“I think I’ve heard this speech.”

“The corporations did it. Not governments. Not politicians. Not this fucking joke Protectorate we pay lip service to. Corporate planning gave us the vision, corporate investment paid for it, and corporate employees built it.”

“Let’s hear it for the corporations.” I patted my palms together, half a dozen dry strokes.

Hand ignored it. “And when we were done, what happened? The UN came and they muzzled us. They stripped us of the powers they’d awarded us for the diaspora. They levied their taxes again, they rewrote their protocols. They castrated us.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Hand.”

“You’re not funny, Kovacs. Do you have any idea what technological advances we might have made by now if that muzzle hadn’t gone back on. Do you know how fast we were during the diaspora?”

“I’ve read about it.”

“In spaceflight, in cryogenics, in bioscience, in machine intelligence.” He ticked them off on bent-back fingers. “A century of advances in less than a decade. A global tetrameth rush for the entire scientific community. And it all stopped with the Protectorate protocols. We’d have fucking faster-than-light spaceflight by now if they hadn’t stopped us. Guaranteed.”

“Easy to say now. I think you’re omitting a few inconvenient historical details, but that’s not really the point. You’re trying to tell me the Protectorate has unwritten the protocols for you, just so you can get this little war won at speed?”

“In essence, yes.” His hands made shaping motions in the space between his knees. “It’s not official, of course. No more than all those Protectorate dreadnoughts that aren’t officially anywhere near Sanction IV. But unofficially, every member of the Cartel has a mandate to push war-related product development to the hilt, and then further.”

“And that’s what’s squirming around out there? Pushed-to-the-hilt nanoware?”

Hand compressed his lips. “SUS-L. Smart Ultra Short-Lived nanobe systems.”

“Sounds promising. So what does it do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh for f—”

“No.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know. None of us do. It’s a new front. They’re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems.”

“The OPERN System? That’s just so fucking cute. And it’s a weapon?”

“Of course it is.”

“So how does it work?”

“Kovacs, you don’t listen.” There was a dreary kind of enthusiasm building in his voice now. “It’s an evolving system. Smart evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way—imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we’re only just starting to map what it can do. They’ve modelled it in high-speed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like grasshoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact.”

“Oh. Good.”

“It shouldn’t take that turn out here—there’s not the density of military personnel for it to be an evolutionarily selective trait.”

“But it could do pretty much anything else.”

“Yes.” The Mandrake exec looked at his hands. “I would imagine so. Once it goes active.”

“And how long have we got before that happens?”

Hand shrugged. “Until it disturbs Sutjiadi’s sentry systems. As soon as they fire on it, it starts evolving to cope.”

“And if we go blast it now? Because I know that’s going to be Sutjiadi’s vote.”

“With what? If we use the UV in the Nagini, it’ll just be ready for the sentry systems that much faster. If we use something else, it’ll evolve around that and probably go up against the sentries that much tougher and smarter. It’s nanoware. You can’t kill nanobes individually. And some always survive. Fuck, Kovacs, eighty per cent kill rate is what our labs work off as an evolutionary ideal. It’s the principle of the thing. Some survive, the toughest motherfuckers, and those are the ones that work out how to beat you next time around. Anything, anything at all you do to kick it out of the null configuration just makes things worse.”

“There must be some way to shut it down.”

“Yes, there is. All you need are the project termination codes. Which I don’t have.”

The radiation or the drugs, whatever it was, I felt suddenly tired. I stared at Hand through gritted up eyes. Nothing to say that wouldn’t be a rant along the lines of Tanya Wardani’s tirade against Sutjiadi the night before. Waste of warm air. You can’t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

Hand cleared his throat. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here before it gets very far advanced.”

“If Ghede is on our side, don’t you mean?”

He smiled. “If you like.”

“You don’t believe a word of that shit, Hand.”

The smile wiped away. “How would you know what I believe?”

“OPERNS. SUS-L. You know the acronyms. You know the construct-run results. You know this fucking programme hardware and soft. Carrera warned us about nanotech deployment, you didn’t blink. And now suddenly you’re pissed-off and scared. Something doesn’t fit.”

“That’s unfortunate.” He started to get up. “I’ve told you as much as I’m going to, Kovacs.”

I beat him to his feet and drew one of the interface guns, right-handed. It clung to my palm like something feeding.

“Sit down.”

He looked at the levelled gun—

“Don’t be ridiculou—”

—then at my face, and his voice dried up.

“Sit. Down.”

He lowered himself carefully back to the bed. “If you harm me, Kovacs, you’ve lost everything. Your money on Latimer, your passage offworld—”

“From the sound of it, I don’t look much like collecting at the moment anyway.”

“I’m backed up, Kovacs. Even if you kill me, it’s a wasted bullet. They’ll re-sleeve me in Landfall and—”

“Have you ever been shot in the stomach?”

His eyes snapped to mine. He shut up.

“These are high-impact fragmentation slugs. Close-quarters antipersonnel load. I imagine you saw what they did to Deng’s crew. They go in whole and they come out like monomol shards. I shoot you in the gut and it’ll take you the best part of a day to die. Whatever they do with your stored self, you’ll go through that here and now. I died that way once, and I’m telling you, it’s something you want to avoid.”

“I think Captain Sutjiadi might have something to say about that.”

“Sutjiadi will do what I tell him, and so will the others. You didn’t make any friends in that meeting, and they don’t want to die at the hands of your evolving nanobes any more than I do. Now suppose we finish this conversation in a civilised fashion.”

I watched him measure the will in my eyes, in my gathered stance. He’d have some diplomatic psychosense conditioning, some learned skill at gauging these things, but Envoy training has a built-in capacity to deceive that leaves most corporate bioware standing. Envoys project pure from a base of synthetic belief. At that moment, I didn’t even know myself whether I was going to shoot him or not.

He read real intent. Or something else cracked. I saw the moment cross his face. I put up the smart gun. I didn’t know which way it would have gone. You very often don’t. Being an Envoy is like that.

“This doesn’t go outside the room,” he said. “I’ll tell the others about SUS-L, but the rest we keep at this level. Anything else will be counterproductive.”