“So how come Kemp suddenly decides, from a position of strength, to cut and nuke?”

“Cruickshank.” I started and then stopped, unable to think of a way to get through the armour plate of youth she was wearing. She was twenty-two, and like all twenty-two year olds she thought she was the immortal focal point of this universe. Sure she’d been killed, but so far all that had done was prove the immortal part. It would not have occurred to her that there might be a world view in which what she saw was not only marginal but almost wholly irrelevant.

She was waiting for an answer.

“Look,” I said finally. “No one told me what we were fighting for up here, and from what we got out of the prisoners we interrogated, I’d say they didn’t know either. I gave up expecting this war to make sense a while ago, and I’d advise you to do the same if you plan on surviving much more of it.”

She raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that she hadn’t quite got nailed in her new sleeve.

“So you don’t know, then.”

“No.”

“Cruickshank!” Even with my own induction rig unhooked, I heard the tinny crash of Markus Sutjiadi’s voice over the comlink. “You want to get down here and work for a living like the rest of us?”

“Coming, cap.” She pulled a mouth-down face in my direction and started back down the slope. A couple of steps down, she stopped and turned back.

“Hey, Envoy guy.”

“Yeah?”

“That stuff about the Wedge taking a pasting? Wasn’t a crit, OK. Just what I heard.”

I felt myself grinning at the carefully deployed sensitivity.

“Forget it, Cruickshank. Couldn’t give a shit. I’m more bent out of shape you didn’t like me drooling on you.”

“Oh.” She grinned back. “Well, I guess I did ask.” Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she crossed her eyes for effect. “What about I get back to you on that one?”

“Do that.”

The induction rig buzzed against my neck. I stuck it back in place and hooked up the mike.

“Yeah, Sutjiadi?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, sir,” The irony dripped off the last word, “would you mind leaving my soldiers alone while they deploy?”

“Yeah, sorry. Won’t happen again.”

“Good.”

I was about to disconnect when Tanya Wardani’s voice came across the net in soft expletives.

“Who’s that?” snapped Sutjiadi. “Sun?”

“I don’t fucking believe this.”

“It’s Mistress Wardani, sir.” Ole Hansen came in, laconically calm, over the muttered curses from the archaeologue. “I think you’d better all get down here and take a look at this.”

I raced Hand to the beach and lost by a couple of metres. Cigarettes and damaged lungs don’t count in a virtuality, so it must have been concern for Mandrake’s investment that drove him. Very commendable. Still not attuned to their new sleeves, the rest of the party fell behind us. We reached Wardani alone.

We found her in much the same position she’d taken up facing the rockfall last time we’d been in the construct. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at.

“Where’s Hansen?” I asked stupidly.

“He went in,” she said, waving a hand forward. “For what it’s worth.”

Then I saw it. The pale bite-marks of recent blasting, gathered around a two-metre fissure opened in the fall, and a path winding out of sight beyond.

“Kovacs?” There was a brittle lightness to the query in Hand’s tone.

“I see it. When did you update the construct?”

Hand stalked closer to examine the blasting marks. “Today.”

Tanya Wardani nodded to herself. “High-orbit satellite geoscan, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well.” The archaeologue turned away and reached in her coat pocket for cigarettes. “We aren’t going to find anything out here then.”

“Hansen!” Hand cupped his hands and shouted into the fissure, the induction rig he was wearing apparently forgotten.

“I hear you.” The demolition expert’s voice came thrumming back on the rig, detached and edged with a smirk. “There’s nothing back here.”

“Of course there isn’t,” commented Wardani, to nobody in particular.

“…some kind of circular clearing, about twenty metres across, but the rocks look strange. Kind of fused.”

“That’s improvisation,” said Hand impatiently into the rig mike. “The MAI’s guessing at what’s in there.”

“Ask him if there’s anything in the middle,” said Wardani, kindling her cigarette against the breeze off the sea.

Hand relayed the query. The answer crackled back over the set.

“Yeah, some kind of central boulder, maybe a stalagmite.”

Wardani nodded. “That’s your gate,” she said. “Probably old echo-sounding data the MAI reeled in from some flyby area recon a while ago. It’s trying to map the data with what it can see from the orbital view, and since it’s got no reason to believe there’s anything in there but rocks—”

“Someone’s been here,” said Hand, jaw set.

“Well yes.” Wardani blew out smoke and pointed. “Oh, and there’s that.”

Anchored in the shallows a few hundred metres along the beach, a small, battered-looking trawler wagged back and forth in a longshore current. Her nets spilled over the side like something escaping.

The sky whited out.

It wasn’t quite as rough a ride as the ID&A set had been, but still, the abrupt return to reality impacted on my system like a bath of ice, chilling extremities and sending a shiver deep through the centre of my guts. My eyes snapped open on the expensive empathist psychogram art.

“Oh, nice,” I grumbled, sitting up in the soft lighting and groping around for the ‘trodes.

The chamber door hinged outward on a subdued hum. Hand stood in the doorway, clothing still fully not closed up, limned from behind by the brightness of normal lights. I squinted at him.

“Was that really necessary?”

“Get your shirt on, Kovacs.” He was closing his own at the neck as he spoke. “We’ve got things to do. I want to be on the peninsula by this evening.”

“Aren’t you overreacting a li—”

He was already turning away.

“Hand, the recruits aren’t used to those sleeves yet. Not by a long way.”

“I left them in there.” He flung the words back over his shoulder. “They can have another ten minutes—that’s two days virtual time. Then we download them for real and leave. If someone’s up at Dangrek ahead of us, they’re going to be very sorry.”

“If they were there when Sauberville went down,” I shouted after him, suddenly furious. “They’re probably already very sorry. Along with everyone else.”

I heard his footsteps, receding up the corridor. Mandrake Man, shirt closed up, suit settling onto squared shoulders, moving forward. Enabled. About Mandrake’s heavy-duty business, while I sat bare-chested in a puddle of my own unfocused rage.

PART III: DISRUPTIVE ELEMENTS