Woken Furies (19 page)

Neurachem reeled in a voice shouting above the others—

“—pid motherfuckers, cease fire! Cease fire!
Cease fucking fire!
Up there, he’s
up there
!”

Ominous quiet. I put on desperate increments of speed. Then the air was ripped through with blast beams. I skidded, nearly went over a gap in the rail. Flung myself forward again.

Dig 301 at my ear, thunderous under neurachem amp.

“Portions of this site are currently considered unsafe—”

My own wordless snarl.

Blast heat at my back and the stink of ionized air.

The new voice below again, neurachem’d in close. “Fucking give me that, will you. I’ll show you how to—”

I threw myself sideways across the flange. The blast I knew was coming cut a scorching pain across my back and shoulder. Pretty sharp shooting at that range with a weapon that clumsy. I went down, rolled in approved fashion, came up, and dived for the nearest oval opening.

Blaster fire chased me inside.

• • •

It took them nearly half an hour to come in after me.

Holed up in the swooping Martian architecture, I strained with the neurachem and followed the argument as best I could. I couldn’t find a vantage point this low in the structure that would give me a view of the outside—
fucking Martian builders
—but peculiar funneling effects in the eyrie’s internal structure brought me the sound of voices in gusts. The gist of what was said wasn’t hard to sort out. The hired help wanted to pack up and go home; their leader wanted my head on a stick.

You couldn’t blame him. In his place, I wouldn’t have been any different. You don’t go back to the yakuza with half a contract fulfilled. And you certainly don’t turn your back on an Envoy. He knew that better than anyone there.

He sounded younger than I’d expected.

“—believe you’re fucking scared of this place. For Christ’s sake, you all grew up just down the hill. It’s only a fucking
ruin.
”

I glanced around at the billowing curves and hollows, felt the gentle but insistent way their lines sucked focus upward until your eyes started to ache. Hard morning light fell in from unseen vents overhead, but somehow on the way down it softened and changed. The clouded bluish alloy surfaces seemed to suck it in, and the reflected light that came back was oddly muted. Below the mezzanine level I’d climbed to, patches of gloom alternated with gashes and holes in flooring where no sane human architect would have put them. A long way below that, the mountainside showed gray rock and sparse vegetation.

Only a ruin. Right.

He
was
younger than I’d expected.

For the first time, I started to wonder constructively exactly how young. At an absolute minimum, he was certainly short a couple of formative experiences I’d had around Martian artifacts.

“Look, he’s not even fucking
armed.
”

I pitched my voice to carry outside.

“Hoy, Kovacs! You’re so fucking confident, why don’t you come in and get me yourself?”

Sudden silence. Some muttering. I thought I caught a muffled guffaw from one of the locals. Then his voice, raised to match mine.

“That’s good eavesdropping gear they fitted you with.”

“Isn’t it.”

“You planning to give us a fight, or just listen in and shout cheap abuse?”

I grinned. “Just trying to be helpful. But you can have a fight if you want it—come on in. Bring the hired help, too, if you must.”

“I’ve got a better idea. How about I let my hired help run an open-all-orifices train on your traveling companion, as long as it takes you to come out? You could use your neurachem to listen in on that as well if you like. Although, to be honest, the sound’ll probably carry enough without. They’re enthusiastic, these boys.”

The fury spiked up through me, too fast for rational thought. Muscles in my face skipped and juddered, and the frame of the Eishundo sleeve cabled rigid. For two sluggish heartbeats, he had me. Then the Envoy systems came soaking coldly through the emotion, bleaching it back out for assessment.

He isn’t going to do that. If Tanaseda traced you through Oshima and the Slipins, it’s because he knows she’s implicated in Yukio Hirayasu’s death. And if he knows that, he’ll want her intact. Tanaseda is old school and he’s promised an old-school execution. He isn’t going to want damaged goods.

And besides, this is you we’re talking about. You know what you’re capable of and it isn’t this.

I was younger then. Now. I am.
I wrestled the concept in my head.
Out there. I’m younger out there. There’s no telling—

Yes there is. This is Envoy bluff and you know it, you’ve used it enough yourself.

“Nothing to say about that?”

“We both know you won’t do it, Kovacs. We both know who you’re working for.”

This time the pause before he called back was barely noticeable. Good recovery, very impressive.

“You seem remarkably well informed for a man on the run.”

“It’s my training.”

“Soak up the local color, huh?”

Virginia Vidaura’s words at Envoy induction, a subjective century ago. I wondered how long ago she’d said it to him.

“Something like that.”

“Tell me something, man, ’cause I’d genuinely like to know. With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living? As a career move, I got to say it puzzles me.”

A cold knowledge crept up through me as I listened. I grimaced and shifted my position slightly. Said nothing.

“Serendipity, right? It’s Serendipity?”

“Well, I have got another name,” I shouted back. “But some fuckhead stole it. Until I get it back, Serendipity’s fine.”

“Maybe you won’t get it back.”

“Nah, it’s good of you to worry, but I know the fuckhead in question. He isn’t going to be a problem for much longer.”

The twitch was tiny, barely a missed beat. Only the Envoy sense picked it up, the anger, shut down as rapidly as it flared.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, like I said. Real fuckhead. Strictly a short-lived thing.”

“That sounds like overconfidence to me.” His voice had changed fractionally. Somewhere in there, I’d stung him. “Maybe you don’t know this guy as well as you like to think.”

I barked a laugh. “Are you kidding? I taught him every fucking thing he knows. Without me—”

And
there.
The figure I’d known was coming. The one I couldn’t listen for with neurachem while I traded veiled insults with the voice outside. A crouched, black-clad form sliding in through the opening five meters under me, some kind of spec ops eyemask-and-sensor gear turning the head insectile and inhuman. Thermographic imaging, sonic locater, motion alert, at a probable minimum—

I was already falling. Pushed off from the ledge, boot heels aligned to hit the neck below the masked head and snap it.

Something in the headgear warned him. He jumped sideways, looking up, twisting the blaster toward me. Beneath the mask, his mouth jerked open to yell. The blast cut through air I’d just dropped out of. I hit the floor crouched, a handbreadth off his right elbow. Blocked the swing of the blaster barrel as it came around. The yell came out of his mouth, shivery with the shock. I struck upward into his throat with the blade of one hand and the sound choked to retching. He staggered. I straightened, went after him, and chopped again.

There were two more of them.

Framed in the opening, side by side. The only thing that saved me was their incompetence. As the lead commando dropped strangling to death at my feet, either one could have shot me—instead, they both tried at the same time and tangled. I sprinted directly at them.

There are worlds I’ve been where you can gun down a man holding a knife at ten meters and claim it as self-defense. The legal argument is that it doesn’t take very long to close that gap and stab.

That much is true.

If you really know what you’re doing, you don’t even need the knife.

This was five meters or less. I got in a flurry of blows, stamping down at shin and instep, blocked weapons however I could, hooking an elbow around hard into a face. A blaster came loose and I fielded it. Triggered it in a savage close-quarters arc.

Muffled shrieks and a short-lived explosion of blood as flesh seared open and then cauterized. Steam wisped, and their bodies tumbled away from me. I had time for a hard breath, a glance down at the weapon in my hands—
piece-of-shit Szeged Incandess
—and then another blaster beam flared off the alloy surface beside my head. They were coming in force.

With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living?

Just fucking incompetent, I guess.

I backed up. Someone poked a head into the oval opening and I chased them away with a barely aimed burst of fire.

And too fucking fascinated with yourself for your own good.

I grabbed a projection one-handed and hauled myself up, hooking my legs onto the wide, spiraling ramp that led back to my initial hiding place on the mezzanine. The Eishundo sleeve’s gecko grip failed on the alloy. I slipped, grabbed again in vain, and fell. Two new commandos burst through a gap to the left of the one I was covering. I fired randomly and low with the Szeged, trying to get back up. The beam chopped a foot off the commando on the right. She screamed and stumbled, clutched at her injured leg, toppled gracelessly, and fell through a gash in the floor. Her second scream floated back up through the gap.

I came up off the ground and flung myself at her companion.

It was a clumsy fight, both of us hampered by the weapons we held. I lunged with the butt of the Szeged; he blocked and tried to level his own blaster. I smashed it aside and kicked at a knee. He turned the blow with a shin kick of his own. I got the Szeged butt under his chin and rammed upward. He dropped his weapon and punched me hard simultaneously in the side of the throat and the groin. I reeled back, hung on somehow to the Szeged, and suddenly had the distance to use it. Proximity sense screamed a warning at me through the pain. The commando ripped out a sidearm and pointed it. I flinched aside, ignoring the pain and the proximity warning in my head, leveled the blaster.

Sharp splatter from the gun in the commando’s hand. The cold wrap of a stunblast.

My hand spasmed open and the Szeged clattered away somewhere.

I staggered backward and the floor vanished under my feet.

—fucking Martian builders—

I dropped out of the eyrie like a bomb, and fell wingless away from the rapidly contracting iris of my own consciousness.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.”

It was like a mantra, like an incantation, and someone seemed to have been singing it to me for hours. I wasn’t sure if I could have disobeyed it anyway—my left arm was an icy branch of numbness from fist to shoulder and my eyes seemed gummed shut. My shoulder felt wrenched, maybe dislocated. Elsewhere, my body throbbed with the more general ache of a stunblast hangover. I was cold everywhere.

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t—”

“I heard you the first time, Dig.” My throat felt clogged. I coughed and an alarming dizziness swung through me. “Where am I?”

A brief hesitation. “Professor Serendipity, perhaps that information would be better dealt with later. Don’t open your left hand.”

“Yeah, got it. Left hand, don’t open it. Is it fucked?”

“No,” said the construct reluctantly. “Apparently not. But it is the only thing holding you up.”

Shock, like a stake in the chest. Then the rolling wave of false calm as the conditioning kicked in. Envoys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing—waking up in unexpected places is part of the brief. You don’t panic, you just gather data and deal with the situation. I swallowed hard.

“I see.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred meters of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.

The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-gray alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.

“What’s going on, Dig?” I croaked.

“As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable, which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.”

“Recovery bay?” I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. “So how does that work?”

“We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—”

“All right.” I stared grimly up at my closed fist. “How long have I been out?”

“Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high-altitude, high-risk environments.”

No shit.

How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me. They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realization of the fall. Grabbing at something half seen as the stun-blast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.

A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked-muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If, for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.

“Where are the others?”

“They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.”

“So they think I fell all the way.”

“It appears so. The man you referred to as Kovacs has detailed some of his employees to begin a search at the base of the mountain. I understand they will try to recover your body along with that of the woman you mutilated in the firefight.”

“And Sylvie? My colleague?”

“They have taken her with them. I have recorded footage of—”

“Not right now.” I cleared my throat, noticing for the first time how parched it felt. “Look, you said there are openings. Ways back into the eyrie from here. Where’s the nearest?”

“Behind the triflex downspire to your left, there is an entry port ninety-three centimeters in diameter.”

I craned my neck and spotted what I assumed Dig 301 was talking about. The downspire looked very much like a two-meter inverted witch’s hat that massive fists had crumpled badly in three different places. It was surfaced in uneven bluish facets that caught the shadowed light beneath the eyrie and gleamed as if wet. The lowest deformation brought its tip almost horizontal and offered a saddle of sorts that I thought I might be able to cling to. It was less than two meters from where I hung.

Easy. Nothing to it.

If you can make the jump with one arm crippled, that is.

If your trick hand grips better on Martian alloy than it did an hour ago upstairs.

If—

I reached up with my right arm and took hold of the loop of cable, close to my other hand. Very gently, I took up the tension and began to lift myself on the new grip. My left arm twinged as the weight came off it, and a jagged flash of heat spiked through the numbness. My shoulder creaked. The heat branched out across abused ligaments and started turning into something resembling pain. I tried to flex my left hand but got nothing outside a sparking sensation in the fingers. The pain in my shoulder swelled and began to soak down through the muscles of the arm. It felt as if, when it finally got going, it was going to hurt a lot.

I tried again with the fingers of my left hand. This time the sparking gave way to a bone-deep, pulsing ache that brought tears squirting into my eyes. The fingers would not respond. My grip was welded in place.

“Do you wish me to alert emergency services?”

Emergency services: the Tekitomura police, closely followed by deCom security with tidings of Kurumaya’s displeasure, tipped-off local yakuza with the new me at their grinning head, and, who knew, maybe even the Knights of the New Revelation, if they could afford the police bribes and had been keeping up on current events.

“Thanks,” I said weakly. “I think I’ll manage.”

I glanced up at my clamped left hand, back at the triflex downspire, down at the drop. I drew a long hard breath. Then, slowly, I worked my right hand along the cable until it was touching its locked-up mate. Another breath and I hinged my body upward from the waist. Barely recovered nerve tissue in my stomach muscles sputtered protest. I hooked with my right foot, missed, flailed and hooked again. My ankle lodged over the cable. More weight came off my left arm. The pain began in earnest, racking explosions through the joints and down the muscles.

One more breath, one more glance d—

No,
don’t
fucking look down.

One more breath, teeth gritted.

Then I began, with thumb and forefinger, to unhinge my paralyzed fingers one at a time from the cable.

• • •

I left the swooping bluish gloom of the eyrie’s interior half an hour later, still on the edge of a persistent manic giggle. The adrenaline humor stayed with me all the way along the cantilever arm, down the shaky archaeologue ladder—not easy with one arm barely functional—then the steps. I hit solid ground still smirking stupidly, and picked my way between the cabins with ingrained caution and tiny explosive snorts of hilarity. Even when I got back to the cabin we’d used, even inside and staring at the empty bed I’d left Sylvie in, I could feel the trace of the comedown grin twitching on and off my lips and the laughter still bubbled faintly in my stomach.

It had been a close thing.

Ungripping my fingers from the cable hadn’t been much fun, but compared with the rest of the escapade, it was a joy. Once released, my left arm dropped and hung at the end of a shoulder socket that ached like a bad tooth. It was as much use to me as a deadweight slung around my neck. A sustained minute of cursing before I could bring myself to then unsling my right foot, swing free by my right hand, and use the momentum to make an ungainly leap sideways at the downspire. I grabbed, clawed, found that the Martians for once had built in a material that offered something approaching decent friction, and clamped myself panting into the saddle at the bottom. I stayed like that for a good ten minutes, cheek pressed to the cold alloy.

Careful exploratory leaning and peering showed me the floor hatch Dig 301 had promised, within grasping distance if I stood up on the tip of the downspire. I flexed my left arm, got some response above the elbow, and reckoned it might serve, if nothing else, as a wedge in the hatch. From that position, I could probably lever my legs up and inside.

Another ten minutes and I was sweatily ready to try.

A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.

Nothing to it.

Eventually, I got up and made my way out.

In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat, and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder. The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.

There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.

On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia. Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.

In too much of a hurry.

Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?

I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.

I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.

I wondered what
he
would do.

I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.

“Dig?”

She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.

“Professor Serendipity?”

“You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?”

“Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic meters of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—”

“Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.”

“Commencing.”

I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.

“And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.”

• • •

He had a good body.

I skipped about in the footage for the best shots, got one as the intruders came up the mountain path toward the cabin. Froze it on him and stared for a while. He had some of the bulk you expect from battlefield custom, but there was a lilt to it, a way of stepping and standing that leaned more toward Total Body theater than combat. Face a smooth blend of more racial variants than you’d usually get on Harlan’s World. Custom-cultured, then. Gene codes brought in from offworld. Skin tanned the color of worn amber, eyes a startling blue. Broad, protruding cheekbones, a wide, full-lipped mouth, and long, crinkled black hair bound back with a static braid. Very pretty.

And very pricey, even for the yakuza.

I quelled the faint scratching of disquiet and got Dig 301 to pan about a bit among the intruders. Another figure caught my eye. Tall and powerful, rainbow-maned. The site microcams yanked in a close-up of steel-lensed eyes and subcutaneous circuitry in a grim, pale face.

Anton.

Anton and at least a couple of slim wincefish types who preceded him up the path with the loose, in-step coordination of deCom operational pitch. One of them was the woman whose foot I’d shot off in the eyrie. Two, no three, more came behind the command head, standing out clearly from the rest of the party now that I was looking for that characteristic scattered-but-meshed pattern.

Somewhere in me, a faint gray sense of loss readied itself for recognition at the sight.

Anton and the Skull Gang.

Kovacs had brought his New Hok hunting dogs back with him.

I thought back to the confusion of the firefight amid the cabins and the eyrie, and it made some more sense. A boatload of yakuza enforcers and a deCom crew, mingled and getting in each other’s way. Very poor logistics for an Envoy. No way I would have made that mistake at his age.

What are you talking about? You just did make that mistake at his age. That’s
you
out there.

A faint shiver coiled down my spine.

“Dig, move it up to the bedroom again. Where they pull her out.”

The coil jumped and shimmered. The woman with the tangled hyper-wired hair blinked awake among twisted sheets. The crash of gunfire outside had woken her. Eyes wide as she registered what it was. Then the door burst open and the room filled with bulky forms brandishing hardware and yelling. When they saw what they had, the shouting powered down to chuckles. Weapons were put up and someone reached for her. She punched him in the face. A brief struggle flared and guttered out as weight of numbers squashed her speed reflexes. Sheets torn away, efficient disabling blows administered to thigh and solar plexus. While she wheezed on the floor, one grinning thug grabbed at a breast, groped between her legs, and made pumped-hip rutting motions over her. A couple of his companions laughed.