I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab and sipped, watching.

“Was there something?” Jiang asked, as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he’d razored the Maori sleeve’s thick dark hair back to an even two centimetres all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.

“You do this every morning?”

“Yes.” The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.

“Impressive.”

“Necessary.” Another death blow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. “Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.”

I nodded. “Hayashi.”

The patterns slowed fractionally.

“You have read him?”

“Met him once.”

Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. “You met Toru Hayashi?”

“I’m older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.”

“You are an Envoy?”

“Was.”

For a moment, he seemed unsure what to say. I wondered if he thought I was joking. Then he brought his arms forward, sheathed his right fist at chest height in the cup of his left hand and bowed slightly over the grasp.

“Takeshi-san, if I offended you with my talk of fear yesterday, I apologise. I am a fool.”

“No problem. I wasn’t offended. We all deal with it different ways. You planning on breakfast?”

He pointed across the living space to where the table had been pushed back to the canvasynth wall. There was fresh fruit piled on a shallow bowl and what looked like slices of rye bread.

“Mind if I join you?”

“I would be. Honoured.”

We were still eating when Schneider came back from wherever he’d been for the last twenty minutes.

“Meeting in the main ‘fab,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing into the dormitory. He emerged a minute later. “Fifteen minutes. Sutjiadi seems to think everyone should be there.”

He was gone again.

Jiang was half to his feet when I put out a hand and gestured him back to his seat.

“Take it easy. He said fifteen minutes.”

“I wish to shower and change,” said Jiang, a little stiffly.

“I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Finish your breakfast, for Christ’s sake. In a couple of days from now it’ll make you sick to the stomach just to swallow food. Enjoy the flavours while you can.”

He sat back down with a strange expression on his face.

“Do you mind, Takeshi-san, if I ask you a question?”

“Why am I no longer an Envoy?” I saw the confirmation in his eyes. “Call it an ethical revelation. I was at Innenin.”

“I have read about it.”

“Hayashi again?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, well, Hayashi’s account is pretty close, but he wasn’t there. That’s why he comes off ambiguous about the whole thing. Didn’t feel fit to judge. I was there, and I’m eminently fit to judge. They fucked us. No one’s too clear on whether they actually intended to or not, but I’m here to tell you that doesn’t matter. My friends died—really died—when there was no need. That’s what counts.”

“Yet, as a soldier, surely you must—”

“Jiang, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I try not to think of myself as a soldier any more. I’m trying to evolve.”

“Then what do you consider yourself?” His voice stayed polite, but his demeanour had tightened and his food was forgotten on his plate. “What have you evolved into?”

I shrugged. “Difficult to say. Something better, at any rate. A paid killer, maybe?”

The whites of his eyes flared. I sighed.

“I’m sorry if that offends you, Jiang, but it’s the truth. You probably don’t want to hear it, most soldiers don’t. When you put on that uniform, you’re saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.”

“That is Quellism.” He all but reared back from the table as he said it.

“Maybe. That doesn’t stop it being true.” I couldn’t quite work out why I was bothering with this man. Maybe it was something about his ninja calm, the way it begged to be shattered. Or maybe it was just being woken up early by his tightly controlled killing dance. “Jiang, ask yourself, what are you going to do when your superior officer orders you to plasma-bomb some hospital full of injured children?”

“There are certain actions—”

“No!” The snap in my own voice surprised me. “Soldiers don’t get to make those kinds of choices. Look out the window, Jiang. Mixed in with that black stuff you see blowing around out there, there’s a thin coating of fat molecules that used to be people. Men, women, children, all vaporised by some soldier under orders from some superior officer. Because they were in the way.”

“That was a Kempist action.”

“Oh, please.”

“I would not carry out—”

“Then you’re no longer a soldier, Jiang. Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldier. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”

He got up.

“I am going to change,” he said coldly. “Please present my apologies to Captain Sutjiadi for the delay.”

“Sure.” I picked up a kiwi fruit from the table and bit through the skin. “See you there.”

I watched him retreat to the other dormitory, then got up from the table and wandered out into the morning, still chewing the furred bitterness of the kiwi skin amidst the fruit.

Outside, the camp was coming slowly to life. On my way to the assembly ‘fab I spotted Ameli Vongsavath crouched under one of the Nagini’s support struts while Yvette Cruickshank helped her lift part of the hydraulic system clear for inspection. With Wardani bunking in her lab, the three remaining females had ended up sharing a ‘fab, whether by accident or design I didn’t know. None of the male team members had tried for the fourth bunk.

Cruickshank saw me and waved.

“Sleep well?” I called out.

She grinned back. “Like the fucking dead.”

Hand was waiting at the door to the assembly ‘fab, the clean angles of his face freshly shaven, the chameleochrome coveralls immaculate. There was a faint tang of spice in the air that I thought might come from something on his hair. He looked so much like a net ad for officer training that I could cheerfully have shot him in the face as soon as said good morning.

“Morning.”

“Good morning, lieutenant. How did you sleep?”

“Briefly.”

Inside, three-quarters of the space was given over to the assembly hall, the rest walled off for Hand’s use. In the assembly space, a dozen memoryboard-equipped chairs had been set out in an approximate ring and Sutjiadi was busy with a map projector, spinning up a table-sized central image of the beach and surroundings, punching in tags and making notes on his own chair’s board. He looked up as I came in.

“Kovacs, good. If you’ve got no objections, I’m going to send you out on the bike with Sun this morning.”

I yawned. “Sounds like fun.”

“Yes, well that isn’t the primary purpose. I want to string a secondary ring of remotes a few kilometres back to give us a response edge, and while Sun’s doing that she can’t be watching her own ass. You get the turret duty. I’ll have Hansen and Cruickshank start at the north end and swing inland. You and Sun go south, do the same thing.” He gave me a thin smile. “See if you can’t arrange to meet somewhere in the middle.”

I nodded.

“Humour.” I took a seat and slumped in it. “You want to watch that, Sutjiadi. Stuff’s addictive.”

Up on the seaward slopes of Dangrek’s spine, the devastation at Sauberville was clearer. You could see where the fireball had blasted a cavity into the hook at the end of the peninsula and let the sea in, changing the whole shape of the coastline. Around the crater, smoke was still crawling into the sky, but from up here you could make out the myriad tiny fires that fed the flow, dull red like the beacons used to flag potential flashpoints on a political map.