“What?” Orr, predictably.

Kiyoka looked unhappy. “I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—”

“You are not fucking taking her hair.”

I got up from the bed and faced the giant. “And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?”

“You shut your fucking m—”

“Orr, he’s got a point.” Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. “If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op, and her own anti-virals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?”

Lazlo nodded vigorously. “Might be her only hope, man.”

“She’s been like this before,” said Orr stubbornly. “That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up fine.”

I saw the look swoop among them. No. Not fine exactly.

“If I induce the decoupler,” said Kiyoka slowly, “I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever—she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.”

“Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.” Orr glared around at us. “She’s a nicking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.”

“Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.” I turned back to the bed. “Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?”

“Yeah, it’s security-buffered.”

“And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but …”

“Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?”

Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. “I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.”

“Then—”

“Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.” Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. “Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?”

“That’s not really the issue here,” I said mildly. “All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—”

He swayed towards me. “You’re talking about fucking killing her.”

Jadwiga pushed him back. “He’s talking about saving her, Orr.”

“And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up? Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?”

I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. “Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.”

“We can’t do it anyway, Mick.” Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again.

“If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.”

You could kill this sleeve, anyway, I didn’t say. Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—

I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.

Maybe Orr was right.

“One thing’s sure,” said Jadwiga sombrely. “We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.”

More silence, while the idea settled in.

“Can she be moved?” I asked.

Kiyoka made a face. “She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,” muttered Lazlo. “It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route. I know it’s a risk.”

A slow nod from Jadwiga. “But probably worth it.”

“Going to be the whole night,” said Lazlo. “You got any meth?”

“Is Mitzi Harlan straight?”

She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to businesslike clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.

“You don’t fucking touch her,” he warned me.

From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old

Alain Marriott experia flics like Polar Quarry and The Deep Chase. It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.

Mostly.

But with skill you could feel out the whisper of local net traffic between the members of a crew, the flickering traces of electronic activity that the deComs carried with them like the scent of cigarettes on a smoker’s clothes. With more skill, you could tell the difference between these and mimint spoor and, with the right scrambler codes, you could open communication.

It took until just before dawn, but in the end, Jad and Lazlo managed to get a line on three other deCom crews working the Uncleared between our position and the Drava beachhead. Coded needlecasts sang back and forth, establishing identity and clearance, and Jadwiga sat back with a broad tetrameth grin on her face.

“Nice to have friends,” she said to me.

Once briefed, all three crews agreed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to provide cover for our retreat within their own operational range. It was pretty much an unwritten rule of deCom conduct in the Uncleared to offer that much succour—you never knew when it might be you—but the competitive standoffishness of the trade made for grudging adherence. The positions of the first two crews forced us into a long, crooked path of withdrawal and both were grumpily unwilling to move either to meet us or to provide escort south. With the third we got lucky.

Oishii Eminescu was camped two hundred and fifty kilometres north west of Drava with nine heavily armed and equipped colleagues. He offered immediately to move up and fetch us from the previous crew’s cover radius, and then to bring us all the way back to the beachhead.

“Truth is,” he told me, as we stood at the centre of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, “we can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it ‘til it breaks.”

“Seems overly rational.”

He laughed. “You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.”

“I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.”

“Yeah, that’s the song.” A wry grimace. “They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?”