“A couple of times in Latimer City. More by reputation than actual contact. But Hand is a hougan.”

“Indeed.” Deprez looked abruptly thoughtful. “That is very interesting. He does not behave like a man of religion.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“It will make him. Less predictable.”

“Hoy. Envoy guy.” The shout came from under the port rail, and in its wake I caught the murmur of motors. “You aboard?”

“Cruickshank?” I looked up from my musing. “That you, Cruickshank?”

Laughter.

I stumbled upright and went to the rail. Peering down, I made out Schneider, Hansen and Cruickshank, all crammed onto one grav bike and hovering. They were clutching bottles and other party apparatus, and from the erratic way the bike held station, the party had started a while ago back on the beach.

“You’d better come aboard before you drown,” I said.

The new crew came with music attached. They dumped the sound system on the deck and the night lit up with Limon Highland salsa. Schneider and Hansen put together a tower pipe and powered it up at base. The smoke fumed off fragrant amidst the hung nets and masting. Cruickshank passed out cigars with the ruin-and-scaffold label of Indigo City.

“These are banned,” observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.

“Spoils of war.” Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, and hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn’t been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.

“Alright,” she said, commandeering the bottle from me. “Now we’re running interference.”

I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket, and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.

“This was a quiet party until you turned up.”

“Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?”

The cigar smoke bit. “So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?”

“Armoury supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn’t steal anything, we have an arrangement. He’s meeting me in the gun room,” she shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display. “In about an hour from now. So. Were you two old dogs comparing kills?”

I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.

“No.”

“That’s good.” She plumed smoke skyward. “I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless assholes. I mean, Samedi’s sake, it’s not like killing people is hard. We’ve all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.”

“And refining your technique, of course.”

“You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?”

I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.

“You’re from Limon, yes?” Deprez asked.

“Highlander, born and bred. Why?”

“You must have had some dealings with Carrefour then.”

Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. “Those fuckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of ‘28. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn’t work, burning villages.”

Deprez threw me a glance.

I said it. “Hand’s ex-Carrefour.”

“Doesn’t show.” She blew smoke. “Fuck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings ‘til it’s time for worship. You know for all the shit they pile on Kemp,” she hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. “At least he won’t have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City, I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.”

“Well, God,” said Deprez dryly. “You know, that’s a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp’s.”

“I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.”

I snorted.

“Hey.” Schneider pushed his way into the ring. “Come on, I heard that too. What was that Quell said? Spit on the tyrant God if the fucker tries to call you to account? Something like that?”

“Kemp’s no fucking Quellist,” said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. “Right, Kovacs?”

“It’s questionable. He borrows from it.” I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my ribcage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider’s direction. “And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.”

That caused a minor storm.

“Oh, come on—”

“What?”

“It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi’s sake.”

“Schneider, she never died.”

“Now there,” said Deprez ironically, “is an article of faith.”

Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.

“Alright, she never died that we know of. She just disappeared. But you don’t get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.”

“Maybe it was a valediction.”

“Maybe it was bullshit.” I stood up, unsteadily. “You want the quote, I’ll give you the quote.”

“Yeahhh!!!”

“Bright!!”

They scooted back to give me room.

I cleared my throat. “ ‘I have no excuses,’ she said. This is from the Campaign Diaries, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, fucked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan’s World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. That’s exactly what she said.”

Applause, like startled birds across the deck.

I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.

“Give us a poem,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” jeered Schneider. “A war poem.”

Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok and Munharto, gathered round, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.

Where were my excuses?

“I never learnt her poetry,” I lied, and walked away along the ship’s rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it was clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.

“Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.” It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. “No joke if you’re from the H World, huh?”

“It isn’t that.”

“No?”

“Nah. She was a fucking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death single-handed than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.”

“Impressive.”

I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself smiling. I shook my head. “Oh, Cruickshank, Cruickshank.”