Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

Kurumaya looked her up and down, then nodded the three wincefish aside. They stepped back with sullen expressions. The holomap winked out. Kurumaya leaned back in his chair and stared at Sylvie.

“Oshima-san, the last time I ramped you ahead of schedule, you neglected your assigned duties and disappeared north. How do I know you won’t do the same thing this time?”

“Shig, you sent me to look at wreckage. Someone got there before us, there was nothing left. I told you that.”

“When you finally resurfaced, yes.”

“Oh, be reasonable. How was I supposed to deCom what’s already been trashed? We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. How can I trust you this time?”

Sylvie gave out a performance sigh. “Jesus, Shig. You’ve got the excess capacity ponytail, you do the math. I’m offering you a favour in return for the chance to make some quick cash. Otherwise, I’ve got to wait to clear the queue some time day after tomorrow, you get nothing but sprog sweepers, everybody loses. What’s the fucking point of that?”

For a long moment, no one moved. Then Kurumaya glanced aside at one of the units on the desk. A datacoil awoke above it.

“Who’s the synth?” he asked casually.

“Oh.” Sylvie made may-I-present gestures. “New recruit. Micky Serendipity. Ordnance backup.”

Kurumaya raised an eyebrow. “Since when does Orr need or want help from anybody?”

“It’s just a try-out. My idea.” Sylvie smiled brightly. “Way I see it, you never can be too backed up out there.”

“That may be so.” Kurumaya turned his gaze on me. “But your new friend here is carrying damage.”

“It’s just a scratch,” I told him.

Colours shifted in the datacoil. Kurumaya glanced sideways and figures coalesced near the apex. He shrugged.

“Very well. Be at the main gate in an hour, bring your gear. You’ll get standard maintenance rate per day plus ten per cent seniority increment. That’s the best I can do. Bonus for any kills you make, MMI chart value.”

She gave him another brilliant smile. “That’ll do fine. We’ll be ready. Nice doing business with you again, Shigeo. Come on, Micky.”

As we turned to go, her face twitched with incoming traffic. She jerked back round to look at Kurumaya, irritated.

“Yes?”

He smiled gently at her. “Just so we’re clear, Oshima-san. You’ll be webbed into a sweep pattern with the others. If you do try and slide out again, I’ll know. I’ll pull your authorisation and I’ll have you brought back in, if I have to deploy the whole sweep to do it. You want to be arrested by a bunch of sprogs and then frogmarched back here, you just try me.”

Sylvie produced another sigh, shook her head sorrowfully and walked out through the throng of queuing deComs. As we passed Anton, he showed his teeth.

“Maintenance rate, Sylvie,” he sneered. “Looks like you found your level at last.”

Then he flinched, his eyes fluttered upward and his expression blanked as Sylvie reached in and twisted something inside his head. He swayed and the deCom next to him had to grab his arm to steady him. He made a noise like a freak fighter taking a heavy punch. Slurred voice, thick with outrage.

“Fucking—”

“Back off, swamp boy.” It trailed out behind her, laconic, as we left the ‘fab.

She hadn’t even looked in his direction.

The gate was a single slab of grey alloy armouring six metres across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-metre towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the grey metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.

Kurumaya’s clean-up volunteers stood about in small knots before the gate, muttered conversation laced with brief flares of loud bravado. As Sylvie had predicted, most were young and inexperienced, both qualities telegraphed clearly in the awkwardness with which they handled their equipment and gawked around them. The sparse assortment of hardware they had was none too impressive either. Weaponry looked to be largely obsolete military surplus, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen vehicles all told—transport for maybe half of the fifty-odd deComs present, some of it not even grav-effect. The rest, it seemed, were doing the sweep on foot.

Command heads were few and far between.

“How it’s done,” said Kiyoka complacently. She leaned back on the nose of the grav bug I was riding and folded her arms. The little vehicle rocked slightly on its parking cushion and I upped the field to compensate. “See, most sprogs got no money to speak of, they come into the game practically systems-blind. Try and earn cash for the upgrades with clean-up work and maybe some easy bounty on the edges of the Uncleared. If they get lucky, they do good work and someone notices them. Maybe some crew with losses takes them on.”

“And if not?”

“Then they go grow their own hair.” Lazlo grinned up from the opened pannier he was rifling through on one of the other two bugs. “Right, skipper?”

“Yeah, just like that.” There was a sour edge in Sylvie’s voice. Stood near the third bug with Orr for company, she was once again trying to make Jadwiga look like a living human being and the strain was showing. I wasn’t enjoying the process much myself—we’d got the dead deCom mounted on one of the bugs, but piloting the vehicle second-hand was beyond Sylvie’s control options, so Jad rode pillion behind me. It would have looked pretty strange if I’d got off while we waited and she’d stayed sitting there, so I stayed aboard too. Sylvie had the corpse drape one arm affectionately on my shoulder and left the other resting on my thigh. From time to time, Jadwiga’s head swivelled and her sunlensed features flexed in something approximating a grin. I tried to look casual about it.

“You don’t want to listen to Las,” Kiyoka advised me. “Not one in twenty sprogs is going to have what it takes to make Command. Sure, they could wire the stuff into your head, but you’d just go insane.”

“Yeah, like the skipper here.” Lazlo finished with the pannier, resealed it and wandered round to the other side.

“What happens,” said Kiyoka patiently. “You look for someone who can stand the heat and you form a co-op. Pool funds ‘til you can pay for them to get the hair plus basic plug-in for everybody else, and there you go. Brand new crew. What’re you looking at?”

This last to a young deCom who’d wandered over to stare enviously at the grav bugs and the equipment they mounted. He backed up a little at Kiyoka’s tone, but the hunger in his face stayed.

“Dracul line, right?” he said.

“That’s right.” Kiyoka rapped knuckles on the bug’s carapace. “Dracul Forty-One series, only three months off the Millsport factory lines and everything you heard about it is one hundred per cent true. Cloaked drives, internally mounted EMP and particle beam battery, fluid response shielding, integrated Nuhanovic smart systems. You name it, they built it in.”

Jadwiga twisted her head in the young deCom’s direction, and I guessed the dead mouth was trying on its grin again. Her hand moved off my shoulder and down my side. I shifted slightly in the seat.

“What’d it cost?” asked our new fan. Behind him, a small crowd of likeminded hardware enthusiasts was gathering.

“More than any of you’ll earn this year.” Kiyoka gestured airily. “Basic package starts at a hundred and twenty grand. And this is not the basic package.”

The young deCom took a couple of steps closer. “Can I—”

I speared him with a look. “No you can’t. I’m sitting on this one.”