Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

She looked up briefly from where she was knelt before a black satchelled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicoloured data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.

“Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ‘S all we need.”

I jerked a thumb backwards at Jadwiga. “Get this fucking thing off me, before I break it, Sylvie.”

She sighed and got up. Jadwiga let go of me and sagged. I twisted in the bug saddle and caught her before she could topple to the floor. Sylvie reached me about the same time. She nodded to herself.

“Okay. Want to be useful?”

“I want to know what the fuck this is about.”

“Later. Right now, you can take that knife I gave you back in Tekitomura and cut the stack out of Jad’s spine for me. Seems to be a core skill for you, and I don’t know that any of the rest of us want the duty.”

I looked down at the dead woman in my arms. She’d flopped face down and the sunlenses had slipped. One dead eye caught the faint light.

“Now you want to do the excision?”

“Yes, now.” Her eyes swivelled up to check a retinal display. We were on a clock. “In the next three minutes, because that’s about all we have.”

“All done this side,” called Orr.

I climbed off the bug and lowered Jadwiga to the fused-glass. The knife came to my hand as if it belonged there. I cut through the corpse’s clothing at the nape and peeled the layers back to reveal the pale flesh beneath. Then switched on the blade.

Across the temple floor, the others looked up involuntarily at the sound.

I stared back, and they looked away.

Under my hands, the top of Jad’s spine came out with a pair of deft slices and a brief levering motion. The smell that came with it wasn’t pleasant. I wiped the knife on her clothing and stowed it, examined the tissue-clogged vertebrae as I straightened up. Orr reached me with long strides and held out his hand.

“I’ll take that.”

I shrugged. “My pleasure. Here.”

“We’re all set.” Back at the satchel unit, Sylvie folded something closed with a gesture that reeked of finality. She stood up. “Ki, you want to do the honours?”

Kiyoka came and stood beside me, looking down at Jad’s mutilated corpse. There was a smooth grey egg in her hand. For what seemed like a long time, we all stood there in silence.

“Running short, Ki,” Lazlo said quietly.

Very gently, Kiyoka knelt at Jadwiga’s head and placed the grenade in the space I’d cut in her nape. As she got up again, something moved in her face.

Orr touched her gently on the arm.

“Be good as new,” he told her.

I looked at Sylvie. “So you guys want to share your plans now?”

“Sure.” The command head nodded at the satchel. “Escape clause. Datamine there blows in a couple of minutes, blips everybody’s comms and scanners out. Couple of minutes more, the noisy stuff goes up. Bits of Jad everywhere, then the house comes down. And we’re gone. Out the back door. Shielded drives, we can ride out the EMP pulse and by the time the sprogs get their scanners back on line we’ll be peripheral, invisible. They’ll find enough of Jad to make it look like we tripped a karakuri nest or a smart bomb and got vaporised in the blast. Leaving us free agents once more. Just the way we like it.”

I shook my head. “That is the worst fucking plan I have ever heard. What if—”

“Hey.” Orr gave me an unfriendly stare. “You don’t like it, you can fucking stay here.”

“Skipper,” Lazlo again, an edge in his voice this time. “Maybe instead of talking about this, we could just do it, you know? In the next two minutes? What do you reckon?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka glanced at Jadwiga’s sprawled corpse and then away.

“Let’s get out of here. Now.”

Sylvie nodded. The Slipins mounted up and we cruised in formation towards the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.

No one looked back.

As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.

We were a good five hundred metres the other side of the temple when it blew. There was a muffled series of detonations, and then a rumbling that built to a roar. I twisted in my seat—with Jadwiga now in Orr’s pocket instead of riding pillion, the view was unobstructed—and in the narrow frame of the street we had taken I saw the whole structure slump undramatically to the ground amidst a boiling cloud of dust. A minute later, an underpass took us below street level and I lost even that fractional view.

I rode level with the other two bugs

“You had this all mapped out?” I asked. “All the time, you knew this was what you were going to do?”

Sylvie nodded gravely in the dim light of the tunnel. Unlike the temple, here the effect was unintended. Decayed illuminum panelling overhead cast a last-gasp bluish glow over everything but it was less than you’d get on a triple-moon night with clear sky. Navigation lights sprang up on the bugs in response. The underpass angled right and we lost the wash of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel behind us. The air started to turn chilly.

“Been through here half a hundred times before,” drawled Orr. “That temple’s been a bolthole dream every time. Just we never had anyone to run away from before.”

“Yeah, well thanks for sharing.”

A ripple of deCom mirth in the blue gloom.

“Thing is,” Lazlo said. “Couldn’t really let you in on the loop without real-time auditory communication, and that’s clumsy. The skip clued us and cued us in about fifteen seconds through the crew net. You we would have had to tell, you know, with words. And the amount of state-of-the-art coms gear floating around the beachhead, no way to know who’s listening in.”

“We had no choice,” said Kiyoka.

“No choice,” echoed Sylvie. “Bodies burnt, and screaming skies and they tell me, I tell myself—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, guys. Fucking slippage again. Really got to get this sorted when we’re back south.”

I nodded back the way we’d come. “So how long before those guys get their scan systems back up?”

The deComs looked at each other. Sylvie shrugged.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, depends what failsafe software they had.”

“Too bad if the karakuri show up in the meantime, huh?”

Kiyoka snorted. Lazlo raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, that’s right,” rumbled Orr. “It’s too bad. Life in New Hok, better get used to it.”

“Anyway, look.” Kiyoka, patiently reasonable. “There are no bloody karakuri in Drava. They wouldn’t—”

Metallic flailing, up ahead.

Another taut exchange of glances. The weapons consoles on all three bugs lit across, tugged to readiness, presumably by Sylvie’s command-head override, and the little convoy jolted to a halt. Orr straightened up in his seat.

Ahead of us, an abandoned vehicle hulked in the gloom. No sign of movement. The frantic clashing sounds bounced past it from somewhere beyond the next bend in the tunnel.

Lazlo grinned tightly in the low light. “What were you saying, Ki?”

“Hey,” she said weakly. “I’m open to contrary evidence.”

The nailing stopped. Repeated.

“The fuck is that?” murmured Orr.

Sylvie’s face was unreadable. “Whatever it is, the datamine should have got it. Las, you want to start earning your wincefish pay?”

“Sure.” Lazlo winked at me and swung off his seat behind Kiyoka. He laced his fingers and pushed them outward until the knuckles cracked “You powered up there, big man?”

Orr nodded, already dismounting. He cracked the bug’s running-board storage space and dragged out a half-metre wrecking bar. Lazlo grinned again.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and stand well back. Scan up.”