Woken Furies (27 page)

It was a standard picture, and I’d had it painted for me before by other Vchira enthusiasts in the past. Looking past the more obvious embellishments, I panned out a little useful detail. Brasil had money—
all those years with the Little Blues, right. No way he has to scratch a living teaching wobblies, selling boards, and training up some fucking Millsport aristo’s spare flesh five years ahead of time
—but the man still didn’t hold with clone reincarnation. He’d be wearing good surfer flesh, but I wouldn’t know his face.
Look for them fucking scars on his chest, sam.
Yes, he still wore his hair long. Current rumor had him holed up in a sleepy beach hamlet somewhere south. Apparently he was learning to play the saxophone. There was this jazzman, used to play with Csango junior, who’d told Milan . . .

I paid for the drinks and got up to go. The sun was gone and the dirty-gold sea all but tarnished through to base metal. Across the beach below us, lights were coming to firefly life. I wondered if I’d catch the bug-hire place before it shut.

“So this aristo,” I said idly. “You teach his body to surf for five years, hone the reflexes for him. What’s your end?”

Milan shrugged and sipped at what was left of his rum. He’d mellowed with the alcohol and the payment. “We trade sleeves. I get what he’s wearing in return for this, age sixteen. So my end’s a thirty-plus aristo sleeve, cosmetic alterations, and witnessed exchange, so I don’t try to pass myself off as him, otherwise catalog-intact. Top-of-the-range clone stock, all the peripherals fitted as standard. Sweet deal, huh?”

I nodded absently. “Yeah, if he looks after what he’s wearing, I guess. Aristo lifestyles I’ve seen can make for some pretty heavy wear and tear.”

“Nah, this guy’s in shape. Comes down here on and off to check on his investment, you know, swim and surf a bit. Would have been down this week but that Harlan limo thing put a lock on it. He’s running a little extra weight he could do without, can’t surf for shit of course. But that’ll sort out easy enough when I—”

“Harlan limo thing?” Envoy awareness slithered along my nerves.

“Yeah, you know. Seichi Harlan’s skimmer. This guy’s real close with that branch of the family, had to—”

“What happened to Seichi Harlan’s skimmer?”

“You didn’t hear about this?” Milan blinked and grinned. “Where you been, sam? Been all over the net since yesterday. Seichi Harlan, taking his sons and daughter-in-law across to Rila, the skimmer just wiped out there in the Reach.”

“Wiped out how?”

He shrugged. “They don’t know yet. Whole thing just exploded, footage they showed looks like from the inside. Sank in seconds, what was left of it. They’re still looking for the pieces.”

They’d be lucky. The maelstrom made itself felt a long way in at this time of year, and the currents in the Reach were lethally unpredictable. Sinking fragments of wreckage might get carried for kilometers before they settled. The broken remains of Seichi Harlan and his family could end up in any of a dozen resting places amid the scattered islets and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago. Stack recovery was going to be a nightmare.

My thoughts fled back to Belacotton Kohei and Plex’s
take
-soaked mutterings.
I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement.
He’d said biological, but on his own admission his knowledge was incomplete. He’d been shut out by high-level yakuza rank and the Harlan family retainer, Aiura. Aiura, who ran damage limitation and cleanup for the Harlan family.

Another wisp of detail settled into place in my mind. Drava wrapped in snow. Waiting in Kurumaya’s antechamber, staring disinterestedly through the global news scrolldown. Accidental death of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district.

It wasn’t a connection as such, but Envoy intuition doesn’t work that way. It just goes on piling up the data until you start to see the shape of something in the mass. Until the connections make themselves for you. I couldn’t see anything yet, but the fragments were singing to me like wind chimes in a storm.

That and the tiny insistent pulse of backbeat:
hurry, hurry, there isn’t time.

I traded a badly remembered Vchira handshake with Milan and set off back up the hill, hurrying.

• • •

The bug-hire place was still lit, and staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with surfer physique. He woke up around the eyes for long enough to find out that I wasn’t a wave rider, aspiring or otherwise, and then settled into mechanical client service mode. Dayjob shielding around the briefly glimpsed inner core that kept him at Vchira, the heat of enthusiasm wrapped carefully back up again for when he could share it with someone who understood. But he set me up competently enough with a garishly colored single-seat speed bug and showed me the streetmap software with the return points I could use up and down the Strip. At request, he also provided me with a premolded polalloy crash suit and helmet, though you could see his already low opinion of me go through the floor when I asked for it. It seemed there were still a lot of people on Vchira Beach who couldn’t tell risk and idiocy apart.

Yeah, maybe including you, Tak. Done anything safe yourself recently?

Ten minutes later, I was suited up and powering out of Kem Point behind a cone of headlamp glow in the gathering gloom of evening.

Somewhere south, listening for a badly played saxophone.

I’d had better sets of clues to follow, but there was one thing massively in my favor. I knew Brasil, and I knew that if he heard someone was looking for him, he wasn’t likely to hide. He’d come out to deal with it the way you paddled up to a big wave. The way you faced down a spread of Harlan Loyalists.

Make enough noise, and I wouldn’t have to find him.

He’d find me.

• • •

Three hours later, I pulled off the highway and into the cold bluish wash of bug-swarmed Angier lamps around an all-night diner and machine shop. Looking back a little wearily, I judged I’d made enough noise. My supply of low-value credit chips was depleted, I was lightly fogged from too much shared drink and smoke up and down the Strip, and the knuckles of my right hand still ached slightly from a badly thrown punch in a beachside tavern where strangers asking after local legends weren’t well regarded.

Under the Angier lamps the night was pleasantly cool, and there were knots of surfers clowning about in the parking area, bottles and pipes in hand. Laughter that seemed to bounce off the darkened distance around the lampglow, someone telling a broken-board story in a high, excited voice. One or two more serious groups gathered around the opened innards of vehicles undergoing repair. Laser cutters flickered on and off, showering weird green or purple sparks off exotic alloys.

I got a surprisingly good coffee at the counter and took it outside to watch the surfers. It wasn’t a culture I’d ever accessed during my youth in Newpest—gang protocols wouldn’t permit a serious commitment to both scuba and wave riding, and the diving found me first. I never switched allegiances. Something about the silent world beneath the surface drew me. There was a vast, slow-breathing calm down there, a respite from all the street craziness and my own even more jagged home life.

You could bury yourself down there.

I finished the coffee and went back inside the diner. Ramen soup smells wreathed the air and tugged at my guts. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t eaten since a late ship’s breakfast on the bridge of the
Haiduci’s Daughter
with Japaridze. I climbed onto a counter stool and nodded at the same meth-eyed kid I’d bought my coffee from.

“Smells good. What have you got?”

He picked up a battered remote and thumbed it in the general direction of the autochef. Holodisplays sprang up over the various pans. I scanned them and chose a hard-to-spoil favorite.

“Give me the chilied ray. That’s frozen ray, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “You expecting fresh, maybe? Place like this? At that price?”

“I’ve been away.”

But it elicited no response in his meth-stunned face. He just set the autochef in motion and wandered away to the windows, staring out at the surfers as if they were some form of rare and beautiful sea life caught in an aquarium.

I was halfway through my bowl of ramen when the door opened behind me. No one said anything, but I knew already. I set down the bowl and turned slowly on the stool.

He was on his own.

It wasn’t the face I remembered, not even close. He’d sleeved to fairer and broader features than the last time around, a tangled mane of blond traced with gray, and cheekbones that owed at least as much to Slavic genes as they did to his predilection for Adoracion custom. But the body wasn’t much different—inside the loose coveralls he wore, he still had the height and slim breadth in chest and shoulders, the tapered waist and legs, the big hands. And his moves still radiated the same casual poise when he made them.

I knew him as certainly as if he’d torn open the coverall to show me the scars on his chest.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” he said mildly. “Do I know you?”

I grinned.

“Hello, Jack. How’s Virginia these days?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.”

She sat on the slope of the dune at my side and traced triangles in the sand between her feet with a bottleback prod. She was still wet from the swim, water pearling on sun-darkened skin all over the surfer sleeve, razored black hair spiked damp and uneven on top of her head. The elfin face beneath was taking some getting used to. She was at least ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. Then again, she was probably having the same problem with me. She stared down at the sand as she spoke, features unreadable. She talked hesitantly, the same way she’d woken me in the spare room at dawn, asking if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. She’d had all night to get over the surprise, but she still looked at me in snatched glances, as if it weren’t allowed.

I shrugged.

“I’m the believable part, Virginia. I’m not the one back from the dead. And don’t call me
kid.
”

She smiled a little. “We’re all back from the dead at some point, Tak. Hazards of the profession, remember?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” She stared away down the beach for a while, where the sunrise was still a blurred blood rumor through early-morning mist. “So do
you
believe her?”

“That she’s Quell?” I sighed and scooped up a handful of sand. Watched it trickle away through my fingers and off the sides of my palm. “I believe
she
believes she is.”

Virginia Vidaura made an impatient gesture. “I’ve met wireheads who believe they’re Konrad Harlan. That isn’t what I asked you.”

“I know what you asked me, Virginia.”

“Then deal with the fucking question,” she said without heat. “Didn’t I teach you anything in the Corps?”

“Is she Quell?” Trace moisture from the swim had left tiny lines of sand still clinging to my palms. I brushed my hands together brusquely. “How can she be, right? Quell’s dead. Vaporized. Whatever your pals back at the house might like to wish for in their political wet dreams.”

She looked over her shoulder, as if she thought they might hear us. Might have woken and come stretching and yawning down to the beach after us, rested and ready to take violent offense at my lack of respect.

“I can remember a time you might have wished for it, too, Tak. A time you might have wanted her back. What happened to you?”

“Sanction Four happened to me.”

“Ah, yes. Sanction Four. Revolution called for a bit more commitment than you’d expected, did it?”

“You weren’t there.”

A small quiet opened up behind the words. She looked away. Brasil’s little band were all nominally Quellists—or neoQuellists at least—but Virginia Vidaura was the only one among them with Envoy conditioning. She’d had the capacity for willful self-deception gouged out of her in a way that would permit no easy emotional attachment to legend or dogma. She’d have, I reasoned, an opinion worth listening to. She’d have perspective.

I waited. Down the beach, wavecrash kept up a slow, expectant backbeat.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”

Her mouth quirked. “Still quoting her, though, I see.”

“Paraphrasing. Look, Virginia, you correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no record of any backup of Nadia Makita ever made. Right?”

“There’s no record of any backup of Takeshi Kovacs, either. Seems to be one out there, though.”

“Yeah, don’t remind me. But that’s the fucking Harlan family, and you can see a rationale for why they’d do it. You can see the value.”

She looked sidelong at me. “Well, it’s good to see your time on Sanction Four didn’t damage your ego.”

“Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have
uses.
It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.”

“Hardly plankton-standard.” She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. “Takeshi, you know Yaros and I . . .”

“Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.”

“Really?”

“Well, what he really said was
ah fuck it,
but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?”

She sighed. “No. It didn’t.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There’s no point, it was all so long ago.” A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. “I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.”

I shrugged.
“We must be prepared to live on time scales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realize our own dreams.”

This time the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.

“You trying to be fucking funny?”

“No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—”

“Shut up, Tak.”

The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognize them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—

Well, never mind.

I shut up. Listened to the waves.

A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and gray, but all the way up four stories of seaward-facing rooms the windows winked broadly at us.

An off note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.

“Ouch.” I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.

“At least he’s trying,” she said obscurely.

“Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.”

She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.

“You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like around here?”

• • •

Surfers.

You’ll find them pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World, because pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World there’s an ocean that throws waves to die for. And
to die for
has a couple of meanings here. Zero point eight G, remember, and three moons—you can ride a wave along some parts of Vchira for half a dozen kilometers at a time, and the height of the things some of these guys get up on has to be seen to be believed. But the low gravity and the trilunar tug has its flip side, and the oceans on Harlan’s World run current systems like nothing ever seen on Earth. Chemical content, temperature, and flow all vary alarmingly, and the sea does bitchy, unforgiving things with very little warning. The turbulence theorists are still coming to grips with a lot of it, back in their modeled simulations. Out on Vchira Beach, they’re doing a different kind of research. More than once I’ve seen the Young effect played out to perfection on a seemingly stable nine-meter face, like some Promethean myth in frame advance—the perfect rising shoulder of water eddies and stumbles drunkenly under the rider, then shatters apart as if caught by artillery frag fire. The sea opens its throat, swallows the board, swallows the rider. I’ve helped pull the survivors from the surf a few times. I’ve seen the dazed grins, the glow that seems to come off their faces as they say things like
I didn’t think that bitch was
ever
going to get off my chest
or
man, did you see that shit come apart on me
or most often of all, urgently,
did you get my plank out okay, sam.
I’ve watched them go back out again, the ones who didn’t have dislocated or broken limbs or cracked skulls from the wipeout, and I’ve watched the gnawing want in the eyes of the ones who have to wait to heal.

I know the feeling well enough. It’s just that I tend to associate it with trying to kill people other than myself.

“Why us?” Mari Ado asked with the blunt lack of manners she obviously thought went with her offworld name.

I grinned and shrugged.

“Couldn’t think of anyone else stupid enough.”

She took a feline kind of offense at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder, and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner, too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that; it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker, and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.

“Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction Four.”

Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.

Ado glanced sideways. “Don’t you think, Sierra?”

Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty. The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue color-washed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than sprayon swimwear and some cheap jewelry. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten. But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.

Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylized grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done, and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.

I cleared my throat.

“You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction Four’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.”

As an insult, it was as unjust as it was complex. Mari Ado, ex of the Little Blue Bugs, was criminally competent in a number of insurgency roles that had nothing to do with wavecraft, and for that matter no less well endowed physically than a number of the other female bodies in the room, Virginia Vidaura included. But I knew she was sensitive about her shape, and unlike Virginia or myself, she’d never been offworld. In effect I’d called her a local yokel, a surf nerd, a cheap source of sexual service,
and
sexually unappealing all in one. Doubtless Isa, had she been there to witness it, would have yipped with delight.

I’m still a little sensitive myself where Sanction IV’s concerned.

Ado looked back across the table to the big oak armchair at the end. “Throw this motherfucker out, Jack.”

“No.” It was a low drawl, almost sleepy. “Not at this stage.”

He sprawled almost horizontal in the dark wood seat, legs stretched out in front of him, face drooping forward, opened hands pressed loosely one on top of the other in his lap, almost as if he was trying to read his own palm.

“He’s being rude, Jack.”

“So were you.” Brasil curled himself upright and forward in the chair. His eyes met mine. A faint sweat beaded his forehead. I recognized the cause. Fresh sleeve notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much. He hadn’t given up his bad habits.

“But she’s got a point, Kovacs. Why us? Why would we do this for you?”

“You know damned well this isn’t for me,” I lied. “If the Quellist ethic isn’t alive on Vchira, then tell me where the fuck else I go looking for it. Because time is short.”

A snort from down the table. A young male surfer I didn’t know. “Man, you don’t even know if this
is
Quell we’re talking about. Look at you, you don’t even believe it yourself. You want us to go up against the Harlan family for the sake of a glitch in some deCom psychobitch’s fucked-up head? No
way,
sam.”

There were a couple of mutterings I took for assent. But the majority stayed silent and watched me.

I hooked the young surfer’s gaze. “And your name is?”

“Fuck’s it to you, sam?”

“This is Daniel,” said Brasil easily. “He hasn’t been here long. And yes, you’re looking at his real age there. Listening to it, too, I’m afraid.”

Daniel flushed and looked betrayed.

“Fact remains, Jack. We’re talking about Rila Crags here. No one ever got inside there without an invitation.”

A smile tripped like lightning from Brasil to Virginia Vidaura and on to Sierra Tres. Even Mari Ado chortled sourly into her coffee.

“What? Fucking what?”

I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. “I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.”

“Natsume,” said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. “Name mean anything to you?”

The look she got back was answer enough.

“Nikolai Natsume.” Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. “Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.”

“That’s a real story?” I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. “I thought it was a propaganda myth.”

Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. “Hey, Natsume never got inside.”