“Hospital stock,” she said, when her augmented vision noticed where I was looking. “I took some fire over Bootkinaree Town last year, and it blew out the dataflow. They patched me up in orbit.”

“You flew back out with blown datafeeds?” I asked sceptically. The overload would have shattered every circuit in her cheekbone and scorched tissue for half a handsbreadth in every direction. “What happened to your autopilot?”

She grimaced. “Fried.”

“So how did you run the controls in that state?”

“I shut down the machine and flew it on manual. Cut back to basic thrust and trim. This was a Lockheed Mitoma—their controls still run manually if you do that.”

“No, I meant how did you run the controls with the state you were in.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “I have a high pain threshold.”

Right.

Luc Deprez:

Tall and untidy, sandy blond hair grown longer than made sense for a battlefield, and in nothing you’d call a style. Face made up of sharp Caucasian angles, long bony nose, lantern jaw, eyes a curious shade of green. Sprawled at ease in the virtual chair, head tilted to one side as if he couldn’t quite make us out in this light.

“So.” He acquired my Landfall Lights from the table with a long arm and shook one out of the packet. “You going to tell me something about this gig?”

“No,” said Hand. “It’s confidential until you’re on board.”

A throaty chuckle amidst smoke as he puffed the cigarette to life. “That’s what you said last time. And like I said to you last time, who the hell am I going to tell, man. You don’t want to hire me, I’m going straight back into the tin can, right?”

“Nonetheless.”

“Alright. So you want to ask me something?”

“Tell us about your last covert assault tag,” I suggested.

“That’s confidential.” He surveyed our unsmiling faces for a moment. “Hey, that was a joke. I already told your partner all about it. Didn’t he brief you?”

I heard Hand make a compressed sound.

“Ah, that was a construct,” I said hurriedly. “We’re hearing this for the first time. Run through it again for us.”

Deprez shrugged. “Sure, why not. Was a hit on one of Kemp’s sector commanders. Inside his cruiser.”

“Successful?”

He grinned at me. “I would say so. The head, you know. It came off.”

“I just wondered. You being dead and all.”

“That was bad luck. The fuck’s blood was deterrent toxin-loaded. Slow-acting. We didn’t find out until we were airborne and heading out.”

Hand frowned. “You got splashed?”

“No, man.” A pained expression flitted across the angular face. “My partner, she caught the spray when the carotid went. Right in the eyes.” He plumed smoke at the ceiling. “Too bad, she was our pilot.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. We flew into the side of a building.” He grinned again. “That was fast-acting, man.”

Markus Sutjiadi:

Beautiful with an uncanny geometric perfection of feature that could have sat alongside Lapinee somewhere in the net. Eyes almond in shade and shape, mouth a straight line, face tending towards an inverted isosceles triangle, blunted at its corners to provide the solid chin and wide forehead, straight black hair plastered down. Features curiously immobile, as if drugged into detachment. A sense of energy conserved, of waiting. The face of a global pin-up who’d played too much competition poker recently.

“Boo!” I couldn’t resist it.

The almond eyes barely flickered.

“There are serious charges outstanding against you,” said Hand with a reproachful glance in my direction.

“Yes.”

We all waited for a moment, but Sutjiadi clearly didn’t think there was any more to say on the subject. I started to like him.

Hand threw out a hand like a conjurer, and a screen evolved into the air just beyond his splayed fingers. More fucking system magic. I sighed and watched as a head and shoulders in a uniform like mine evolved beside a downscroll of biodata. The face was familiar.

“You murdered this man,” Hand said coldly. “Would you like to explain why?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I gestured at the face on the screen. “Dog Veutin gets a lot of people that way. I’m just interested to know how you managed to kill him.”

This time, the eyes lost some of their flatness, and his gaze glanced briefly off my Wedge insignia, confused.

“I shot him in the back of the head.”

I nodded. “Shows initiative. Is he really dead?”

“Yes. I used a Sunjet on full charge.”

Hand system-magicked the screen away with a snap of his fingers. “Your brig shuttle may have been shot out of the sky, but the Wedge think your stack probably survived. There’s a reward posted for anyone who turns it up. They still want you for formal execution.” He looked sideways at me. “As I understand it that tends to be a pretty unpleasant business.”

“Yeah, it is.” I’d seen a couple of these object lessons early on in my career with the Wedge. They took a long time.

“I have no interest in seeing you handed over to the Wedge,” said Hand. “But I cannot risk this expedition on a man who will carry insubordination to these extremes. I need to know what happened.”

Sutjiadi was watching my face. I gave him the faintest hint of a nod.

“He ordered my men decimated,” he said tightly.

I nodded again, to myself this time. Decimation was, by all accounts, one of Veutin’s favourite forms of liaison with local troops.

“And why was that?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Hand,” I turned in my seat. “Didn’t you hear him? He was ordered to decimate his command, and he didn’t want to. That kind of insubordination, I can live with.”

“There may be factors which—”

“We’re wasting time,” I snapped, and turned back to Sutjiadi. “Given the same situation again, is there anything you’d do differently?”

“Yes.” He showed me his teeth. I’m not sure I’d call it a grin. “I’d have the Sunjet on wide beam. That way I’d have half-cooked his whole squad, and they wouldn’t have been in any condition to arrest me.”

I tipped a glance back at Hand. He was shaking his head, one hand up to his eyes.

Sun Liping:

Dark Mongol eyes shelved in epicanthic folds on high, broad cheekbones. A mouth poised in a faint downturn that might have been the aftermath of rueful laughter. Fine lines in the tanned skin and a solid fall of black hair draped over one shoulder and held firmly in place by a big silver static field generator. An aura of calm, equally unshakeable.

“You killed yourself?” I asked doubtfully

“So they tell me.” The downturned lips amped up to a crooked grimace. “I remember pulling the trigger. It’s gratifying to know my aim doesn’t deteriorate under pressure.”

The slug from her sidearm had gone in under the right jaw line, ploughed directly through the centre of the brain and blown an admirably symmetrical hole in the top of her head on its way out.

“Hard to miss at that range,” I said with experimental brutality.

The calm eyes never flinched.

“I understand it can be done,” she said gravely.

Hand cleared his throat. “Would you like to tell us why you did it?”

She frowned. “Again?”

“That,” said Hand through slightly gritted teeth, “was a debriefing construct, not me.”

“Oh.”

The eyes slanted sideways and up, searching, I guessed, for a retina-wired peripheral scroll down. The virtuality had been written not to render internal hardware, except in Mandrake personnel, but she showed no surprise at a lack of response so maybe she was just remembering it the old-fashioned way.

“It was a squadron of automated armour. Spider tanks. I was trying to undermine their response parameters, but there was a viral booby trap wired into the control systems. A Rawling variant, I believe.” The mild grimace again. “There was very little time to take stock, as you can probably imagine, so I can’t be sure. In any event, there was no time to jack out; the primary baffles of the virus had already welded me in. In the time I had before it downloaded fully, I could only come up with the one option.”