Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

We found nothing.

The sun fought a losing battle against the cloud cover. After a while, it started to rain.

Watch the scans. Move on up the street. Stop.

“Not all it’s cracked up to be in the ads, eh?” Kiyoka sat beneath the magical splatter of rain off her bug’s invisible screens and nodded at the foot sweepers as they disappeared into the latest façade. They were already drenched and the tense, flicker-eyed excitement of an hour ago was fading fast. “Opportunity and adventure in the fallow land of New Hok. Bring an umbrella.”

Seated behind her, Lazlo grinned and yawned. “Knock it off, Ki. Everyone’s got to start somewhere.”

Kiyoka leaned back in the seat, looking over her shoulder. “Hey, Sylvie. How much longer are we going to—”

Sylvie made a sign, one of the terse coded gestures I’d seen in action in the aftermath of the firefight with Yukio. Envoy focus gave me the quiver of one eyelid from Kiyoka as she ate up data from the command head.

Lazlo nodded contentedly to himself.

I tapped the comset they’d given me in lieu of a direct line into the command head’s skull.

“Something going on I should know about, Sylvie?”

“Nah.” Orr’s voice came back, dismissive. “We’ll cut you in when you need to know something. Right, Sylvie?”

I looked back at her. “Right, Sylvie?”

She smiled a little wearily. “Now isn’t the time, Micky.”

Watch the scans. Move along the rain-damp, damaged streets. The screens on the bugs made shimmering oval umbrellas of rainsplash over our heads, the foot sweepers cursed and got wet.

We found nothing.

By midday, we were a couple of kilometres into the city and operational tension had given way to boredom. The nearest crews were a half dozen streets away on either side. Their vehicles showed up on the mapping equipment in lazily slewed parking formations and if you tuned to the general channel, you could hear the foot sweepers grumbling their way up and down buildings, all trace of the earlier make-a-killing enthusiasm gone from their voices.

“Oh look,” rumbled Orr suddenly.

The thoroughfare we were working dog-legged right and then opened immediately onto a circular plaza lined with pagoda-style terracing and blocked at the far end by a multi-levelled temple supported on broadly spaced pillars. Across the open space, rain lay in broad pools where the paving had taken damage. Aside from the massive tilted wreckage of a burnt-out scorpion gun, there was no cover.

“Is that the one they killed last night?” I asked.

Lazlo shook his head. “Nah, been there for years. Besides, the way Oishii told it, last night’s never built beyond the chassis before it got fried. That one out there was a walking, talking self-prop mimint motherfucker before it died.”

Orr shot him a frowning glance.

“Better get the sprogs downstairs,” said Kiyoka.

Sylvie nodded. Over the local channel, she hurried the sweepers out of the last buildings and got them assembled behind the grav bugs. They wiped rain out of their faces and stared resentfully out across the plaza.

Sylvie stood up on the running boards at the rear of the bug and cued the coms jacket.

“Alright, listen,” she told them. “This looks pretty safe, but there’s no way to be sure, so we’re taking a new pattern. The bugs will cruise across to the far side and check the temple’s lower level. Say ten minutes. Then one bug backs up and maintains a sentry point while the other two work their way back round on either side of the plaza. When they get back to you safely, everybody comes across in a wedge and the foot sweepers go up to check the upper levels of the temple. Has everybody got that?”

Sullen wave of assent up and down the line. They couldn’t have cared less. Sylvie nodded to herself.

“Good enough. So let’s do it. Scan up.”

She twisted about on the bug and seated herself once more behind Orr.

As she leaned into him, I saw her lips move but the synth sleeve wasn’t up to hearing what she said. The murmur of the bug’s drives lifted fractionally and Orr drifted them out into the plaza. Kiyoka nudged the bug she and Lazlo were riding into a flanking position on the left and followed. I bent to my own controls and picked up the right flank.

After the relative press of the debris-choked streets, the plaza felt at once less oppressive and more exposed. The air seemed lighter, the rainsplash on the bug shield less intense. Over the open ground, the bugs actually picked up some speed. There was an illusory sensation of progress—and risk.

The Envoy conditioning, scratching for attention. Trouble, just over the perceptual horizon. Something getting ready to blow.

Hard to tell what gleanings of subconscious detail might have triggered it this time. Envoy intuitive functions are a temperamental set of faculties at the best of times, and the whole city had felt like a trap since we left the beachhead.

But you don’t dismiss that stuff.

You don’t dismiss it when it’s saved your life half a thousand times before, on worlds as far apart and different as Sharya and Adoracion.

When it’s wired into the core of who you are, deeper than the memory of your childhood.

My eyes ran a constant peripheral scan along the pagoda terracing. My right hand rested lightly on the weapons console.

Coming up on the wrecked scorpion gun.

Almost halfway.

There!

Flare of adrenalin analogue, rough through the synth system. My hand skittered on the fire control—

No.

Just the nodding flower heads on a stand of plant life sprouting up through the shattered carapace of the gun. Rain splatter knocking each flower gently down against the spring of its stalk.

My breathing eased back into action. We passed the scorpion gun and the halfway mark. The sense of impending impact stayed.

“You okay, Micky?” Sylvie’s voice in my ear.

“Yeah.” I shook my head. ”

“ ‘S nothing.”

At my back, Jadwiga’s corpse clutched me a little closer.

We made the shadows of the temple without incident. The angled stonework bulked over our heads, leading the eye upward towards huge statues of daiko drummers. Steep-leaning load-bearing support structures like drunken pillars, merging seamlessly with the fused-glass floor. Light fell in from side vents and rainwater from the roof in incessant clattering streams further back in the gloom. Orr pushed his bug inward with what seemed to me a lack of due care.

“This’ll do,” Sylvie called, voice loud enough to echo in the space we’d entered. She stood, leaned on Orr’s shoulder and twisted herself lithely to the floor beside the bug. “Make it quick, guys.”

Lazlo vaulted from the back of Kiyoka’s bug and prowled about for a while, apparently scanning the supporting structure of the temple. Orr and Kiyoka started to dismount.

“What are we—” I started, and stopped at the muffled sense of a dead comlink in my ear. I braked the bug, tugged the comset off and stared at it.

My gaze flickered to the deComs and what they were doing. “Boy! Someone want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?”

Kiyoka offered me a busy smile in passing. She was carrying a webbing belt strapped with enough demolition charges to—

“Sit tight, Micky,” she said easily. “Be done in a moment.”

“Here,” Lazlo was saying. “Here. And here. Orr?”

The giant waved a hand from the other side of the deserted space. “In hand. Maps just like you figured, Sylvie. Couple more, max.”

They were placing the charges.

I stared up at the propped and vaulted architecture.

“Oh no. Oh no, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I moved to get off and Jadwiga’s dead grip wrapped around my chest. “Sylvie!”