BooksBarbecue
Back Woken Furies
Chapters (56)
  1. PROLOGUE
  2. PART 1
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. PART 2
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. PART 3
  24. TWENTY
  25. TWENTY-ONE
  26. TWENTY-TWO
  27. TWENTY-THREE
  28. TWENTY-FOUR
  29. TWENTY-FIVE
  30. TWENTY-SIX
  31. TWENTY-SEVEN
  32. PART 4
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. PART 5
  44. THIRTY-EIGHT
  45. THIRTY-NINE
  46. FORTY
  47. FORTY-ONE
  48. FORTY-TWO
  49. FORTY-THREE
  50. FORTY-FOUR
  51. FORTY-FIVE
  52. FORTY-SIX
  53. FORTY-SEVEN
  54. FORTY-EIGHT
  55. FORTY-NINE
  56. EPILOGUE

Back along the path I’d already traced looking for him. Past the all-night diner, past the other stops and knots of population where I’d scattered his name like blood around a bottleback charter boat, back through Kem Point and further. In daylight, the Strip lost a lot of its romance. The tiny hamlets of window light I’d passed going south the previous evening showed up as sunblasted utilitarian low rises and ‘fabs. Neon and holosigns were switched off or bleached out to near invisibility. The dunetown settlements shed their cosy main-street-at-night appeal and became simple accretions of structure on either side of a detritus-strewn highway. Only the sound of the sea and the fragrances in the air were the same, and we were going too fast to register them.

Twenty kilometres north of Kem Point a small, badly-paved side road led away into the dunes. Brasil throttled back for the turn, not as much as I would have liked, and took us off the highway. Sand boiled from under the bug, scoured out from around the irregular chunks of evercrete and off the bedrock the road had been laid over. With grav-effect vehicles, paving is often as much about signalling where the path goes as providing an actual surface. And just over the first line of dunes, whoever had laid this track had abandoned the effort in favour of illuminum and carbon-fibre marker poles driven into the ground at ten-metre intervals. Brasil let our speed bleed off and we cruised sedately along the trail of poles as it snaked seaward through the sand scape. A couple of dilapidated bubblefabs appeared along the route, pitched at unlikely angles on the slopes around us. It wasn’t clear if anyone was living in them. Further on, I saw a combat-rigged skimmer parked under a tented dust canopy in a shallow defile. Spiderlike watchdog systems like miniature karakuri flexed themselves awake on its upper surfaces at the sound of the bug’s engine or maybe the heat we gave off. They raised a couple of limbs in our direction, then settled down again as we passed.

We crested the final set of dunes, and Brasil stopped the bug sideways on to the sea. He lifted off his helmet, leaned forward on the controls and nodded down the slope.

“There you go. Tell you anything?”