Woken Furies

The blasterfire was still in the air, long, undisciplined bursts laced with excited shouting and laughter. Mallory shrugged.

“So where’s Tomaselli?”

“Still setting up the gear with Liebeck. And Wang’s waiting for you on the bridge, trying to make sure no one gets eaten by accident. It’s your boat, Vlad. Go get them to stop racking about, and when they’ve finished the sweep, bring Impaler round to this side for loading.”

“Alright.” Like a ripple over water, Mallory adopted the Vlad persona and started to pick twitchily at his acne scars. He nodded down at me. “See you soon as I see you, eh, Kovacs. Soon as.”

I watched him to the corner of the station wall and round it, out of sight.

Flicked my gaze back to Murakami, who was still staring away towards the sounds of the post-op merriment.

“Fucking amateurs,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“So,” I said bleakly. “You’re deployed after all.”

“Got it in one.” As he spoke, Murakami crouched and hauled me up into an ungainly sitting position with a grunt. “Don’t hold it against me, huh? Not like I could have told you last night and appealed to your sense of nostalgia for help, is it?”

I looked around from my new vantage point and saw Virginia Vidaura, slumped against a mooring post, arms bound back. There was a long darkening bruise across her face, and her eye had swollen. She looked dully at me, and then away. There were tears smeared in the dirt and sweat on her face. No sign of Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve, dead or alive.

“So instead you played me for a sucker.”

He shrugged. “Work with the tools to hand, you know.”

“How many of you are there? Not the whole crew, apparently.”

“No,” he smiled faintly. “Just five. Mallory there, Liebeck, who I understand you’ve met, sort of. Two others, Tomaselli and Wang, and me.”

I nodded. “Covert deployment strength. I should have known there was no way you’d be just hanging around Millsport on furlough. How long have you been on the ground?”

“Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.”

“Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.”

“Not really.” Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. “They’re not overly perceptive, these meth-head guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag.” He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. “Bye bye head, bye bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after.

Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!” Murakami slapped fist into palm.

“That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and re-sleeve in a hotel bathroom.”

Sourcetown.

“You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?”

“Among others.” Another shrug. “The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.”

“Hence Tanaseda.”

“Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the haiduci, well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate no-table-ma

“Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.”

Murakami chuckled. “Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?”

I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse.

“What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?”

“Ah—no, not yet.”

I opened my eyes again, surprised.

“He’s still walking around somewhere?”

Murakami made an embarrassed gesture. “Apparently. Looks like you were hard to kill, even at that age. We’ll get him, though.”

“Will you,” I said sombrely.

“Yeah, we will. With Aiura down, he’s got no handler, nowhere to run. And sure as fucking lightspeed no one else in the First Families is going to want to pick up where she left off. Not if they want the Protectorate to stay home and let them keep their oligarch toys.”

“Or,” I said casually, “you could just kill me now you’ve got me, then let him come in and cut a deal.”

Murakami frowned. “That’s not fu

“Wasn’t meant to be. He’s still calling himself an Envoy, you know. He’d probably jump at the chance to get back in the Corps if you offered.”

“I don’t fucking care.” There was anger in his tone now. “I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.”

“Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.”

“My life’s easy enough,” he growled. “Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.”

“You get a stack out of Aiura?”

“Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. “You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.”

He gri

I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. “You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.” Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. “Is it?”

“Sorry?” But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been ru

The grin crept out. “Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.”

“The orbitals?” I blinked at him. “What have the orbitals got to do with it?”

“At the moment, nothing. And that’s the way we’d like it to stay. But with deCom tech, there’s just no way to be sure of that any more.”

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the numbness. “Wha—? Why?”

“Because,” he said seriously. “The fucking stuff appears to work.”