{"product_id":"woken-furies-isbn-9780345499776","title":"Woken Furies","description":"\u003cb\u003eMixing  classic noir sensibilities with a searing futuristic vision of an age when death  is nearly meaningless, Richard K. Morgan returns to his saga of betrayal, mystery, and revenge,  as Takeshi Kovacs, in one fatal moment, joins forces with a mysterious woman who  may have the power to shatter Harlan’s World forever.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Once a gang member, then a  marine, then a galaxy-hopping Envoy trained to wreak slaughter and suppression across  the stars, a bleeding, wounded Kovacs was chilling out in a New Hokkaido bar when  some so-called holy men descended on a slim beauty with tangled, hyperwired hair.  An act of quixotic chivalry later and Kovacs was in deep: mixed up with a woman with  two names, many powers, and one explosive history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In a world where the real and  virtual are one and the same and the dead can come back to life, the damsel in distress  may be none other than the infamous Quellcrist Falconer, the vaporized symbol of  a freedom now gone from Harlan’s World. Kovacs can deal with the madness of AI. He  can do his part in a battle against biomachines gone wild, search for a three-centuries-old  missing weapons system, and live with a blood feud with the yakuza, and even with  the betrayal of people he once trusted. But when his relationship with “the” Falconer  brings him an enemy specially designed to destroy him, he knows it’s time to be afraid.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e After all, the guy sent to kill him is himself: but younger, stronger, and straight  out of hell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Wild, provocative, and riveting, Woken Furies is a full-bore science  fiction spectacular of the highest order—from one of the most original and spellbinding  storytellers at work today.Praise for Richard K. Morgan\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMarket Forces\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Morgan is one of science fiction’s bright young lights, a crisp stylist who demonstrates equal facility with action scenes and angst.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Times Book Review \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Forces is turbo-injected with moral ambiguity, Wag the Dog political scenarios, and action sequences fit for a Bruckheimer movie.”\u003cbr\u003e–Entertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAltered Carbon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compelling . . . immensely entertaining . . . full of duplicitous characters, murky motives, and a detective who’s as tough as he looks.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Philadelphia Inquirer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gritty and vivid . . . Looks as if we have another interstellar hero on our hands.”\u003cbr\u003e–USA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBroken Angels\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Clearly the work of a gifted, ambitious writer.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A superior, satisfying cyberpunk noir adventure.”\u003cbr\u003e–Publishers Weekly\u003cb\u003eRichard K. Morgan\u003c\/b\u003e is the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eThe Cold Commands, The Steel Remains, Thirteen, Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAltered Carbon,\u003c\/i\u003e a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2003. The movie rights to \u003ci\u003eAltered Carbon\u003c\/i\u003e were optioned by Joel Silver and Warner Bros on publication, and a film version is currently in development with Mythology Entertainment. \u003ci\u003eMarket Forces\u003c\/i\u003e was also optioned to Warner Bros, before it was even published, and it won the John W. Campbell Award in 2005. \u003ci\u003eThirteen\u003c\/i\u003e won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007 and is currently under movie option to Straight Up films. T\u003ci\u003ehe Steel Remains\u003c\/i\u003e won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2010, and its sequel, \u003ci\u003eThe Cold Commands,\u003c\/i\u003e appeared in both \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e’ and NPR’s Best Science Fiction\/Fantasy Books of the Year lists. Morgan is a fluent Spanish speaker and has lived and worked in Madrid, Istanbul, Ankara, and London, as well as having traveled extensively in the Americas, Africa, and Australia. He now lives in Scotland with his wife, Virginia, and son, Daniel.Damage.        The wound stung like fuck, but it wasn’t as bad as some I’d had. The  blaster bolt came in blind across my ribs, already weakened by the door  plating it had to chew through to get to me. Priests, up against the  slammed door and looking for a quick gut shot. Fucking amateur night.  They’d probably caught almost as much pain themselves from the point-blank  blowback off the plating. Behind the door, I was already twisting aside.  What was left of the charge plowed a long, shallow gash across my rib cage  and went out, smoldering in the folds of my coat. Sudden ice down that  side of my body and the abrupt stench of fried skin-sensor components.  That curious bone-splinter fizzing that’s almost a taste, where the bolt  had ripped through the biolube casing on the floating ribs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eighteen minutes later, by the softly glowing display chipped into my  upper left field of vision, the same fizzing was still with me as I  hurried down the lamplit street, trying to ignore the wound. Stealthy seep  of fluids beneath my coat. Not much blood. Sleeving synthetic has its  advantages.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Looking for a good time, sam?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Already had one,” I told him, veering away from the doorway. He blinked  wave-tattooed eyelids in a dismissive flutter that said your loss and  leaned his tightly muscled frame languidly back into the gloom. I crossed  the street and took the corner, tacking between a couple more whores, one  a woman, the other of indeterminate gender. The woman was an augment,  forked dragon tongue flickering out around her overly prehensile lips,  maybe tasting my wound on the night air. Her eyes danced a similar passage  over me, then slid away. On the other side, the cross-gender pro shifted  its stance slightly and gave me a quizzical look but said nothing. Neither  was interested. The streets were rain-slick and deserted, and they’d had  longer to see me coming than the doorway operator. I’d cleaned up since  leaving the citadel, but something about me must have telegraphed the lack  of business opportunity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At my back, I heard them talking about me in Stripjap. I heard the word  for broke.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They could afford to be choosy. In the wake of the Mecsek Initiative,  business was booming. Tekitomura was packed that winter, thronging with  salvage brokers and the deCom crews that drew them the way a trawler wake  draws ripwings. Making New Hok Safe for a New Century, the ads went. From  the newly built hoverloader dock down at the Kompcho end of town it was  less than a thousand kilometers, straight-line distance, to the shores of  New Hokkaido, and the ’loaders were running day and night. Outside of an  airdrop, there is no faster way to get across the Andrassy Sea. And on  Harlan’s World, you don’t go up in the air if you can possibly avoid it.  Any crew toting heavy equipment—and they all were—was going to New Hok on  a hoverloader out of Tekitomura. Those that lived would be coming back the  same way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Boomtown. Bright new hope and brawling enthusiasm as the Mecsek money  poured in. I limped down thoroughfares littered with the detritus of spent  human merriment. In my pocket, the freshly excised cortical stacks clicked  together like dice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was a fight going on at the intersection of Pencheva Street and Muko  Prospect. The pipe houses on Muko had just turned out and their  synapse-fried patrons had met late-shift dockworkers coming up through the  decayed quiet of the warehouse quarter. More than enough reason for  violence. Now a dozen badly coordinated figures stumbled back and forth in  the street, flailing and clawing inexpertly at each other while a gathered  crowd shouted encouragement. One body already lay inert on the fused-glass  paving, and someone else was dragging their body, a limb’s length at a  time, out of the fray, bleeding. Blue sparks shorted off a set of  overcharged power knuckles; elsewhere light glimmered on a blade. But  everyone still standing seemed to be having a good time, and there were no  police as yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yeah, part of me jeered. Probably all too busy up the hill right now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I skirted the action as best I could, shielding my injured side. Beneath  the coat, my hands closed on the smooth curve of the last hallucinogen  grenade and the slightly sticky hilt of the Tebbit knife.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Never get into a fight if you can kill quickly and be gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Virginia Vidaura—Envoy Corps trainer, later career criminal and sometime  political activist. Something of a role model for me, though it was  several decades since I’d last seen her. On a dozen different worlds, she  crept into my mind unbidden, and I owed that ghost in my head my own life  a dozen times over. This time I didn’t need her or the knife. I got past  the fight without eye contact, made the corner of Pencheva, and melted  into the shadows that lay across the alley mouths on the seaward side of  the street. The timechip in my eye said I was late.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Pick it up, Kovacs. According to my contact in Millsport, Plex wasn’t all  that reliable at the best of times, and I hadn’t paid him enough to wait  long.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Five hundred meters down and then left into the tight fractal whorls of  Belacotton Kohei Section, named centuries ago for the habitual content and  the original owner-operator family whose warehouse frontages walled the  curving maze of alleys. With the Unsettlement and the subsequent loss of  New Hokkaido as any kind of market, the local belaweed trade pretty much  collapsed and families like Kohei went rapidly bankrupt. Now the  grime-filmed upper-level windows of their façades peered sadly across at  each other over gape-mouthed loading bay entrances whose shutters were all  jammed somewhere uncommitted between open and closed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was talk of regeneration, of course, of reopening units like these  and retooling them as deCom labs, training centers, and hardware storage  facilities. Mostly, it was still just talk—the enthusiasm had kindled on  the wharf-line units facing the hoverloader ramps farther west, but so far  it hadn’t spread farther in any direction than you could trust a wirehead  with your phone. This far off the wharf and this far east, the chitter of  Mecsek finance was still pretty inaudible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The joys of trickledown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-six showed a faint glow in one upper  window, and the long restless tongues of shadows in the light that seeped  from under the half-cranked loading bay shutter gave the building the look  of a one-eyed, drooling maniac. I slid to the wall and dialed up the  synthetic sleeve’s auditory circuits for what they were worth, which  wasn’t much. Voices leaked out into the street, fitful as the shadows at  my feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “—telling you, I’m not going to hang around for that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a Millsport accent, the drawling metropolitan twang of Harlan’s  World Amanglic dragged up to an irritated jag. Plex’s voice, muttering  below sense-making range, made soft provincial counterpoint. He seemed to  be asking a question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How the fuck would I know that? Believe what you want.” Plex’s companion  was moving about, handling things. His voice faded back in the echoes of  the loading bay. I caught the words kaikyo, matter, a chopped laugh. Then  again, coming closer to the shutter, “—matters is what the family  believes, and they’ll believe what the technology tells them. Technology  leaves a trail, my friend.” A sharp coughing and indrawn breath that  sounded like recreational chemicals going down. “This guy is fucking late.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I frowned. Kaikyo has a lot of meanings, but they all depend on how old  you are. Geographically, it’s a strait or a channel. That’s  early-Settlement-years use, or just hypereducated, kanji-scribbling, First  Families pretension. This guy didn’t sound First Family, but there was no  reason he couldn’t have been around back when Konrad Harlan and his  well-connected pals were turning Glimmer VI into their own personal  backyard. Plenty of DH personalities still on stack from that far back,  just waiting to be downloaded into a working sleeve. Come to that, you  wouldn’t need to resleeve more than half   a dozen times, end-to-end, to live through the whole of Harlan’s World’s  human history anyway. It’s still not much over four centuries,  Earth-standard, since the colony barges made planetfall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Envoy intuition twisted about in my head. It felt wrong. I’d met men and  women with centuries of continuous life behind them, and they didn’t talk  like this guy. This wasn’t the wisdom of ages, drawling out into the  Tekitomura night over pipe fumes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the street, scavenged into the argot of Stripjap a couple of hundred  years later, kaikyo means a contact who can shift stolen goods. A covert  flow manager. In some parts of the Millsport Archipelago, it’s still  common usage. Elsewhere, the meaning is shifting to describe aboveboard  financial consultants.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yeah, and farther south it means a holy man possessed by spirits, or a  sewage outlet. Enough of this detective shit. You heard the man—you’re  late.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I got the heel of one hand under the edge of the shutter and hauled  upward, locking up the tidal rip of pain from my wound as well as the  synthetic sleeve’s nervous system would let me. The shutter ratcheted  noisily to the roof. Light fell out into the street and all over me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Evening.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Jesus!” The Millsport accent jerked back a full step. He’d been only a  couple of meters away from the shutter when it went up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Tak.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hello, Plex.” My eyes stayed on the newcomer. “Who’s the tan?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By then I already knew. Pale, tailored good looks straight out of some  low-end experia flick, somewhere between Micky Nozawa and Ryu Bartok.  Well-proportioned fighter’s sleeve, bulk in the shoulders and chest,  length in the limbs. Stacked hair, the way they’re doing it on the bioware  catwalks these days, that upward static-twisted thing that’s meant to look  like they just pulled the sleeve out of a clone tank. A suit bagged and  draped to suggest hidden weaponry, a stance that said he had none he was  ready to use. Combat arts crouch that was more bark than readiness to  bite. He still had the discharged micropipe in one curled palm, and his  pupils were spiked wide open. Concession to an ancient tradition put  illuminum-tattooed curlicues across one corner of his forehead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Millsport yakuza apprentice. Street thug.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You don’t call me tani,” he hissed. “You are the outsider here, Kovacs.  You are the intruder.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I left him at the periphery of my vision and looked toward Plex, who was  over by the workbenches, fiddling with a knot of webbing straps and trying  on a smile that didn’t want to be on his dissipated aristo face.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Look, Tak—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “This was strictly a private party, Plex. I didn’t ask you to subcontract  the entertainment.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The yakuza twitched forward, barely restrained. He made a grating noise  deep in his throat. Plex looked panicked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Wait, I . . .” He put down the webbing with an obvious effort. “Tak, he’s  here about something else.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “He’s here on my time,” I said mildly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Listen, Kovacs. You fucking—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No.” I looked back at him as I said it, hoping he could read the bright  energy in my tone for what it was. “You know who I am, you’ll stay out of  my way. I’m here to see Plex, not you. Now get out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t know what stopped him, Envoy rep, late-breaking news from the  citadel—because they’ll be all over it by now, you made such a fucking  mess up there—or just a cooler head than the cheap-suited punk persona  suggested. He stood braced in the door of his own rage for a moment, then  stood down and displaced it, all poured into a glance at the nails of his  right hand and a grin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Sure. You just go ahead and transact with Plex here. I’ll wait outside.  Shouldn’t take long.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He even took the first step toward the street. I looked back at Plex.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What the fuck’s he talking about?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Plex winced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak. We can’t—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh no.” But looking around the room I could already see the swirled  patterns in the dust where someone had been using a grav lifter. “No, no,  you told me—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I-I know, Tak, but—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I paid you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ll give you the money—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t want the fucking money, Plex.” I stared at him, fighting down the  urge to rip his throat out. Without Plex, there was no upload. Without the  upload—“I want my fucking body back.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s cool, it’s cool. You’ll get it back. It’s just right now—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s just right now, Kovacs, we’re using the facilities.” The yakuza  drifted back into my line of sight, still grinning. “Because to tell the  truth, they were pretty much ours in the first place. But then Plex here  probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I shuttled a glance between them. Plex looked embarrassed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You gotta feel sorry for the guy. Isa, my Millsport contact broker, all of  fifteen years old, razored violet hair and brutally obvious archaic  datarat plugs, working on world-weary reflective while she laid out the  deal and the cost. Look at history, man. It fucked him over but good.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    History, it was true, didn’t seem to have done Plex any favors. Born three  centuries sooner with the name Kohei, he’d have been a spoiled stupid  younger son with no particular need to do more than exercise his obvious  intelligence in some gentleman’s pursuit like astrophysics or archaeologue  science. As it was, the Kohei family had left its post-Unsettlement  generations nothing but the keys to ten streets of empty warehouses and a  decayed aristo charm that, in Plex’s own self-deprecating words, made it  easier than you’d think to get laid when broke. Pipe-blasted, he told me  the whole shabby story on less than three days’ acquaintance. He seemed to  need to tell someone, and Envoys are good listeners. You listen, you file  under local color, you soak it up. Later, the recalled detail maybe saves  your life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Driven by the terror of a single life span and no resleeve, Plex’s newly  impoverished ancestors learned to work for a living, but most of them  weren’t very good at it. Debt piled up; the vultures moved in. By the time  Plex came along, his family were in so deep with the yakuza that low-grade  criminality was just a fact of life. He’d probably grown up around  aggressively slouched suits like this one. Probably learned that  embarrassed, give-up-the-ground smile at his father’s knee.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The last thing he wanted to do was upset his patrons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The last thing I wanted to do was ride a hoverloader back to Millsport in  this sleeve.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Plex, I’m booked out of here on the Saffron Queen. That’s four hours  away. Going to refund me my ticket?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’ll flicker it, Tak.” His voice was pleading. “There’s another ’loader  out to EmPee tomorrow evening. I’ve got stuff, I mean Yukio’s guys—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “—use my fucking name, man,” yelped the yakuza.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They can flicker you to the evening ride, no one’s ever going to know.”  The pleading gaze turned on Yukio. “Right? You’ll do that, right?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I added a stare of my own. “Right? Seeing as how you’re fucking up my exit  plans currently?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You already fucked up your exit, Kovacs.” The yakuza was frowning,  head-shaking. Playing at sempai with mannerisms and a clip-on solemnity  he’d probably copied directly from his own sempai not too far back in his  apprenticeship. “Do you know how much heat you’ve got out there looking  for you right now? The cops have put in sniffer squads all over uptown,  and my guess is they’ll be all over the ’loader dock inside an hour. The  whole TPD is out to play. Not to mention our bearded stormtrooper friends  from the citadel. Fuck, man, you think you could have left a little more  blood up there.”  “I asked you a question. I didn’t ask for a critique. You going to flicker  me to the next departure or not?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yeah, yeah.” He waved it away. “Consider it fucking done. What you don’t  appreciate, Kovacs, is that some people have got serious business to  transact. You come up here and stir up local law enforcement with your  mindless violence, they’re liable to get all enthusiastic and go busting  people we need.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Need for what?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “None of your fucking business.” The sempai impression skidded off and he  was pure Millsport street again. “You just keep your fucking head down for  the next five or six hours and try not to kill anyone else.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “And then what?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “And then we’ll call you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I shook my head. “You’ll have to do better than that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Better than.” His voice climbed. “Who the fuck do you think you’re  talking to, Kovacs?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I measured the distance, the time it would take me to get to him. The pain  it would cost. I ladled out the words that would push him. “Who am I  talking to? I’m talking to a whiff-wired chimpira, a fucking street punk  up here from Millsport and off the leash from his sempai, and it’s getting  old, Yukio. Give me your fucking phone—I want to talk to someone with  authority.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The rage detonated. Eyes flaring wide, hand reaching for whatever he had  inside the suit jacket. Way too late.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I hit him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Across the space between us, unfolding attacks from my uninjured side.  Sideways into throat and knee. He went down choking. I grabbed an arm,  twisted it, and laid the Tebbit knife across his palm, held so he could  see.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s a bioware blade,” I told him tightly. “Adoracion Hemorrhagic  Fever. I cut you with this and every blood vessel in your body ruptures  inside three minutes. Is that what you want?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He heaved against my grip, whooped after breath. I pressed down with the  blade, and saw the panic in his eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It isn’t a good way to die, Yukio. Phone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He pawed at his jacket and the phone tipped out, skittered on the  evercrete. I leaned close enough to be sure it wasn’t a weapon, then toed  it back toward his free hand. He fumbled it up, breath still coming in  hoarse jags through his rapidly bruising throat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Good. Now punch up someone who can help, then give it to me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He thumbed the display a couple of times and offered the phone to me, face  pleading the way Plex’s had a couple of minutes earlier. I fixed him with  my eyes for a long moment, trading on the notorious immobility of cheap  synth features, then let go of his locked-out arm, took the phone, and  stepped back out of reach. He rolled over away from me, still clutching  his throat. I put the phone to my ear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Who is this?” asked an urbane male voice in Japanese.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “My name is Kovacs.” I followed the language shift automatically. “Your  chimpira Yukio and I are having a conflict of interest that I thought you  might like to resolve.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A frigid silence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s sometime tonight I’d like you to resolve it,” I said gently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was a hiss of indrawn breath at the other end of the line.  “Kovacssan, you are making a mistake.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Really?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It would be unwise to involve us in your affairs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m not the one doing the involving. Currently I’m standing in a  warehouse looking at an empty space where some equipment of mine used to  be. I have it on pretty good authority the reason it’s gone is that you  took it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    More silence. Conversations with the yakuza are invariably punctuated with  long pauses, during which you’re supposed to reflect and listen carefully  to what’s not being said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I wasn’t in the mood for it. My wound ached.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m told you’ll be finished in about six hours. I can live with that. But  I want your word that at the end of that time the equipment will be back  here and in working order, ready for me to use. I want your word.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hirayasu Yukio is the person to—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yukio is a chimp. Let us deal honestly with each other in this. Yukio’s  only job here is to make sure I don’t slaughter our mutual service  provider. Which, incidentally, is something he’s not doing well. I was  already short on patience when I arrived, and I don’t expect to replenish  my stock anytime soon. I’m not interested in Yukio. I want your word.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “And if I do not give it?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Then a couple of your front offices are going to end up looking like the  inside of the citadel tonight. You can have my word on that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Quiet. Then: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh please. What are you, making speeches? I thought I was dealing at  executive level. Am I going to have to do some damage here?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Another kind of silence. The voice on the other end of the line seemed to  have thought of something else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Is Hirayasu Yukio harmed?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not so’s you’d notice.” I looked down coldly at the yakuza. He’d mastered  breathing again and was beginning to sit up. Beads of sweat gleamed at the  borders of his tattoo. “But all that can change. It’s in your hands.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Very well.” Barely a handful of seconds before the response. By yakuza  standards, it was unseemly haste. “My name is Tanaseda. You have my word,  Kovacs-san, that the equipment you require will be in place and available  to you at the time you specify. In addition, you will be paid for your  trouble.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Thank you. That—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I have not finished. You further have my word that if you commit any acts  of violence against my personnel, I shall issue a global writ for your  capture and subsequent execution. I am talking about a very unpleasant  Real Death. Is that understood?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It seems fair. But I think you’d better tell the chimp to behave himself.  He seems to have delusions of competence.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Let me speak to him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yukio Hirayasu was sitting by now, hunched over on the evercrete, wheezing  breathily. I hissed at him and tossed him the phone. He caught it  awkwardly, one-handed, still massaging his throat with the other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Your sempai wants a word.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He glared up at me out of tear-smeared, hating eyes, but he put the phone  to his ear. Compressed Japanese syllables trickled out of it, like someone  riffing on a ruptured gas cylinder. He stiffened, and his head lowered.  His answers ran bitten off and monosyllabic. The word yes featured a lot.  One thing you’ve got to hand to the yakuza—they do discipline in the ranks  like no one else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The one-sided conversation ended and Yukio held the phone out to me, not  meeting my eye. I took it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “This matter is resolved,” said Tanaseda in my ear. “Please arrange to be  elsewhere for the remainder of the night. You may return six hours from  now when the equipment and your compensation will both be waiting for you.  We will not speak again. This. Confusion. Has been most regrettable.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He didn’t sound that upset.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You recommend a good place for breakfast?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Silence. A polite static backdrop. I weighed the phone in my palm for a  moment, then tossed it back to Yukio.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “So.” I looked from the yakuza to Plex and back. “Either of you recommend  a good place for breakfast?”Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award; Author of Market Forces and Altered Carbon [quote] --Entertainment Weekly","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305479885029,"sku":"NP9780345499776","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345499776.jpg?v=1767744454","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/woken-furies-isbn-9780345499776","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}