“So which are your folks?”

Sylvie shifted her body on the lounger again, frowned and gave Jadwiga another shove to make space.

“Used to be moderate preps, that’s the faith I grew up in. The last couple of decades though, with the Beards and the whole anti-stack thing, a lot of moderates are turning into hardline asps. My mother probably went that way, she was always the seriously pious one.” She shrugged. “No idea really. Haven’t been home in years.”

“Like that, huh?”

“Yeah, like that. There’s no fucking point. All they’d do is try and marry me off to some eligible local.” She snorted with laughter. “As if that’s going to happen while I’m carrying this stuff.”

I propped myself up a little, groggy with the drugs. “What stuff?”

“This.” She tugged at a handful of hair. “This fucking stuff.”

It crackled quietly around her grasp, tried to writhe away like thousands of tiny snakes. Under the crinkled black and silver mass of it, the thicker cords moved stealthily, like muscles under skin.

DeCom command datatech.

I’d seen a few like her before—a prototype variant back on Latimer, where the core of the new Martian machine interface industry was boiling into R&D overdrive. A couple more used as minesweepers in the Hun Home system. It never takes long for the military to bastardise cutting edge technology for their own use. Makes sense. As often as not, they’re the ones paying for the R&D anyway.

“That’s not unattractive,” I said carefully.

“Oh, sure.” She raked through the tresses and separated out the central cord until it hung clear of the rest, an ebony snake gripped in her fist.

“That’s attractive, right? Because, after all, any red-blooded male’s just going to love a twice-prick-length member flopping around in bed at head height, right? Fucking competition anxiety and creeping homophobia, all in one.”

I gestured. “Well, women—”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m straight.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” She let the cord fall and shook her head so the rest of the silvered mane rearranged itself as it had been. “Oh.”

A century ago they were harder to spot. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal. Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different to the next human sleeve—a bit sick around the gills maybe when they’d been in the field for too long, but that’s the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say.

The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that. For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians’ interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot.

They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporisation of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels’ motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.

Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan’s World’s very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you’d call smart. Now here were the archaeologue systems specialists suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half million years old.

Some form of upgrade was in order. Definitely.

Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whisky glass.

“Why’d you sign up?” I asked her, to fill the quiet.

She shrugged. “Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.”

“And it isn’t?”

A wry grin. “No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.”

“The Initiative can’t last forever.”

“No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.”

“Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.”

“Well, spot the fucking offworlder.” She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. “Might not be big by your standards—I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Round here it’s a little different.”

I smiled. “I’m from here, Sylvie.”

“Oh, yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.”

In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.

You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar System with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

Well, wouldn’t you?

“I’m going to bed,” slurred Sylvie. “Busy day tomorrow.”

I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the

Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.

“Sylvie, it is tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated.

“ ‘loader doesn’t lift ‘til lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.”

“Thanks.”

She gave me a faded smile. “Hey, Micky. Least I can do. G’night.”

“ ‘night.”

I watched her wander to her room, checked my time chip and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.

That was the last conscious thought I had.

Fucking synth sleeves.