“I’d lend you one of these, but they’re personally coded.”

“Take a blaster, Tanya,” said Schneider without looking up from his own preparations. “More chance you’ll hit something with it anyway. Slug throwers are for fashion victims.”

The archaeologue raised her eyebrows. I smiled a little. “He’s probably right. Here, you don’t have to wear it around your waist. The straps web out like this. Sling it over your shoulder.”

I moved to help her fit the weapon and as she turned towards me something indefinable happened in the small space between our bodies. As I settled the bolstered weapon at the downward slope of her left breast, her eyes slanted upward to mine. They were, I saw, the colour of jade under swift-flowing water.

“That comfortable?”

“Not especially.”

I went to move the holster and she raised a hand to stop me. Against the dusty ebony of my arm, her fingers looked like naked bones, skeletal and frail.

“Leave it, it’ll do.”

“OK. Look, you just pull down and the holster lets it go. Push back up and it grips again. Like that.”

“Got it.”

The exchange had not been lost on Schneider. He cleared his throat loudly and went to crack the hatch. As it hinged outward, he held onto a handgrip at the leading edge and swung down with practised flyer nonchalance. The effect was spoiled slightly as he landed and began coughing in the still settling dust our landing brake had raised. I suppressed a grin.

Wardani went after him, letting herself down awkwardly with the heels of her palms on the floor of the open hatchway. Mindful of the dust clouds outside, I stayed in the hatchway, eyes narrowed against the airborne grit in an attempt to see if we had a reception committee.

And we did.

They emerged from the dust like figures on a frieze gradually sandblasted clean by someone like Tanya Wardani. I counted seven in all, bulky silhouettes swathed in desert gear and spiky with weapons. The central figure looked deformed, taller than the others by half a metre but swollen and misshapen from the chest up. They advanced in silence.

I folded my arms across my chest so my fingertips touched the butts of the Kalashnikovs.

“Djoko?” Schneider coughed again. “That you, Djoko?”

More silence. The dust had settled enough for me to make out the dull glint of metal on gun barrels and the enhanced vision masks they all wore. There was room for body armour beneath the loose desert gear.

“Djoko, quit fucking about.”

A high-pitched, impossible laugh from the towering, misshapen figure in the centre. I blinked.

“Jan, Jan, my good friend.” It was the voice of a child. “Do I make you so nervous?”

“What do you think, fuckwit?” Schneider stepped forward and as I watched the huge figure spasmed and seemed to break apart. Startled, I cranked up the neurachem vision and made out a small boy of about eight scrambling down from the arms of the man who held him to his chest. As the boy reached the ground and ran to meet Schneider, I saw the man who had carried him straighten up into a peculiar immobility. Something quickened along the tendons in my arms. I screwed up my eyes some more and scanned the now unremarkable figure head to foot. This one was not wearing the EV mask and his face was…

I felt my mouth tighten as I realised what I was looking at.

Schneider and the boy were trading complicated handshakes and spouting gibberish at each other. Midway through this ritual, the boy broke off and took Tanya Wardani’s hand with a formal bow and some ornate flattery that I didn’t catch. He seemed insistent an clowning his way through the meeting. He was spouting harmlessness like a tinsel fountain on Harlan’s Day. And with the worst of the dust down where it belonged, the rest of the reception committee had lost the vague menace their silhouettes had given them. The clearing air revealed them as an assortment of nervous-looking and mostly young irregulars. I saw one wispy-bearded Caucasian on the left chewing his lip below the blank calm of the EV mask. Another was shifting from foot to foot. All of them had their weapons slung or stowed and as I jumped down from the hatch, they all flinched backward.

I raised my hands soothingly shoulder height, palms outward.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to this idiot.” Schneider was now trying to cuff the boy around the back of the head, with limited success. “Djoko, come here and say hello to a real live Envoy. This is Takeshi Kovacs. He was at Innenin.”

“Indeed?” The boy came and offered his hand. Dark-skinned and fine-boned, it was already a handsome sleeve—in later life it would be androgynously beautiful. It was dressed immaculately in a tailored mauve sarong and matching quilted jacket. “Djoko Roespinoedji, at your service. I apologise for the drama, but one cannot be too careful in these uncertain times. Your call came in on satellite frequencies that no one outside Carrera’s Wedge have access to and Jan, while I love him like a brother, is not known for his connections in high places. It could have been a trap.”

“Mothballed scrambler uplink,” said Schneider importantly. “We stole it from the Wedge. This time, Djoko, when I say I’m jacked in, I mean it.”

“Who might be trying to trap you?” I asked.

“Ah.” The boy sighed with a world-weariness several decades out of place in his voice. “There is no telling. Government agencies, the Cartel, corporate leverage analysts, Kempist spies. None of them have any reason to love Djoko Roespinoedji. Remaining neutral in a war does not save you from making enemies as it should. Rather, it loses you any friends you might have and earns you suspicion and contempt from all sides.”

“The war isn’t this far south yet,” Wardani pointed out.

Djoko Roespinoedji placed a hand gravely on his chest. “For which we are all extremely grateful. But these days, not being on the front line merely means you are under occupation of one form or another. Landfall is barely eight hundred kilometres to our west. We are close enough to be considered a perimeter post, which means a state militia garrison and periodic visits from the Cartel’s political assessors.” He sighed again. “It is all very costly.”

I looked at him suspiciously. “You’re garrisoned? Where are they?”

“Over there.” The boy jerked a thumb at the ragged group of irregulars. “Oh, there are a few more back at the uplink bunker, as per regulations, but essentially what you see here is the garrison.”

“That’s the state militia?” asked Tanya Wardani.

“It is.” Roespinoedji looked sadly at them for a moment, then turned back to us. “Of course, when I said it was costly, I was referring mostly to the cost of making the political assessor’s visits congenial. For us and for him, that is. The assessor is not a very sophisticated man, but he does have substantial, um, appetites. And of course ensuring that he remains our political assessor displaces a certain amount of expenditure too. Generally they are rotated every few months.”

“Is he here now?”

“I would hardly have invited you here if he were. He left only last week.” The boy leered, unnerving to watch on a face that young. “Satisfied, you might say, with what he found here.”

I found myself smiling. I couldn’t help it.

“I think we’ve come to the right place.”

“Well that will depend on what you came for,” said Roespinoedji, glancing at Schneider. “Jan was far from explicit. But come. Even in Dig 27 there are more congenial places than this to discuss business.”

He led us back to the little group of waiting militiamen and made a sharp clucking sound with his tongue. The figure who had been carrying him before stooped awkwardly and picked him up. Behind me, I heard Tanya Wardani’s breath catch slightly as she saw what had been done to the man.

It was by no means the worst thing I’d ever seen happen to a human being, wasn’t in fact even the worst I’d seen recently; still there was something eerie about the ruined head and the silvery alloy cement that had been used to patch it together. If I’d had to guess, I would have said this sleeve had been struck by flying shrapnel. Any land of deliberate, directional weapon just wouldn’t have left anything to work with. But someone somewhere had taken the trouble to repair the dead man’s skull, seal up the remaining gaps with resin and replace the eyeballs with photoreceptors that sat in the gutted sockets like cyclopic silver spiders waiting for prey. Then, presumably, they’d coaxed enough life back into the brainstem to operate the body’s vegetative systems and basic motor functions, and maybe respond to a few programmed commands.