“No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—”

“Shut up, Tak.”

The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognise them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—

Well, never mind.

I shut up. Listened to the waves.

A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and grey, but all the way up four storeys of seaward facing rooms, the windows winked broadly at us.

An off-note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.

“Ouch.” I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.

“At least he’s trying,” she said obscurely.

“Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.”

She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.

“You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like round here?”

Surfers.

You’ll find them pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World, because pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World there’s an ocean that throws waves to die for. And to die for has a couple of meanings here. 0.8G, remember, and three moons—you can ride a wave along some parts of Vchira for half a dozen kilometres at a time, and the height of the things some of these guys get up on has to be seen to be believed. But the low gravity and the trilunar tug has its flip side, and the oceans on Harlan’s World run current systems like nothing ever seen on Earth. Chemical content, temperature and flow all vary alarmingly and the sea does bitchy, unforgiving things with very little warning. The turbulence theorists are still getting to grips with a lot of it, back in their modelled simulations.

Out on Vchira Beach, they’re doing a different kind of research. More than once I’ve seen the Young effect played out to perfection on a seemingly stable nine-metre face, like some Promethean myth in frame advance—the perfect rising shoulder of water eddies and stumbles drunkenly under the rider, then shatters apart as if caught by artillery frag fire. The sea opens its throat, swallows the board, swallows the rider. I’ve helped pull the survivors from the surf a few times. I’ve seen the dazed grins, the glow that seems to come off their faces as they say things like I didn’t think that bitch was ever going to get off my chest or man, did you see that shit come apart on me or most often of all, urgently, did you get my plank out okay, sam. I’ve watched them go back out again, the ones that didn’t have dislocated or broken limbs or cracked skulls from the wipeout, and I’ve watched the gnawing want in the eyes of the ones who have to wait to heal.

I know the feeling well enough. It’s just that I tend to associate it with trying to kill people other than myself.

“Why us?” Mari Ado asked with the blunt lack of manners she obviously thought went with her offworld name.

I grinned and shrugged.

“Couldn’t think of anyone else stupid enough.”

She took a feline kind of offence at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that, it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.

“Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction IV.”

Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.

Ado glanced sideways. “Don’t you think, Sierra?”

Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty.

The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue colourwashed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than the spray-on swimwear and some cheap jewellery. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten.

But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.

Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylised grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.

I cleared my throat.

“You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction IV’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.”

As an insult, it was as unjust as it was complex. Mari Ado, ex of the Little Blue Bugs, was criminally competent in a number of insurgency roles that had nothing to do with wavecraft, and for that matter no less well endowed physically than a number of the other female bodies in the room, Virginia Vidaura included. But I knew she was sensitive about her shape, and unlike Virginia or myself, she’d never been offworld. In effect I’d called her a local yokel, a surf nerd, a cheap source of sexual service and sexually unappealing all in one. Doubtless Isa, had she been there to witness it, would have yipped with delight.

I’m still a little sensitive myself where Sanction IVs concerned.

Ado looked back across the table to the big oak armchair at the end.

“Throw this motherfucker out, Jack.”

“No.” It was a low drawl, almost sleepy. “Not at this stage.”

He sprawled almost horizontal in the dark wood seat, legs stretched out in front of him, face drooping forward, opened hands pressed loosely one on top of the other in his lap, almost as if he was trying to read his own palm.

“He’s being rude, Jack.”

“So were you.” Brasil curled himself upright and forward in the chair.

His eyes met mine. A faint sweat beaded his forehead. I recognised the cause. Fresh sleeve notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much. He hadn’t given up his bad habits.

“But she’s got a point, Kovacs. Why us? Why would we do this for you?”

“You know damn well this isn’t for me,” I lied. “If the Quellist ethic isn’t alive on Vchira, then tell me where the fuck else I go looking for it. Because time is short.”

A snort from down the table. A young male surfer I didn’t know. “Man, you don’t even know if this is Quell we’re talking about. Look at you, you don’t even believe it yourself. You want us to go up against the Harlan family for the sake of a glitch in some deCom psychobitch’s fucked up head? No way, sam.”

There were a couple of mutterings I took for assent. But the majority stayed silent and watched me.