A tall man in a dark jacket stands on a stone quay at night above a lantern-lit harbour town of tiled roofs and suspension bridges, as a single straight beam of blue light falls from a broken ring of platforms in the sky far out over the sea.
Harlan’s World, where nobody flies if they can help it: Takeshi Kovacs home, in a borrowed combat sleeve, under the orbitals.

Altered Carbon · Book III · 2005

Woken Furies

Home on Harlan’s World and two years into a private war on a priesthood, Kovacs falls in with a deCom crew whose captain has something else in her head, while the Harlan family wakes a younger copy of him to hunt him down.

Woken Furies (Gollancz, 17 March 2005; Del Rey, September 2005) is the third Takeshi Kovacs novel, the longest — 472 pages in the Del Rey hardback — and, two decades on, still the last. It brings Kovacs home to Harlan’s World, the ocean planet where he was born: Newpest, Millsport, the Weed Expanse, and overhead the Martian orbitals that burn anything that flies too high. The jacket put the plot in six words: “Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Twice.”

It is three books in one. A revenge thriller (Kovacs is killing the priests of a fundamentalist order, and won’t say why); a war story among self-repairing war machines in the ruins of New Hokkaido; then a heist and a revolution in Millsport and on the Kossuth coast. Its four parts carry titles that track who Kovacs is — This Is Who You Are, This Is Someone Else, That Was a While Ago, This Is All That Matters — and the reviewer Christian Sauvé called it Kovacs’s most personal story so far.

It pays off the whole series. The Martian warships of Broken Angels explain the deCom crews’ command technology; Quellcrist Falconer, quoted in epigraphs since the first book, walks onstage, or something calling itself her does; Virginia Vidaura, the Envoy trainer in Kovacs’s head, appears in person; and the Sarah of Altered Carbon’s first page turns out to be the reason for everything. Netflix’s second season (2020) took its setting from here.

Movement 1

Prologue and Part One: This Is Who You Are

The Prologue is a scene Kovacs never saw. He imagines it: in a black reception suite flecked with gold, under a holosculpture of old Konrad Harlan, a young man surfaces from a sunken bath of tank gel, and a composed woman who gives her name as Aiura briefs him. He is a copy of Kovacs from his Envoy days, stored for a little under two hundred years since Sharya, now in a Harkany Neurosystems sleeve and privately retained by the Harlan family; his quarry is an ex-Envoy. Then the narrator shrugs:

“Maybe it went something like that.”

The real Kovacs limps through rain-slick night streets in Tekitomura, on the Saffron Archipelago, in a cheap synthetic sleeve with a blaster burn across its ribs. He has just killed priests of the Knights of the New Revelation in their citadel above the town, and their cortical stacks click in his pocket like dice. Tekitomura is a boom town, the jumping-off point for deCom crews clearing New Hokkaido of the Unsettlement’s war machines.

He wants his own body back from Plex, a bankrupt aristocrat turned biotech technician deep in the yakuza’s debt, but the yakuza have taken the resleeving gear for a job of their own, leaving their apprentice Yukio Hirayasu to mind Plex. Kovacs puts Yukio on the floor, lays a Tebbit knife — a bioware blade carrying a haemorrhagic fever — across his palm, and makes him phone his boss. Tanaseda promises the gear back in six hours, and warns what will happen if his men are harmed.

In the Tokyo Crow on the wharf, nine senior priests — patriarchs’ beards, shaven skulls, ochre robes — order a woman at the bar to cover herself. She kills the lead officiator and goes down under the rest; Kovacs wades in with the knife and his last hallucinogen grenade, and a wounded priest knows him: the Envoy, the transgressor. Outside, the woman — pale, wolfish, one eye silver — nicknames him Micky, after an experia star, and offers him a place to sleep.

She is Sylvie Oshima, command head of a deCom crew, Sylvie’s Slipins. Her mane of black and silver datatech cords ties her to the crew’s net, technology descended from the Martian warships found at Sanction. At the Kompcho hoverloader docks he meets Orr, a shaven-headed giant, and Jadwiga, “Jad”, cocky and from Newpest; Kiyoka is asleep and Lazlo out on the town. The newscast says someone has killed half the senior priests in town; Sylvie looks at his pocket.

In the morning Yukio comes back with muscle and shoots Jad dead; at a word from Sylvie, Orr cuts Yukio and his men down, and Kovacs cuts out their stacks. Sylvie knows a New Hokkaido bunker with a clone bank where both could be re-sleeved, so they walk Jad’s corpse aboard the hoverloader Guns for Guevara, lenses over her open eyes, Sylvie working the body through the team net — and words come out of the dead mouth, Quellist cant from somewhere buried.

Drava, across the Andrassy Sea, was once New Hokkaido’s trade gateway; now it is a ruin behind the deCom beachhead’s livewire and spider blocks. The crew lead raw recruits through the ruined city with Jad’s corpse riding a grav bug, cut out her stack in a pillared temple and bring the temple down on the body. In a tunnel a karakuri caretaker hovers protectively over a dead war machine until Orr smashes it. “Welcome to deCom, Micky.”

A young man with long braided black hair rises chest-deep from a sunken bath of clear gel in a black-and-gold room as an attendant in a black high-collared tunic kneels with a towel beneath a tall, softly glowing statue of a man shading his eyes.
III · 1 The Waking, Imagined The Prologue is a guess. Kovacs pictures how the Harlan family must have woken a copy of him, made in his Envoy days and kept in storage for nearly two centuries: a young man surfacing from a bath of tank gel beneath a holosculpture of old Konrad Harlan, the planet’s discoverer, one hand raised high. Then he admits it: “Maybe it went something like that.” He wasn’t there. The copy was.
A composed woman in a dark high-collared suit sits across a low black table from a young man with a long braid in dark clothes, a paper screen glowing behind her.
III · 2 An Audience with Aiura In the same imagined scene a woman in a custom-grown clone sleeve gives her name as Aiura. Precisely and politely she tells the young Envoy that he has been in storage since the Sharya campaign, that he is now privately retained by the Harlan family, and that his quarry is an ex-Envoy. Kovacs is inventing the details of the room. The arrangement, the book will show, is real, and Aiura runs the family’s security.
A man in a long coat limps down a steep, rain-slick, lamp-lit street of tiled-roof houses at night, one hand pressed to his side and the other in his pocket, a dark fortress on the mountain above.
III · 3 Stacks Like Dice Chapter One, Tekitomura. Kovacs limps through rain-slick streets in a cheap synthetic sleeve, a priest’s blaster wound across its ribs. “In my pocket, the freshly excised cortical stacks clicked together like dice.” He has come from the New Revelation citadel above the town, two years into a private war on the priesthood, and the book will not say why until Part Three. Tonight all he wants is his own body back.
In a dim warehouse, a man in a long coat kneels on the arm of a young man in a draped suit pinned to the concrete floor, a long pale knife held flat above his open palm, while a thin man watches from beside a workbench.
III · 4 The Tebbit Knife Plex, a bankrupt aristocrat in hock to the yakuza, has let them take the resleeving gear Kovacs is waiting for, and their apprentice, Yukio Hirayasu, is there to keep the peace. Kovacs puts Yukio on the floor and lays a Tebbit knife — a bioware blade carrying a haemorrhagic fever — across his palm until he calls his boss. Tanaseda promises the gear back in six hours, and a very unpleasant real death if his men come to harm.
A pale woman with a long black-and-silver mane stands with both hands flat on a dark bar as a bearded, shaven-headed man in ochre robes looms beside her, more robed men behind him, while a man in a coat watches from a corner table.
III · 5 The Tokyo Crow Nine senior priests order the woman at the bar to cover herself. Her answer to the lead officiator: “don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.” Then she breaks his elbow and kills him before the rest beat her down. Kovacs wades in with the Tebbit knife and his last hallucinogen grenade, and a wounded priest knows him: the Envoy, the transgressor. Outside, she names him Micky, after an experia star.
In grey dawn light a pale woman on a cheap lounger holds up one thick black cord from her long black-and-silver mane while the other cords stir, as a man watches and a wiry young woman sleeps on a couch behind.
III · 6 Command Hair She is Sylvie Oshima, command head of a deCom crew, and her hair is the job: a mane of datatech cords that ties her to her crew’s net, technology descended from the Martian warships found at Sanction in Broken Angels. Above the Kompcho docks Kovacs meets her people: Orr, a shaven-headed giant, and Jadwiga, cocky and from Newpest. The newscast says someone has killed half the senior priests in town. Sylvie glances at his pocket.
On a lamplit concrete ramp below a huge gun-studded hovercraft, a grim pale woman with a long mane, a man in a long dark coat and a stiff, slack-faced young woman in a black skinsuit and dark goggle lenses walk side by side past a uniformed steward holding a reader.
III · 7 Walking the Dead In the morning Yukio comes back with muscle and shoots Jadwiga dead. Sylvie knows a bunker in New Hokkaido where she could be re-sleeved, so they walk her aboard the hoverloader Guns for Guevara: lenses over her open eyes, her body run through the team net. Then words come out of the dead mouth, Quellist cant from somewhere buried. Sylvie blames junk flushed out of the nervous system.
Under a flat grey sky, a pale woman with a long black-and-silver mane stands at the rail of a hovercraft looking at a ruined harbour city fenced with coiling razor wire, squat spider-shaped blocks and sentry towers.
III · 8 The Drava Beachhead A day and a night across the Andrassy Sea lies Drava, once New Hokkaido’s trade gateway and naval port, now a ruin behind the deCom beachhead: livewire crawling restlessly, crouched spider blocks, robot sentries. Beyond it lies the Uncleared, where the Unsettlement’s war machines still run. The commander, Shigeo Kurumaya, sends the Slipins in ahead of schedule; a rival command head, Anton of the Skull Gang, will matter later.
In a dim stone tunnel, a giant shaven-headed man raises a wrecking bar at a hovering eight-armed machine that hangs over a dead, dragon-like war machine, while a man with a ponytail points.
III · 9 Welcome to deCom Through the beachhead gate, the Slipins lead raw recruits on a sweep of the ruined city with Jad’s corpse riding a grav bug. In a pillared temple Kovacs cuts out her stack, and they bring the temple down on the body. In a tunnel an eight-armed karakuri caretaker hovers protectively over a dead missile mimint until Orr, egged on by Lazlo, smashes it. “Welcome to deCom, Micky.”
Movement 2

Part Two: This Is Someone Else

“Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves / And burn your fingers once again”

Five weeks later, deep in the Uncleared, Kovacs is someone else. Sylvie has hotwired the bunker’s clone bank, and he and Jad wear sibling bodies grown from the same genetic stem: rare Eishundo Organics combat sleeves, Slavic and Japanese, long-limbed and jade-eyed, with gecko-gene palms. A scorpion-chassis gun with a Millsport accent pleads over the open channel to be left alone; Kovacs plants a mine on its flank and is dragged under a river while it weeps.

After the fight Sylvie is down with fever, her command software refusing to shut down, and Kovacs and Jad look at each other like walking past a mirror. Then Sylvie wakes, grips his arm with a machine’s strength and begs him in Japanese for help.

“It was not her voice.”

In Drava the beachhead commander, Kurumaya, orders Sylvie held, and a rival crew passes on a rumour: a stranger has been asking about Sylvie’s new recruit. “Kovacs. Said his name was Kovacs.” He has gone into the Uncleared with Anton’s Skull Gang. Kovacs takes Sylvie and runs for Tekitomura through the snow.

There he calls Isa, a data broker in Millsport, and Yaroslav, partner of Virginia Vidaura, his old Envoy trainer, who can only guess where she has gone. He and Sylvie lie low at an archaeologue camp on the mountain beside a Martian eyrie, where the site’s construct, Dig 301, recites the life of Nadia Makita — Quellcrist Falconer — whose last flight, in a stripped-down jetcopter, ended in angelfire. They become lovers. His careless trawl through the Quell archives brings the hunters.

Next morning, inside the eyrie, Kovacs trades shouts with an attacker and hears his own voice, younger. He drops out of the eyrie and a Martian cable hauls him to safety, but Sylvie is gone. Dig 301’s footage shows the other Kovacs — amber skin, startling blue eyes, a long braid — escorting her away with Anton’s crew and yakuza.

At Plex’s party Kovacs bluffs his way in dressed as Yukio, then mimes lifting off a Noh mask: he has Yukio in his pocket. Plex tells him the Slipins are dead in Drava, stacks gone; that the Harlan spymistress Aiura is running the hunt; and that Sylvie came to him first, selling an Unsettlement weapon she called the Qualgrist Protocol, and he put her in touch with the yakuza. He walks out into falling snow.

A long-limbed man in grey coveralls, a disc-shaped mine in his hand, glances back as he runs across a grey valley floor toward a towering scorpion-shaped war machine with a gun in its curled tail, small spider-legged tanks at the river.
III · 10 The Scorpion Gun Part Two opens five weeks later, and Kovacs is someone else: in a bunker’s clone bank Sylvie has re-sleeved him and Jad in sibling bodies, rare Eishundo Organics combat sleeves. In the Uncleared a scorpion gun pleads over the open channel, in a Millsport accent, to be left alone as it has been for three centuries. Kovacs plants a mine on its flank and is dragged under a river while it weeps.
Inside a ribbed field shelter, a tall man and a tall woman with the same jade-green eyes and sharp cheekbones study each other, while a woman kneels by a cot where a feverish woman with a long mane lies.
III · 11 Like Walking Past a Mirror After the fight Sylvie is down and burning with fever: her command software should be shutting down, and it isn’t, and Kiyoka is afraid to force it. Kovacs and Jad, in bodies grown from the same genetic stem, catch each other’s eye like walking past a mirror; physically, they are brother and sister. Orr, who has watched Kovacs cut the stacks out of the dead, sneers at the habit.
Inside a ribbed field shelter, a pale woman with a long black-and-silver mane sits up on a cot and grips a man’s wrist hard, staring wide-eyed, as he kneels beside her, tense and watchful.
III · 12 It Was Not Her Voice When Sylvie wakes she grabs Kovacs’s arm with a machine’s grip and begs him, in Japanese, for help. “It was not her voice.” Something else is in her command capacity, and from now on two minds take turns behind her face. Earlier, arguing over her as she lay unconscious, Orr heard Kovacs as a man ready to kill her; Jad had to tell him Kovacs was talking about saving her.
In falling snow at night, a man in a padded jacket crouches in the lee of a battered freight container on a stone wharf, razor wire and spider-legged blocks along the shore and a lit vessel beyond him across the dark water.
III · 13 Snow in Drava Back in Drava, Kurumaya orders Sylvie held, and a rival crew’s wince brings news: a stranger has been asking about Sylvie’s new recruit. “Kovacs. Said his name was Kovacs.” He has gone into the Uncleared with Anton’s Skull Gang. Kovacs takes Sylvie and runs for Tekitomura; Oishii and Lazlo smuggle them aboard the Daikoku Dawn through the snow. Crouched on the wharf, he wonders how the other Kovacs is coping.
In cold early light, a man and a woman with a long mane stand by a timber cabin on a mountainside, looking up at a vast dark alien structure thrust out over a sheer drop like a rocket, a harbour town far below.
III · 14 The Eyrie They hide at an archaeologue camp on the mountain above Tekitomura, beside a Martian eyrie launched out over a five-hundred-metre drop. The site’s construct, Dig 301, recites the life of Nadia Makita — Quellcrist Falconer — whose last flight, in a stripped-down jetcopter, was cut out of the sky by angelfire. Kovacs and Sylvie become lovers. His careless trawl through the Quell archives is what brings the hunters.
In a dark chamber of smooth curved metal, a bruised man in a torn jacket watches a pale-gold floating projection of a young man with a long braid courteously leading a woman with a long mane away from a cabin, while a faintly glowing figure of a woman stands behind him.
III · 15 The Other Kovacs The camp is hit next morning. Inside the eyrie Kovacs trades shouts with an attacker and hears his own voice, younger. He drops out of the eyrie and a Martian cable hauls him to safety, but Sylvie is gone. Dig 301’s footage, which the book narrates in the third person, shows the other Kovacs at the camp — amber skin, startling blue eyes, a braid — leading her away with exquisite manners.
At a lantern-lit party in an old warehouse, a tall man in a flashy coat lifts both hands from his face as if removing a mask, while a thin man in a silk shirt stares at him, appalled.
III · 16 The Noh Mask Kovacs bluffs into Plex’s party dressed and voiced as Yukio, then mimes lifting off a Noh mask: he isn’t Yukio, though he has Yukio in his pocket. Plex tells him the Slipins are dead in Drava, stacks gone; that a Harlan spymistress, Aiura, is running the hunt; and that Sylvie came to him first, selling an Unsettlement weapon she called the Qualgrist Protocol. Kovacs walks out into falling snow.
Movement 3

Part Three: That Was a While Ago

Kovacs goes west on Haiduci’s Daughter, a tug welded to four cargo pods, to Newpest, the low, stormproofed town where he grew up, beside the Weed Expanse. There he calls Radul Segesvar, boss of the Newpest haiduci, who has been keeping Kovacs’s captive priests for nine weeks, and a disposable phone whispers hurry by itself: Sylvie, reaching out through her dead crew’s net. Segesvar owes him his life — at sixteen, when a man they were robbing ripped Radul’s leg open with a gaff, Kovacs took the hook from him and killed him with it — and roars into the harbour in a red-and-black sports skimmer.

A skimmer takes him across the Expanse to the Kossuth coast and Vchira Beach, seven hundred kilometres of surf. He finds Jack Soul Brasil, legend of the Little Blue Bugs, the old revolutionary crew Kovacs once ran with, and then, on a dune, Virginia Vidaura, wet from the sea in a surfer’s sleeve at least ten years younger than when he saw her last.

“I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.”

She has met wireheads who believe they’re Konrad Harlan, and doubts the Quell story. The Bugs barely exist any more: Brasil, Vidaura, Koi of the old Black Brigades, the sceptical Mari Ado, Sierra Tres, young Daniel. Sylvie is held at Rila Crags, a Harlan fortress on a spire of rock off Millsport. They plan the rescue in a marine architects’ mapping construct, where a day passes in ten minutes outside, Kovacs and Vidaura knee-deep among the islands like sea giants.

When Koi demands an explanation, Vidaura takes Kovacs out for coffee, and on a terrace looking out to sea he tells her about Sarah Sachilowska. Sarah was out of storage, on parole, and happy with a man named Josef. When her daughter died in a fishing accident, Josef, lost to the faith, would not help; Sarah stole a skimmer to get the girl re-sleeved, and the New Revelation hunted her down, with Josef’s help, cut out both stacks in a punishment chair and dropped them in the sea. Kovacs got the names from Josef and began killing; later he killed every adult he could find who had been in the village that day. The priests he takes now go to Segesvar, who re-sleeves them for the swamp-panther pits on his farm.

“They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”

At dusk on top of a long cargo pod towed at sea, a man sits hunched, watching a large, ragged winged creature hunched a few metres away.
III · 17 The Ripwing Part Three, “That Was a While Ago”, goes home. Kovacs heads west on Haiduci’s Daughter, a tug welded to the nose of four cargo pods, away from Millsport and toward Newpest, where he grew up. A New Revelation priest’s wife talks with him at the rail. At dusk he sits out on the pods with a storm-blown ripwing, the two of them hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence.
A garish red-and-black open-top speedboat roars into a crowded harbour of squat, rounded buildings, a slim pale man in dark glasses standing at its wheel, while a tall man waits on the quay.
III · 18 Radul Segesvar Newpest, Kovacs’s home town, sits low and stormproofed between the sea and the Weed Expanse. Radul Segesvar, boss of the Newpest haiduci, comes into the harbour in a garish red-and-black sports skimmer. He owes Kovacs his life: at sixteen, when a man they were robbing in an alley ripped Radul’s leg open with a gaff and the other boys ran, Kovacs took the hook and killed him with it. Now he has been keeping Kovacs’s captive priests for nine weeks.
On a sand dune above a wide surf beach at sunrise, a woman in a full-length black wetsuit with spiky damp black hair sits beside a man in a dark jacket, both looking out to sea.
III · 19 On the Dune at Vchira Across the Weed Expanse and down the Kossuth coast lies Vchira Beach, seven hundred kilometres of surf. Kovacs finds Jack Soul Brasil first, and then Virginia Vidaura, his Envoy trainer, wet from the sea in a surfer’s sleeve at least ten years younger than when he saw her last. “I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.” When he tells her about Quell, she says she has met wireheads who believe they’re Konrad Harlan.
A tall, long-limbed surfer with faint scars on his chest and long wet hair wades out of the waves in board shorts and ankle boots, a battered old surfboard under one arm, as a man in a dark jacket waits on the sand.
III · 20 Jack Soul Brasil Brasil walks out of the surf with a board older than his sleeve and knows Kovacs’s body for what it is: Eishundo Organics, a design classic from a Quellist-leaning Drava cooperative long out of business. He is a legend of the Little Blue Bugs, the old crew Kovacs once ran with. The Bugs barely exist any more — an old core and a few newcomers drawn by the legend — but they hear him out.
Two giant figures, a man and a woman, stand knee-deep in a calm, gridded sea among tiny islands and toy-sized harbour towns, bending to look down at a sharp spire of rock with tiny lights at its tip.
III · 21 Sea Giants Sylvie is held at Rila Crags, a Harlan fortress on a spire of rock off Millsport. The Bugs plan the rescue inside a marine architects’ mapping construct, where a whole day takes about ten minutes outside, and Kovacs and Vidaura stand in it like sea giants out of legend, knee-deep among the islands. Afterwards, when Koi demands an explanation, Vidaura takes Kovacs out for a coffee.
In soft, hazy light, a woman with long black hair holds a cigarette at a small café table by a window, smiling faintly at a man seen from behind across from her.
III · 22 Sarah, Out of Storage He tells her about Sarah Sachilowska, the Sarah of Altered Carbon’s Prologue: out of storage, on parole, happy with a man named Josef. When her daughter died in a fishing accident, Josef, lost to the faith, would not help. Sarah stole a skimmer to get the child re-sleeved, and the New Revelation hunted her down, Josef with them, cut out both stacks and dropped them in the sea. “They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”
Movement 4

Part Four: This Is All That Matters — Millsport and Rila Crags

“This much must be understood: Revolution requires Sacrifice.”

The Bugs slip into the Millsport Archipelago for Harlan’s Day. Isa, all of fifteen, brings Rila’s security schematics and gossip: Mitzi Harlan’s guard is doubled, and another Harlan heir has been hacked to death with a baling tine. Nikolai Natsume, a Renouncer monk and the only man ever to climb into Rila, rebuilds the climb for them in virtual.

On Harlan’s Day, at the signal, balloons go up all over Millsport and draw the orbitals. Rainbow angelfire pours down across the city, the archipelago’s electronic security goes blind and deaf, and under the storm Kovacs, Brasil and Sierra Tres cross the Reach on grav-assisted dive gear. Kovacs goes up the Crags on gecko palms, a ripwing stabbing at his eyes.

In the stone garden at the top armoured guards step out: they were expected. Aiura is waiting with the younger Kovacs, who laughs at him. Then Kovacs plays his real hand: two minutes ago a Quellist team took Mitzi Harlan, the patriarch’s favourite granddaughter, in Danchi. Sylvie for Mitzi, thirty minutes. Sylvie is wheeled out iron-haired and death-white, a slash down her cheek, and Kovacs and Aiura carry her between them to a swoopcopter.

They drop to the trimaran Boubin Islander, where Isa waits with one of Brasil’s antique rifles. A swoopcopter makes a stealth run and hits Isa and Sierra Tres; then a finger of angelfire reaches down out of the clouds and it is gone. Isa dies apologising in a little girl’s whisper. In Danchi, Mari Ado and Daniel are dead too. Kovacs whispers to the empty sky.

In a dim room with a window on a lantern-strung night street, a fifteen-year-old girl with spiky violet hair holds out a small data chip to a tall man.
III · 23 Isa, Fifteen Part Four’s epigraph, from Sandor Spaventa: “This much must be understood: Revolution requires Sacrifice.” The Bugs slip into the Millsport Archipelago for Harlan’s Day. Isa, Kovacs’s data broker — all of fifteen, violet hair, archaic datarat plugs — brings Rila’s security schematics and court gossip: Mitzi Harlan’s guard is doubled, and another Harlan heir has been hacked to death with a baling tine. Nobody yet knows why.
From the deck of a trimaran at night, two men in black dive suits look up grinning as jagged beams of blue light strike down from the starry sky onto rising balloons over a city of tiled roofs and bridges below mountains.
III · 24 Harlan’s Day On Harlan’s Day the sirens play a birthday hymn, and at the signal balloons go up from all over Millsport. Anything that climbs so high draws the orbitals: angelfire pours down across the city in rainbow light, and the archipelago’s electronic security goes blind and deaf in the storm. Waiting on the trimaran Boubin Islander, Kovacs and Brasil are both grinning. It is time to go.
At night a man in a dark dive suit clings to a sheer wet cliff with his bare palms beneath an overhanging stone parapet, turning his face aside as a winged creature lunges at him out of the dark.
III · 25 The Climb The Renouncer monk Nikolai Natsume, the only man ever to climb into Rila, has rebuilt the climb for them in his monastery’s virtuality. Now it is real: a night dive through the Reach under the light show, then the cliff, Kovacs going up it on the Eishundo sleeve’s gecko palms. The top third of the Crags belongs to ripwing colonies, and one of them goes for his eyes in the dark.
In a raked stone garden at night, a man in a dark dive suit faces a composed woman in a dark suit and a young man with a long braid, guards in the shadows behind, as a pale woman lies on a wheeled stretcher under bluish light.
III · 26 The Stone Garden At the top, armoured guards step out of the cloisters: they were expected. Aiura is waiting, and with her the younger Kovacs, who laughs. Then Kovacs plays his real hand. A Quellist team has just taken Mitzi Harlan, the patriarch’s favourite granddaughter, in Danchi: Sylvie for Mitzi, thirty minutes. Sylvie is wheeled out iron-haired and death-white, and Kovacs and Aiura carry her between them to a swoopcopter.
From a trimaran’s spray-wet deck at night, a kneeling man in a dive suit looks up as a thin vertical beam of blue light stabs down out of the clouds onto a distant aircraft, while a long-haired man with a rifle slung on his back kneels over a figure wrapped in a blanket.
III · 27 A Finger of Blue They drop to the Boubin Islander, where Isa waits waving one of Brasil’s antique rifles. A swoopcopter makes a stealth run and hits Isa and Sierra Tres; then a long finger of blue fire reaches down out of the clouds, and the swoopcopter is gone. Isa dies apologising in a little girl’s whisper. In Danchi, Mari Ado and Daniel are dead too. Kovacs stares at the empty sky where the beam came from and whispers to it.
Movement 5

This Is All That Matters, continued — Eltevedtem, Kossuth and Vchira

They hide at Eltevedtem, among reefs north of Millsport where a Martian tower more than two kilometres high once stood. Sylvie’s body thrashes and gibbers machine code. Kovacs rages at the ghost of Nadia Makita over Isa, then lets it go: it isn’t this fractured woman’s fault.

On the rayhunter Angelfire Flirt the woman who calls herself Quell admits what she sold through Plex. The Qualgrist Protocol is a Black Brigade weapon: a gene-level hatred of Harlan blood, pheromone-triggered, spread by a symptomless flu from carrier sleeves buried at covert sites. Its carriers kill with whatever is to hand. She defends it. On Pictures of the Floating World, a floating city in the Gulf of Kossuth, Koi turns out to be alive; in the ritual of Ascertainment she knows him as Shaky Koi, and dismisses Sandor Spaventa, the epigraph’s author, as a fraud.

At Segesvar’s farm on the Expanse, an old station refitted in deliberately antique style around nine swamp-panther fight pits, Kovacs admits he stopped watching his re-sleeved priests die and just hands over the stacks. He and Vidaura become lovers. Quell tells him the oligarchs kill off anything that competes; he says he needs nothing he doesn’t already have.

Back at Vchira, in a rented construct dressed as a deCom bar full of grey speed ghosts, Kovacs reaches Sylvie Oshima herself. She has been whiting out since Iyamon Canyon; she remembers a name from school, Grigori Ishii; grieving, she has fallen back on her Renouncer childhood and will not come out. Then a phone crackles: Jadwiga, alive, chasing him for nearly a month.

A man on the bow of a trimaran looks up at huge, vine-hung fragments of a fallen alien tower rising from a grey-green sea, another boat moored at the mouth of a sea cave beneath them.
III · 28 Hiding at Eltevedtem They hide at Eltevedtem, a maze of reefs north of Millsport where a Martian tower more than two kilometres high once stood; its wreckage is sea caves now, and ruin smothered in hanging vines. Sylvie’s body thrashes and gibbers machine code. Kovacs turns on the ghost of Nadia Makita over Isa’s death, then lets it go: it isn’t this fractured woman’s fault. Koi, he believes, is gone, and the uprising with him.
At the rail of a boat racing over a whitecapped sea, a woman with a scarred cheek and a heavy silver-grey mane blown back from her pale face looks out fiercely while a man beside her listens, a grey armoured vessel cutting through the waves behind.
III · 29 The Qualgrist Protocol Aboard the rayhunter Angelfire Flirt, part warship and part oversize racing skiff, the woman who calls herself Quell recites her own verse and admits what she sold through Plex. The Qualgrist Protocol is a Black Brigade weapon: a gene-level hatred of Harlan blood, pheromone-triggered, carried by a symptomless flu. Its carriers kill with whatever is to hand. She defends it: is it any less discriminating than the economics that grind down the belaweed farmers?
In a plain room on a great ship at sunset, a lean grey-haired man with his hands on a bare table stares across it at a woman with a long silver-grey mane whose face breaks into a grin, two veterans standing behind.
III · 30 Shaky Koi On Pictures of the Floating World, a floating city in the Gulf of Kossuth, Soseki Koi turns out to be alive. In the ritual of Ascertainment, before Koi and two Black Brigade veterans, the woman in Sylvie’s body passes her own way: she knows him as Shaky Koi, and she dismisses Sandor Spaventa, the author of Part Four’s epigraph about revolution and sacrifice, as a fucking fraud.
In hazy morning light, a man and a woman stand close on a walkway above oval pits sunk in mud, her hand on his arm, a maned, beaked beast prowling in a pit below and old ornate timber buildings behind.
III · 31 Segesvar’s Farm They lie up at Segesvar’s farm on the Expanse, an old station refitted in deliberately antique style around nine swamp-panther fight pits sunk into the silt. This is where Kovacs’s priests have been going, re-sleeved to die again; he admits he stopped watching and just hands over the stacks. He and Vidaura become lovers. Quell tells him the oligarchs kill off anything that competes; he needs nothing he doesn’t already have.
In a dim virtual bar crowded with blurred grey ghostly figures, a man and a pale woman with a long mane sit facing each other across a small table.
III · 32 Sylvie Herself Back at Vchira, in a rented virtual construct dressed as a deCom bar full of grey speed ghosts, Kovacs gets through to Sylvie Oshima herself. She has been whiting out since Iyamon Canyon; she remembers a name from school, Grigori Ishii. Grieving, she has fallen back on her Renouncer childhood and will not come out. Then a phone crackles, and it is Jadwiga — alive, and chasing him for nearly a month.
Movement 6

This Is All That Matters, concluded — the farm, the angelfire and the Epilogue

At a hostel in Kem Point, Jad — shaven-headed now, picking at a beard prosthesis — tells how the other Kovacs’s team kicked in the doors in Drava; she wasn’t on their list. She thinks Quell is only a propulsion system for the weapon. Her skimmer is run down at night by the armoured hoverloader Impaler, and aboard is Todor Murakami, an Envoy of Kovacs’s generation: Segesvar has sold them out, and the Harlans hold Vidaura, Sylvie and the rest. Murakami brokers a truce with Tanaseda, who concedes Kovacs was not wholly to blame for Yukio. At a grey dawn the Impaler runs across the Expanse into a storm.

Inside the farm Anton grabs Aiura and throws her in front of Jad’s shard gun; she is torn apart, and he gets away. Kovacs comes into the pens through a tunnel in pouring rain. On a broken gantry above the fight pits Segesvar spits out the grudge under the life-debt, a woman named Yvonna whom Kovacs took from him. Kovacs tears out Segesvar’s eye, and a loose swamp panther drags him off the walkway. In the bunker every corpse has had its stack hacked out. On the dock Anton lies dead, shot, by the look of it, by Jad; Murakami holds out the empty shard blaster, clubs Kovacs with it, says “Sorry, Tak,” and stuns him.

He wakes bound on the dock. Murakami’s Envoy team, four years on Harlan’s World, is here to watch the deCom technology and the Quellists both. They bring in Sylvie’s body, and Murakami argues that a neo-Quellist rising would be worse than Sharya. Vidaura, concussed, answers him:

“Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system.”

What frightens Murakami is a first contact made through the Martian machines, and the old deCom joke about bringing down an orbital stops sounding like a joke.

When Kovacs comes to, the dock is deserted under a faint mist and the air smells scorched. The angelfire has come down on the farm and taken the captors, sparing him and Vidaura. At the water’s edge Sylvie says a name — Grigori Ishii, the Quellist pilot who tried to fly Quell out of Alabardos. Angelfire records what it destroys: the orbitals copied Nadia Makita when they burned her jetcopter, and the copy found its way into Sylvie’s command capacity. The younger Kovacs has survived by swimming, gashed and poised, and sneers at his older self — “You’re like some lame old wolf that can’t keep up with the pack.” Kovacs chooses not to kill him. Jad does. Sylvie, oddly tranquil, says that in her capacity vault she can stretch minutes into months and teach Quell the command software.

The Epilogue looks back from the deck of Haiduci’s Daughter, leaving Newpest. Kovacs thinks of Segesvar and the others, especially the other Kovacs; he can’t blame Jad, and slowly they are talking again. Vidaura, her face still healing, has given him a lesson in letting things go, and wept all night for Jack Soul Brasil. “Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals.” Whether they and the spreading Qualgrist will turn the planet against its oligarchs, the book leaves open. Its last lines hope that a system able to destroy and record at once might someday find a pair of weed-grown stacks off the Nurimono Ocean, Sarah’s and her daughter’s by every implication, and bring back what they hold.

At a scarred table in a cheap hostel room striped with daylight, a shaven-headed woman in a dark hooded robe holds a tuft of false beard in her long fingers, beside a tall man with the same green eyes.
III · 33 Supposed to Be Dead Jad is meant to be dead, twice over. In a Kem Point hostel, shaven-headed now and picking at a beard prosthesis, she tells how the other Kovacs’s team found the Slipins by their net signature and kicked in the doors in Drava; she wasn’t on their list. She thinks the Quell personality is only a propulsion system for the weapon. Meanwhile Segesvar has sold the Bugs to the Harlans.
Under harsh spotlights on the deck of a huge armoured hovercraft at night, a grey-haired man in a dark suit faces a tall man with cold formality while a lean man in a field jacket watches from between them.
III · 34 A Truce with Tanaseda Jad’s skimmer is run down at night by the armoured hoverloader Impaler and its lanky pirate master. Aboard is Todor Murakami, an Envoy of Kovacs’s generation, with news: Segesvar has sold them out, and the Harlans hold Vidaura, Sylvie and the rest. Murakami has brokered a truce with Tanaseda, who comes aboard and concedes that Kovacs was not wholly to blame for Yukio’s death. Kovacs pushes him anyway.
In pounding rain, two soaked men in dark shirts stand on a timber walkway above an oval mud pit, one cold and still, the other shouting at him with clenched fists, as a huge maned, beaked beast rears in the pit below, its talons striking sparks.
III · 35 The Fight Pits The Impaler runs at Segesvar’s farm at a grey dawn, into a storm. Inside, Anton throws Aiura in front of Jad’s shard gun and escapes. Kovacs comes into the pens through a tunnel in pouring rain. On a broken gantry above the fight pits Segesvar spits out the grudge that has been festering under the life-debt: a woman named Yvonna, whom Kovacs took from him. Kovacs tears out Segesvar’s eye, and a loose swamp panther drags him off the walkway.
On a rain-swept timber dock, a lean man in a dark jacket holds out a pistol toward a soaked, wary tall man, while a dazed woman in a grey cape sits on a crate behind them with a hand to her head and a still figure with long rainbow-dyed hair lies at the dock’s edge.
III · 36 Sorry, Tak In the bunker every corpse has had its stack hacked out, and there is no sign of Vidaura or Sylvie. On the dock Anton lies dead, shot, by the look of it, by Jad, his rainbow command hair trailing toward the water. Murakami lets go of Vidaura’s face and holds out an empty shard blaster to Kovacs. Then its butt comes up into Kovacs’s head, and Murakami draws a stunner: “Sorry, Tak.”
On a deserted dock in faint mist, a woman with a long silver-grey mane stands motionless at the end of the planks as a man in waterlogged clothes walks unsteadily toward her, a faint blue glow on the boards.
III · 37 The Air Smells Scorched Murakami’s Envoys, on Harlan’s World for four years, are here to watch the deCom technology and the Quellists both, and Vidaura, concussed, tells him: “Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system.” When Kovacs comes to, the dock is deserted under a faint mist and the air smells scorched. The angelfire has come down on the farm and taken the captors, sparing him and Vidaura. At the water’s edge Sylvie says a name: Grigori Ishii, the pilot who tried to fly Quell out.
On a misty, scorched dock, a young man with long, wet, tangled black hair and a gash across his forehead stands sneering beside a tall man in a soaked dark shirt, a lamp burning on a post behind them.
III · 38 The Lame Old Wolf Angelfire records what it destroys. When the orbitals burned Nadia Makita’s jetcopter they copied her, and the copy found its way into Sylvie’s command capacity. The younger Kovacs has survived by swimming, gashed but poised: “You’re like some lame old wolf that can’t keep up with the pack.” Kovacs chooses not to kill him. Jad does, and in the Epilogue he can’t blame her.
In the dusk, a man, a woman with spiky black hair and a shaven-headed woman stand on long cargo pods towed behind a tug away from a low domed coastline, while a pale woman with a silver-grey mane stands apart, gazing up at a broken ring of platforms in the sky.
III · 39 Learning to Talk to the Orbitals The Epilogue, from the deck of Haiduci’s Daughter leaving Newpest. Kovacs thinks of Segesvar and the others, especially the other Kovacs; slowly, he is talking to Jad again. Vidaura, her face still healing, has wept and talked about Jack Soul Brasil all night. Down in Sylvie’s capacity vault, where minutes stretch into months, “Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals.” And Kovacs lets himself hope the orbitals might one day find two lost stacks in the sea.

What season 2 took from this book

  • Setting and spine. Netflix’s season 2 (27 February 2020, eight episodes; showrunner Alison Schapker, Anthony Mackie as Kovacs) is not an adaptation of any one novel, but it takes this book’s frame: Kovacs home on Harlan’s World, the orbitals and their angelfire (the show’s “Angels”), a Quellcrist Falconer who may not be herself, a younger double-sleeved Kovacs, the Harlan family, Harlan’s Day, a Renouncer construct and Dig 301. Birth.Movies.Death said it “blends together elements from Morgan’s two sequels”, plus inventions of its own.
  • Quell comes back in her own body. The book’s Quell is a revolutionary dead for centuries whose mind, copied by angelfire, surfaces in Sylvie Oshima’s command implants. The show’s Quell (Renée Elise Goldsberry) is Kovacs’s lover from season 1, alive in her own sleeve, and what drives her to kill is an invented alien “Elder” in her stack — a word the novel never uses; its aliens are the long-vanished Martians. Sylvie, her hair and her deCom crew are cut.
  • The duplicate Kovacs, the other way round. The book’s younger copy is Aiura’s hire, loyal and contemptuous, and he dies — Jad kills him — while the older Kovacs lives. The show’s “Kovacs Prime” is an old backup in a sleeve matching Kovacs’s original birth sleeve, spun up by Jaeger in the guise of Colonel Carrera (a name from Broken Angels); he switches sides and survives, and it is the older Kovacs who dies under Angelfire, with Poe saving a copy of him.
  • The Harlans and Harlan’s Day. The book’s Harlans are Aiura and the hostage Mitzi, with old Konrad a holosculpture and a pod. The show makes Konrad a living “Founder”, murdered by an invented daughter, Governor Danica Harlan, and turns Harlan’s Day into a festival where Quellist prisoners are strapped to celebration rockets and shot down by Angelfire.
  • The orbitals. In the book angelfire records what it destroys, and the novel ends with Sylvie and Quell learning to talk to the platforms. The show adds that whoever controls the array could erase every stack, and Kovacs turns it on himself to kill the Elder.
  • Names kept, roles changed; much cut. Tanaseda and Anton become Founders whom Quell kills; Jack Soul Brasil becomes the AI leader of a Renouncer construct; Dig 301 befriends Poe and renames herself Annabel. Gone: the New Revelation and the vendetta for Sarah (the show’s Kovacs has spent thirty years looking for Quell), New Hokkaido’s mimints, Vidaura’s role, the Little Blue Bugs and the Rila raid, Segesvar, Plex and Yukio, and Murakami’s Envoy team.

Continuity notes

  • Kovacs ends the book in the Eishundo Organics sleeve, sailing for Tekitomura on Haiduci’s Daughter; he never gets back the body he left with Plex. He has let the vendetta go. This is his last appearance in prose to date.
  • The younger Kovacs, the Envoy-era copy the Harlans woke, is dead; Jad killed him.
  • Sylvie Oshima is alive and herself, sharing her command capacity with the Quell copy and teaching it the deCom software; the orbitals may be listening.
  • Jadwiga survives in her Eishundo sleeve, Kovacs’s physical sibling. Orr, Kiyoka and Lazlo died in the raid on the Slipins in Drava, stacks gone.
  • Virginia Vidaura, in person for the first time in the series, ends injured and grieving Jack Soul Brasil. Brasil, Isa, Mari Ado, Daniel, Segesvar, Anton and Yukio are dead.
  • The Harlans still rule; the Qualgrist Protocol is loose in their bloodline, and the Hapeta administration is a hard-line one. Aiura is torn apart at Segesvar’s farm by Jad’s shard gun when Anton throws her in front of himself. Murakami’s Envoys were among the captors on the farm when the angelfire came down; the companion does not count their dead.
  • From the earlier books: Sarah Sachilowska, sent home to Harlan’s World at the end of Altered Carbon, died before this book begins; the Martian warships at Sanction, from Broken Angels, are the source of the command heads’ technology; Quellism, studied in Broken Angels, becomes the plot; Innenin and Vidaura’s teachings still run through Kovacs’s head; double-sleeving returns from Altered Carbon, and Kovacs remembers the last time he met himself.

Notes

  • The book’s own architecture: a Prologue, four titled parts, forty-nine chapters and an Epilogue. Each part has an epigraph: Quellcrist Falconer (“Make it personal . . .”), a graffito on a bench outside Bay City’s Central Penal Storage Facility, a spoken remark about Quell, and Sandor Spaventa, whom the woman in Sylvie’s body later calls a fraud.
  • Three shifts the book keeps straight and the companion follows: the Prologue is imagined; Dig 301’s footage of the other Kovacs is narrated in the third person; and much of the planning happens in virtual (Natsume’s monastery, the mapping construct, the rented construct at Vchira), with Sylvie’s capacity vault the last virtual space of all.
  • Who Quell really is stays open until the last chapter: Plex, Jad and Murakami suspect a delivery shell for the Qualgrist weapon; the companion, borrowing Kovacs’s phrase, calls her the woman who calls herself Quell until the reveal.
  • “Micky Nozawa” is an experia (film) star; Kovacs is “Micky Serendipity” to the deCom crews. The Little Blue Bugs were the half-criminal, half-political crew Kovacs and Vidaura once ran with; the haiduci are Kossuth’s gangsters.
  • Reception: reviewers praised the depth, the setting and the action; Christian Sauvé, who called it the most personal of the three, also found it too long. Morgan has said it may be the last Kovacs novel, though in 2018 he said Netflix had woken the series up again.
  • Audiobook: Tantor Media, 2006, read by William Dufris (22 hours). Translated as Furies déchaînées (French, 2005), Heiliger Zorn (German), Zbudzone furie (Polish, 2006) and Il ritorno delle furie (Italian, 2008).
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