Woken Furies

In the midst of a freezing rainstorm, we hit the station in stealth suits and grav packs, sewing the sky around us with tinsel to simulate massive numbers. In the confusion of the storm, the ruse worked like a dream. The garrison were largely conscripted youngsters with a few seasoned NCOs riding herd. Ten minutes into the firefight, they broke and scattered through the rain-slashed streets in frantic, retreating knots. We chased, isolated, mopped them up. Some few went down fighting, most were taken alive and locked up.

Later, we used their bodies to sleeve the first wave of Envoy heavy assault.

I closed my eyes.

“Micky?” Jad’s voice from the bunk above.

“Takeshi.”

“Whatever. Let’s stick with Micky, huh?”

“Alright.”

“You think that fuck Anton’s going to be there today?”

I levered my eyes open again. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Tanaseda seemed to think so. Looks like Kovacs is still using him anyway, maybe as a safeguard. If no one’s sure what to expect from Sylvie or the thing she’s carrying, might be comforting to have another command head around.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” She paused. Then, just as my eyes were sliding closed once more. “It doesn’t bother you, talking about yourself that way. Knowing he’s out there?”

“Of course it bothers me.” I yawned cavernously. “I’m going to kill the little fuck.”

Silence. I let my eyelids shutter themselves.

“So Micky.”

“What?”

“If Anton is there?”

I rolled my eyes at the bunk above me. “Yes?”

“If he’s there, I want that motherfucker. You have to shoot him, you wreck his legs or something. He’s mine.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it, Micky.”

“So do I,” I mumbled, tilting ponderously away under the weight of deferred sleep. “Kill whoever you fucking like, Jad.”

Kill whoever you fucking like.

It could have been a mission statement for the raid.

We hit the farm at ramming speed. Garbled distress broadcasts got us close enough that any long-range weaponry Segesvar had would be useless.

Vlad’s helmsman ran a vector that looked like driven before the storm but was actually a high-speed controlled swerve. By the time the haiduci realised what was going on, Impaler was upon them. She smashed in through the panther pens, crushing webbing barriers and the old wooden jetties of the original baling station, unstoppable, ripping loose the planking, demolishing decayed antique walls, carrying the growing mass of piled-up wreckage forward on her armoured nose.

Look, I told Murakami and Vlad the night before, there is no subtle way to do this. And Vlad’s eyes lit up with meth-fired enthusiasm.

Impaler ploughed to a clanking, grinding halt amidst the half submerged wet-bunker modules. Her decks were canted steeply to the right, and down on the debarkation level, a dozen collision alerts shrilled hysterically in my ears as the hatches on that side blew wide open on explosive bolts.

Boarding ramps dropped like bombs, livewire security lines at their tips, writhing and shredding into evercrete for purchase. Dully through the hull, I heard the clang and whirr of the major grapple lines firing. Impaler caught and clung fast.

It was a system once designed only for emergency use, but the pirates had rewired every aspect of their vessel for fast assault, boarding and battery. Only the machine mind that ran it all had been left out of the loop, and still thought we were a ship in crisis.

The weather met us on the ramp. Rain and wind rushed me, slapped at my face, shoved at me from odd angles. Vlad’s assault team ran bellowing into the midst of it. I glanced once at Murakami, shook my head, and then followed. Maybe they had the right idea—with Impaler snagged fast amidst the damage she’d just created, there was no way back for anybody that didn’t involve either wi

Gunfire started in the grey swirl of the storm. Hiss, sizzle of beam weapons, the boom and bark of slug guns. The beams showed pale blue and yellow in the murk. A distant ripple of thunder across the sky and pale lightning seemed to respond. Someone screamed and fell somewhere up ahead. Indistinct yelling. I cleared the end of the ramp, skidded on the bulge of a wet-bunker module, gained balance with the Eishundo sleeve and leapt forward. Down into the shallow slosh of water between modules, up the bubbled slope of the next. The surface was gritty and gave good purchase. Peripheral vision told me I was the apex of a wedge, Jad on my left flank, Murakami on my right with a plasmafrag gun.

I cranked the neurachem and spotted a maintenance ladder ahead, three of Vlad’s pirates pi

I flung myself towards the ladder with wincefish abandon.

“Jad!”

“Yeah-go!”

Like being back in the Uncleared. Vestiges of Slipin attunement, maybe some twin-like affinity, care of Eishundo. I sprinted flat out. Behind me the shard blaster spoke—spiteful rushing whine in the rain and the edge of the dock exploded in a hail of fragments. More screams. I reached the ladder about the same moment the pirates realised they were no longer pi

At the top, there were bodies, torn and bloodied from the shard fire, and one of Segesvar’s men, injured but still on his feet. He spat and lurched at me with a knife. I twisted aside, locked out the knife arm and threw him off the dock. Short scream, lost in the storm.

Crouch and search, Rapsodia out and sweeping in the poor visibility, while the others came up behind me. Rain smashed down and made a million little geysers back off the evercrete surface. I blinked it out of my eyes.

The dock was clear.

Murakami clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, not bad for a retired man.”

I snorted. “Someone’s got to show you how. Come on, this way.”

We stalked along the dock in the rain, found the entrance I wanted and slipped inside, one at a time. The sudden relief from the force of the storm was shocking, almost like silence. We stood dripping water on the plastic floor of a short corridor set with familiar, heavy, portholed metal doors.

Thunder growled outside. I peered through the glass of a door just to be sure, and saw a room of blank-faced metal cabinets. Cold storage for the panther feed and, occasionally, the corpses of Segesvar’s enemies. At the end of the corridor, a narrow stairwell led down to the crude resleeving unit and veterinary section for the panthers.

I nodded to the stairs.

“Down there. Three levels and we’re in the wet-bunker complex.”

The pirates went in the van, noisy and enthusiastic. Meth-wired as they were, and not a little pissed off with having to follow me up the ladder, it would have been hard to dissuade them. Murakami shrugged and didn’t try. They clattered down the stairwell at speed, and ran straight into an ambush at the bottom.

We were a flight of stairs behind, moving with undrugged caution, and even there I felt the splashback from the blasters scorch my face and hands.

Cacophony of high, sudden shrieks as the pirates caught fire and died as human torches. One of them made three blundering steps back up out of the inferno, flame-winged arms raised imploringly towards us. His melted face was less than a metre from mine when he collapsed, hissing and smoking, on the cold steel stairs below.

Murakami hurled an ultravibe grenade down the well and it bounced once metallically before the familiar cluttering scream kicked in. In the confined space it was deafening. We slapped palms to ears in unison. If anybody down there screamed when it killed them, their deaths were inaudible.