Woken Furies

“I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?”

“How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.”

The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.

“I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.”

I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.

“Check the account,” I told Segesvar. “The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.”

“You’re calling from a construct?”

“Go check your cashflow, Rad. I’ll hold.”

The rest was easy.

In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep and most programmes don’t bother to include the sub-routines that would cause it. Long term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely … odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that.

You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.

We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, ru

At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included.

You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.

“There you are,” she said, with an odd lightness of tone.

“Here I am,” I agreed.

She cleared her throat. “How’s your head?”

“Cooling off.” I raised the sake cup in one hand. “Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.”

“You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.”

But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand and poured.

“Kampai,” she said.

“Por nosotros.”

We drank. She settled onto the automould opposite me. “Trying to make me feel homesick?”

“Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?”

“I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.”

“Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.”

“And the beach life.” She reclined a little on the automould and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and ta

“Very beautiful,” I admitted. “Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.”

She seemed to realise the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.

“What else did he tell you?”

“Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.”

“You were looking for me.”

“Yeah.” Something stopped me at that simple admission. “I was.”

“And now that you’ve found me, what?”

My pulse had settled at an accelerated pounding. The edged whine of overstay in virtual was back. Images cascaded through my head. Virginia Vidaura, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, unattainable Envoy trainer, poised before us at induction, a dream of female competence beyond everyone’s reach. Splinters of mirth in voice and eyes that might have kindled to sensuality in a less clearly defined set of relationships. A cringingly clumsy attempt at flirtation from Jimmy de Soto once in the mess bar, slapped down with brutal disinterest. Authority wielded with an utter lack of sexual tension. My own lurid undischarged fantasies, slowly flattening under an immense respect that went in at the same bone deep level as the Envoy induction.

And then combat, the final dissipation of any romantic fumes that might have endured the training years. Vidaura’s face in a dozen different sleeves on a dozen different worlds, sharpened with pain or fury or just the intense focus of mission time. The stink of her too-long-unwashed body in a cramped shuttle on the dark side of Loyko’s moon, the slick feel of her blood on my hands one murderous night in Zihicce when she almost died.

The look on her face when the orders to crush all resistance in Neruda came through.

I’d thought those moments had taken us beyond sex. They seemed to scoop out emotional depths that made fucking seem shallow by comparison.

The last time I’d visited Vchira and seen the way Brasil leaned towards her—her Adoracion ancestry alone enough to strike sparks of desire off him—I’d felt a vague sort of superiority. Even with Yaroslav and the on-and-off long-term commitment they’d managed, I’d always believed that somehow he wasn’t getting to the core of the woman I had fought beside in more corners of the Protectorate than most people would ever see.

I adopted a quizzical look that felt like taking cover.

“You think this is a good idea?” I asked.

“No,” she said huskily. “Do you?”

“Umm. In all honesty, Virginia, I’m rapidly begi

She laughed. “This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.”

I looked around the suite. “He could pop up any minute. So could any of them for that matter. I’m not much for display sex.”

“Me neither.” She got up and offered me her hand. “Come with me.”

She led me out of the suite and into the corridor. In both directions, identical doors mirrored each other across the anonymous grey carpeting and receded into a pale mist after a few dozen metres. We went, hand-in-hand, right up to the begi

It doesn’t take long to peel off spray-ons. Five seconds after the door closed, she had my surf shorts to my ankles and was rolling my rapidly hardening cock between her palms. I tugged free with an effort, got her swimsuit off her shoulders and ski

Then I spread the lips of her cunt with my fingers, traced the opening lightly with my tongue and stood up to kiss her on the mouth. Another tremor ran through her. She sucked my tongue in and bit it gently, then put both hands to my head and pulled back. I dragged my fingertips up the creases of her cunt again, found damp and heat and pressed gently at her clitoris. She shivered and gri