Woken Furies Read Online Free PDF Page B

gestured at the door.
    “Out. Try not to breathe.”
    Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commandos. Those who had not already started to hemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d gotten them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.
    “A light,” he driveled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted toward me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim
rebirth
when they would not, when they await.”
    He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.
    “The angel.”
    I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”
    “The an—” And then something must have gotten through the hallucinogens. His voice turned suddenly shrill, and he scrabbled backward away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I
see
the old one, the reborn.
I see the destroyer.
”
    “Now you’ve got it.”
    The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimeter off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.
    I slashed his face open and left.
    Deep enough.
    • • •
    Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.
    The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.
    Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.
    The paving . . .
    Move. Breathe. Get out of here.
    A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid toward me, jeweled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss-clank of autograpples firing home into their shoreside sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated, and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.
    Get a grip, Tak. It’s just the chemicals.
    Across the wharf, under a stilled robot crane, stray light glinted off her hair as she turned. I checked once more over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but the entrance to the bar was firmly closed. Faint noises leaked through at the lower limits of my cheap synth hearing. Could have been laughter, weeping, pretty much anything. H-grenades are harmless enough long-term, but while they last you do tend to lose interest in rational thought or action. I doubted anyone’d work out where the door was for the next half hour, let alone how to get through it.
    The sweeper bumped up to the wharf, cranked tight by the autograpple cables. Figures leapt ashore, trading banter. I crossed unnoticed to the shadow of the crane. Her face floated ghost-like in the gloom. Pale, wolfish beauty. The hair that framed it seemed to crackle with half-seen energies.
    “Pretty handy with that knife.”
    I shrugged. “Practice.”
    She looked me over. “Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom?”
    “No. Nothing like that.”
    “Well, you sure—” Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. “Shit, they got you.”
    I shook my head. “Different party. Happened a while back.”
    “Yeah? Looks to me like