After all, the guy sent to kill him is himself: but younger, stronger, and straight out of hell. Wild, provocative, and riveting, Woken Furies is a full-bore science fiction spectacular of the highest order—from one of the most original and spellbinding storytellers at work today.
Subscribe to posts. Le Peau. A tubular needle made tiny sucking sounds. Military-issue biochem isn't available at that rate. You're almost done. You won't even get to enjoy the 'dorphs.
I'm bored rigid here. The machine's hooded display lit and shifted. The operative looked back at Orr. Orr glared. I'm shipping out tomorrow, I'm good for it and you know it. Read the sponsor screen, will you. Fujiwara Havel. Making New Hok safe for a New Century.
We're not some goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. I don't come back, the enka payment covers it. You know that. And get me some of those milissue endorphins while you're about it. I'll take them later. The soundproofing was good. Sylvie shrugged off her jacket and slung it over the back of a lounger. She looked back at me as she moved to the kitchen space. Bathroom in the back over there if you need to clean up. She was over at the kitchen worksurface, searching cabinets. And then some.
Orr just has a datarat tunnel into FH's clearance codes. We're all wired better for crime than a fucking Envoy. Got electronic intrusion gear up the ass. The neck of the bottle made a single tiny clink in the quiet of the room each time it touched down. Same thing every time we ship out. Views it as an art form, I reckon. You been crewing with him long?
I used to get paid to soak up local information. I lowered myself carefully into a lounger. The wound in my side seemed to be healing, to the extent that synth flesh ever did. A couple of the thicker strands flexed and crackled faintly at the intrusion. But I've seen the same thing in a lot of other places. Parts of Adoracion. Catch those names. She put her head on one side as she spotted me and came to lean on the back of Sylvie's lounger, scrutinising me with unapologetic curiosity.
There were kanji characters shaved into her stubble length hair. Bit late for shore-leave romances, isn't it? Micky, meet Jadwiga. We are not fucking. He's just crashing here. From the back, the kanji on her skull readjust don't fucking miss. It wasn't my party. Try the box on the window. A tiny vial fell out into her hand.
She held it up to the light and shook it so the pale red liquid at the bottom quivered back and forth. Ordinarily I'd offer it round, but — ' 'But instead you're going to hog the whole lot yourself,' predicted Sylvie. Just gets me right there every time. You know for a Renouncer kid, you're pretty fucking stingy with your capacity. Kiyoka says — ' 'Kiyoka doesn't — ' 'Guys, guys.
I'm not up for any recreational chemicals right now. She was clearly still miffed, either over the breach of host etiquette or the mention of her Renouncer background. I couldn't work out which. Getting cut. He's never going to learn. Fingers programmed by obvious habit screwed the mechanism onto the end of the vial, then she tipped her head back and with the same automatic deftness spread the eyelids of one eye and fired the hypo into it.
Her tight-cabled stance slackened, and the drug's signature shudder dropped through her from the shoulders. Shiver is pretty innocuous stuff — it's about six-tenths betathanatine analogue, cut with a couple of take extracts that make everyday household objects dreamily fascinating and perfectly innocent conversational gambits sniggeringly hilarious.
Fun if everyone in the room is dropping it, irritating for anyone left out. Mostly, it just slows you down, which I imagine was what Jad, in common with most deComs, was after. Well worth a visit. Long time ago. He grinned as he saw Jadwiga. Jad shook her head and waved the empty vial at the giant.
Definitely down. Chilled to flatline. Orr's grin broadened. He mimed junkie trembling, a twitching, idiot face. Jadwiga erupted into laughter. It was infectious. I saw the smile on Sylvie's face and caught myself chuckling. Jad nodded back at the room she'd come out of. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn't have thought anyone could forget that rack. Now I — ' 'Any of you guys hear about the citadel?
Orr grunted. Some psycho offed half the head Beards in Tekitomura by the sound of it. They say there are stacks missing. Guy just carved them out of the spines like he'd been doing it all his life, apparently. It's an article of faith for them. Come on. Orr had long ago slipped away to another room. You were already cranked up. Micky Serendipity, that's got a ring to it. Can't put my finger on it. But I do. I like you. You know? Have you seen the size of the hole in my ribs?
Spectrochem vision chip, right? From being the operative word. Logically — ' 'Yeah, logically. This is a religion you're talking about. Renouncers make no more fucking sense than the Beards when it comes down to it. The aspirant hardliners don't like it, they don't like anything that roots construct systems firmly to physical being.
The preparant wing of the faith just want to play nice with everyone. They say any virtuality interface is, as you say, a step on the road.
They don't expect Upload to come in their lifetime anyway, we're all just handmaidens to the process.
The last couple of decades though, with the Beards and the whole anti-stack thing, a lot of moderates are turning into hardline asps. My mother probably went that way, she was always the seriously pious one.
Haven't been home in years. There's no fucking point. All they'd do is try and marry me off to some eligible local. Under the crinkled black and silver mass of it, the thicker cords moved stealthily, like muscles under skin. DeCom command datatech. A couple more used as minesweepers in the Hun Home system. It never takes long for the military to bastardise cutting edge technology for their own use.
Makes sense. Because, after all, any red-blooded male's just going to love a twice-prick-length member flopping around in bed at head height, right? Fucking competition anxiety and creeping homophobia, all in one. Unfortunately, I'm straight. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal.
Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different to the next human sleeve — a bit sick around the gills maybe when they'd been in the field for too long, but that's the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say. The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that.
For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians' interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot. They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporisation of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels' motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.
Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan's World's very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you'd call smart. Now here were the archaeologue systems specialists suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half million years old.
Some form of upgrade was in order. Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whisky glass. She shrugged. The money. You figure you'll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it's all pure credit stacking up. But you know, there's a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself.
Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out. Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We've barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places.
And even then you've got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you've been, keep the mimints from creeping back in.
They're talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I'll tell you Micky, personally I think even that's crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption. New Hok isn't so big. Round here it's a little different. You said. So don't tell me New Hok's a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it's the biggest we've got. You'd think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar System with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate.
You'd think they'd develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You'd think they wouldn't fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn't deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come. Well, wouldn't you? Outside, dawn was creeping up over the Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.
On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated. Look, you want to crash, use Las's room. Doesn't look like he's coming back. Left of the bathroom. Least I can do. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex's place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in.
I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee. That was the last conscious thought I had. Fucking synth sleeves. FOUR The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger.
Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger's worn belacotton covering. Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least. Bang bang.
I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr's endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept. Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me. If that's fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he's looking for a boot in the, crotch. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.
Her voice dropped back to a mutter. No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Following her in, the figure who'd dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad. He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones. It didn't take much imagination to guess what was coming next.
Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who'd shoved Jad aside except he wasn't smiling. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do? She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals.
Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio's muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.
I nodded. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him, maybe it was just the five to three disadvantage he'd just walked into. So I think you'd better just leave. Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me.
Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it. She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odour of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped. I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns.
I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad. I don't know what the fuck's going on here, but you — ' Sylvie spat out a single word. This time, it was blinding. I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still halfway up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down.
His mouth gaped wide. His sun lenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare. The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.
The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons. The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up. Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.
The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels. That seemed to work. He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back.
They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her. Not much we can do for her here. As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech.
Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip. His other hand traced tattooing across his face. And him? I missed it, guessed and grabbed. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn't hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast.
It was a misunderstanding. He trod closer, looming. Given recent advances in nanotech, you could get large blotches of energy to go pretty much anywhere you wanted over a limited distance.
The nanocon shepherd fragments just rode the blast like surfers, sucking power and tugging the containment field wherever the launch data had them headed. I made a mental note, if I had to hit him, to go left. I don't see another solution right now.
Another sign, thumb and forefinger forced apart by the fingers of the other hand. From the look on her face I got the sense she was emitting data through the team net as well.
Three days. Torch and wipe, now. He was still angry, speaking slowly. You run blank. This, this, maybe this. I'll flag you. She allowed herself a single backward look at Jadwiga's corpse, then she was gone. He came back and stood in front of me with the weapon, deliberately enough for me to tauten up. Only the obvious — that Orr didn't need a knife to grease me — kept me from jumping him. My physical reaction must have been pretty obvious, because it got a derisive grunt out of the giant.
Then he spun the knife in his hand and presented it to me grip first. I think you've had the practice for it. Jad you can leave. The woman looked at him and made a spiralling gesture. He compressed a sigh and went to his room. And while you're at it, you want to tell me who exactly we've killed here? I shook off a teeth-on-edge shiver, placed one cupped palm on the back of Yukio's skull to steady it and started cutting into the spine. The mingled stink of scorched flesh and shit didn't help.
Never seen him before. You can toss him over the side halfway to New Hok. This one I'd keep for ransom, if I were you. I switched off, changed grip and started a new cut, a couple of vertebrae lower down. The sempai had cut a deal with me purely on the strength of Yukio's value in one piece. And he'd been pretty explicit about what would happen if things didn't stay that way. They're going to come after you with everything they've got.
However,' she paused as Orr came back out of his room fully dressed and headed out the door with a curt nod, 'I think we have this handled.
Ki is off wiping our electronic traces now. Orr can torchblast every room in this place in about half an hour. That leaves them with nothing but — ' 'Sylvie, this is the yakuza we're talking about.
And no one's going to follow us there. No one wants to fuck with the mimints. For one thing, I'd had it from an old friend six months back that Envoy Command had tendered for the New Hokkaido contract — they just hadn't been cheap enough to suit the Mecsek government's freshly rediscovered faith in unfettered market forces. A sneer across Todor Murakami's lean face as we shared a pipe on the ferry from Akan to New Kanagawa. Fragrant smoke on the winter air of the Reach, and the soft grind of the maelstrom as backdrop.
Murakami was letting his cropped Corps haircut grow out, and it stirred a little in the breeze off the water. He wasn't supposed to be here, talking to me, but it's hard to tell Envoys what to do.
They know what they're worth. Hey, fuck Leo Mecsek. We told him what it'd cost. He can't afford it, whose problem is that supposed to be? We're supposed to cut corners and endanger Envoy lives, so he can hand the First Families back some more of the tax they pay? Fuck that. We're not fucking locals.
You're a local, Tod, I felt driven to point out. Millsport born and bred. You know what I mean. I knew what he meant. Local government don't get to punch keys on the Envoy Corps. The Envoys go where the Protectorate needs them, and most local governments pray to whatever gods they give house room that they'll never be found wanting enough for that contingency to be invoked. The aftermath of Envoy intervention can be very unpleasant for all concerned.
This whole tendering angle's fucked anyway. Todor plumed fresh smoke out over the rail. No one can afford us, no one trusts us. Can't see the point, can you? I thought it was about offsetting non-operational costs while you guys were sitting on your arses undeployed.
Oh, yeah. Which is when? I heard it was all pretty quiet right now. Since Hun Home, I mean. Going to tell me some covert insurgency tales? Hey, sam. He passed me the pipe. You're not on the team any more. I remembered. It bursts on the edges of memory like a downed marauder bomb going up distant, but not far enough off to be safe.
Red laser fire and the screams of men dying as the Rawling virus eats their minds alive. I shivered a little and drew on the pipe. With Envoy-tuned sensitivity, Todor spotted it and shifted subject. So what's this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days.
Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime. I looked at him bleakly. Where 'dyou hear that then? A shrug. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?
The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu's neck. Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now. Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior too, presumably. Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuck-up he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan's World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right.
Organised crime is like that. Radul Segesvar's Newpest haiduci mafia or the yak, north or south, they're all the fucking same. Fucking blood tie junkies. War with the yakuza. Why you going up north again? I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn't what I'd had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago. Your Comment:. Morgan Submitted by: Jane Kivik. Read Online Download. Morgan by Richard K. Hot Altered Carbon by Richard K.
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