Woken Furies (11 page)

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?”

“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.

Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with resleeves. The pheremonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.

“She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.” Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. “I just don’t know what’s going on in there.”

Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of color in the coil.

“Ki.” I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister. I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. “Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?”

“What?”
Orr, predictably.

Kiyoka looked unhappy. “I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—”

“You are not fucking taking her hair.”

I got up from the bed and faced the giant. “And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?”

“You shut your fucking m—”

“Orr, he’s got a point.” Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. “If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op and her own antivirals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?”

Lazlo nodded vigorously. “Might be her only hope, man.”

“She’s been like this before,” said Orr stubbornly. “That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up
fine.
”

I saw the look swoop among them.
No. Not fine exactly.

“If I induce the decoupler,” said Kiyoka slowly, “I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever—she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.”

“Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.” Orr glared around at us. “She’s a fucking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.”

“Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.” I turned back to the bed. “Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?”

“Yeah, it’s security-buffered.”

“And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but . . .”

“Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?”

Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. “I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.”

“Then—”

“Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.” Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. “Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?”

“That’s not really the issue here,” I said mildly. “All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—”

He swayed toward me.
“You’re talking about fucking killing her.”

Jadwiga pushed him back. “He’s talking about saving her, Orr.”

“And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat
just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up?
Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?”

I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. “Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.”

“We can’t do it anyway, Mick.” Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again. “If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.”

You could kill this sleeve, anyway,
I didn’t say.
Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—

I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.

Maybe Orr was right.

“One thing’s sure,” said Jadwiga somberly. “We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.”

More silence, while the idea settled in.

“Can she be moved?” I asked.

Kiyoka made a face. “She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,” muttered Lazlo. “It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route? I know it’s a risk.”

A slow nod from Jadwiga. “But probably worth it.”

“Going to be the whole night,” said Lazlo. “You got any meth?”

“Is Mitzi Harlan straight?”

She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to business-like clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.

“You don’t fucking touch her,” he warned me.

• • •

From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old Alain Marriott experia flicks like
Polar Quarry
and
The Deep Chase.
It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.

Mostly.

But with skill you could feel out the whisper of local net traffic among the members of a crew, the flickering traces of electronic activity that the deComs carried with them like the scent of cigarettes on a smoker’s clothes. With more skill, you could tell the difference between these and mimint spoor and, with the right scrambler codes, you could open communication. It took until just before dawn, but in the end Jad and Lazlo managed to get a line on three other deCom crews working the Uncleared between our position and the Drava beachhead. Coded needlecasts sang back and forth, establishing identity and clearance, and Jadwiga sat back with a broad tetrameth grin on her face.

“Nice to have friends,” she said to me.

Once briefed, all three crews agreed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to provide cover for our retreat within their own operational range. It was pretty much an unwritten rule of deCom conduct in the Uncleared to offer that much succor—you never knew when it might be you—but the competitive standoffishness of the trade made for grudging adherence. The positions of the first two crews forced us into a long, crooked path of withdrawal, and both were grumpily unwilling to move either to meet us or to provide escort south. With the third we got lucky. Oishii Eminescu was camped 250 kilometers northwest of Drava with nine heavily armed and equipped colleagues. He offered immediately to move up and fetch us from the previous crew’s cover radius, and then to bring us all the way back to the beachhead.

• • •

“Truth is,” he told me, as we stood at the center of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, “we can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired, too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it till it breaks.”

“Seems overly rational.”

He laughed. “You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.”

“I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.”

“Yeah, that’s the song.” A wry grimace. “They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?”

I stared at the darkening horizon. “I don’t know.”

“Got to think past that stuff, sam. Got to. It’ll kill you if you don’t.”

On the other side of one of the bubblefabs, someone went past in the thickening gloom and called something out in Stripjap. Oishii grinned and yelled back. Laughter rattled back and forth. Behind us, I caught the scent of wood smoke as someone kindled a fire. It was a standard deCom camp—temporary ’fabs blown and hardened from stock that would dissolve down just as rapidly as soon as it was time to move on. Barring occasional stopovers in abandoned buildings like the Quellist listening post, I’d been living in similar circumstances with Sylvie’s crew for most of the last five weeks. Still, there was a relaxed warmth around Oishii Eminescu that was at odds with most of the deComs I’d run into so far. A lack of the usual racing-dog edginess.