Richard Morgan - Woken Furies

And he was gone, loping along the curved wall of the tunnel, hugging the cover it offered until he reached the wrecked vehicle, then flitting sideways, seeming in the dim light to have no more substance than the shadow he cast. Orr stalked after him, a brutal apeman figure with the wrecking bar held low in his left hand. I glanced back to the bug where Sylvie sat crouched forward, eyes hooded, face blanked in the curious mix of intent and absent that signalled net engagement.

It was poetry to watch.

Lazlo grabbed part of the wreckage with one hand and hauled himself, monkey casual, up onto the vehicle’s roof. He froze into immobility, head cocked slightly. Orr hung back at the curve. Sylvie muttered inaudibly to herself, and Lazlo moved. A single leap, straight back to the floor of the tunnel and he landed running. Diagonally, across the curve towards something I couldn’t see. Orr stepped across, arms spread for balance, upper body held rigid facing the way the wincefish had gone. Another split second, a half-dozen rapid, deliberate steps forward and then he too was out of line of sight.

Seconds decayed. We sat and waited in the blue gloom.

Seconds decayed.

And—

“…so what the fuck is …?”

Sylvie’s voice, puzzled. Sliding up in volume as she emerged from the link-up and gave her real-world senses dominance again. She blinked a couple of times and looked sideways at Kiyoka.

The slight woman shrugged. Only now, I realised she’d been part of it, tuned into the ballet I’d just watched at standby, her body slightly stiff in the saddle of the bug while her eyes rode with the rest of the crew on Lazlo’s shoulder.

“Fucked if I know, Sylvie.”

“Alright.” The command head’s gaze turned on me. “Seems safe. Come on, let’s go have a look.”

We rode the bugs cautiously up around the bend in the tunnel and dismounted to stare at what Lazlo and Orr had found.

The kneeling figure in the tunnel was only humanoid in the vaguest terms. There was a head, mounted on the main chassis, but the only reason it bore resemblance to a man was that something had ripped the casing apart and left a more delicate structure beneath partially exposed. At the uppermost point, a wide bracing ring had survived, halo-like, to hover on a skeletal framework over the rest of the head.

It had limbs too, in approximately the positions you’d expect on a human being, but enough of them to suggest insect rather than mammalian life. On one side of the main body mass, two of the available four arms were inert, hanging limp and in one case scorched and shredded to scrap. On the other side, one limb had been torn entirely off, with massive damage to the surrounding body casing, and two more were clearly beyond useful function. They kept trying to flex but at every attempt, sparks ripped savagely across the exposed circuitry until the movement spasmed and froze. The flaring light threw spastic shadows on the walls.

It wasn’t clear if the thing’s four lower limbs were functional or not, but it didn’t try to get up as we approached. The three functioning arms merely redoubled their efforts to achieve something indefinable in the guts of the metal dragon laid out on the tunnel floor.

The machine had four powerful-looking side-mounted legs ending in clawed feet, a long, angular head full of multibarrelled ancillary weaponry, and a spiked tail that would gouge into the ground to give added stability.

It even had wings—a webbed framework of upward-curving launch cradles designed to take the primary missile load.

It was dead.

Something had torn huge parallel gashes in the left flank and the legs below the damage had collapsed. The launch cradles were twisted out of alignment and the head was wrenched to one side.

“Komodo launcher,” said Lazlo, skirting the tableau warily. “And karakuri caretaker unit. You lose, Ki.”

Kiyoka shook her head. “Doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s it doing down here? What’s it fucking doing, come to that?”

The karakuri cocked its head at her. Its functional limbs crept out of the gash in the dragon’s body and hovered over the damage in a gesture that looked weirdly protective.

“Repairs?” I suggested.

Orr barked a laugh. “Yeah. Karakuri are caretakers to a point. After that, they turn scavenger. Something this badly hit, they’d dismember it for a co-op cluster to make into something new. Not try and repair it.”

“And that’s another thing.” Kiyoka gestured around. “The mech puppets don’t get out that much on their own. Where’s the rest of them? Sylvie, you’re getting nothing, right?”

“Nothing.” The command head looked up and down the tunnel pensively.

Blue light glinted off strands of silver in her hair. “This is all there is.”

Orr hefted his wrecking bar. “So we going to switch it off or what?”

“Worth fuck-all bounty anyway,” grumbled Kiyoka. “Even if we could claim it, which we can’t. Why not just leave it for the sprogs to find?”

“I am not,” said Lazlo, “walking the rest of this tunnel with that thing still on ops behind me. Turn it off, big man.”

Orr looked questioningly at Sylvie. She shrugged and nodded.

The wrecking bar swung. Inhumanly swift, into the eggshell remnants of the karakuri’s head. Metal grated and tore. The halo ripped loose, bounced on the tunnel floor and rolled away into the shadows. Orr pulled the bar clear and swung again. One of the machine’s arms came up, fending—the bar flattened it into the ruins of the head. Eerily silent, the karakuri struggled to rise on lower limbs that I now saw were irretrievably mangled. Orr grunted, lifted one booted foot and stomped down hard.

The machine went over, thrashing at the damp tunnel air. The giant moved in, wielding the bar with the economical savagery of experience.

It took a while.

When he was done, when the sparks had bled dry amidst the wreckage at his feet, Orr straightened and wiped his brow. He was breathing hard.

He glanced at Sylvie again.

“That do?”

“Yeah, it’s off.” She went back to the bug they were sharing. “Come on, we’d better get cracking.”

As we all mounted up again, Orr caught me watching him. He flexed his brows good-naturedly at me and puffed out his cheeks.

“Hate it when you’ve got to do them by hand,” he said. “Specially after just paying out all that cred on new blaster upgrades.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s tough.”

“Ah, be better when we hit the Uncleared, you’ll see. Plenty of room to deploy the hardware, no need to hide the splash. Still.” He pointed at me with the wrecking bar. “If we do have to do another by hand, you’re aboard now. You can turn off the next one.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, no big deal.” He handed the bar back over his shoulder to Sylvie, who stowed it. The bug quivered under his hands and drifted forward, past the wreckage of the fallen karakuri. The flexed brows again, and a grin.

“Welcome to deCom, Micky.”

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang.

A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty metres below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.