Woken Furies

  “Who the fuck cares?” echoed Jadwiga.

  “We would have,” I pointed out. “If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.”

  It was unfair—if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

  “Correct!” she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centers in the brain spewing an analog of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio-phone link. “Correct your fucking parameters.”

  The shell hit.

  Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then—nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

  We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshaled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

  “. . . our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has . . .”

  Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

  Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake and called me a liar.

  A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.

  “Here we go, people.” A sharp whisper, for Jadwiga’s and my benefit. The rest would already know, advised on the internal net in less time than it takes to form a conscious human thought. “Through the primary baffles. Move on my command.”

  The self-propelled gun was past the little huddle of prefabs now. Lazlo and Kiyoka had taken up positions close to the river not two kilometers downstream of the base. The karakuri advance guard had to be almost on top of them by now. The undergrowth and long silver grass along the valley twitched in a dozen places with their passing. The rest kept pace with the bigger machines.

  “Now!”

  Fire bloomed, pale and sudden amid the trees downstream. Orr, cutting loose against the first of the mech puppets.

  “Go! Go!”

  The lead spider tank staggered slightly in the water. I was already moving, a route down the rock I’d mapped out a couple of dozen times while I was waiting under the overhang. Cascading seconds, the Eishundo sleeve took over and put my hands and feet in place with engineered poise. I jumped the last two meters and hit the scree slope. An ankle tried to turn on the uneven footing—emergency sinew servos yanked taut and stopped it. I stood and sprinted.

  A spider turret swiveled. The scree shattered into shale where I’d been. Splinters stung the back of my head and ripped into my cheek.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry.” The strain was in her voice like unshed tears. “On it.”

  The next shot went way over my head, maybe homing in on some seconds-decayed image of my scramble down the rock face that she’d stabbed into the sighting software, maybe just a blind shot in the machine equivalent of panic. I snarled relief, drew the Ronin shard blaster from the sheath on my back, and closed with the mimints.

  Whatever Sylvie had done to the co-op’s systems was brutally effective. The spider tanks were swaying drunkenly, loosing fire at random into the sky and the upper crags of the valley’s sides. Around them, karakuri ran about like rats on a sinking raft. The scorpion gun stood in the midst of it all, apparently immobilized, low on its haunches.

  I reached the gun in under a minute, pushing the sleeve’s biotech to its anaerobic limits. Fifteen meters off, a semi-functional karakuri stumbled into my path, upper arms waving confusedly. I shot it left-handed with the Ronin, heard the soft cough of the blast and saw the storm of monomolecular fragments rip it apart. The shard gun clanked another round into the chamber. Against the small mimints, it was a devastating weapon, but the scorpion gun was heavily armored and its internal systems would be hard to damage with directional fire.

  I got up close, slapped the ultravibe mine against one towering metal flank, then tried to get out of the way before it blew.

  And something went wrong.

  The scorpion gun lurched sideways. Weapons systems on its spine woke to sudden life and swiveled. One massive leg flexed and kicked out. Intended or not, the blow grazed my shoulder, numbed the arm below it, and dumped me full-length into the long grass. I lost the shard blaster from fingers gone abruptly nerveless.

  “Fuck.”

  The gun moved again. I got to my knees, saw peripheral movement. High up on the carapace, a secondary turret was trying to bring its machine guns to bear on me. I spotted the blaster lying in the grass and dived after it. Combat-custom chemicals squirted in my muscles, and feeling fizzed back down the numbed arm. Above me on the self-propelled weapon’s bodywork, the machine-rifle turret triggered and slugs ripped the grass apart. I grabbed up the blaster and rolled frantically back toward the scorpion gun, trying to get under the angle of fire. The machine-rifle storm tracked me, showering ripped-up earth and shredded undergrowth. I shielded my eyes with one arm, threw up the Ronin right-handed, and fired blind at the sound of the guns. Combat conditioning must have put the shot somewhere close—the hail of slugs choked off.

  And the ultravibe mine came to life.

  It was like a swarm of Autumn Fire beetles in feeding frenzy, amplified for some bug’s-eye experia documentary. A shrilling, chittering explosion of sound as the bomb shattered molecular bonds and turned a meter-broad sphere of armored machinery into iron filings. Metallic dust fountained out of the breach where I’d slapped the mine. I scrabbled backward along the scorpion gun’s flank, unstrapping a second bomb from the bandolier. They’re not much bigger than the ramen bowls they very closely resemble, but if you get caught in the blast radius, you’re paste.

  The scream of the first mine cut off as its field collapsed inward and it turned itself to dust. Smoke boiled out of the massive gash it had left. I snapped the fuse on the new mine and pitched it into the hole. The gun’s legs flexed and stamped, uncomfortably close to where I was crouched, but it looked spasmodic. The mimint seemed to have lost directional sense of where the attack was coming from.

  “Hey, Micky.” Jadwiga, on the covert channel, sounding a little puzzled. “You need any help there?”

  “Don’t think so. You?”

  “Nah, just you should see—” I lost the rest in the shriek as the new mine cut in. The breached hull vomited fresh dust and violet electrical discharge. Across the general channel, the scorpion gun began a high-pitched electronic weeping as the ultravibe chewed deeper into its guts. I felt every hair on my body rise at the sound.

  In the background, someone was shouting. Sounded like Orr.

  Something blew in the scorpion gun’s innards, and it must have knocked out the mine because the chittering insect scream shut off almost the same instant. The weeping died away like blood soaking into parched earth.

  “Say again?”
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  “I said,” yelled Orr, “command head down. Repeat, Sylvie is down. Get the fuck out of there.”

  Sense of something massive tumbling—

  “Easier said than done, Orr.” There was a tight, high-tension grin in Jad’s voice. “We’re a little fucking pressed right now.”

  “Seconded,” gritted Lazlo. He was using the audio link—Sylvie’s collapse must have taken out the crew net. “Get the heavy ordnance up here, big man. We could use—”

  Kiyoka broke in. “Jad, you just hang—”

  Something flashed at the corner of my vision. I whipped about just as the karakuri came at me with all eight arms crooked to grab. No confused lurching to it this time, the mech puppet was up and running at capacity. I got my head out of the way just in time to miss a scything upper limb and pulled the shard blaster’s trigger point-blank. The shot blew the karakuri backward in pieces, lower section shredded. I shot the upper half again to make sure, then swung about and skirted the dead bulk of the scorpion gun, Ronin cradled tight in both hands.

  “Jad, where are you?”

  “In the fucking river.” Short, crunching explosions behind her voice on the link. “Look for the downed tank and the million fucking karakuri that want it back.”

  I ran.

  • • •

  I killed four more karakuri on the way to the river, all of them far too fast moving to be corrupted. Whatever had floored Sylvie hadn’t left her time to finish the intrusion run.

  On the audio link, Lazlo yelped and cursed. It sounded like damage. Jadwiga shouted a steady stream of obscenities at the mimints, counterpoint for the flat reports of her shard blaster.

  I winced past the tumbling wreckage of the last mech puppet and sprinted flat-out for the bank. At the edge, I jumped. Drenching impact of icy water splashed to groin height and suddenly the swirling sound of the river. Mossed stones underfoot and a sensation like hot sweat in my feet as the genetech spines tried instinctively to grip inside my boots. Grab after balance. I nearly went over, didn’t quite. Flexed like a tree in a high wind, beat my own momentum barely and stayed upright, knee deep. I scanned for the tank.

  Near the other bank, I found it, collapsed in what looked like about a meter of fast-flowing water. Cranked-up vision gave me Jadwiga and Lazlo huddled in the lee of the wreck, karakuri crawling on the riverbank but seemingly not keen to trust themselves to the current the river was running. A couple had jumped to the tank’s hull but didn’t seem able to get much purchase. Jadwiga was firing at them one-handed, almost at random. Her other arm was wrapped around Lazlo. There was blood on both of them.

  The range was a hundred meters—too far for effective shooting with the shard blaster. I plowed into the river until it reached chest height and was still too far off. The current tried to knock me down.

  “Motherfucking—”

  I kicked off and swam awkwardly, Ronin held to my chest with one arm. Instantly the current started tugging me away downstream.

  “Fuuuck—”

  The water was freezing, crushing my lungs closed against the need to breathe, numbing the skin on face and hands. The current felt like a living thing, yanking insistently at my legs and shoulders as I thrashed about. The weight of the shard blaster and the bandolier of ultravibe mines tried to drag me under.

  Did drag me under.

  I flailed to the surface of the water, sucked for air, got half and half, went under again.

  Get a grip, Kovacs.

  Think.

  Get a fucking grip.

  I kicked for the surface, forced myself up, and filled my lungs. Took a bearing on the rapidly receding wreck of the spider tank. Then I let myself be dragged down, reached for the bottom, and grabbed hold.

  The spines gripped. I found purchase with my feet as well, braced myself against the current, and started to crawl across the riverbed.

  It took longer than I’d have liked.

  In places the stones I chose were too small or too poorly embedded, and they ripped loose. In other places my boots couldn’t gouge enough purchase. I gave up seconds and meters of ground each time, flailed back again. Once I nearly lost the shard blaster. And anaerobic enhancement or not, I had to come up every three or four minutes for air.

  But I made it.

  After what seemed like an eternity of grabbing and rooting around in the stabbing, cramping cold, I stood up in waist-high water, staggered to the bank, and hauled myself panting and shaking out of the river. For a couple of moments, it was all I could do to kneel there, coughing.

  Rising machine hum.

  I staggered to my feet, trying to hold the shard blaster somewhere close to still in both trembling hands. My teeth were chattering as if something had short-circuited in my jaw muscles.

  “Micky.”

  Orr, seated astride one of the bugs, a long-barrel Ronin of his own in one raised hand. Stripped to the waist, blast discharge vents still not fully closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonized dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.

  He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.

  “Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.”

  “I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—”

  He nodded. “Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.”

  “And sssssSylvie?”

  He looked away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “How is she?”

  Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.

  “Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.”

  A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colors and motion. Recognizable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.

  “That’s the command software?”

  “Yeah.” Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright gray raged around her fingertip. “This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.”

  I looked at the multicolored tangle. “Lot of activity.”

  “Yeah, far too much. Postrun, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways, and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.” She shrugged again. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.

  “What went wrong out there today, Ki?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an antiviral that already knew our intrusion systems.”

  “In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.”

  “I know.”

  “They say the stuff is evolving.” Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone. Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. “Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—”

  Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. “Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?”

  “—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.” Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil. “That’s black clinic software in there, and it’s going to eat Sylvie’s mind if we don’t find a blueprint for it. And that’s bad news, because the original architects are all back
in fucking Millsport.”

  “And that,” shouted Kiyoka, “is fucking bullshit.”

  “Hoy!” To my amazement, they both shut up and looked at me. “Uh, look. Las. I don’t see how even evolved software is going to map on to our particular systems just like that. I mean, what are the odds?”

  “Because it’s the same people, Mick. Come on. Who writes the stuff for deCom? Who designed the whole deCom program? And who’s buried to the fucking balls in developing secret black nanotech? The fucking Mecsek administration, that’s who.” Lazlo spread his hands, gave me a world-weary look. “You know how many reports there are, how many people I know, I’ve talked to, who’ve seen mimints there are no fucking archive descriptors for? This whole continent’s an experiment, man, and we’re just a little part of it. And the skipper there just got dumped in the rat’s maze.”

  More movement at the door—Orr and Jadwiga, come to see what all the shouting was about. The giant shook his head.

  “Las, you really got to buy yourself that turtle farm down in Newpest you’re always talking about. Go barricade yourself in there and talk to the eggs.”

  “Fuck you, Orr.”

  “No, fuck you, Las. This is serious.”

  “She no better, Ki?” Jadwiga crossed to the monitor and dropped a hand on Kiyoka’s shoulder. Like mine, her new sleeve was grown on a standard Harlan’s World chassis. Mingled Slavic and Japanese ancestry made for savagely beautiful cheekbones, epicanthic folds to the pale jade eyes, and a wide slash of a mouth. Combat biotech requirements hauled the body toward long-limbed and muscular, but the original gene stock brought it out at a curiously delicate ranginess. Skin tone was brown, faded out with tank pallor and five weeks of miserable New Hok weather.

  Watching her cross the room was almost like walking past a mirror. We could have been brother and sister. Physically, we were brother and sister—the clone bank in the bunker ran to five different modules, a dozen sleeves grown off the same genetic stem in each. It had turned out easiest for Sylvie to hotwire only the one module.