“I’ll send the medics,” I heard him say somewhere above me. “And Mistress Wardani, I suggest you shut your mouth, or I will have some of my less sensitive men come and fill it for you. That and maybe give you a forcible reminder of what the word catamite means. Don’t test me, woman.”

There was a rustle of clothing, and then he crouched at my side. One hand gripped my jaw and turned my face upward.

“You’re going to have to get that sentimental shit out of your system if you want to work for me, Kovacs. Oh, and just in case you don’t.” He held up a curled up inhib spider in his hand. “Temporary measure, purely. Just until we’re done with Sutjiadi. We’ll all feel a lot safer this way.”

He tipped his opened palm sideways, and the inhib unit rolled off into space. To my endorphin-dulled senses, it seemed to take a long time. I got to watch with something approaching fascination as the spider unrolled its legs in mid-air and fell nailing to the floor less than a metre from my head. There it gathered itself, spun about once or twice and then scuttled towards me. It clambered up over my face, then down around to my spine. A tiny spike of ice reached down into the bone, and I felt the cable-like limbs tighten around the back of my neck.

Oh well.

“Be seeing you, Kovacs. Have a think about it.” Carrera got up and apparently left. For a while, I lay there checking the seals on the cosy blanket of numbness my sleeve’s systems had wrapped me in. Then there were hands on my body, helping me into a sitting position I had no real interest in attaining.

“Kovacs.” It was Deprez, peering into my face. “You OK, man?”

I coughed weakly. “Yeah, great.”

He propped me against the edge of the table. Wardani moved into view above and behind him. “Kovacs?”

“Uhhhhhh, sorry about that, Tanya.” I risked a searching glance at the level of control on her face. “Should have warned you not to push him. He’s not like Hand. He won’t take that shit.”

“Kovacs.” There were muscles twitching her face that might have been the first crumbling of the jerry-built recovery edifice. Or not. “What are they going to do to Sutjiadi?”

A little pool of quiet welled up in the wake of the question.

“Ritual execution,” said Vongsavath. “Right?”

I nodded.

“What does that mean?” There was an unnerving calm in Wardani’s voice. I thought I might rewrite my assumptions about her state of recovery. “Ritual execution. What are they going to do?”

I closed my eyes, summoned images from the last two years. The recollection seemed to bring a dull seeping ache up from my shattered elbow joint. When I’d had enough, I looked at her face again.

“It’s like an autosurgeon,” I said slowly. “Reprogrammed. It scans the body, maps the nervous system. Measures resilience. Then, they run a rendering programme.”

Wardani’s eyes widened a little. “Rendering?”

“It takes him apart. Flays the skin, flenses the flesh, cracks the bones.” I drew on memory. “Disembowels him, cooks his eyes in their sockets, shatters his teeth and probes the nerves.”

She made a half-formed gesture against the words she was hearing.

“It keeps him alive while it does it. If he looks like going into shock, it stops. Gives him stimulants if necessary. Gives him whatever’s necessary, apart from painkillers, obviously.”

Now it felt as if there was a fifth presence among us, crouched at my side, grinning and squeezing the shards of broken bone in my arm. I sat in my own biotech-damped pain, remembering what had happened to Sutjiadi’s predecessors while the Wedge gathered to watch like the faithful at some arcane altar to the war.

“How long does this last?” asked Deprez

“It depends. Most of the day.” The words dragged out of me. “It has to be over by nightfall. Part of the ritual. If no one stops it earlier, the machine sections and removes the skull at last light. That usually does it.” I wanted to stop talking, but it seemed no one else wanted to stop me, “Officers and noncoms have the option to call a coup de grâce vote from the ranks, but you won’t get that until late afternoon, even from the ones that want it over. They can’t afford to come across softer than the rank and file. And even late, even then, I’ve seen the vote go against them.”

“Sutjiadi killed a Wedge platoon commander,” said Vongsavath. “I think there will be no mercy vote.”

“He’s weak,” Wardani said hopefully. “With the radiation poisoning—”

“No.” I flexed my right arm and a spike of pain ran up to my shoulder, even under the neurachem. “The Maori sleeves are contam combat-designed. Very high endurance.”

“But the neurache—”

I shook my head “Forget it. The machine will adjust for that, kill the pain management systems first, rip them out.”

“Then he’ll die.”

“No, he won’t,” I shouted. “It doesn’t work that way.”

No one said much after that.

A pair of medics arrived, one the man who had treated me earlier, the second a hard-faced woman I didn’t know. They checked my arm with elaborately non-committal competence. The presence of the inhib unit crouched on my nape and what it said about my status both went carefully unremarked. They used an ultravibe microset to break up the bone fragments around the shattered elbow joint, then set regrowth bios in deep, long monofilament feed lines topped off at skin level with the green marker tags and the chip that told my bone cells what to do and, more to the point, how fucking rapidly to get it done. No slacking here. Never mind what you did back in the natural world, you’re part of a military custom operation now, soldier.

“Couple of days,” said the one I knew, peeling a rapid-dump endorphin dermal off the crook of my arm. “We’ve cleared up the ragged edges, so flexing it shouldn’t do any serious damage to the surrounding tissue. But it will hurt like fuck, and it slows down the healing process so try to avoid it. I’ll grip-pad you so you remember.”

A couple of days. In a couple of days, I’d be lucky if this sleeve was still breathing. Recollection of the doctor aboard the orbital hospital flashed through my head. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The absurdity of it bubbled through me and escaped as a sudden, unlooked-for grin.

“Hey, thanks. Don’t want to slow down the healing process, do we?”

He smiled back weakly, then hurriedly turned his gaze to what he was doing. The grip-pad went on tight from bicep to lower forearm, warm and comforting, and constricting.

“You part of the anatomiser crew?” I asked him.

He gave me a haunted look. “No. That’s scan-related, I don’t do it.”

“We’re done here, Martin,” said the woman abruptly. “Time to go.”

“Yeah.” But he moved slowly, unwillingly as he folded up the battlefield kitpack. I watched the contents disappearing, taped-over surgical tools and the strips of brightly coloured dermals in their tug-down sleeves

“Hey, Martin.” I nodded at the pack. “You going to leave me a few of those pinks. I was planning to sleep late, you know.”

“Uh—”

The female medic cleared her throat. “Martin, we aren’t—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, will you.” He turned on her with fury boiling up out of nowhere. Envoy instinct kicked me in the head. Behind his back, I reached for the pack. “You don’t rank me, Zeyneb. I’ll dispense what I fucking like and you—”

“ ‘S OK,” I said quietly. “I got them anyway.”

Both medics fixed on me. I held up the trailing strip of endorphin dermals I’d grabbed free in my left hand. I smiled thinly.

“Don’t worry, I won’t take them all at once.”

“Maybe you should,” said the female medic. “Sir.”

“Zeyneb, I told you to shut up.” Martin gathered up the kitpack in a hurry, tightening it in his arms, cradling it. “You, uh, they’re fast-acting. No more than three at any one time. That will keep you under, whatever you h—” He swallowed. “Whatever is going on around you.”