“Cool,” said Jadwiga. “And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” Lazlo rolled his eyes. “Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?”

I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?”

Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head towards the centre of the camp.

“Come on then. Let’s get this over with.”

Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly-heated outer chamber of the command ‘fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets.

Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls and a corner mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots.

Our breath clouded faintly in the air.

“So what did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.

“What?”

“Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?”

A grin surfaced on his face. “Well, you know I always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.”

“Las.”

“Okay, okay.” He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. “You were there with her when she woke up, right.”

“Right.”

“What did she say to you? Really.”

I shifted round to look at him. “Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.”

“Yeah.” He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. “See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.”

“Really?” I kept my tone mild.

“Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.” He turned to meet my eyes. “You’ve lost your appetite.”

“She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.”

He shook his head. “Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now, you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.”

“I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.”

And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline. So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.

We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.

“Not going to tell me, huh?”

“There’s nothing to tell, Las.”

More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.

“Look, Micky.” Lazlo hesitated. “I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And to what do I owe this honour?”

“Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—”

The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.

“All yours. See you in the bar.”

We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.

Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ‘fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.

“Oshima’s ill?” he asked flatly.

“Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands.” Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. “Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?”

“The highlands.” Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. “Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work cleanup.”

Lazlo shrugged. “Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have—”

“You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.”

“We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.” The lie came out, Envoy smooth.

Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight—it had been a while since I’d done this. “Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.”

Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.

“You are Serendipity?”

“Yes.”

“The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?”

Tag the pressure point, go after it. “I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.”

“Yes. So I see.” Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. “Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.”

This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. “Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.”

“And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.”

“Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.”

The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.”

“But—”

“We fell back to the north east,” I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. “As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.”

“We? You were involved in that decision?”

“I was bleeding to death,” I repeated.

Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. “You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.”

“Yeah, that’s ‘cause we brought the fucking house down on them,” snapped Lazlo. “Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand to fucking hand in a tunnel on our way out.”

Again, Kurumaya favoured the wincefish with a cold stare.

“There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower level structure. If there—”