“Was he? Why don’t you call him?”

I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.

Just killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.

Hand had his audio phone open.

“Wake up Deng Zhao Jun please.” He waited. “I see. Well, try that then.”

I shook my head.

“That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.”

Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.

“Hand, I practically told him to do it.” I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. “Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.”

“I did not assign Deng, goddamn you Kovacs.” He was hanging onto his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. “And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes this is Hand.”

He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.

“Deng left the tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.”

“Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?”

“Kovacs.” The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. “I don’t want to hear it. Alright? I don’t. Want to hear it.”

I shrugged.

“No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.” Hand breathed out, compressed.

“I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.” He turned on his heel. “You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.”

I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.

Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.

“Oh.” He turned to face us. “By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred per cent casualties.”

I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.

Hand stood there and watched it happen.

“Thought you’d both like to know that,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dangrek.

The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.

At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.

“Proud of yourself, Kovacs?”

Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from further up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.

I went after her.

“You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,” I told her when I caught up. “And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.”

“Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.”

It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it non-stop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom, cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.

The MAI had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating grey fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.

“Sutjiadi, get your team deployed.”

It was Hand’s voice, drumming through the induction rig speaker. A loose exchange of military shorthand followed and in irritation I yanked the speaker away from its resting place behind my ear. I ignored the footfalls of someone tramping up the slope behind us and focused on the locked posture of Tanya Wardani’s head and neck.

“I guess it was quick for them,” she said, still staring out at the headland.

“Like the song says. Nothing faster.”

“Mistress Wardani.” It was Ole Hansen, some echo of the arc-light intensity from his original blue eyes somehow burning through the wide-set dark gaze of his new sleeve. “We’ll need to see the demolition site.”

She choked back something that might have been a laugh, and didn’t say the obvious thing.

“Sure,” she said instead. “Follow me.”

I watched the two of them pick their way down the other side of the slope towards the beach.

“Hoy! Envoy guy!”

I turned unwillingly, and spotted Yvette Cruickshank navigating her Maori sleeve uncertainly up the slope towards me, Sunjet slung flat across her chest and a set of ranging lenses pushed up on her head. I waited for her to reach me, which she did without tripping in the long grass more than a couple of times.

“How’s the new sleeve?” I called as she stumbled for the second time.

“It’s—” She shook her head, closed the gap and started again, voice lowered back to normal, “ ‘S a fraction strange, know what I mean?”

I nodded. My first re-sleeve was more than thirty subjective years in my past, objectively close to two centuries ago, but you don’t forget. The initial re-entry shock never really goes away.

“Bit fucking pallid, too.” She pinched up the skin on the back of her hand and sniffed. “How come I couldn’t get some fine black cover like yours?”

“I didn’t get killed,” I reminded her. “Besides, once the radiation starts to bite, you’re going to be glad. What you’re wearing there needs about half the dosage I’ll be taking to stay operational.”

She scowled. “Still going to get us all in the end, though, isn’t it.”

“It’s only a sleeve, Cruickshank.”

“That’s right, just give me some of that Envoy cool.” She barked a laugh and upended her Sunjet, gripping the short, thick barrel disconcertingly in one slim hand. Squinting up from the discharge channel and directly at me, she asked, “Think you could go for a white-girl sleeve like this then?”

I considered. The Maori combat sleeves were long on limb and broad in the chest and shoulders. A lot of them, like this one, were pale-skinned, and being fresh out of the clone tanks accentuated the effect, but faces ran to high cheekbones, wide spaced eyes and flaring lips and noses. White-girl sleeve seemed a little harsh. And even inside the shapeless battlefield chameleochrome coveralls…

“You going to look like that,” Cruickshank remarked, “you’d better be buying something.”

“Sorry. Just giving the question my full consideration.”

“Yeah. Skip it. I wasn’t that worried. You were operational around here, weren’t you?”

“A couple of months back.”

“So what was it like?”

I shrugged. “People shooting at you. Air full of pieces of fast-moving metal looking for a home. Pretty standard stuff. Why?”

“I heard the Wedge got a pasting. That true?”

“It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.”