Woken Furies, Page 31

  The voice caught me as I straightened up.

  “So is this him?”

  I blinked in the sun and made out a slight figure ahead of us on the lightly canted deck. He stood about a head shorter than Brasil and wore a simple gray coverall whose sleeves were hacked off at the shoulders. From the features below the sparse white hair, he had to be in his sixties at least, but the exposed arms were ropey with muscle and ended in big, bony hands. And the soft voice had a corded strength behind it. There was a tension to the question that approached hostility.

  I stepped forward to join Brasil. Mirrored the way the old man stood with his hands hanging at his sides like weapons he might need. Met his eyes incuriously.

  “Yeah, I’m him.”

  His gaze seemed to flinch downward, but it wasn’t that. He was looking me over. There was a moment of silence.

  “You’ve spoken to her?”

  “Yes.” My voice softened a fraction. I’d misread the tension in him. It wasn’t hostility. “I’ve spoken to her.”

  • • •

  Inside the hoverloader, there was an unexpected sense of space and natural light. Combat vessels of this sort are usually pretty cramped, but Soseki Koi had had a lot of time to change all that. Bulkheads had been ripped out, and in places the upper-level deck had been peeled back to create five-meter light wells. The sun poured in through the few vision ports and the opened dorsal hatches, blasted its way elsewhere between cracked armoring that might have been battle damage or deliberate modification. A riot of plant life clustered about these opened areas, spilling out of hung baskets and twining up exposed struts in the skeleton of the fuselage. Illuminum paneling had been carefully replaced in some areas, left to decay in others. Somewhere not visible, waterflow over rocks chuckled in patient counterpoint to the bassline pounding of the surf outside.

  Koi got us seated on padded matting around a low, formally set table at the bottom of one of the light wells. He served us with traces of old-school ceremony from the ’loader’s autochef, which sat on a shelf behind him and still seemed to be working pretty well. To the selection of grilled meat and pan noodles, he added a pot of belaweed tea and fruit grown from the plants overhead—vine plums and thick, thirty-centimeter lengths of Kossuth chainberry. Brasil dug into everything with the enthusiasm of a man who’d been in the water all day. I picked at my food, took just enough to be polite apart from the chainberry, which was some of the best I’d ever tasted. Koi held himself rigidly back from questions while we ate.

  Eventually, Brasil tossed the stripped threads of his last piece of chainberry onto his plate, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and nodded at me.

  “Tell him. I gave him the highlights, but it’s your story.”

  “I—” I looked across the table of devastated food and saw the hunger that sat there. “Well. It’s a while back now. A few months. I was up in Tekitomura, on. Business. I was in this bar down on the waterfront, Tokyo Crow. She was—”

  It felt strange, telling it. Strange and, if I was honest, very distant. Listening to my own voice now, I suddenly had a hard time myself believing the path I’d tracked from that night of splattered blood and screaming hallucinations, out across the machine-haunted wastes of New Hok and back south again, running from a doppelgänger. Quixotic chivalry in wharfside bars, frantic schizophrenic sex and repeated waterborne flight in the company of a mysterious and damaged woman with hair of living steel, mountainside gun battles with the shards of myself amid the ruins of our Martian heritage. Sylvie was right when she christened me Micky in the shadows of the crane. It was pure experia.

  No wonder Radul Segesvar was having a hard time coming to terms with what I’d done. Told this tale of muddled loyalties and blown-off-course rerouting, the man who’d come to him two years previously for backing would have laughed out loud in disbelief.

  No, you wouldn’t have laughed.

  You would have stared, cold with detachment as you barely listened, and thought about something else. About the next New Revelation slaughter, blood on the blade of a Tebbit knife, a steep-sided pit out in the Weed Expanse, and a shrill screaming that goes on and on . . .

  You would have shrugged the story away, true or not, content with what you had instead.

  But Koi drank it in without a word. When I paused and looked at him, he asked no questions. He waited patiently and once, when I seemed to have stalled, he made a single, gentle gesture for me to continue. Finally, when I was done, he sat for a while and then nodded to himself.

  “You say she called you names when she first came back.”

  “Yes.” Envoy recall lifted them from the depths of inconsequential memory for me. “Odisej. Ogawa. She thought I was one of her soldiers, from the Tetsu battalion. Part of the Black Brigades.”

  “So.” He looked away, face indecipherable. Voice soft. “Thank you, Kovacs-san.”

  Quiet. I exchanged glances with Brasil.

  The surfer cleared his throat. “Is that bad?”

  Koi drew breath as if it hurt him.

  “It isn’t helpful.” He looked at us again and smiled sadly. “I was in the Black Brigades. Tetsu battalion wasn’t part of them, it was a separate front.”

  Brasil shrugged. “Maybe she was confused.”

  “Yes, maybe.” But the sadness never left his eyes.

  “And the names?” I asked him. “Do you recognize them?”

  He shook his head. “Ogawa’s not an uncommon name for the north, but I don’t think I knew anyone called that. It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but it doesn’t chime. And Odisej, well”—a shrug—“there’s the kendo sensei, but I don’t think she had a Quellist past.”

  We sat in silence for a little while. Finally, Brasil sighed.

  “Ah, fuck.”

  For some reason, the tiny explosion seemed to animate Koi. He smiled again, this time with a gleam I hadn’t seen in him before.

  “You sound discouraged, my friend.”

  “Yeah, well. I really thought this might be it, you know. I thought we were really going to do this.”

  Koi reached for the plates and began to clear them onto the ledge behind his shoulder. His movements were smooth and economical, and he talked as he worked.

  “Do you know what day it is next week?” he asked conversationally.

  We both blinked at him.

  “No? How unhealthy. How easily we wrap ourselves up in our own concerns, eh? How easily we detach from the wider scheme of life as it’s lived by the majority.” He leaned forward to collect the farthest dishes, and I handed them to him. “Thank you. Next week, the end of next week, is Konrad Harlan’s birthday. In Millsport, celebration will be mandatory. Fireworks and festivities without mercy. The chaos of humans at play.”

  Brasil got it before me. His face lit up. “You mean . . . ?”

  Koi smiled gently. “My friend, for all I know this might well really be it, as you rather cryptically describe it. But whether it is or not, I can tell you now we are really going to do this. Because we really have no other choice.”

  It was what I wanted to hear, but I still couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. On the ride south, I’d imagined I might get Brasil and Vidaura, maybe another few of the neoQuell faithful, to weigh in on my side whatever the holes in their wish fulfillment. But Brasil’s data shrapnel story, the way it fitted the New Hok detail, and the understanding that it came from someone who knew, who’d been there, the meeting with this small, self-contained man and his serious approach to gardening and food—all this was pushing me toward the vertiginous edge of a belief that I’d been wasting my time.

  The understanding that I hadn’t was almost as dizzying.

  “Consider,” said Koi, and something seemed to have changed in his voice. “Maybe this ghost of Nadia Makita is exactly that, a ghost. But is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough? Has it not already been enough for the oligarchs to panic and disobey the binding covenants of their puppet masters back on Earth? How then can we not do
this? How can we not take back from their grip this object of their terror and rage?”

  I traded another look with Brasil. Raised an eyebrow.

  “This isn’t going to be easy to sell,” the surfer said grimly. “Most of the ex-Bugs will fight if they think it’s Quell they’re going to get, and they’ll talk the others around. But I don’t know if they’ll do it for a woken ghost, however fucking vengeful.”

  Koi finished clearing the plates, took up a napkin, and examined his hands. He found a ribbon of chainberry juice caught around one wrist and cleaned it off with meticulous attention. His gaze was fixed on the task as he spoke. “I will speak to them, if you wish. But in the end, if they have no conviction of their own, Quell herself wouldn’t ask them to fight, and neither will I.”

  Brasil nodded. “Great.”

  “Koi.” Suddenly I needed to know. “Do you think this is a ghost we’re chasing?”

  He made a tiny sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh.

  “We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we now do, how could we not be.”

  Sarah.

  I forced it down, wondering if he saw the wince at the edges of my eyes as I did it. Wondering with sudden paranoia if he already somehow knew. My voice grated coming out.

  “That isn’t what I asked you.”

  He blinked and suddenly smiled again

  “No, it isn’t. You asked me if I believed, and I evaded your question. Forgive me. On Vchira Beach, cheap metaphysics and cheap politics rub shoulders and both are in frequent demand. With a little effort, a passable living can be made from dispensing them, but then the habit becomes hard to break.” He sighed. “Do I believe we are dealing with the return of Quellcrist Falconer? With every fiber of my being I want to, but like any Quellist I am impelled to face the facts. And the facts do not support what I want to believe.”

  “It’s not her.”

  “It’s not likely. But in one of her less passionate moments, Quell herself once offered an escape clause for situations such as these. If the facts are against you, she said, but you cannot bear to cease believing—then at least suspend judgment. Wait and see.”

  “I’d have thought that mitigates pretty effectively against action.”

  He nodded. “Mostly it does. But in this case, the issue of what I want to be true has nothing to do with whether we act or not. Because this much I do believe: even if this ghost has no more than talismanic value, its time is here and its place is among us. One way or another, there is a change coming. The Harlanites recognize it as well as we do, and they have already made their move. It only remains for us to make ours. If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.”

  That stayed in my head like an echo, long after we left Soseki Koi to his preparations and rode the bug back along the Strip. That, and his simple question. The simple conviction behind it.

  Is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough?

  But it wasn’t the same for me. Because this ghost I’d held, and I’d watched moonlight across the floor of a cabin in the mountains while she slipped away from me into sleep, not knowing if she’d be waking again.

  If she could be woken again, I didn’t want to be the one to tell her what she was. I didn’t want to be there to watch her face when she found out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  After that, it went rapidly.

  There is thought and there is action, a youngish Quell once said, stealing liberally, I later discovered, from Harlan’s World’s ancient samurai heritage. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins.

  Brasil went back to the others and presented Koi’s decision as his own. There was a splutter of dispute from some of the surfers who still hadn’t forgiven me for Sanction IV, but it didn’t last. Even Mari Ado dropped her hostility like a broken toy as it became clear I was peripheral to the real issue. One by one, in the sunset-painted shade and glow of the common living room, the men and women of Vchira Beach gave their assent.

  It seemed that a woken ghost was going to be enough.

  • • •

  The component parts of the raid floated together with a speed and ease that for the more suggestible might have implied the favor of gods or agents of destiny. For Koi, it was simply the flow of historical forces, no more in question than the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. It was a confirmation that the time had come, that the political pot was boiling over. Of course it was going to spill, of course it was all going to fall in the same direction, onto the floor. Where else could it go?

  I told him I thought it was luck, and he just smiled.

  And it came together anyway.

  Personnel:

  The Little Blue Bugs. They barely existed anymore as an actual entity, but there were enough of the old crew around to form a core that corresponded roughly to legend. Newcomers drawn in over the years by the legend’s gravitational pull sketched an outlined weight of numbers and claimed the nomenclature by association. Over even more years, Brasil had learned to trust some of them. He’d seen them surf and he’d seen them fight. More importantly, he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate. Together, the old and the new, they were as close to a Quellist task force as it was possible to get without a time machine.

  Weapons:

  The casually parked military skimmer in Koi’s backyard was emblematic of a tendency that ran the length and breadth of the Strip. The Bugs weren’t the only heavy-heist types to have taken refuge on Vchira Beach. Whatever it was that drew Brasil and his kind to the waves, it was a general tug that manifested itself just as easily in an enthusiasm for lawbreaking of a dozen different stripes. Sourcetown was awash with retired thugs and revolutionaries, and it seemed none of them had ever felt like giving up their toys for good. Shake down the Strip and hardware tumbled out of it like vials and sex toys from the sheets of Mitzi Harlan’s bed.

  Planning:

  Overrated as far as most of Brasil’s crew were concerned. Rila Crags was almost as notorious as the old secret-police headquarters on Shimatsu Boulevard, the one Black Brigade member Iphigenia Deme brought down in smoking rubble when they tried to interrogate her in the basement and triggered her implanted enzyme explosives instead. The desire to do the same thing at Rila was a palpable prickle in the air of the house. It took a while to convince the more passionate among the newly reconfigured Bugs that an all-out assault on the Crags would be suicide of an infinitely less productive form than Deme’s.

  “Can’t blame them,” said Koi, his Black Brigade past suddenly glinting in the edge on his voice. “They’ve been waiting long enough for the chance to make someone pay.”

  “Daniel hasn’t,” I said pointedly. “He’s barely been alive two decades.”

  Koi shrugged. “Rage at injustice is a forest fire—it jumps all divides, even those between generations.”

  I stopped wading and looked back at him. You could see how he might be getting carried away. We were both sea giants out of legend now, knee deep in a virtual ocean amid the islands and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago at one-to-two-thousand scale. Sierra Tres had called in some haiduci favors and gotten us time in a high-resolution mapping construct belonging to a firm of marine architects whose commercial management techniques wouldn’t bear too much close legal scrutiny. They weren’t overjoyed about the loan, but that’s what happens when you cozy up with the haiduci.

  “Have you ever actually seen a forest fire, Koi?”

  Because they sure as hell aren’t common on a world that’s 95 percent ocean.

  “No.” He gestured. “It was a metaphor. But I have seen what happens when injustice finally triggers retribution. And it lasts for a long time.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  I
stared away toward the waters of the southern Reach. The construct had reproduced the maelstrom there in miniature, gurgling and grinding and tugging at my legs beneath the surface. If the depth of the water had been to the same scale as the rest of the construct, it probably would have dragged me off my feet.

  “And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?”

  “Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.” I went on looking into the maelstrom. “During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract, and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.”

  “I see.” His voice showed no reaction. “Did it work?”

  “Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.”

  “Yes. And the fire?”

  I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. “Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.”

  He waded across and looked.

  “Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.”

  “They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.”

  The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.