Woken Furies (32 page)

Hard grins and kisses that were more like bites—

Breathing tipped frantically out of control—

My face, buried against the scant swelling of her breasts and the sweat-slick flat space between—

Her face rubbing sideways on the top of my head—

One agonizing moment when she held herself off me with all her force—

A yell, maybe hers, maybe mine—

—and then the liquid gushing of release, and collapse, juddering and sliding down the wall in a heap of splayed limbs and spasming bodies.

Spent.

After a long moment, I propped myself up sideways, and my flaccid cock popped slickly out of her. She moved one leg and moaned faintly. I tried to shift us both into a slightly more tenable position. She opened one eye and grinned.

“So, soldier. Wanted to do that for long, have you?”

I grinned back, weakly. “Only forever. You?”

“The thought had crossed my mind once or twice, yeah.” She pushed against the wall with the soles of both feet and sat up, leaning on her elbows. Her gaze flickered down the length of her body and then across at mine. “But I don’t fuck the recruits. Jesus, look at the mess we made.”

I reached a hand across to her sweat-smeared belly, trailed a finger down into the cleft at the start of her cunt. She twitched and I smiled.

“Want a shower then?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, I think we’d better.”

We started to fuck again in the shower, but neither of us had the same manic strength that had imbued the first time and we couldn’t stay braced. I carried her out to the bedroom and laid her down soaking wet on the bed instead. I knelt by her head, turned it gently and guided her mouth to my prick. She sucked, lightly at first then with gathering force. I lay backward alongside her slim muscled body, turned my own head and opened her thighs with my hands. Then I slid an arm around her hips, drew her cunt to my face, and went to work with my tongue. And the hunger came out all over again, like rage. The pit of my belly felt as if it was filled with sparking wires. Down the bed she made muffled noises, rolled her weight over, and crouched above me on elbows and spread knees. Her hips and thighs crushed down on me, her mouth worked the head of my prick, and her hand pumped at the shaft.

It took a long, slow, delirious time. Chemically unaided, we didn’t know each other well enough for a truly synchronized orgasm, but the Envoy conditioning or maybe something else covered for the lack. When finally I came into the back of her throat, the force of it bent me up off the bed against her crouched body and in pure reflex I wrapped both arms tight around her hips. I dragged her down onto me, tongue frantic, so that she spat me out still spasming and leaking, and screamed with her own climax, and collapsed onto me shuddering.

But not long after, she rolled off, sat up cross-legged, and looked seriously at me, as if I were a problem she couldn’t solve.

“I think that’s probably enough,” she said. “We’d better get back.”

• • •

And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.

I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I reentered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured, and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a coordination that spoke volumes.

“You’ll get your money back, you know,” I told him.

Brasil twitched impatiently. “I know that, Tak. I’m not concerned about the money. We would have cleared your debt with Segesvar as simple payment, if you’d asked. We still can—you could consider it a bounty for what you’ve brought us if you like.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said stiffly. “I’m considering it a loan. I’ll pay you back as soon as things have calmed down.”

A stifled snort from Sierra Tres. I turned on her.

“Something amusing you?”

“Yeah. The idea that things are going to calm down anytime soon.”

We watched the creep of night, across the sea in front of us. At the darkened end of the horizon, Daikoku crept up to join Marikanon in the western sky. Farther along the beach, the rest of Brasil’s crew were building a bonfire. Laughter cracked around the gathering pile of driftwood, and bodies clowned about in dim silhouette. In defiance of any misgivings either Tres or I might have, there was a deep calm soaking into the evening, as soft and cool as the sand underfoot. After the manic hours of the virtuality, there seemed nothing that really needed to be done or said until tomorrow. And right now tomorrow was still rolling around the other side of the planet, like a wave out deep and building force. I thought that if I were Koi, I’d believe I could feel the march of history holding its breath.

“So I take it no one’s going to get an early night,” I said, nodding at the preparations for the bonfire.

“We could all be Really Dead in a couple of days,” Tres said. “Get plenty of sleep then.”

Abruptly, she tugged her T-shirt cross-armed up over her head. Her breasts lifted and then swung disconcertingly as she completed the movement. Not what I needed right now. She dumped the T-shirt in the sand and started down the beach.

“I’m going for a swim,” she called back to us. “Anyone coming?”

I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.

I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen meters out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately, and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred meters from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s Reef.

I angled right and set off along the beach toward the site of the bonfire. People nodded at me; some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.

“Strong stuff,” I wheezed and handed it back.

“Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.” He gestured muzzily. “Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.”

Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand among them. Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.

“Just want to say,” she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic. “Thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.”

Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity. “That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.”

Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.

“Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,” said Hiro.

I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.

“What’s she like?” asked Andrea.

“Uh.” An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. “She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.”

Andrea nodded, smiling happily. “You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.”

“You’ll get your chance,” Daniel said, slurring a little. “Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.”

A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.

Hiro nodded grimly. “Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.”

“It’ll be
so good,
” said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. “To have someone again who knows what to
do.
”

PART FOUR

THIS IS ALL
THAT MATTERS

This much must be understood: Revolution requires
Sacrifice.

SANDOR SPAVENTA
Tasks for the Quellist Vanguard

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Northeastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Millsport Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, eons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometers across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fueled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast with other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base, and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation. Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plant life. Later still, humans came and did the same.

At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendor. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometers in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power, and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.

“I hate the fucking place,” Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to-do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffeehouse called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. “Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.”

It was a standard rant—one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

“You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“So?” She swung a glare on me. “Does that mean I’ve got to like it?”

“No, I guess not.”

We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbor quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafés. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death; others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets farther down seemed to have been sanitized—there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbor was full of yachts.

In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky-clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun; inside, the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workman-like little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system.
Millsport Sessions,
“Dream of Weed.”

At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d graysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect, and her eyes were dusted with some hemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

I smiled as I sat down. “We’re fashionably late, Isa. This is Mari. Mari, Isa. So how are we doing?”

Isa took a long, insolent moment to check out Mari, then turned her head and unjacked with an elegant, much-practiced gesture that showed off the nape of her neck.

“We’re doing well. And we’re doing it silently. Nothing new on the Millsport PD net, and nothing from any of the private security outfits the First Families like to use. They don’t know you’re here.”

I nodded. Gratifying though the news was, it made sense. We’d hit Millsport across the earlier part of the week, split into half a dozen separate groups, arrivals coordinated days apart. Fake ID at Little Blue Bug standards of impenetrability and a variety of different transport options ranging from cheap speed freighters to a Saffron Line luxury cruiser. With people streaming into Millsport from all over the planet for the Harlan’s Day festivities, it would have been either very bad luck or very bad operational management if any of us had been picked up.

But it was still good to know.

“What about security up at the Crags?”

Isa shook her head. “Less noise out of there than a priest’s wife coming. If they knew what you had planned, there’d be a whole new protocol layer, and there isn’t.”

“Or you haven’t spotted it,” said Mari.

Isa fixed her with another cool stare. “My dear, do you know
anything
at all about dataflow?”

“I know what levels of encryption we’re dealing with.”

“Yes, so do I. Tell me, how do you think I pay for my studies?”

Mari Ado examined her nails. “With petty crime, I assume.”

“Charming.” Isa shuttled her gaze in my direction. “Where
did
you get her, Tak? Madame Mi’s?”

“Behave, Isa.”

She gusted a long-suffering teenage sigh. “All right, Tak. For you. For you, I won’t rip this mouthy bitch’s hair out. And Mari, for your information, I am gainfully employed nights, under a pseudident, as a freelance security software scribe for more corporate names than you’ve probably given back-street blowjobs.”

She waited, tensed. Ado looked back at her with glittery eyes for a moment, then smiled and leaned forward slightly. Her voice rose no higher than a corrosive murmur.

“Listen, you stupid little virgin, if you think you’re going to get a catfight out of me, you’re badly mistaken. And lucky, too. In the unlikely event that you could push my buttons sufficient to piss me off that far, you wouldn’t even see me coming. Now, why don’t we discuss the business at hand, and then you can go back to playing at datacrime with your study partners and pretending you know something about the world.”

“You fucking whor—”

“Isa!” I put a snap into my voice and a hand in front of her as she started to rise. “That’s enough. She’s right, she could kill you with her bare hands and not even break a sweat. Now behave, or I’m not going to pay you.”

Isa shot me a look of betrayal and sat back down. Under the harlequin face paint, it was hard to tell, but I thought she was flushing furiously. Maybe the crack about virginity had touched a nerve. Mari Ado had the good grace not to look pleased.

“I didn’t have to help you,” Isa said in a small voice. “I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.”

“We won’t,” I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. “Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?”

• • •

What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matte-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to-date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week. Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool. Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.

But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?

I certainly didn’t at her age.

If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—

Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it’s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.

Isa covered it well enough to deserve applause. Whatever misgivings she had, by the time we’d finished the handover, her ruffled feathers had smoothed and she had her laconic Millsport drawl back in place.

“Did you find Natsume?” I asked her.

“Yeah, as it happens I did. But I’m not convinced you’ll want to talk to him.”

“Why not?”

She grinned. “Because he got religion, Kovacs. Lives in a monastery now, over on Whaleback and Ninth.”

“Whaleback? That the Renouncer place?”

“Sure is.” She struck an absurdly solemn, prayerful pose that didn’t match her hair and face. “Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware. Renounce henceforth all flesh, and the world.”

I felt my mouth twitch. Beside me, Mari Ado sat humorless as a ripwing.

“I got no problem with those guys, Isa. They’re harmless. Way I see it, they’re stupid enough to shun female company, that’s their loss. But I’m surprised someone like Natsume’d buy into something like that.”

“Ah, but you’ve been away. They take women, too, these days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, started way back, nearly a decade ago. What I heard, they found a couple of covert females in their midst. Been there for years. Figures, right? Anyone who’s resleeved could lie about their sex.” Isa’s voice picked up a beat as she hit her home turf running. “No one outside government’s got the money to run datachecks on stuff like that. If you’ve lived in a male sleeve for long enough, even psychosurgery has a hard time telling the difference. So anyway, back at the Brotherhood, it was either go the NewRev single-sleeve-and-you’re-out route, or come over all modern and desegregate. Lo and behold, the word from on high spake suddenly of change.”

“Don’t suppose they changed the name, too, did they?”

“Don’t suppose they did. Still the Brotherhood. Brother embraces sister, apparently.” A teenage shrug. “Not sure how the sisters feel about all that embracing, but that’s entry-level dues for you.”

“Speaking of which,” said Mari Ado. “Are we permitted entry?”

“Yeah, they take visitors. You may have to wait for Natsume, but not so’s you’d notice. That’s the great thing about Renouncing the flesh, isn’t it.” Isa grinned again. “No inconvenient things like Time and Space to worry about.”

“Good work, Issy.”

She blew me a kiss.

But as we were getting up to leave, she frowned slightly and evidently came to a decision. She raised a hand and cupped her fingers to get us back closer.

“Listen, guys. I don’t know exactly what you’re after up at Rila, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this for nothing. Old Harlan won’t be coming out of the pod this time around.”

“No?” On his birthday, that was unusual.

“That’s right. Bit of semi-covert court gossip I dipped yesterday. They lost another heirling down at Amami Sands. Hacked to death with a baling tine, apparently. They’re not making it public, but the MPD are a bit sloppy with their encryption these days. I was cruising for Harlan-related stuff so, like that. Picked it out of the flow. Anyway, with that and old Seichi getting toasted in his skimmer last week, they’re not taking any chances. They’ve called off half the family appearances altogether, and looks like even Mitzi Harlan’s getting a doubled secret-service detachment. And Old Man Harlan stays unsleeved. That’s for definite. Think they’re planning to let him watch the celebrations through a virtual linkup.”

I nodded slowly. “Thanks. That’s good to know.”

“Yeah, sorry if it’s going to fuck up some spectacular assassination attempt for you. You didn’t ask, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’d hate for you to go all that way up there and find nothing to kill.”

Ado smiled thinly.

“That’s not what we’re here for,” I said quickly. “But thanks anyway. Listen Isa, you don’t remember a couple of weeks back, some other Harlan small fry got himself killed in the wharf district?”

“Yep. Marek Harlan-Tsuchiya. Methed out of his head, fell off Karlovy Dock, banged his head, and drowned. Heartbreaking.”

Ado made an impatient gesture. I held up a hand to forestall her.

“Any chance our boy Marek was helped over the edge, do you think?”

Isa pulled a face. “Could be, I guess. Karlovy’s not the safest of places after dark. But they’ll have resleeved him by now, and there’s been nothing in the air about it being a murder. Then again—”

“Why should they let the general public in on it. Right.” I could feel the Envoy intuition twitching, but it was too faint to make anything of. “Okay, Isa. Thanks for the newsflash. It doesn’t affect anything at our end, but keep your ears tuned anyway, huh?”

“Always do, sam.”

We paid the tab and left her there, red-veined eyes and harlequin mask and the coil of light weaving at her elbow like some domesticated demon familiar. She waved as I looked back, and I felt a brief stab of affection for her that lasted me all the way out into the street.

“Stupid little bitch,” said Mari Ado as we headed down toward the waterfront. “I hate that fucking fake underclass thing.”

I shrugged. “Well, rebellion takes a lot of different forms.”