I shrugged. “Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.”

“Of course they have.” It was almost a shout. “Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could walk and talk?”

“But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. “I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.”

“Yeah. Or maybe it’s just that you and your Quellist friends don’t want to see the limits of our evolved social biology.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. I tried to hold it down and the words came out gritted.

“That’s right. Bow down and fucking worship, do what the man with the beard or the suit tells you. Like I said, maybe people are happy like that.

Maybe the ones like you and me are just some fucking irritant, some swamp bug swarm that won’t let them sleep.”

“So, this is where you get off, is it?” She opened her eyes at the sky and glanced slantwise at me without lowering her head. “Give up, let scum like the First Families have it all, let the rest of humanity slip into a coma. Cancel the fight.”

“No, I suspect it’s already too late for that, Nadia.” I found there was none of the grim satisfaction in saying it that I’d expected. All I felt was tired. “Men like Koi are hard to stop once they’re set in motion. I’ve seen a few. And for better or worse, we are in motion now. You’re going to get your new Unsettlement, I think. Whatever I say or do.”

The stare still pinned me. “And you think it’s all a waste of time.”

I sighed. “I think I’ve seen it go wrong too many times on too many different worlds to believe this is going to be very different. You’re going to get a lot of people slaughtered for at best not very much in the way of local concessions. At worst, you’ll bring the Envoys down on Harlan’s World, and believe me, that you do not want in your worst nightmares.”

“Yes, Brasil told me. You used to be one of these stormtroopers.”

“That’s right.”

We watched the sun dying for a while.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t pretend to know anything about what they did to you in this Envoy Corps, but I have met men like you before. Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand. But it’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. At base, you don’t really want things to get any better because then you’d be out of targets. And if the external focus for your hate ran out, you’d have to face up to what’s inside you.”

I snorted. “And what is that?”

“Exactly? I don’t know. But I can hazard a few guesses. An abusive parent. A life on the streets. A loss of some sort early in childhood. Betrayal of some kind. And sooner or later, Kovacs, you need to face the fact that you can never go back and do anything about that. Life has to be lived forward.”

“Yeah,” I said tonelessly. “In the service of the glorious Quellist revolution no doubt.”

She shrugged. “That’d have to be your choice.”

“I’ve already made my choices.”

“And yet you came to prise me free of the Harlan family. You mobilised Koi and the others.”

“I came for Sylvie Oshima.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

There was another pause. Aboard the skimmer, Brasil disappeared into the cabin. I only caught the tail end of the motion, but it seemed abrupt and impatient. Tracking back, I saw Virginia Vidaura staring up at me.

“Then,” said the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita, “it would seem I’m wasting my time with you.”

“Yeah. I would think you are.”

If it made her angry, she didn’t show it. She just shrugged again, got up and gave me a curious smile, then wandered away along the sunset drenched dock, peering occasionally over the edge into the soupy water.

Later, I saw her talking to Koi, but she left me alone for the duration of the ride to Segesvar’s place.

As a final destination, the farm was not impressive. It broke the surface of the Expanse resembling nothing so much as a collection of waterlogged helium blimps sunk among the ruins of yet another U-shaped baling station. In fact, before the advent of the combines, the place had seen service as an independent belaweed dock, but unlike the other stations we’d stopped at, it hadn’t sold to the incoming corporate players and was derelict within a generation. Radul Segesvar had inherited the bare bones as part-payment of a gambling debt and must not have been too happy when he saw what he’d won. But he put the space to work, refitted the decaying station in deliberately antique style and extended the whole installation across what was previously the commercial capacity harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. Now the complex boasted a small, exclusive brothel, elegant casino facilities and the blood-rich heart of it all, the thing that gave customers a frisson they couldn’t duplicate in more urban surroundings, the fight pits.

There was a party of sorts when we arrived. Haiduci pride themselves on their hospitality and Segesvar was no exception. He’d cleared a space on one of the covered docks at the end of the old station and laid on food and drink, muted music, fragrant real-wood torches and huge fans to shift the swampy air. Handsome men and women drawn either from the brothel downstairs or one of Segesvar’s Newpest holoporn studios circulated with heavily-laden trays and limited clothing. Their sweat was artfully beaded in patterns across their exposed flesh and scented with tampered pheromones, their pupils were blasted open on some euphoric or other, their availability subtly hinted at. It was perhaps not ideal for a gathering of neoQuell activists, but that may have been deliberate on Segesvar’s part.

He’d never had much patience with politics.

In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.

Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger. Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.

The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.

Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.

“Did you kill her?” I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter—cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.

He stared away across the dock. “Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.”

“Real death?”

He nodded. “For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty eight hours of her life.”