Woken Furies (39 page)

“See anything?”

“I think they’ve put up microlights.” Tres put aside the binoculars. “It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.”

“Still twitchy, then.”

“Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.”

“Well.” I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. “Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?”

“You don’t think he made four hundred meters, either, then?”

“I don’t know.” I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. “He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defenses. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred meters off the water when it took them all out.”

She shot me an amused look. “I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.”

“Oh. Sorry. You seem older.”

“Thank you.”

“In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.”

“Or we got lucky.”

“Or we got lucky,” I echoed.

Brasil came up the companionway and stalked toward us. There was an uncharacteristic anger flickering around in the way he moved and he looked at me with open dislike. I spared him a return glance, then went back to staring at the water.

“I won’t have you talking to her like that again,” he told me.

“Oh
shut
up.”

“I’m serious, Kovacs. We all know you’ve got a problem with political commitment, but I’m not going to let you vomit up whatever fucked-in-the-head rage you’re carrying all over this woman.”

I swung on him.

“This woman? This
woman
? You’re calling
me
fucked in the head.
This woman
you’re talking about is not a human being. She’s a fragment, a ghost at best.”

“We don’t know that yet,” said Tres quietly.

“Oh please. Can neither of you see what’s happening here? You’re projecting your desires onto a fucking digitized human sketch. Already. Is this what’s going to happen if we get her back to Kossuth? Are we going to build a whole fucking revolutionary movement on a mythological scrap?”

Brasil shook his head. “The movement’s already there. It doesn’t need to be built, it’s ready to happen.”

“Yeah, all it needs is a figurehead.” I turned away as the old weariness rose in me, stronger even than the anger. “Which is handy, because all you’ve
got
is a fucking figurehead.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, you’re right.” I began to walk away. There isn’t far you can go on a thirty-meter boat, but I was going to open up as much space as I could between myself and these sudden idiots. Then something made me swing about to face them both across the deck. My voice rose in abrupt fury. “I
don’t
know that. I
don’t know
that Nadia Makita’s whole personality wasn’t stored and then left lying around in New Hok like some unexploded shell nobody wanted. I
don’t know
that it didn’t somehow find a way to get uploaded into a passing deCom.
But what are the fucking chances?
”

“We can’t make that judgment yet,” Brasil said, coming after me. “We need to get her to Koi.”

“Koi?”
I laughed savagely. “Oh,
that’s
good. Fucking Koi. Jack, do you really think you’re ever going to see Koi again? Koi is more than likely blasted meat scraped up off some back street in Millsport. Or better yet, he’s an interrogation guest of Aiura Harlan. Don’t you get it, Jack? It is
over.
Your neoQuellist resurgence is fucked. Koi is gone, probably the others are, too. Just more fucking casualties on the glorious road to revolutionary change.”

“Kovacs, you think I don’t feel for what happened to Isa?”

“I think, Jack, that provided we rescued that shell of a myth we’ve got down there, you don’t much care who died or how.”

Sierra Tres moved awkwardly on the rail. “Isa chose to get involved. She knew the risks. She took the pay. She was a free agent.”

“She was fifteen fucking years old!”

Neither of them said anything. They just watched me. The slap of water on the hull grew audible. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath, and looked at them again. I nodded.

“It’s okay,” I said tiredly. “I see where this is going. I’ve seen it before, I saw it on Sanction Four. Fucking Joshua Kemp said it at Indigo City.
What we crave is the revolutionary momentum. How we get it is almost irrelevant, and certainly not admitting of ethical debate—historical outcome will be the final moral arbiter.
If that isn’t Quellcrist Falconer down there, you’re going to turn it into her anyway. Aren’t you?”

The two surfers traded a look. I nodded again.

“Yeah. And where does that leave Sylvie Oshima? She didn’t choose this. She wasn’t a free agent. She was a fucking innocent bystander. And she’ll be just the first of many if you get what you want.”

More silence. Finally, Brasil shrugged.

“So why did you come to us in the first place?”

“Because I fucking misjudged you, Jack. Because I remembered you all as better than this sad wish-fulfillment shit.”

Another shrug. “Then you remember wrong.”

“So it seems.”

“I think you came to us out of lack of options,” said Sierra Tres soberly. “And you must have known that we would value the potential existence of Nadia Makita above the host personality.”

“Host?”

“No one wants to harm Oshima unnecessarily. But if a sacrifice is necessary, and this is Makita—”

“But it isn’t. Open your fucking eyes, Sierra.”

“Maybe not. But let’s be brutally honest, Kovacs. If this is Makita, then she’s worth a lot more to the people of Harlan’s World than some mercenary deCom bounty hunter you happen to have taken a shine to.”

I felt a cold, destructive ease stealing up through me as I looked at Tres. It felt almost comfortable, like homecoming.

“Maybe she’s worth a lot more than some crippled neoQuellist surf bunny, too. Did that ever occur to you? Prepared to make
that
sacrifice, are you?”

She looked down at her leg, then back at me.

“Of course I am,” she said gently, as if explaining to a child. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

• • •

An hour later, the covert channel broke open into sudden, excited transmission. Detail was confused but the gist was jubilantly clear. Soseki Koi and a small group of survivors had fought their way clear of the Mitzi Harlan debacle. The escape routing out of Millsport had held up.

They were ready to come and get us.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

As we steered into the village harbor and I looked around me, the sense of déjà vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.

I could almost see myself.

Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.

It didn’t. But it was the same loosely gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline, and the same working harbor complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big oceangoing rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances. Men did not.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.

We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago,
Boubin Islander
’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in at any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags, and headed up the main street. It was a slow process—Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up, too.

No one spoke to us.

We found the village’s only hotel, overlooking the main square, and booked rooms for a week, using two pristine ID datachips from among the selection we’d brought with us from Vchira. As women, Tres and Makita were our charges and didn’t rate ID procedure of their own. A scarfed and robed receptionist nonetheless greeted them with a warmth that, when I explained that my aged aunt had suffered a hip injury, became solicitous enough to be a problem. I snapped down an offer of a visit from the local woman’s doctor, and the receptionist retreated before the display of male authority. Lips tight, she busied herself with running our ID. From the window beside her desk, you could look down into the square and see the raised platform and fixing points for the community’s punishment chair. I stared bleakly down at it for a moment, then locked myself back into the present. We handprinted for access on an antique scanner and went up to our rooms.

“You have something against these people?” Makita asked me, stripping off her head garb in the room. “You seem angry. Is this why you’re pursuing a vendetta against their priests?”

“It’s related.”

“I see.” She shook out her hair, pushed fingers up through it, and regarded the cloth-and-metal masking system in her other hand with a quizzical curiosity at odds with the blunt distaste Sylvie Oshima had shown when forced to wear a scarf in Tekitomura. “Why under three moons would anybody choose to wear something like this?”

I shrugged. “It’s not the most stupid thing I’ve seen human beings commit themselves to.”

She eyed me keenly. “Is that an oblique criticism?”

“No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.”

She matched my shrug. “Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.”

I drew a hard breath.

“Assume what you want. I’m going out.”

• • •

Down at the commercial end of the harbor, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl of fish ramen, carried it to a window seat, and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-age local wandered across to my table with his tray.

“Mind if I sit here. It’s kind of crowded.”

I glanced around the ’fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.

“Suit yourself.”

“Thanks.” He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box, and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence; then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.

“Not from around here then?”

I felt a light tautening across my nerves. “Makes you say that?”

“Ah, see.” He grinned again. “If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.”

“Good for you.”

“Not off that rayhunter, though, are you?”

I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. “What are you, a detective?”

“No!” He laughed delightedly. “What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green-painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t anymore.”

“So why’d you stay?”

“Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.”

The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.

I made my voice work. “Really?”

“Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.” He pulled a wry face. “Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.”

“What about your parents? See much of them?”

“No, they’re dead.” His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.

I sat and watched him carefully.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.

“Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.” He drew breath as if it hurt him. “It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.”

“Did they get the guy?”

“No.” Another painfully hitched breath. “No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.”

I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbor complex. I thought about giving him his chance.

“No money for resleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?”

He gave me a hard look. “You know we don’t do that.”

“Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.”

“Yeah, but.” He hesitated. Glanced around the ’fab, then back to me. His voice lowered. “Look, I came up with the Revelation. I don’t hold with everything the priests say, especially these days. But it’s a faith, it’s a way of life. Gives you something to hold on to, something to bring up your kids with.”

“You got sons or daughters?”

“Two daughters, three sons.” He sighed. “Yeah, I know. All that shit. You know, down past the point we’ve got a bathing beach. Most of the villages have them, I remember when I was a kid we used to spend the whole summer in the water, all of us together. Parents would come down after work sometimes. Now, since things got serious, they’ve built a wall right into the sea there. If you go for the day, they’ve got officiators watching the whole time, and the women have to go in on the other side of the wall. So I can’t even enjoy a swim with my own wife and daughters. It’s fucking stupid, I know. Too extreme. But what are you going to do? We don’t have the money to move to Millsport, and I wouldn’t want my kids running around the streets down there anyway. I saw what it was like when I studied there. It’s a city full of fucking degenerates. No heart left in it, just mindless filth. At least the people around here still believe in something more than gratifying every animal desire whenever they feel like it. You know what, I wouldn’t want to live another life in another body if that was all I was going to do with it.”

“Well, lucky you don’t have the money for a resleeve then. It’d be a shame to get tempted, wouldn’t it.”

Shame to see your parents again,
I didn’t add.

“That’s right,” he said, apparently oblivious to the irony. “That’s the point. Once you understand you’ve only got the one life, you try so much harder to do things right. You forget about all that material stuff, all that decadence. You worry about this life, not what you might be able to do in your next body. You focus on what matters. Family. Community. Friendship.”

“And, of course, Observance.” The mildness in my voice was oddly unfaked. We needed to keep a low profile for the next few hours, but it wasn’t that. I reached curiously inside me and I found I’d lost my grip on the customary contempt I summoned into situations like this. I looked across the table at him, and all I felt was tired. He hadn’t let Sarah and her daughter die for good; he maybe hadn’t even been born when it happened. Maybe, given the same situation, he’d take the same bleating-sheep option his parents had, but right now I couldn’t make that matter. I couldn’t hate him enough to take him into that alley, tell him the truth about who I was, and give him his chance.

“That’s right, Observance.” His face lit up. “That’s the key, that’s what underwrites all the rest. See, science has betrayed us here, it’s gotten out of hand, gotten so
we
don’t control it anymore. It’s made things too easy. Not aging naturally, not having to die and account for ourselves before our Maker, that’s blinded us to the real values. We spend our whole lives scraping away trying to find the money for resleeving, and we waste the real time we have to live this life right. If people would only—”

“Hey, Mikulas.” I glanced up. Another man about the same age as my new companion was striding toward us, behind the cheerful yell. “You finished bending that poor guy’s ear or what? We’ve got hull to scrape, man.”

“Yeah, just coming.”

“Ignore him,” said the newcomer with a wide grin. “Likes to think he knows everyone, and if your face doesn’t fit the list, he has to damned well find out who you are. Bet he’s done that already, right?”

I smiled. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Knew it. I’m Toyo.” A thick, extended hand. “Welcome to Kuraminato. Maybe see you around town if you’re staying long.”

“Yeah, thanks. That’d be good.”

“Meantime, we’ve got to go. Nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” agreed Mikulas, getting to his feet. “Nice talking to you. You should think about what I was saying.”

“Maybe I will.” A final twist of caution made me stop him as he was turning away. “Tell me something. How come you knew I wasn’t off the rayhunter?”

“Oh, that. Well, you were watching them like you were interested in what they were doing. No one watches their own ship in dock that closely. I was right, huh?”

“Yeah. Good call.” The tiny increment of relief soaked through me. “Maybe you should be a detective after all. New line of work for you. Doing the right thing. Catching bad guys.”

“Hey, it’s a thought.”

“Nah, he’d be way too nice to them once he’d caught them. Soft as shit, he is. Can’t even discipline his own wife.”

General laughter as they left. I joined in. Let it fade slowly out to a smile, and then nothing but the small relief inside.

I really wouldn’t have to follow him and kill him.

• • •

I gave it half an hour, then wandered out of the ’fab and onto the wharf. There were still figures on the decks and superstructure of the rayhunter. I stood and watched for a few minutes, and finally a crew member came down the forward gangplank toward me. His face wasn’t friendly.

“Something I can do for you?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “
Sing the hymn of dreams gone down from Alabardos’s sky.
I’m Kovacs. The others are at the hotel. Tell your skipper. We’ll move as soon as it’s dark.”