Woken Furies

“What does it feel like?” I asked her gently. “Talking to them?”

She snorted. “What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.” She gestured. “Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the … Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.” She gri

“But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, ru

Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?”

For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousand and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.

I shook my head. Borrowed imagery from the Renouncer school, and some trace element of perverse Christian sacrifice myth. It’s the first thing they teach cub archaeologues. Don’t try to transfer your anthropomorphic baggage onto what is nothing like human.

“Too easy,” I said.

“Yeah. What I thought. Anyway, it’s the orbital that’s talking, it feels like a machine the same way the mimints do, the same way the software does. But yes, there are still Martians in there. Grigori Ishii, what’s left of him, gibbers about them when you can get any verbal sense out of him at all.

And I think Nadia’s going to remember something similar when she gets enough distance on it. I think when she does that, when she finally remembers how she walked out of their database and into my head, she’s going to be able to really talk to them. And it’s going to make the link I’ve got look like Morse code on tom-toms by comparison.”

“I thought she didn’t know how to use the command software.”

“She doesn’t. Not yet. But I can teach her, Micky.”

There was a peculiar tranquillity on Sylvie Oshima’s face as she spoke. It was something I’d never seen there before, in all the time we spent together in the Uncleared and after. It reminded me of Nikolai Natsume’s face in the Renouncer monastery, before we came and spoilt it all for him sense of purpose, confirmed beyond human doubt. A belonging to what you did that I hadn’t known since I

“Going to be a deCom sensei, Sylvie? That the plan?”

She gestured impatiently. “I’m not talking about teaching in the real world, I’m talking about her. Down in the capacity vault, I can crank up the real-time ratio so we get months out of every minute, and I can show her how to do this. It’s not like hunting the mimints, that’s not what this stuff is for. It’s only now I realise that. All the time I spent in the Uncleared, it feels like I was half-asleep by comparison with this. This, it feels like I was born for.”

“That’s the software talking, Sylvie.”

“Yeah, maybe. So what?”

I couldn’t think of any answer to that. Instead, I looked across at the grav sled where Virginia Vidaura lay in place of Sylvie. I moved closer, and it felt like something was tugging me there by a cable wired into my guts.

“She going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sylvie pushed herself wearily off the mooring post.

“Friend of yours, huh?”

“Er—something like that.”

“Yeah, well, that bruising on her face looks bad. Think the bone might be cracked. I stuck her in there as gently as I could, kicked the system on, but all it’s done so far is sedate her, on general principles I think. Haven’t got a diagnosis out of it yet. It’ll need re—”

“Hmm?”

I turned to prompt her and saw the grey-cased canister at the top of its arc. There was no time to get to Sylvie, no time to do anything except fling myself, tumbling over the grav sled and into the scant shadow its covered length offered. Tseng military custom—at a minimum it had to be battlefield-hardened.

I hit the ground on the other side and flattened myself to the dock, arms wrapped over my head.

The grenade blew with a curiously muffled crump, and something in my head screamed with the sound. A muted Shockwave slapped me, dented my hearing. I was on my feet in the blurred humming it left, no time to check for shrapnel injuries, snarling, spi

“That was fast,” he called. “Thought I’d get you both there.”

His clothes were drenched from his swim, and there was a long gash across his forehead that the water had leached pink and bloodless, but the poise in the amber-ski

Sylvie lay crumpled, halfway between the water and the sled. I couldn’t see her face.

“I’m going to fucking kill you now,” I said coldly.

“Yeah, you’re going to try, old man.”

“Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any fucking idea who you just killed?”

He shook his head, mock-sorrowful. “You really are getting past your sell-by date, aren’t you? You think I’m going to go back to the Harlan family with a corpse when I can take a live sleeve. That’s not what I’m getting paid for. That was a stun grenade, my last one unfortunately. Didn’t you hear it crack? Kind of hard to mistake if you’ve been anywhere near a battlefield recently. Ah, but then maybe you haven’t. Shockwave knock-out and inhaled molecular shrapnel to keep everyone that way. She’ll be out all day.”

“Don’t lecture me on battlefield weaponry, Kovacs. I fucking was you, and I gave it up to do something more interesting.”

“Really?” The anger sparked in the startling blue eyes. “What was that, then? Low grade criminality or failed revolutionary politics? They tell me you’ve had a crack at both.”

I stalked forward a step, and watched him draw into a combat guard.

“Whatever they tell you, I have seen a century more sunrises than you. And now I’m going to take them all away from you.”

“Yeah?” He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Well if they’re all leading up to what you are now, you’d be doing me a favour. Because whatever else happens to me, the one thing I never want to be is you. I’d rather blow my own stack out the back of my head than end up standing where you are now.”

“Then why don’t you do that. It’ll save me the trouble.”

He laughed. It was meant to be contemptuous, I think, but didn’t quite make it. There was a nervousness to it, and too much emotion. He made a displacement gesture.

“Man, I’m almost tempted to let you walk away, I feel so sorry for you.”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not going to let you take her back to Harlan again. This is over.”

“It certainly fucking is. I can’t believe how totally you’ve fucked up your life. Just fucking look at you.”

“You look at me. It’s the last face you’re ever going to see, you stupid little fuck.”