“What?”

“You’re going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you’re standing on my side of the interface.”

“Yeah, right, old man.”

I shook my head again, but couldn’t seem to shake the grin loose. “Suit yourself.”

“Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.”

“Gosh, almost a whole decade.”

“I’m twenty-two, Kovacs.” She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black and starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn’t match the smile. “Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That’s out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal’s flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.”

“Dead at twenty-two.” It came out harsher than I’d meant.

Cruickshank drew a slow breath. “Man, you are in a shitty mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I’m back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I’m a big girl, Kovacs, so how ‘bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.”

I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realisation that she was right than anything else.

“Whatever you say. Big girl.”

“Yeah, I saw you looking.” She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out towards the beach. “So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?”

Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.

“I don’t know, Cruickshank. I’m not convinced this is the time and place.”

“Gate got you spooked, huh?”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

She waved it away. “Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?”

“Well, she did before, by all accounts.”

“Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.”

“Well, I guess that’s military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it some time.”

“Back off, Kovacs.” There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. “We don’t work the camps, man. That’s government levy. Strictly home-grown.”

Riding the updraft. “Cruickshank, you don’t know a fucking thing.”

She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.

“Well, uh, I know what they say about Carrera’s Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy, by all accounts. So maybe you want to make sure you’re clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?”

She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.

“Sorry.”

“Skip it.” But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.

“No, really. I’m sorry. This place is killing me.”

An unwilling smile curled her lip.

“I mean it. I’ve been killed before, more times than you’d believe,” I shook my head. “It’s just, it never took this long before.”

“Yeah. Plus you’re abseiling after the archaeologue, right?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is now.” She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. “I don’t blame you. She’s smart, she’s got her head wrapped around stuff that’s just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.”

She looked around.

“Surprise you, huh?”

“A little.”

“Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we’ve got back there, it’s going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Yeah.” She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. “I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.”

She looked at me.

“Feels weird, you know. It’s like, I died. And now I’ve come back, and I have to face this moment. I don’t know if it should scare me. But it doesn’t. Man, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.”

There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.

She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.

“See you there, Kovacs,” she murmured.

I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.

Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?

Extenuating circumstances. I’m dying.

You’re all, dying, Kovacs. All of you.

The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we’d hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.

Chemicals.

That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that fucking wolf splice again. Don’t forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.

No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.

I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—

Fuck off.

I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned and walked rapidly to the main companion way.

“Hoy, Kovacs?” It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. “Where you going, man?”

“Call of nature,” I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half metre at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem and lurched into the narrow space behind.

IIluminum tiles with badly-fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, moulded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes; and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.

Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see how the new harvest begins?

Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.

You are mistaken. I am no charlatan, and Semetaire is only one of a hundred names…

Whoever you are, you’re looking for an antipersonnel round in the face.

But you brought me here.

I don’t think so.

I saw a skull, lolling at a rakish angle in the nets. Sardonic amusement grinning from blackened, eaten-back lips.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but I am finished there now. And there is work for me here.

Now you’re mistaken. When I want you, I’ll come looking for you.

Kovacs-vacs-vacs-vacs-vacs…

I blinked. The datadisplay ripped light across my open eyes. Someone moved behind me.

I straightened up and stared into the bulkhead above the desk. The dull metal threw back blue from the display. Light caught on a thousand tiny dents and abrasions.

The presence behind me shifted—