?”

“My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.”

“Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fall-back detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.”

“Then…”

“Yeah.” She laughed, barely, a single small sound. “She is who she says she is.”

“Did?” I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. “Did she do this?”

“No, I did.” A shrugged correction. “They did, I asked them to.”

“You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?”

A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. “Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

I pressed a hand hard against my face. “Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?”

“Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.” She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. “It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.”