“Anyone here who still has a hangover had better deal with it now. One of the outer-ring sentry systems is down. There’s no indication of how.”

It got the desired reaction. The murmur of conversation damped out. I felt my own endorphin high dip.

“Cruickshank and Hansen, I want you to take one of the bikes and go check it out. Any sign of activity, any activity at all, you veer off and get straight back here. Otherwise, I want you to recover any wreckage on site and bring it back for analysis. Vongsavath, I want the Nagini powered up and ready to lift at my command. Everybody else, arm yourselves and stay where you can be found. And wear your rigs at all times.” He turned to Tanya Wardani, who was slumped in a chair at the back of the room, wrapped in her coat and masked with sunlenses. “Mistress Wardani. Any chance of an estimated opening time.”

“Maybe tomorrow.” She gave no sign that she was even looking at him behind the lenses. “With luck.”

Someone snorted. Sutjiadi didn’t bother to track it.

“I don’t need to remind you, Mistress Wardani, that we are under threat.”

“No. You don’t.” She unfolded herself from the chair and drifted for the exit. “I’ll be in the cave.”

The meeting broke up in her wake.

Hansen and Cruickshank were gone less than half an hour.

“Nothing,” the demolitions specialist told Sutjiadi when they got back. “No debris, no scorching, no signs of machine damage. In fact,” he looked back over his shoulder, back to where they’d searched. “No sign the fucking thing was ever there in the first place.”

The tension in the camp notched higher. Most of the spec ops team, true to their individual callings, retreated into moody quiet and semi-obsessive examinations of the weapons they were skilled with. Hansen unpacked the corrosion grenades and studied their fuses. Cruickshank stripped down the mobile artillery systems. Sutjiadi and Vongsavath disappeared into the cockpit of the Nagini, followed after a brief hesitation by Schneider. Luc Deprez sparred seriously with Jiang Jiang-ping down by the waterline, and Hand retreated into his bubblefab, presumably to burn some more incense.

I spent the rest of the morning seated on a rock ledge above the beach with Sun Liping, hoping the residues from the night before would work their way out of my system before the painkillers did. The sky over us had the look of better weather. The previous day’s nailed-down grey had broken apart on reefs of blue arrowing in from the west. Eastward, the smoke from Sauberville bent away with the evacuating cloud cover. Vague awareness of the hangover that waited beyond the curtain of endorphins lent the whole scene an undeservedly mellow tone.

The smoke from the nanocolonies that Hansen had seen was gone altogether. When I mentioned the fact to Sun, she just shrugged. I wasn’t the only one feeling irrationally mellow, it seemed.

“Any of this worry you at all?” I asked her.

“This situation?” she appeared to think about it. “I’ve been in more danger, I think.”

“Of course you have. You’ve been dead.”

“Well, yes. But that wasn’t what I meant. The nanosystems are a concern, but even if Matthias Hand’s fears are well founded, I don’t imagine they will evolve anything capable of pulling the Nagini out of the sky.”

I thought about the grasshopper robot guns Hand had mentioned. It was one of many details he had chosen not to pass on to the rest of the team when he briefed them on the OPERN system.

“Do your family know what you do for a living?”

Sun looked surprised. “Yes, of course. My father recommended the military. It was a good way of getting my systems training paid for. They always have money, he told me. Decide what you want to do, and then get them to pay you to do it. Of course, it never occurred to him that there’d be a war here. Who would have thought it, twenty years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“And yours?”

“My what? My father? Don’t know, haven’t seen him since I was eight. Nearly forty years ago, subjective time. More than a century and a half, objective.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. My life got radically better when he left.”

“Don’t you think he’d be proud of you now?”

I laughed. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He was always a big fan of violence, my old man. Season ticket holder to the freak fights. ‘Course, he had no formal training himself, so he always had to make do with defenceless women and children.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, yeah. He’d be proud of what I’ve done with my life.”

Sun was quiet for a moment.

“And your mother?”

I looked away, trying to remember. The downside of Envoy total recall is that memories of everything before the conditioning tend to seem blurry and incomplete by comparison. You accelerate away from it all, like lift-off, like launch. It was an effect I’d craved at the time. Now, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember.

“I think she was pleased when I enlisted,” I said slowly. “When I came home in the uniform, she had a tea ceremony for me. Invited everyone on the block. I guess she was proud of me. And the money must have helped. There were three of us to feed—me and two younger sisters. She did what she could after my father left, but we were always broke. When I finished basic, it must have tripled our income. On Harlan’s World, the Protectorate pays its soldiers pretty well—it has to, to compete with the yakuza and the Quellists.”

“Does she know you are here?”

I shook my head.

“I was away too much. In the Envoys, they deploy you everywhere except your home world. There’s less danger of you developing some inconvenient empathy with the people you’re supposed to be killing.”

“Yes.” Sun nodded. “A standard precaution. It makes sense. But you are no longer an Envoy. Did you not return home?”

I grinned mirthlessly.

“Yeah, as a career criminal. When you leave the Envoys, there isn’t much else on offer. And by that time my mother was married to another man, a Protectorate recruiting officer. Family reunion seemed. Well, inappropriate.”

Sun said nothing for a while. She seemed to be watching the beach below us, waiting for something.

“Peaceful here, isn’t it,” I said, for something to say.

“At a certain level of perception.” She nodded. “Not, of course, at a cellular level. There is a pitched battle being fought there, and we are losing.”

“That’s right, cheer me up.”

A smile flitted across her face. “Sorry. But it’s hard to think in terms of peace when you have a murdered city on one hand, the pent-up force of a hyperportal on the other, a closing army of nanocreatures somewhere just over the hill and the air awash with lethal-dose radiation.”

“Well, now that you put it like that…”

The smile came back. “It’s my training, Kovacs. I spend my time interacting with machines at levels my normal senses can’t perceive. When you do that for a living, you start to see the storm beneath the calm everywhere. Look out there. You see a tideless ocean, sunlight falling on calm water. It’s peaceful, yes. But under the surface of the water, there are millions of creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle to feed themselves. Look, most of the gull corpses are gone already.” She grimaced. “Remind me not to go swimming. Even the sunlight is a solid fusillade of subatomic particles, blasting apart anything that hasn’t evolved the appropriate levels of protection, which of course every living thing around here has because its distant ancestors died in their millions so that a handful of survivors could develop the necessary mutational traits.”

“All peace is an illusion, huh? Sounds like something a Renouncer monk would say.”

“Not an illusion, no. But it is relative, and all of it, all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.”

“That’s what keeps you in the military, is it?”