Woken Furies

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“Yes.” My voice softened a fraction. I’d misread the tension in him. It wasn’t hostility. “I’ve spoken to her.”

Inside the hoverloader, there was an unexpected sense of space and natural light. Combat vessels of this sort are usually pretty cramped, but Soseki Koi had had a lot of time to change all that. Bulkheads had been ripped out and in places the upper level deck had been peeled back to create five metre light wells. The sun poured in through the few vision ports and the opened dorsal hatches, blasted its way elsewhere between cracked armouring that might have been battle damage or deliberate modification. A riot of plantlife clustered about these opened areas, spilling out of hung baskets and twining up exposed struts in the skeleton of the fuselage. Illuminum panelling had been carefully replaced in some areas, left to decay in others.

Somewhere not visible, waterflow over rocks chuckled in patient counterpoint to the bassline pounding of the surf outside.

Koi got us seated on padded matting around a low, formally-set table at the bottom of one of the light wells. He served us with traces of old school ceremony from the ‘loader’s autochef, which sat on a shelf behind him and still seemed to be working pretty well. To the selection of grilled meat and pan noodles, he added a pot of belaweed tea and fruit grown from the plants overhead—vine plums and thick, thirty-centimetre lengths of Kossuth chainberry. Brasil dug into everything with the enthusiasm of a man who’d been in the water all day. I picked at my food, took just enough to be polite apart from the chainberry, which was some of the best I’d ever tasted. Koi held himself rigidly back from questions while we ate.

Eventually, Brasil tossed the stripped threads of his last piece of chainberry onto his plate, wiped his fingers on a napkin and nodded at me.

“Tell him. I gave him the highlights, but it’s your story.”

“I—” I looked across the table of devastated food and saw the hunger that sat there. ”Well. It’s a while back now. A few months. I was up in Tekitomura, on. Business. I was in this bar down on the waterfront, Tokyo Crow. She was—”

It felt strange, telling it. Strange, and if I was honest, very distant.

Listening to my own voice now, I suddenly had a hard time myself believing the path I’d tracked from that night of splattered blood and screaming hallucinations, out across the machine-haunted wastes of New Hok and back south again, ru

No wonder Radul Segesvar was having a hard time coming to terms with what I’d done. Told this tale of muddled loyalties and blown-off course rerouting, the man who’d come to him two years previously for backing would have laughed out loud in disbelief.

No, you wouldn’t have laughed.

You would have stared, cold with detachment as you barely listened, and thought about something else. About the next New Revelation slaughter, blood on the blade of a Tebbit knife, a steep-sided pit out in the Weed Expanse and a shrill screaming that goes on and on …

You would have shrugged the story away, true or not, content with what you had instead.

But Koi drank it in without a word. When I paused and looked at him, he asked no questions. He waited patiently and once, when I seemed to have stalled, he made a single, gentle gesture for me to continue. Finally, when I was done, he sat for a while and then nodded to himself.

“You say she called you names when she first came back.”

“Yes.” Envoy recall lifted them from the depths of inconsequential memory for me. “Odisej. Ogawa. She thought I was one of her soldiers, from the Tetsu battalion. Part of the Black Brigades.”

“So.” He looked away, face indecipherable. Voice soft. “Thank you, Kovacs-san.”

Quiet. I exchanged glances with Brasil. The surfer cleared his throat.

“Is that bad?”

Koi drew breath as if it hurt him.

“It isn’t helpful.” He looked at us again and smiled sadly. “I was in the Black Brigades. Tetsu battalion wasn’t part of them, it was a separate front.”

Brasil shrugged. “Maybe she was confused.”

“Yes, maybe.” But the sadness never left his eyes.

“And the names?” I asked him. “Do you recognise them?”

He shook his head. “Ogawa’s not an uncommon name for the north, but I don’t think I knew anyone called that. It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but it doesn’t chime. And Odisej, well,” a shrug, “there’s the kendo sensei, but I don’t think she had a Quellist past.”

We sat in silence for a little while. Finally, Brasil sighed.

“Ah, fuck.”

For some reason, the tiny explosion seemed to animate Koi. He smiled again, this time with a gleam I hadn’t seen in him before.

“You sound discouraged, my friend.”

“Yeah, well. I really thought this might be it, you know. I thought we were really going to do this.”

Koi reached for the plates and began to clear them onto the ledge behind his shoulder. His movements were smooth and economical, and he talked as he worked.

“Do you know what day it is next week?” he asked conversationally.

We both blinked at him.

“No? How unhealthy. How easily we wrap ourselves up in our own concerns, eh? How easily we detach from the wider scheme of life as it’s lived by the majority.” He leaned forward to collect the furthest dishes and I handed them to him. “Thank you. Next week, the end of next week, is Konrad Harlan’s birthday. In Millsport, celebration will be mandatory. Fireworks and festivities without mercy. The chaos of humans at play.”

Brasil got it before me. His face lit up. “You mean …?”

Koi smiled gently. “My friend, for all I know this might well really be it, as you rather cryptically describe it. But whether it is or not, I can tell you now we are really going to do this. Because we really have no other choice.”

It was what I wanted to hear, but I still couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. On the ride south, I’d imagined I might get Brasil and Vidaura, maybe another few of the neoQuell faithful, to weigh in on my side whatever the holes in their wish fulfillment. But Brasil’s data shrapnel story, the way it fitted the New Hok detail and the understanding that it came from someone who knew, who’d been there, the meeting with this small, self contained man and his serious approach to gardening and food—all this was pushing me towards the vertiginous edge of a belief that I’d been wasting my time.

The understanding that I hadn’t was almost as dizzying.

“Consider,” said Koi, and something seemed to have changed in his voice. “Maybe this ghost of Nadia Makita is exactly that, a ghost. But is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough? Has it not already been enough for the oligarchs to panic and disobey the binding covenants of their puppet masters back on Earth? How then can we not do this? How can we not take back from their grip this object of their terror and rage?”

I traded another look with Brasil. Raised an eyebrow.

“This isn’t going to be easy to sell,” the surfer said grimly. “Most of the ex-Bugs will fight if they think it’s Quell they’re going to get, and they’ll talk the others round. But I don’t know if they’ll do it for a woken ghost, however fucking vengeful.”

Koi finished clearing the plates, took up a napkin and examined his hands. He found a ribbon of chainberry juice caught around one wrist and cleaned it off with meticulous attention. His gaze was fixed on the task as he spoke. “I will speak to them, if you wish. But in the end, if they have no conviction of their own, Quell herself wouldn’t ask them to fight, and nor will I.”