The skip up-ended, emptied. The sound stopped.

“Just in,” observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. “Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid deployment casualties as well. We’re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp’s ground cover pretty badly.”

“Not for the first time,” I muttered.

“Nor the last, we hope.” Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. “Business has rarely been this good.”

Something scraped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.

All the way round the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, scraping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel-load rattled in the buckets like gravel.

For all the competition for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I guessed and watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.

“Most sell by gross weight,” he murmured. “It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire.”

“Get to the point,” said Hand curtly.

Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man’s voice. “The point,” he said courteously, “is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire. What do you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf?”

I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.

Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn’t recognise, and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.

“You are playing a dangerous game,” said the Mandrake exec quietly. “And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?”

Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimetres. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.

“Slowly,” I suggested.

“There is no problem here, Kovacs.” Hand’s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire’s. “The family ties have been established now.”

Semetaire’s grin said that wasn’t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn’t show.

“What is it you desire, company man?”

“Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger.”

“He’s not talking to you, Kovacs.” Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. “Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we’re in a hurry. Whatever you’ve got on the slab.”

Semetaire shrugged. “The freshest are here,” he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cylinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. “But if you are pressed for time…”

He turned aside and led us to a sombrely-appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the bass-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors’ shovels and buckets behind us.

Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier and she unwound herself languidly from amongst the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.

I glanced at Hand.

“The chosen of Ogon,” he said, without apparent irony. “Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors.”

He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then, she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.

“How many kilos do you want?” asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.

Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.

“How much are you going to gut me?”

“Seventy-nine fifty the kilo.”

The exec grunted. “Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it.”

“That’s a dross price and you know it, company man.” Semetaire shook his head, smiling. “Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn’t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior class, cleaned and anointed, and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other’s time in this way.”

“Alright,” Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. “You’ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I’ll be back sometime.”

“Sometime.” Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. “Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead.”

“We may indeed.” Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. “And some of us sooner than others, if we go round making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire.”

The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.

“Where would be the point in arresting me?” he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. “Look at this. Without me, you’d only have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy.”

“Sixty-seven fifty, and I’ll make you Mandrake’s preferred supplier.”

Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. “Very well,” he said finally. “Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos.”

“Agreed.” Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. “I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up.”

Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.