Back before I got shot up on the Rim, I’d had a Wedge noncom working with me whose Afro-Caribbean sleeve was actually his own. One night, waiting out a satellite bombardment in the ruins of some kind of temple, he’d told me one of the myths his people, in chains, had taken across an ocean on Earth, and later, in hope of a new beginning, across the gulfs of the Martian astrogation charts to the world that would later become known as Latimer. It was a story of magicians and the slaves they made of bodies raised from the dead. I forget what name he gave to these creatures in the story, but I know he would have seen one in the thing that held Djoko Roespinoedji in its arms.

“Do you like it?” The boy, cuddled up obscenely close to the ravaged head, had been watching me.

“Not much, no.”

“Well, aesthetically, of course…” The boy let his voice trail off delicately. “But with judicious use of bandaging, and some suitably ragged clothing for me, we should make a truly pitiful ensemble. The wounded and the innocent, fleeing from the ruins of their shattered lives—ideal camouflage, really, should things become extreme.”

“Same old Djoko,” Schneider came up and nudged me. “Like I told you. Always one step ahead of the action.”

I shrugged. “I’ve known refugee columns get gunned down just for target practice.”

“Oh, I’m aware of that. Our friend here was a tactical marine before he met his unfortunate end. Still quite a lot of ingrained reflex left in the cortex, or wherever it is they store that kind of thing.” The boy winked at me. “I’m a businessman, not a technician. I had a software firm in Landfall knock what was left into usable shape. Look.”

The child’s hand disappeared into his jacket and the dead man snatched a long-barrelled blaster from the scabbard across his back. It was very fast. The photoreceptors whirred audibly in their sockets, scanning left to right. Roespinoedji grinned broadly and his hand emerged clutching the remote. A thumb shifted and the blaster was returned smoothly to its sheath. The arm supporting the boy had not shifted an inch.

“So you see,” the boy piped cheerfully, “where pity cannot be mined, less subtle options are always available. But really, I’m optimistic. You’d be surprised how many soldiers still find it difficult to shoot small children, even in these troubled times. Now. Enough chatter, shall we eat?”

Roespinoedji had the top floor and penthouse of a raddled warehouse block not far off touching distance from the tail of the dighead. We left all but two of the militia escort outside in the street and picked our way through cool gloom to where an industrial elevator stood in one corner. The animated dead man dragged the cage door aside with one hand. Metallic echoes chased around the empty space over our heads.

“I can remember,” said the boy as we rose towards the roof, “when all this was stacked with grade-one artefacts, crated and tagged for airlift to Landfall. The inventory crews used to work shifts round the clock. The dighead never stopped, you could hear it running day and night under all the other sounds. Like a heartbeat.”

“Is that what you used to do?” asked Wardani. “Stack artefacts?”

I saw Schneider smile to himself in the gloom.

“When I was younger,” said Roespinoedji, self-mocking. “But I was involved in a more, organisational capacity, shall we say?”

The elevator passed through the roof of the storage area and clanged to a halt in suddenly bright light. Sunlight strained through fabric-curtained windows into a reception lounge screened from the rest of the floor by amber-painted internal walls. Through the elevator cage I saw kaleidoscopic designs on carpets, dark wood flooring and long, low sofas arranged around what I took to be a small, internally-lit swimming pool. Then, as we stepped out, I saw that the floor recess held not water but a wide horizontal video screen on which a woman appeared to be singing. In two corners of the lounge, the image was duplicated in a more viewable format on two vertical stacks of more reasonably sized screens. The far wall held a long table on which someone had laid out enough food and drink for a platoon.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Roespinoedji, as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. “I’ll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.”

The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognisable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit Open Ground that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic sub-orgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.

Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up station near the elevator, shrugged and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there

“Told you,” said Schneider to me. “If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He’s interfaced with every player in Landfall.”

“You mean he was before the war.”

Schneider shook his head. “Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn’t still jacked into the machine.”

“If he’s jacked into the machine,” I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, “how come he’s living in this shithole town?”

“Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now that’s a shithole.”

Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn’t.

“Let’s wait,” I said softly. “It’s only polite.”

He snorted. “What do you think; he’s going to poison us? What for? There’s no angle in it.”

But he left the food alone.

The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitised, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, rebel operations neutralised.

Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.

“Ivanna and Kas,” he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. “My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn’t you say? Or two. Now,” he snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself in an adjacent sofa. “To business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?”

“You’re not eating?” I asked him.

“Oh.” He smiled and gestured at his two companions. “Well, they are, and I’m really very fond of both of them.”

Schneider looked embarrassed.

“No?” Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. “There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?”

“We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.” Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. “Knockdown price.”

“Indeed?”

“Yeah—call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-70, very little wear and no previous owner of record.”