“Let’s go then, come on.” He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honour guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed, chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris, and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarised windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.

Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still …

I remembered the voyage aboard the Angelfire Flirt, the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.

And then everything came tumbling down.

“Hello Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?”

Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.

“Didn’t see that one coming, huh?” he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?”

“Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?” He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. “Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there too.”

I felt Jad bristle at my back.

“She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.”

He shrugged and nodded at my newly-acquired pirate friends. “Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.”

It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.

“That was a joke,” he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.

“Yeah, I guessed.” Jad wandered past me to the windows and peered out at the moored bulk of the Impaler. “So Micky, Tak, Kovacs, whoever the fuck you are at the moment. Want to introduce me to your friend?”

“Uh, yeah. Tod, this is Jadwiga. As you obviously already know, she’s from deCom. Jad, Todor Murakami, colleague of mine from, uh, the old days.”

“I’m an Envoy,” Murakami supplied casually.

To her credit, Jad barely blinked. She took the hand he offered with a slightly incredulous smile, then propped herself against the outward lean of the tower windows and folded her arms.

Murakami took the hint.

“So what’s all this about?”

I nodded. “We can start there.”

“I think you can probably guess.”

“I think you can probably drop the elicitation and just tell me.”

He grinned and touched a trigger finger to his temple. “Sorry, force of habit. Alright, look. Here’s my problem. According to sources, seems you’ve got a little revolutionary momentum up here, maybe enough to seriously rock the First Families’ boat.”

“Sources?”

Another grin. No ground given up. “That’s right. Sources.”

“I didn’t know you guys were deployed here.”

“We’re not.” A little of his Envoy cool slipped from him, as if by the admission he’d lost some kind of vital access to it. He scowled. “Like I said, this is pro bono. Damage limitation. You know as well as I do, we can’t afford a neoQuellist uprising.”

“Yeah?” This time, I was the one grinning. “Who’s we, Tod? The Protectorate? The Harlan family? Some other bunch of super-rich fucks?”

He gestured irritably. “I’m talking about all of us, Tak. You really think that’s what this planet needs, another Unsettlement. Another war?”

“Takes two sides to run a war, Tod. If the First Families wanted to accept the neoQuellist agenda, institute reforms, well.” I spread my hands. “Then I can’t see there’d be any need for an uprising at all. Maybe you should be talking to them.”

A frown. “Why are you talking like this, Tak? Don’t tell me you’re buying into this shit.”

I paused. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What kind of fucked political philosophy is that?”

“It isn’t a philosophy at all, Tod. It’s just a feeling that maybe we’ve all had enough. That maybe it’s time to burn these motherfuckers down.”

He frowned. “I can’t allow that. Sorry.”

“So why don’t you just call down the wrath of the Envoys and stop wasting time?”

“Because I don’t fucking want the Corps here.” There was a sudden, brief desperation in his face as he spoke. “I’m from here, Tak. This is my home. You think I want to see the World turned into another Adoracion? Another Sharya?”

“Very noble of you.” Jad shifted against the canted windows, came forward to the table and poked at the datacoil. Purple and red sparked around her fingers where they broke the field. “So what’s the battleplan, Mister Qualms?”

His eyes flickered between the two of us, came to rest on me. I shrugged.

“It’s a fair question, Tod.”

He hesitated for a moment. It made me think of the moment I’d had to unpin my own numbed fingers from the cable beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura. He was letting go of a lifetime of Envoy commitment here, and my own lapsed membership of the Corps wasn’t much in the way of a justification.

Finally, he grunted and spread his hands.

“Okay. Here’s the newsflash.” He pointed at me. “Your pal Segesvar has sold you out.”

I blinked. Then: “No fucking way.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Haiduci dues, right? He owes you. Thing is, Tak, you got to ask yourself which of you he thinks he owes.”

Oh shit.

He saw it hit me and nodded again. “Yeah, I know all about that too. See, Takeshi Kovacs saved Segesvar’s life a couple of centuries ago, objective time. But that’s something both copies of you did. Old Radul’s got a debt alright, but he apparently sees no reason to discharge it more than the once. And your younger, fresher self has just cut a deal on that very basis. Segesvar’s men took most of your beach party revolutionaries early this morning. Would have got you, Vidaura and the deCom woman too, if you hadn’t all taken off on some crack-of-dawn errand to the Strip.”

“And now?” The last stubborn fragments of clinging hope. Scour them out, and face the facts with features carved out of stone. “They’ve got Vidaura and the others now?”

“Yes, they took them on their return. They’re holding everyone until Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka can arrive with a clean-up squad. Had you gone back with the others, you’d be sharing a locked room with them now. So.” A rapidly flexed smile, a raised brow. “Looks like you owe me a favour.”

I let the fury come aboard, like deep breath, like a swelling. Let it rage through me, then tamped it carefully down like a half-smoked seahemp cigar, saved for later. Lock it down, think.

“How come you know all this, Tod?”

He gestured, self-deprecating. “Like I said, I live here. Pays to keep the wires humming. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is. Who’s your fucking source, Tod?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I shrugged. “Then I can’t help you.”