“Very impressive,” said Hand.

When it was done, we went back up to the roof to clear our heads. I leaned on a parapet and looked out over the curfewed quiet of Landfall while Hand went off to find some coffee. The terraces behind me were deserted, chairs and tables scattered like some hieroglyphic message left for orbital eyes. The night had cooled off while we were below, and the breeze made me shiver. Sun Liping’s words came back to me.

Rawling variant.

It was the Rawling virus that had killed the Innenin beachhead. Had made Jimmy de Soto claw out his own eye before he died. State-of-the-art back then, cheap off-the-rack military surplus now. The only viral software Kemp’s hard-pressed forces could afford.

Times change, but market forces are forever. History unreels, the real dead stay that way.

The rest of us get to go on.

Hand came back apologetically with machine-coffee canisters. He handed me mine and leaned on the parapet at my side.

“So what do you think?” he asked after a while.

“I think it tastes like shit.”

He chuckled. “What do you think of our team?”

“They’ll do.” I sipped at the coffee and brooded on the city below. “I’m not overhappy about the ninja, but he’s got some useful skills and he seems prepared to get killed in the line of duty, which is always a big advantage in a soldier. How long to prep the clones?”

“Two days. Maybe a little less.”

“It’ll be twice that before these people are up to speed in a new sleeve. Can we do the induction in virtual?”

“I see no reason why not. The MAI can spin out hundred per cent accurate renderings for each clone from the raw data in the biolab machines. Running at three-fifty times real, we can give the whole team a full month in their new sleeves, on site in the Dangrek construct, all inside a couple of hours, real time.”

“Good,” I said, and wondered why it didn’t feel that way.

“My own reservations are with Sutjiadi. I am not convinced that a man like that can be expected to take orders well.”

I shrugged. “So give him the command.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? He’s qualified for it. He’s got the rank, and he’s had the experience. Seems to have loyalty to his men.”

Hand said nothing. I could sense his frown across the half metre of parapet that separated us.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “I had just. Assumed. You would want the command yourself.”

I saw the platoon again as the smart shrapnel barrage erupted overhead. Lightning flash, explosions, and then the fragments, skipping and hissing hungrily through the quicksilver flashing curtain of the rain. Crackling of blaster discharge in the background, like something ripping.

Screams.

What was on my face didn’t feel like a smile, but evidently it was.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’ve read my file, Hand.”

“Yes.”

“And you still thought I wanted the command. Are you fucking insane?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The coffee kept me awake.

Hand went to bed or whatever canister he crawled into when Mandrake wasn’t using him, and left me staring at the desert night. I searched the sky for Sol and found it glimmering in the east at the apex of a constellation the locals called the Thumb Home. Hand’s words drifted back through me.

…So far from earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine…

I shook it off, irritably.

It wasn’t like I’d been born there. Earth was no more home to me than Sanction IV, and if my father had ever pointed Sol out to me in between bouts of drunken violence, I had no memory of it. Any significance that particular point of light had for me, I’d got off a disc. And from here, you couldn’t even see the star that Harlan’s World orbited.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Or maybe it was just that I’d been there, to the legendary home of the human race, and now, looking up, I could imagine, a single astronomical unit out from the glimmering star, a world in spin, a city by the sea dropping away into darkness as night came on, or rolling back up and into the light, a police cruiser parked somewhere and a certain police lieutenant drinking coffee not much better than mine and maybe thinking…

That’s enough, Kovacs.

For your information, the light you’re watching arrive left fifty years before she was even born. And that sleeve you’re fantasising about is in its sixties by now, if she’s even wearing it still. Let it go.

Yeah, yeah.

I knocked back the dregs of the coffee, grimaced as it went down cold. By the look of the eastern horizon, dawn was on its way, and I had a sudden crushing desire not to be here when it arrived. I left the coffee carton standing sentinel on the parapet, and picked my way back through the scattered chairs and tables to the nearest elevator terminal.

The elevator dropped me the three floors to my suite and I made it along the gently curving corridor without meeting anyone. I was pulling the retina cup out of the door on its saliva-thin cable when the sound of footfalls in the machined quiet sent me back against the opposite wall, right hand reaching for the single interface gun I still carried from habit tucked into the back of my waistband.

Spooked.

You’re in the Mandrake Tower, Kovacs. Executive levels. Not even dust gets up here without authorisation. Get a fucking grip, will you.

“Kovacs?”

Tanya Wardani’s voice.

I swallowed and pushed myself away from the wall. Wardani rounded the curve of the corridor and stood looking at me with what seemed like an unusual proportion of uncertainty in her stance.

“I’m sorry, did I scare you?”

“No.” Reaching again for the retina cup, which had backreeled into the door when I went for the Kalashnikov.

“Have you been up all night?”

“Yes.” I applied the cup to my eye and the door folded back. “You?”

“More or less. I tried to get some sleep a couple of hours ago, but…” she shrugged. “Too keyed up. Are you all done?”

“With the recruiting?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“How are they?”

“Good enough.”

The door made an apologetic chiming sound, drawing attention to the lack of entry effected so far.

“Are you—”

“Do you—” I gestured.

“Thanks.” She moved, awkwardly, and stepped in ahead of me.

The suite lounge was walled in glass that I’d left at semi-opaque when I went out. City lights specked the smoky surface like deep-fry caught glowing in a Millsport trawler’s nets. Wardani halted in the middle of the subtly furnished living space and turned about.

“I—”

“Have a seat. The mauve ones are all chairs.”

“Thanks, I still can’t quite get used to—”

“State of the art.” I watched as she perched on the edge of one of the modules, and it tried in vain to lift and shape itself around her body. “Want a drink?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Pipe?”

“God, no.”

“So how’s the hardware?”

“It’s good.” She nodded, more to herself than anyone. “Yes. Good enough.”

“Good.”

“You think we’re nearly ready?”

“I—” I pushed away the flash-rip behind my eyes and crossed to one of the other seats, making a performance of settling into it. “We’re waiting for developments up there. You know that.”

“Yes.”

A shared quiet.

“Do you think they’ll do it?”

“Who? The Cartel?” I shook my head. “Not if they can help it. But Kemp might. Look, Tanya. It may not even happen. But whether it does or not, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s too late for that kind of intervention now. Way war works. Abolition of the individual.”

“What’s that? Some kind of Quellist epigram?”

I smiled. “Loosely paraphrased, yes. You want to know what Quell had to say about war? About all violent conflict?”