I hooked the young surfer’s gaze. “And your name is?”

“Fuck’s it to you, sam?”

“This is Daniel,” said Brasil easily. “He’s not been here long. And yes, you’re looking at his real age there. Listening to it too, I’m afraid.”

Daniel flushed and looked betrayed.

“Fact remains, Jack. We’re talking about Rila Crags here. No one ever got inside there without an invitation.”

A smile tripped like lightning from Brasil to Virginia Vidaura and on to Sierra Tres. Even Mari Ado chortled sourly into her coffee.

“What? Fucking what?”

I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. “I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.”

“Natsume,” said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. “Name mean anything to you?”

The look she got back was answer enough.

“Nikolai Natsume.” Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. “Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.”

“That’s a real story?” I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. “I thought it was a propaganda myth.”

Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. “Hey, Natsume never got inside.”

“Yeah, he did,” said Ado. “You don’t want to believe that crap they sell in school these days. He—”

“We can discuss Natsume’s achievements later,” said Brasil mildly.

“For now it’s enough that if we have to crack Rila, the precedent already exists.”

There was a brief pause. The surfer who hadn’t believed in Natsume’s existence outside legend was whispering in Daniel’s ear.

“Okay, that’s fine,” said someone else finally, “But if the Harlan family have got this woman, whoever she is, is there any point in mounting a raid? Interrogation tech they’ve got up at Rila, they’ll have cracked her by now.”

“Not necessarily.” Virginia Vidaura leaned forward across her cleared plate. Small breasts moved under her sprayon. It was strange seeing her in the surfer uniform too. “DeCom are running state-of-the-art gear and more capacity than most AI mainframes. They’re built as well as the wetware engineers know how. Supposed to be able to beat Martian naval intelligence systems, remember. I think even good interrogation software is going to look pretty sick against that.”

“They could just torture her,” said Ado, returning to her seat. “This is the Harlans we’re talking about.”

I shook my head. “If they try that, she can just withdraw into the command systems. And besides, they need her coherent at complicated levels. Inflicting short-term pain isn’t going to get them there.”

Sierra Tres lifted her head.

“You say she’s talking to you?”

“I think so, yes.” I ignored a couple more disbelieving noises from down the table. “At a guess, I’d say she’s managed to use her deCom gear to hook into a phone I used to call one of her crew a while back. Probably a residual trace in the team net system, she could run a search for it. But he’s dead now and it’s not a good connection.”

Hard laughter from a couple of the company, Daniel included. I memorised their faces.

Maybe Brasil noticed. He gestured for quiet.

“Her team are all dead, right?”

“Yes. That’s what I was told.”

“Four deComs, in a camp full of deComs.” Mari Ado made a face.

“Slaughtered just like that? Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“I don’t—”

She talked over me. “That they’d let it happen, I mean. This, what’s his name, Kurumaya was it? Old-school deCom big daddy, he’s going to just let the Harlanites walk in and do that under his nose? And what about the rest of them? Doesn’t say much for their esprit de corps, does it?”

“No,” I said evenly. “It doesn’t. DeCom runs as a competition-based nail-it-and-cash-in bounty dynamic. The crews are tight-knit internally. Outside of that, from what I saw there’s not a lot of loyalty. And Kurumaya will have bowed to whatever oligarchy pressure was brought to bear, probably after the event. Sylvie’s Slipins never did themselves any favours with him, certainly not enough for him to buck the hierarchy.”

Ado curled her lip. “Sounds charming.”

“Signs of the times,” said Brasil unexpectedly. He looked at me. “When you strip away all the higher loyalties, we inevitably fall back on fear and greed. Right?”

In the wake of the quote, no one said anything. I scanned the faces in the room, trying to reckon support against dislike and the shades of grey between. Sierra Tres cranked one expressive eyebrow and stayed silent.

Sanction IV, fucking Sanction IV, hung in the air about me. You could make a good case for my actions there being governed by fear and greed.

Some of the faces I was watching already had.

Then again, none of them were there.

None of them were fucking there.

Brasil stood up. He searched the faces around the table, maybe for the same things I’d been looking at.

“Think about this, all of you. It will affect us all, one way or the other. Each one of you is here because I trust you to keep your mouth shut, and because if there’s something to be done I trust you to help me do it. There’ll be another meeting tonight at sundown. There’ll be a vote. Like I said, give it some thought.”

Then he picked up his saxophone from a stool by the window and ambled out of the room as if there was nothing more important going on in his life at that moment.

After a couple of seconds, Virginia Vidaura got up and went out after him.

She didn’t look at me at all.

TWENTY-FIVE

Brasil found me again later, on the beach.

He came trudging up out of the surf with the board slung under one arm, body stripped to shorts, scar tissue and spray-on ankle boots, raking the sea out of his hair with his free hand. I lifted an arm in greeting and he broke into a jog towards where I sat in the sand. No mean feat after the hours he’d had in the water. When he reached me, he was barely breathing heavily.

I squinted up at him in the sun. “Looks like fun.”

“Try?” He touched the surfboard, angled it towards me. Surfers don’t do that, not with a board they’ve owned any longer than a couple of days. And this one looked older than the sleeve that was carrying it.

Jack Soul Brasil. Even here on Vchira Beach, there was no one else much like him.

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

He shrugged, dug the board into the sand and flopped down beside me.

Water sprang off him in droplets. “Suit yourself. Good swell out there today. Nothing too scary.”

“Must be dull for you.”

A broad grin. “Well that’s the trap, isn’t it.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is.” He gestured out to sea. “Get in the water, you do every wave for what it’s worth. Lose that, you might as well go back to Newpest. Leave Vchira for good.”

I nodded. “Get many like that?”

“The burnouts? Yeah, some. But leaving’s okay. It’s the ones who stay on that hurt to look at.”

I glanced at the scar tissue on his chest.

“You’re such a sensitive guy, Jack.”

He smiled out at the sea. “Trying to be.”

“That why you won’t do the clone thing, huh? Wear every sleeve for what it’s worth?”

“Learn every sleeve for what it’s worth,” he corrected me gently. “Yeah. Plus you wouldn’t believe what clone storage costs these days, even in Newpest.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother Ado or Tres.”

He grinned again. “Mari’s got an inheritance to spend. You know what her real name is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I remember. And Tres?”

“Sierra knows people in the trade. When the rest of us packed in the Bug stuff, she went on contracting for the haiduci for a while. She’s owed some favours up in Newpest.”

He shivered slightly, let it run up to a shudder that twitched his shoulders. Sneezed suddenly.

“Still doing that shit, I see. Is that why Ado’s so thin?”