Woken Furies (10 page)

PART TWO

THIS IS
SOMEONE ELSE

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves
And burn your fingers once again

BAY CITY GRAFFITO
On a bench outside the
Central Penal Storage Facility

CHAPTER NINE

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang. A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok gray, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty meters below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.

“Leave us alone,” it repeated. “And we’ll do you the same favor.”

“Can’t do that.” Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew linkup at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. “You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.”

“Yeah.” Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. “And besides which, we want the fucking land.”

“The essence of empowerment,” said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, “is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonweal economic constitution . . .”

“
You
are the aggressors here.” The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. “We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.”

Kiyoka snorted. “Oh
come
off it.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” rumbled Orr.

It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we’d crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge. Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.

So, after a fashion, had I.

“. . . those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic . . .”

Drone’s the right fucking word.

I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards—there was, for example, no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves—but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.

“. . . in a struggle that has surfaced again and again everyplace the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—”

Movement.

Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength—Sylvie had estimated the co-op’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.

“Then you leave me no choice,” it said. “I shall be forced to neutralize your incursion with immediate effect.”

“Yeah,” said Lazlo through a yawn. “You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.”

“I am already about it.”

Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley toward us, heatseeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted. The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-meter drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.

Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared. Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve—Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were—came equipped with geckogene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could—assuming I actually fucking wanted to—scramble up a hundred meters of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene-engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain. Jadwiga, resleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an earsplitting whoop as she discovered the genetech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.

Personally, I don’t like heights.

On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.

I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised, but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew. Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security-scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it—they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographics and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.

The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked-up vision. Still a kilometer off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line-of-sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earned the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.

I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig. “Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.”

“Take it easy, Micky,” she drawled back. “I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation, either. Programmed parameters. Remember
that
?”

A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background. On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.

Sylvie sighed. “So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement? All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armor, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November Seventeenth Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?”

“Who the fuck cares?” echoed Jadwiga.

“We would have,” I pointed out. “If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.”

It was unfair—if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

“Correct!”
she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centers in the brain spewing an analog of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio-phone link.
“Correct your fucking parameters.”

The shell hit.

Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then—nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshaled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

“. . . our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has . . .”

Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake and called me a liar.

A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.

“Here we go, people.” A sharp whisper, for Jadwiga’s and my benefit. The rest would already know, advised on the internal net in less time than it takes to form a conscious human thought. “Through the primary baffles. Move on my command.”

The self-propelled gun was past the little huddle of prefabs now. Lazlo and Kiyoka had taken up positions close to the river not two kilometers downstream of the base. The karakuri advance guard had to be almost on top of them by now. The undergrowth and long silver grass along the valley twitched in a dozen places with their passing. The rest kept pace with the bigger machines.

“Now!”

Fire bloomed, pale and sudden amid the trees downstream. Orr, cutting loose against the first of the mech puppets.

“Go! Go!”

The lead spider tank staggered slightly in the water. I was already moving, a route down the rock I’d mapped out a couple of dozen times while I was waiting under the overhang. Cascading seconds, the Eishundo sleeve took over and put my hands and feet in place with engineered poise. I jumped the last two meters and hit the scree slope. An ankle tried to turn on the uneven footing—emergency sinew servos yanked taut and stopped it. I stood and sprinted.

A spider turret swiveled. The scree shattered into shale where I’d been. Splinters stung the back of my head and ripped into my cheek.

“Hey!”

“Sorry.” The strain was in her voice like unshed tears. “On it.”

The next shot went way over my head, maybe homing in on some seconds-decayed image of my scramble down the rock face that she’d stabbed into the sighting software, maybe just a blind shot in the machine equivalent of panic. I snarled relief, drew the Ronin shard blaster from the sheath on my back, and closed with the mimints.

Whatever Sylvie had done to the co-op’s systems was brutally effective. The spider tanks were swaying drunkenly, loosing fire at random into the sky and the upper crags of the valley’s sides. Around them, karakuri ran about like rats on a sinking raft. The scorpion gun stood in the midst of it all, apparently immobilized, low on its haunches.

I reached the gun in under a minute, pushing the sleeve’s biotech to its anaerobic limits. Fifteen meters off, a semi-functional karakuri stumbled into my path, upper arms waving confusedly. I shot it left-handed with the Ronin, heard the soft cough of the blast and saw the storm of monomolecular fragments rip it apart. The shard gun clanked another round into the chamber. Against the small mimints, it was a devastating weapon, but the scorpion gun was heavily armored and its internal systems would be hard to damage with directional fire.

I got up close, slapped the ultravibe mine against one towering metal flank, then tried to get out of the way before it blew.

And something went wrong.

The scorpion gun lurched sideways. Weapons systems on its spine woke to sudden life and swiveled. One massive leg flexed and kicked out. Intended or not, the blow grazed my shoulder, numbed the arm below it, and dumped me full-length into the long grass. I lost the shard blaster from fingers gone abruptly nerveless.

“Fuck.”

The gun moved again. I got to my knees, saw peripheral movement. High up on the carapace, a secondary turret was trying to bring its machine guns to bear on me. I spotted the blaster lying in the grass and dived after it. Combat-custom chemicals squirted in my muscles, and feeling fizzed back down the numbed arm. Above me on the self-propelled weapon’s bodywork, the machine-rifle turret triggered and slugs ripped the grass apart. I grabbed up the blaster and rolled frantically back toward the scorpion gun, trying to get under the angle of fire. The machine-rifle storm tracked me, showering ripped-up earth and shredded undergrowth. I shielded my eyes with one arm, threw up the Ronin right-handed, and fired blind at the sound of the guns. Combat conditioning must have put the shot somewhere close—the hail of slugs choked off.