I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die either.

Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.

“Well, that’s that.”

“Do you think it will work?”

I shrugged. “Like Hansen says. For a while.”

“So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons—the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?”

“Sharp sticks?”

“Are we close to opening the gate?”

“Why ask me? Wardani’s the expert.”

“You seem. Close to her.”

I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.

“Are you staying out here?”

I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.

“No reason to leave yet that I can see.”

He chuckled. “You do realise that we are drinking a collector’s item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean,” He gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be. “They aren’t going to be making any more.”

“Yeah.” I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck towards the murdered city. I poured another glass full and raised it to the sky. “So here’s to them. Let’s drink the fucking bottle.”

We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser’s handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.

At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me:

“Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?”

I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and ‘tankhead’ was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I’d been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops…

“No, of course not. Were you?”

“Of course I fucking was not. But the Envoys—”

“Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned shit that in your saner moments you’d probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that’s pretty much essential.”

“Not really.” Deprez wagged a finger. “They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn’t even have to know it hadn’t had a real upbringing. You could be something like that for all you know.”

I yawned. “Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It’s something you live with every time you get re-sleeved, every time you get DHF’d, and you know how I know they haven’t done that to me?”

“How?”

“Because there’s no way they’d programme an upbringing as fucked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some fucking clone warrior that makes me, Luc.”

He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.

“It brings you to think, though,” he said, laughter drying up.

“What does?”

He gestured around. “All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it’s all some military construct, man. Maybe it’s a place to shunt us while we’re dead, while they decide where to decant us next.”

I shrugged. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“You would be happy like that? In a construct?”

“Luc, after what I’ve seen in the last two years, I’d be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the damned.”

“Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality.”

“We differ over terms.”

“You consider yourself damned?”

I downed more Sauberville whisky and grimaced past the burn. “It was a joke, Luc. I’m being funny.”

“Ah. You should warn me.” He leaned forward suddenly. “When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?”

“If it’s not a personal question.”

“We may die on this beach. Really die.”

“Not if it’s a construct.”

“Then what if we are damned, as you say?”

“I don’t see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you.”

Deprez pulled a face. “We’ll talk about something else, then. Are you fucking the archaeologue?”

“Sixteen.”

“What?”

“Sixteen. I was sixteen. That’s closer to eighteen, earth standard. Harlan’s World orbits slower.”

“Still very young.”

I considered. “Nah, it was about time. I’d been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I’d come close a couple of times already.”

“It was a gang killing?”

“It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we’d expected. The others ran, I got caught up.” I looked at my hands. “Then I was tougher than he expected.”

“Did you take his stack?”

“No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got re-sleeved, but I’d joined up by then. He wasn’t connected enough to fuck with the military.”

“And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death.”

“I’m sure I would have got around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly fucked run-up at this stuff?”

“Oh no,” he said lightly. “It’s in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historic links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military.” He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. “You might say we were bred for it.”

“So how does covert ops sit with your historic military family history? They disappointed you didn’t end up with a command? If that’s not a personal question.”

Deprez shrugged. “Soldier’s a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains.”

“And your first?”

“On Latimer.” He smiled again, remembering. “I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose. During the Soufriere Uprising, I was part of a reconnaissance squad across the swamplands. Walked around a tree and bam!” He brought fist and cupped hand together. “There he was. I shot him before I realised it. It blasted him back ten metres and cut him in two pieces. I saw it happen and in that moment I did not understand what had happened. I did not understand that I had shot this man.”

“Did you take his stack?”

“Oh, yes. We had been instructed. Recover all fatalities for interrogation, leave no evidence.”

“That must have been fun.”

Deprez shook his head.

“I was sick,” he admitted. “Very sick. The others in my squad laughed at me, but the sergeant helped me do the cutting. He also cleaned me up and told me not to worry about it too much. Later there were others, and I, well, I became accustomed.”

“And good at it.”

He met my gaze, and the confirmation of that shared experience sparked.

“After the Soufriere campaign, I was decorated. Recommended for covert duties.”

“You ever run into the Carrefour Brotherhood?”

“Carrefour?” He frowned. “They were active in the troubles further south. Bissou and the cape—do you know it?”

I shook my head.

“Bissou was always their home ground, but who they were fighting for was a mystery. There were Carrefour hougans running guns to the rebels on the cape—I know, I killed one or two myself—but we had some working for us as well. They supplied intelligence, drugs, sometimes religious services. A lot of the rank-and-file soldiers were strong believers, so getting a hougan blessing before battle was a good thing for any commander to do. Have you had dealings with them?”