Of the buildings, the city itself, there was nothing left at all.

“You’ve got to hand it to Kemp,” I said, mostly to the wind coming in off the sea, “he doesn’t mess about with decision-making by committee. There’s no bigger picture with this guy. Soon as it looks like he’s losing, bam! He just calls in the angelfire.”

“Sorry?” Sun Liping was still engrossed in the innards of the sentry system we had just planted. “You talking to me?”

“Not really.”

“Then you were talking to yourself?” Her brows arched over her work. “That’s a bad sign, Kovacs.”

I grunted and shifted in the gunner’s saddle. The grav bike was canted at an angle on the rough grass, mounted Sunjets cranked down to maintain a level bead on the landward horizon. They twitched from time to time, motion trackers chasing the wind through the grass or maybe some small animal that had somehow managed not to die when the blast hit Sauberville.

“Alright, we’re done.” Sun closed up the inspection hatch and stood back, watching the turret reel drunkenly to its feet and turn to face the mountains. It firmed up as the ultravibe battery snicked out of the upper carapace, as if it suddenly recalled its purpose in life. The hydraulic system settled it into a squat that took the bulk of the body below line of sight for anyone coming up this particular ridge. A fairweather sensor crept out of the armour below the gun segment and flexed in the air. The whole machine looked absurdly like a starved frog in hiding, testing the air with one especially emaciated foreleg.

I chinned the contact mike.

“Cruickshank, this is Kovacs. You paying attention?”

“Nothing but.” The rapid deployment commando came back laconic. “Where you at, Kovacs?”

“We have number six fed and watered. Moving on to site five. We should have line of sight on you soon. Make sure you keep your tags where they can be read.”

“Relax, will you? I do this for a living.”

“That didn’t save you last time, did it?”

I heard her snort. “Low blow, man. Low blow. How many times you been dead anyway, Kovacs?”

“A few,” I admitted.

“So.” Her voice rose derisively. “Shut the fuck up.”

“See you soon, Cruickshank.”

“Not if I get you in my sights first. Out.”

Sun climbed aboard the bike.

“She likes you,” she said over her shoulder. “Just for your information. Ameli and I spent most of last night hearing what she’d like to do to you in a locked escape pod.”

“Good to know. You weren’t sworn to secrecy then?”

Sun fired up the motors and the wind shield snipped shut around us. “I think,” she said meditatively, “the idea was that one of us would tell you as soon as possible. Her family are from the Limon Highlands back on Latimer, and from what I hear the Limon girls don’t mess about when they want something plugging in.” She turned to look at me. “Her choice of words, not mine.”

I grinned.

“Of course she’ll need to hurry,” Sun went on, busying herself with the controls. “In a few days none of us’ll have any libido left worth talking about.”

I lost the grin.

We lifted and coasted slowly along the seaward side of the ridge. The grav bike was a comfortable ride, even weighed down with loaded panniers, and with the wind screen on, conversation was easy.

“Do you think the archaeologue can open the gate as she claims?” Sun asked.

“If anyone can.”

“If anyone can,” she repeated thoughtfully.

I thought about the psychodynamic repairs I had done on Wardani, the bruised interior landscape I had had to open up, peeling it back like bandaging that had gone septic and stiffened into the flesh beneath. And there at the core, the tightly wired centredness that had allowed her to survive the damage.

She had wept when the opening took hold, but she cried wide-eyed, like someone fighting the weight of drowsiness, blinking the tears out of her eyes, hands clenched into fists at her sides, teeth gritted.

I woke her up, but she brought herself back.

“Scratch that,” I said. “She can do it. No question.”

“You show remarkable faith.” There was no criticism in Sun’s voice that I could hear. “Strange in a man who works so hard at burying himself beneath the weight of disbelief.”

“It isn’t faith,” I said shortly. “It’s knowledge. There’s a big difference.”

“Yet I understand Envoy conditioning provides insights that readily transform the one into the other.”

“Who told you I was an Envoy?”

“You did.” This time I thought I could detect a smile in Sun’s voice. “Well, at least, you told Deprez, and I was listening.”

“Very astute of you.”

“Thank you. Is my information accurate then?”

“Not really, no. Where did you hear it?”

“My family is originally from Hun Home. There, we have a Chinese name for the Envoys.” She made a short string of tightly sung syllables. “It means One who makes Facts from Belief.”

I grunted. I’d heard something similar on New Beijing a couple of decades ago. Most of the colonial cultures have built myths around the Envoys at one time or another.

“You sound unimpressed.”

“Well, it’s a bad translation. What the Envoys have is just an intuition enhancement system. You know. You’re going out, it’s not a bad day but you take a jacket on impulse. Later it rains. How does that work?”

She looked over her shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. “Luck?”

“Could be luck. But what’s more likely is that systems in your mind and body that you’re not aware of measure the environment at some subconscious level and just occasionally manage to squirt the message through all the superego programming. Envoy training takes that and refines it so your superego and subconscious get along better. It’s nothing to do with belief, it’s just a sense of something underlying. You make the connections and from that you can assemble a skeleton model of the truth. Later on, you go back and fill in the gaps. Gifted detectives have been doing it for centuries unaided. This is just the superamped version.” Suddenly I was tired of the words coming out of my mouth, the glib flow of human systems specs that you could wrap yourself in to escape the emotional realities of what you did for a living. “So tell me, Sun. How did you get from Hun Home to here?”

“Not me, my parents. They were contract biosystems analysts. They came here on the needlecast when the Hun Home cooperatives bought into settling Sanction IV. Their personalities, I mean. DHF’d into custom-grown clones from Sino stock on Latimer. All part of the deal.”

“Are they still here?”

She hunched her shoulders slightly. “No. They retired to Latimer several years ago. The settlement contract paid very well.”

“You didn’t want to go with them?”

“I was born on Sanction IV. This is my home.” Sun looked back at me again. “I imagine you have a problem understanding that.”

“Not really. I’ve seen worse places to belong.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Sharya for one. Right! Go right!”

The bike dipped and banked. Admirable responses from Sun in her new sleeve. I shifted in my saddle, scanning the hillscape. My hands went to the flying grips of the mounted Sunjet set and jerked it down to manual height. On the move it wasn’t much good as an automated weapon without some very careful programming and we hadn’t had time for that.

“There’s something moving out there.” I chinned the mike. “Cruickshank, we’ve got movement across here. Want to join the party?”

The reply crisped back. “On our way. Stay tagged.”

“Can you see it?” asked Sun.

“If I could see it, I’d have shot it. What about the scope?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“I think…” We crested a hillock and Sun’s voice came back, cursing, by the sound of it, in Mandarin. She booted the bike sideways and swung about, creeping up another metre from the ground. Peering down over her shoulder, I saw what we’d been looking for.