Woken Furies

“So you went back to the Angels.”

“Good guess.”

I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.

“Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.”

“Yeah?” I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. “How long this time?”

He gri

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whisky and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.

“This time, I lost them all for good. Whatever second life my mother got, I missed that. And she’d opted out of a third time around, just had herself stored with instructions for rental re-sleeve on a list of family occasions. Release of her son Ari from penal storage wasn’t on that list, so I took the hint. Brother was still dead, sister got out of the store while I was in, went north decades before I got out again, I don’t know where. Maybe looking for her father.”

“And your daughter’s family?”

He laughed and shrugged. “Daughter, grandkids. Man, by then I was another two generations out of step with them, I didn’t even try to catch up. I just took what I had and I ran with it.”

“Which was what?” I nodded at him. “This sleeve?”

“Yeah, this sleeve. I got what you might call lucky. Belonged to some rayhunter captain got busted for hooking out of a First Families marine estate. Good solid sleeve, well looked after. Some useful seagoing software racked in, and some weird instinctive shit for weather. Sort of painted a career for me all on its own. I got a loan on a boat, made some money. Got a bigger boat, made some more. Got the ‘duct. Got a woman back in Newpest now. Couple of kids I’m watching grow up.”

I raised my glass without irony. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, like I said. I got lucky.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

He leaned forward on the table and looked at me. “You know why I’m telling you this.”

I quelled a grin. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know. He was doing his best.

“Alright, Ari. Tell you what, I’ll lay off your cargo. I’ll mend my ways, give up piracy and start a family. Thanks for the tip.”

He shook his head. “Not telling you anything you don’t already know, sam. Just reminding you, is all. This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop ru

He was right, of course.

As a messenger, he was also a little late.

Evening caught up with the Haiduci’s Daughter on her westward curve a couple of hours later. The sun split like a cracked egg either side of a rising

Hotei and reddish light soaked out across the horizon in both directions.

The low rise of Kossuth’s gulf coastline painted a thick black base for the picture. High above, thin cloud cover glowed like a shovel full of heated coins.

I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset—I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.

I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines—if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.

Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between.

Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground—might as well see some of it, I reasoned at the time.

And then I

When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime.

Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the I

An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.

It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right—all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some u

But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.

I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.

On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked south east where the dark was gathering, approximately towards Newpest.

I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.

Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half dozen metres away. I edged round to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good metre from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.

“Fuck are you looking at?”

For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.

“I’m not going to see them,” I told it after a while. “So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.”

But still, in the fast growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.