I’d just done. He blinked up at me.

“You know,” I said, and my voice jammed rustily. I had to start again, quietly, wearily. “You know, fuck you. You weren’t at Innenin, you weren’t on Loyko, you weren’t at Sanction IV or Hun Home. You’ve never even been to Earth. What the fuck do you know?”

He spat out blood. Sat up and wiped his smashed mouth. I laughed mirthlessly and shook my head.

“You know what, let’s see you do it better. Think you can sidestep all my fuck-ups? Go on then. Fucking try.” I moved aside and waved at the moored ranks of skimmers by the dock. “Got to be a few of those that weren’t shot up all that badly. Choose your own ride out of here. No one’s going to be looking for you, get moving while you’re ahead.”

He picked himself up a fraction at a time. His eyes never left mine, his hands trembled with tension, floating at guard. Maybe I hadn’t broke his arm after all. I laughed again, and it felt better this time.

“I mean it. Let’s see you steer my fucking life better than I have. Let’s see you not end up like I have. Go on.”

He stepped past me, still wary, face grim.

“I will,” he said. “I don’t see how I could do much worse.”

“Then fucking go. Get the fuck out of here.” I grabbed at the fresh anger, the urge to knock him down again and finish it. I cranked it back down. It took surprisingly little effort. My voice came out even again. “Don’t fucking stand here bitching to me about it, let’s see you do better.”

He gave me one more guarded look, and then he walked away, to the edge of the dock and towards the less damaged skimmers.

I watched him go.

A dozen metres away, he paused and turned back. I thought he started to lift one hand.

And a liquid gout of blasterfire splashed out from across the dock. It caught him in the head and chest and torched away everything in its path.

He stood for a moment, gone from the chest up, and then the smoking ruins of his body collapsed sideways, over the edge of the dock, bounced off the nose carapace of the nearest skimmer and slid into the water with a flat splash.

Something tiny stabbed up under my ribs. A small noise came seeping up through me and I locked it down behind my teeth. I spun, weaponless in the direction the blast had come from.

Jadwiga stepped out of a doorway in the baling station. From somewhere she’d got hold of Murakami’s plasmafrag rifle, or one very like it.

She held it propped upright on her hip. The heat haze still shimmered around the muzzle.

“I take it you’ve not got a problem with that,” she called across the breeze and the dead quiet between us.

I closed my eyes and stood there, just breathing.

It didn’t help.

EPILOGUE

From the deck of Haiduci’s Daughter, the coastline of Kossuth fades to a low charcoal line astern. Tall, ugly clouds are still just visible further south where the storm blunders about the western end of the Expanse, losing force in the shallow waters and dying. The forecasts are for calm seas and sunshine all the way north.

Japaridze reckons he could get us to Tekitomura in record time, and he’d happily do it for the money we’ve paid him. But a sudden sprint north from an ageing freight hoverloader would probably just get us noticed, and that’s not what we need right now. The slow, commonplace commercial rhythm of the stopping route up the western coast of the Saffron Archipelago makes afar better cover. And timing is the key.

Somewhere, I know, there’s an investigation ripping through the corridors of power in Millsport. The Envoy ops auditors have been needlecast in and are picking over the scant debris of Murakami’s covert operation. But like the fading storm on the Expanse, it isn’t going to touch us. We’ve got time, if we’re lucky all the time we need. The Qualgrist virus is creeping steadily through the global population and the threat it poses will drive the Harlan family out of their aristo flesh and back into the datastacks with their ancestors. The power vacuum their withdrawal creates at the centre of things will suck the rest of the First Families oligarchy into a political maelstrom that they’ll handle badly, and then things will begin to fall apart. The yakuza, the haiduci and the Protectorate will circle like bottlebacks around a weakened elephant ray, waiting for outcome and watching each other. But they won’t move yet, any of them.

That’s what Quellcrist Falconer believes, and though sometimes it sounds a little too slick, like Soseki Koi’s march-of-history rhetoric, I’m inclined to agree with her. I’ve seen this process on other worlds, in some places I’ve worked to bring it about, and there’s the ring of truth to her projections. Plus she was there for the Unsettlement and that makes her a bigger expert on political change on Harlan’s World than any of us.

It’s strange, being around her. Bad enough that you know you’re talking to a centuries-old historical legend—that knowledge is a fluctuating thing, sometimes vague, sometimes eerily immediate. But beyond it, there’s the increasing fluidity with which she comes and goes, switching places with Sylvie Oshima the way Japaridze changes watch on the bridge with his first officer. Sometimes you’ll see it happen, and it’s like a flash of static across her face—then she blinks it away and you’re dealing with a different woman. At other times, I have moments when I’m not sure which of them I’m talking to. I have to watch the way the face moves, listen to the cadences of the voice again.

I wonder if in the decades to come, this slippery new kind of identity is going to become a common human reality. From what Sylvie tells me when she’s up, there’s no reason why not. The potential in the deCom systems is almost unlimited.

It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies.

Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.

I try not to think too much about Segesvar and the others. Especially the other Kovacs. Slowly, I’m talking to Jad again because in the end I can’t blame her for what she did. And Virginia Vidaura, the night we pulled out of Newpest harbour aboard Haiduci’s Daughter, gave me an object lesson in learning to let these things go. We fucked, gently, careful of her slowly healing face, and then she wept and talked to me about Jack Soul Brasil all night. I listened and soaked it up, the way she trained me a century ago. And in the morning, she took my waking erection in her hand, pumped it and mouthed it and slid it inside herself and we fucked again, and then got up to face the day. She hasn’t mentioned Brasil since, and when I did, inadvertently, she blinked and smiled, and the tears never made it out of her eyes onto her face.

We are all learning to put these things away, to live with our losses and to worry instead about something we can change.

Oishii Eminescu once told me there was no point in toppling the First Families because it would only bring the Protectorate and the Envoys down on Harlan’s World. He thought Quellism would have failed if the Envoys had existed during the Unsettlement. I think he was probably right, and even Quell herself has a hard time arguing it any other way, though when the sun is going down over a burnished evening ocean and we sit on deck with tumblers of whisky, she likes to try.

It doesn’t really matter. Because down in the capacity vault, stretching minutes into months, Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals. By the time we get to Tekitomura, Sylvie at least thinks they’ll have it down. And from there she thinks they can teach the same trick to Oishii and maybe some other like-minded deComs.