“Ahem. Perhaps we could discuss a »version?/view?« of those events which pivots less on »?????« than »recoil?/slingshot?« theories of …”

“Very well, as far as it goes. But give me a single »binding example?« to support those claims.”

“Ahhhhhh …”

“Exactly. Demodynamics isn’t »blood in the water?«, it’s an attempt to …”

“But—”

And on and on, until, in a clatter of cheap furniture, Koi was suddenly on his feet.

“That’s enough,” he said gruffly.

Glances flickered back and forth between the rest of us. Koi came round the side of the table and his old face was taut with emotion as he looked down at the woman sitting there. She looked back up at him without expression.

He offered her his hands.

“I have,” he swallowed, “concealed my identity from you until now, for the sake of. Our cause. Our common cause. But I am Soseki Koi, ninth Black Brigade command, Saffron theatre.”

The mask on Sylvie Oshima’s face melted away. Something like a grin took its place.

“Koi? Shaky Koi?”

He nodded. His lips were clamped together.

She took his outstretched hands, and he lifted her to her feet beside him.

He faced the table and looked at each of us in turn. You could see the tears in his eyes, hear them in his voice when he spoke.

“This is Quellcrist Falconer,” he said tightly. “In my mind there is no longer room for doubt.”

Then he turned and flung his arms around her. Sudden tear-ribbons glistened on his cheeks. His voice was hoarse.

“We waited so long for you to come again,” he wept. “We waited so long.”

PART 5

THIS IS THE STORM TO COME

THIRTY-EIGHT

I woke to Kossuth-grade heat and low-angle sunlight, a mild hangover and the serrated sound of snarling. Out in the pens, someone was feeding the swamp panthers.

I glanced at my watch. It was very early.

I lay for a while in sheets tangled to my waist, listening to the animals and the harsh male whoops of the feeding crew on the gantries above them. Segesvar had taken me on a tour of the place two years previously, and I still remembered the awful power with which the panthers nailed up to catch chunks of fishsteak the size of a man’s torso. The feeding crew had yelled then as well, but the more you listened the more you realised that it was bravado to shore up courage against an instinctive terror. With the exception of one or two hardened swamp-game hunters, Segesvar recruited pretty exclusively from the wharf fronts and slums of Newpest, where the chances of any of the kids having seen a real panther were about even with them ever having been to Millsport.

A couple of centuries back, it was different—the Expanse was smaller then, not yet cleared all the way south to make way for the belaweed mono-cropping combines. In places, the swamp’s poisonously beautiful trees and float-foliage crept almost up to the city limits, and the inland harbour had to be redredged on a twice-yearly basis. It wasn’t unheard of for panthers to turn up basking on the loading ramps in the summer heat, the chameleon skin of mane and mantle shimmering to mimic the sun’s glare. Peculiar variations in the breeding cycles of their prey out on the Expanse sometimes drove them in to roam the streets closest to the swamplands, where they ripped open sealed refuse canisters with effortless savagery and occasionally, at night, took the homeless or the unwary drunk. Just as they would in their swamp environment, they sprawled prone in back alleys, body and limbs concealed beneath a mane and mantle that would camouflage to black in the darkness. To their victims, they would resemble nothing so much as a pool of deep shadow until it was too late, and they left nothing behind for the police but broad splashes of blood and the echo of screams in the night. By the time I was ten, I’d seen my share of the creatures in the flesh, had even myself once run screaming up a wharf-shed ladder with my friends when a sleepy panther rolled over at our step-freeze-step approach, flapped one corner of its sloppy, tendrilled mane at us and treated us to a gape-beaked yawn.

The terror, like much that you experience in childhood, was transient.

Swamp panthers were scary, they were lethally dangerous if you encountered them under the wrong circumstances, but in the end they were a part of our world.

The snarling outside seemed to reach a crescendo.

To Segesvar’s crew, swamp panthers were the bad guys of a hundred cheap hologames and maybe a school biology class they hadn’t cut, made suddenly real. Monsters from another planet.

This one.

And maybe, inside some of the young thugs who worked for Segesvar until the lower-echelon haiduci lifestyle inevitably took them down, maybe these monsters awoke the shivery existential understanding of exactly how far from home we all really were.

Then again, maybe not.

Someone shifted in the bed beside me and groaned.

“Don’t those fucking things ever shut up?”

Recollection arrived at the same moment as the shock, and they cancelled each other out. I rolled my head sideways and saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin features squashed up under a pillow she’d crushed to her own head. Her eyes were still closed.

“Feeding time,” I said, mouth sticky as I spoke.

“Yeah, well I can’t make up my mind what’s pissing me off more. Them or the fucking idiots feeding them.” She opened her eyes. “Good morning.”

“And to you.” Memory of her the night before, hunched forward astride me. Beneath the sheets, I was hardening with the thought. “I didn’t think this was ever going to happen in the real world.”

She looked back at me for a moment, then rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

“No. Nor did I.”

The events of the previous day floated sluggishly to the surface. My first sight of Vidaura, poised in the snout of Segesvar’s low-profile skimmer as it held station on the roiled waters beneath the urbraft’s massive load bearing supports. The dawn light from the opening at the stern had not reached this deep into the space between hulls and she was little more than a gun-handed, spike-haired silhouette as I came down through the maintenance hatch. There was a reassuring operational toughness to the figure she cut, but when torchglow fell briefly across her face as we boarded, I saw something else there that I couldn’t define. She met my eyes briefly, then looked away.

Nobody spoke much during the skimmer ride across the early morning waters of the Gulf. There was a solid wind out of the west and a cold gunmetal light across everything that didn’t encourage conversation. As we closed on the coast, Segesvar’s contraband driver called us all inside and a second hard-faced young haiduci swung himself up into the skimmer’s gun-turret. We sat in the cramped cabin in silence, listening to the engines change pitch as we slowed on approach to the beach. Vidaura took the seat beside Brasil, and down in the gloom where their thighs touched, I saw them clasp hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back in the comfortless metal and webbing seat, running the route behind my eyes for something to do.

Off the ocean, straight up some shabby, effluent-poisoned beach somewhere at the north end of Vchira, out of sight, but barely, of the Newpest suburb skyline whose shanties supplied the poison by piped outflow. No one stupid enough to come here to swim or fish, no one to see the blunt nosed, heavy-skirted skimmer come brazening through. Across the oil stained mudflats behind, through choked and dying float-foliage and then out onto the Expanse proper. Zigzag through the endless belaweed soup at standard traffic speeds to break the trail, three stops at different baling stations, each with haiduci-connected employees, and a change of heading after each one. Isolation and journey’s end at Segesvar’s home from home, the panther farm.