“I’m sorry?”

He laughs. “Very droll. Why don’t you kneel at the fire, it’s warmer that way.”

“I’m not that cold,” I say, shivering, and risk a look at his face. His eyes glitter in the firelight. He knows.

“It’s taken you a long time to get here, Wedge Wolf,” he says kindly. “We can wait a little longer.”

I stare through my splayed fingers at the flames. “What do you want from me, Semetaire?”

“Oh, come now. What do I want? You know what I want.” He shrugs off the blanket and rises gracefully to his feet. He is taller than I remember, elegantly menacing in his ragged black coat. He fits the top hat on his head at a rakish angle. “I want the same as all the others.”

“And what’s that?” I nod up at the thing crucified behind him.

“That?” For the first time, he seems off balance. A little embarrassed, maybe. “That’s, well. Let’s say that’s an alternative. An alternative for you, that is, but I really don’t think you want to—”

I look up at the looming structure, and suddenly it’s easier to see through the wind and sleet and fallout.

It’s me.

Pinned in place with swathes of netting, dead grey flesh pressing into the spaces between the cord, body sagging away from the rigid structure of the scaffold, head sunk forward on the neck. The gulls have been at my face. The eyesockets are empty and the cheeks tattered. Bone shows through in patches across my forehead.

It must, I think distantly, be cold up there.

“I did warn you.” A trace of the old mockery is creeping back into his voice. He’s getting impatient. “It’s an alternative, but I think you’ll agree it’s a lot more comfortable down here by the fire. And there is this.”

He opens one gnarled hand and shows me the cortical stack, fresh blood and tissue still clinging to it in specks. I slap a hand to the back of my neck and find a ragged hole there, a gaping space at the base of my skull into which my fingers slip with horrifying ease. Through on the other side of the damage, I can feel the slick, spongy weight of my own cerebral tissue.

“See,” he says, almost regretfully.

I pull my fingers loose again. “Where did you get that, Semetaire?”

“Oh, these are not hard to come by. Especially on Sanction IV.”

“You got Cruickshank’s?” I ask him, with a sudden surge of hope.

He hesitates fractionally. “But of course. They all come to me, sooner or later.” He nods to himself. “Sooner or later.”

The repetition sounds forced. Like he’s trying to convince. I feel the hope die down again, guttering out.

“Later then,” I tell him, holding my hands out to the fire one more time. The wind buffets at my back.

“What are you talking about?” The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.

“I’m going now. There’s nothing for me here.”

“Go?” His voice turns abruptly ugly. He holds up the stack between thumb and forefinger, red glinting in the firelight. “You’re not going anywhere, my wolf-pack puppy. You’re staying here with me. We’ve got some accounts to process.”

This time, I’m the one that laughs.

“Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.”

“You. Will.” One hand reaching crooked across the fire for me. “Stay.”

And the Kalashnikov is in my hand, the gun heavy with a full clip of antipersonnel rounds. Well, wouldn’t you know it.

“Got to go,” I say. “I’ll tell Hand you said hello.”

He looms, grasping, eyes gleaming.

I level the gun.

“You were warned, Semetaire.”

I shoot into the space below the hatbrim. Three shots, tight-spaced.

It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three metres beyond the fire. I wait for a moment to see if he’ll get up, but he’s gone. The flames dampen down visibly with his departure.

I look up and see that the cruciform structure is empty, whatever that means. I remember the dead face it held up before and squat by the fire, warming myself until it gutters down to embers.

In the glowing ash, I spot the cortical stack, burnt clean and metallic shiny amidst the last charred fragments of wood, I reach in amongst the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.

It scorches a little, but that’s OK.

I stow it and the Kalashnikov, thrust my rapidly chilling hands back into the pockets of my jacket and straighten up, looking around.

It’s cold, but somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

PART V: DIVIDED LOYALTIES

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Night sky starscape, piercingly clear.

I looked at it dully for a while, watching a peculiarly fragmented red glow creep up over it from the left edge of my vision, then retreat again.

This ought to mean something to you, Tak.

Like some kind of code, webbed into the way the glow shattered across the rim of my vision, something designed in the way it levered itself up and then sank down again by fractions.

Like glyphs. Like numerals.

And then it did mean something to me, and I felt a cold wave of sweat break across my entire body as I realised where I was.

The red glow was a head-up display, printing out across the bowl of the spacesuit faceplate I was lying trapped beneath.

This is no fucking night sky, Tak.

I was outside.

And then the weight of recall, of personality and past came crashing in on me, like a micrometeorite punching through the thin seal of transparency that was keeping my life in.

I flailed my arms and found I couldn’t move from the wrists up. My fingers groped around a rigid framework under my back, the faint thrum of a motor system. I reached around, twisting my head.

“Hey, he’s coming out of it.”

It was a familiar voice, even through the thin metallic straining of the suit’s comsystem. Someone else chuckled tinnily.

“Are you fucking surprised, man?”

Proximity sense gave me movement at my right side. Above me, I saw another helmet lean in, faceplate darkened to an impenetrable black.

“Hey, lieutenant.” Another voice I knew. “You just won me fifty bucks UN. I told these fucking suitfarts you’d pull through faster than anyone else.”

“Tony?” I managed faintly.

“Hey, no cerebral damage either. Key another one in for 391 platoon, guys. We are fucking immortal.”

They brought us back from the Martian dreadnought like a vacuum commando funeral procession. Seven bodies on powered stretchers, four assault bugs and a twenty-five strong honour guard in full hard space combat rig. Carrera had been taking no chances when he finally deployed to the other side of the gate.

Tony Loemanako took us back through in immaculate style, as if Martian gate-beachheads were something he’d been doing all his professional life. He sent two bugs through first, followed with the stretchers and infantry, commandos peeling off in matched pairs on left and right, and closed it out with the last two bugs retreating through backwards. Suit, stretcher and bug drives all powered up to full grav-lift hover the second they hit Sanction IV’s gravity field and when they grounded a couple of seconds after that, it was unified, on a single raise-and-clench command from Loemanako’s suited fist.