“And another thing.”

“Colonel?”

“This is a lieutenant’s uniform. And Wedge command has no rank of colonel. Try to remember that.”

Then a freak wave of pain swept in from some mutilated part of my body, dodged through the grasp of the endorphin bouncers posted at the door of my brain and started hysterically shrilling its damage report to anyone who’d listen. The smile I had pinned to my face melted away the way the cityscape must have done at Evenfall, and I abruptly lost interest in anything except screaming.

Water was lapping gently somewhere just below me when I next woke up, and gentle sunlight warmed my face and arms. Someone must have removed the shrapnel-shredded remains of my combat jacket and left me with the sleeveless Wedge T-shirt. I moved one hand and my fingertips brushed age-smoothed wooden boards, also warm. The sunlight made dancing patterns on the insides of my eyelids.

There was no pain.

I sat up, feeling better than I had in months. I was stretched out on a small, simply-made jetty that extended a dozen metres or so out into what appeared to be a fjord or sea loch. Low, rounded mountains bounded the water on either side and fluffy white clouds scudded unconcernedly overhead. Further out in the loch a family of seals poked their heads above the water and regarded me gravely.

My body was the same Afro-Caribbean combat sleeve I’d been wearing on the Northern rim assault, undamaged and unscarred.

So.

Footsteps scraped on the boards behind me. I jerked my head sideways, hands lifting reflexively into an embryonic guard. Way behind the reflex came the confirming thought that in the real world no one could have got that close without my sleeve’s proximity sense kicking in.

“Takeshi Kovacs,” said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic “ch” at the end of the name correct. “Welcome to the recuperation stack.”

“Very nice.” I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. “Am I still aboard the hospital?”

The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. “Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.”

I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. “And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“How did I guess?”

“Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—”

“Skip it. I was being rhetorical.” I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

“What ratio are you running all this on?”

“Real time equivalence,” said the woman promptly. “Though I can speed it up if you prefer.”

The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was going to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.

“There is accommodation,” said the woman, pointing, “for your use. Please request modifications if you would like them.”

I followed the line of her arm to where a glass and wood two-storey structure stood beneath gull-winged eaves on the edge of the long shingle beach.

“Looks fine.” Vague tendrils of sexual interest squirmed around in me. “Are you supposed to be my interpersonal ideal?”

The woman shook her head again. “I am an intra-format service construct for Wedge One Systems Overview, based physically on Lieutenant Colonel Lucia Mataran of Protectorate High Command.”

“With that hair? You’re kidding me.”

“I have latitudes of discretion. Do you wish me to generate an interpersonal ideal for you?”

Like the offer of a high-ratio format, it was tempting. But after six weeks in the company of the Wedge’s boisterous do-or-die commandos, what I wanted more than anything was to be alone for a while.

“I’ll think about it. Is there anything else?”

“You have a recorded briefing from Isaac Carrera. Do you wish it stored at the house?”

“No. Play it here. I’ll call you if I need anything else.”

“As you wish.” The construct inclined her head, and snapped out of existence. In her place, a male figure in the Wedge’s black dress uniform shaded in. Close-cropped black hair seasoned with grey, a lined patrician face whose dark eyes and weathered features were somehow both hard and understanding, and beneath the uniform the body of an officer whose seniority had not removed him from the battlefield. Isaac Carrera, decorated ex-Vacuum Command captain and subsequently founder of the most feared mercenary force in the Protectorate. An exemplary soldier, commander, and tactician. Occasionally, when he had no other choice, a competent politician.

“Hello, Lieutenant Kovacs. Sorry this is only a recording, but Evenfall has left us in a bad situation and there wasn’t time to set up a link. The medical report says your sleeve can be repaired in about ten days, so we’re not going to go for a clone-bank option here. I want you back on the Northern Rim as soon as possible, but the truth is, we’ve been fought to a standstill there for the moment and they can live without you for a couple of weeks. There’s a status update appended to this recording, including the losses sustained in the last assault. I’d like you to look it over while you’re in virtual, set that famous Envoy intuition of yours to work. God knows, we need some fresh ideas up there. In a general context, acquisition of the Rim territories will provide one of the nine major objectives necessary to bring this conflict…”

I was already in motion, walking the length of the jetty and then up the sloping shore towards the nearest hills. The sky beyond was tumbled cloud but not dark enough for there to be a storm in the offing. It looked as if there would be a great view of the whole loch if I climbed high enough.

Behind me, Carrera’s voice faded on the wind as I left the projection on the jetty, mouthing its words to the empty air and maybe the seals, always assuming they had nothing better to do than listen to it.

CHAPTER TWO

In the end, they kept me under for a week.

I didn’t miss much. Below me, the clouds roiled and tore across the face of Sanction IV’s northern hemisphere, pouring rain on the men and women killing each other beneath. The construct visited the house regularly and kept me abreast of the more interesting details. Kemp’s offworld allies tried and failed to break the Protectorate blockade, at the cost of a brace of IP transports. A flight of smarter-than-average marauder bombs got through from somewhere unspecified and vaporised a Protectorate dreadnought. Government forces in the tropics held their positions while in the north-east the Wedge and other mercenary units lost ground to Kemp’s elite presidential guard. Evenfall continued to smoulder.

Like I said, I didn’t miss much.

When I awoke in the re-sleeving chamber, I was suffused in a head-to-foot glow of well-being. Mostly, that was chemical; military hospitals shoot their convalescent sleeves full of feelgood stuff just before download. It’s their equivalent of a welcome-home party, and it makes you feel like you could win this motherfucking war single-handed if they’d only let you up and at the bad guys. Useful effect, obviously. But what I also had, swimming alongside this patriot’s cocktail, was the simple pleasure of being intact and installed with a full set of functioning limbs and organs.