Brasil nodded. “Great.”

“Koi.” Suddenly, I needed to know. “Do you think this is a ghost we’re chasing?”

He made a tiny sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh.

“We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we now do, how could we not be.”

Sarah.

I forced it down, wondering if he saw the wince at the edges of my eyes as I did it. Wondering with sudden paranoia if he already somehow knew.

My voice grated coming out.

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

He blinked and suddenly smiled again

“No, it isn’t. You asked me if I believed, and I evaded your question. Forgive me. On Vchira Beach, cheap metaphysics and cheap politics rub shoulders and both are in frequent demand. With a little effort, a passable living can be made from dispensing them, but then the habit becomes hard to break.” He sighed. “Do I believe we are dealing with the return of Quellcrist Falconer? With every fibre of my being I want to, but like any Quellist I am impelled to face the facts. And the facts do not support what I want to believe.”

“It’s not her.”

“It’s not likely. But in one of her less passionate moments, Quell herself once offered an escape clause for situations such as these. If the facts are against you, she said, but you cannot bear to cease believing—then at least suspend judgment. Wait and see.”

“I’d have thought that mitigates pretty effectively against action.”

He nodded. “Mostly it does. But in this case, the issue of what I want to be true has nothing to do with whether we act or not. Because this much I do believe: even if this ghost has no more than talismanic value, its time is here and its place is among us. One way or another, there is a change coming. The Harlanites recognise it as well as we do, and they have already made their move. It only remains for us to make ours. If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.”

That stayed in my head like an echo, long after we left Soseki Koi to his preparations and rode the bug back along the Strip. That, and his simple question. The simple conviction behind it.

Is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough?

But it wasn’t the same for me. Because this ghost I’d held, and I’d watched moonlight across the floor of a cabin in the mountains while she slipped away from me into sleep, not knowing if she’d be waking again.

If she could be woken again, I didn’t want to be the one to tell her what she was. I didn’t want to be there to watch her face when she found out.

TWENTY-SIX

After that, it went rapidly.

There is thought and there is action, a youngish Quell once said, stealing liberally, I later discovered, from Harlan’s World’s ancient samurai heritage. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins.

Brasil went back to the others and presented Koi’s decision as his own.

There was a splutter of dispute from some of the surfers who still hadn’t forgiven me for Sanction IV, but it didn’t last. Even Mari Ado dropped her hostility like a broken toy as it became clear I was peripheral to the real issue. One by one, in the sunset-painted shade and glow of the common living room, the men and women of Vchira Beach gave their assent.

It seemed that a woken ghost was going to be enough.

The component parts of the raid floated together with a speed and ease that for the more suggestible might have implied the favour of gods or agents of destiny. For Koi, it was simply the flow of historical forces, no more in question than the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. It was a confirmation that the time had come, that the political pot was boiling over. Of course it was going to spill, of course it was all going to fall in the same direction, onto the floor. Where else could it go?

I told him I thought it was luck, and he just smiled.

And it came together anyway.

Personnel:

The Little Blue Bugs. They barely existed any more as an actual entity, but there were enough of the old crew around to form a core that corresponded roughly to legend. Newcomers drawn in over the years by the legend’s gravitational pull sketched an outlined weight of numbers and claimed the nomenclature by association. Over even more years, Brasil had learned to trust some of them. He’d seen them surf and he’d seen them fight. More importantly, he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate. Together, the old and the new, they were as close to a Quellist taskforce as it was possible to get without a time machine.

Weapons:

The casually parked military skimmer in Koi’s backyard was emblematic of a tendency that ran the length and breadth of the Strip. The Bugs weren’t the only heavy-heist types to have taken refuge on Vchira Beach. Whatever it was that drew Brasil and his kind to the waves, it was a general tug that manifested itself just as easily in an enthusiasm for lawbreaking of a dozen different stripes. Sourcetown was awash with retired thugs and revolutionaries and it seemed none of them had ever felt like giving up their toys for good. Shake down the Strip and hardware tumbled out of it like vials and sex toys from the sheets of Mitzi Harlan’s bed.

Planning:

Overrated as far as most of Brasil’s crew were concerned. Rila Crags was almost as notorious as the old secret police headquarters on Shimatsu Boulevard, the one Black Brigade member Iphigenia Deme brought down in smoking rubble when they tried to interrogate her in the basement and triggered her implanted enzyme explosives instead. The desire to do the same thing at Rila was a palpable prickle in the air of the house. It took a while to convince the more passionate among the newly reconfigured Bugs that an all-out assault on the Crags would be suicide of an infinitely less productive form than Deme’s.

“Can’t blame them,” said Koi, his Black Brigade past suddenly glinting in the edge on his voice. “They’ve been waiting long enough for the chance to make someone pay.”

“Daniel hasn’t,” I said pointedly. “He’s barely been alive two decades.”

Koi shrugged. “Rage at injustice is a forest fire—it jumps all divides, even those between generations.”

I stopped wading and looked back at him. You could see how he might be getting carried away. We were both sea-giants out of legend now, knee deep in a virtual ocean amidst the islands and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago at 1:2000 scale. Sierra Tres had called in some haiduci favours and got us time in a high-resolution mapping construct belonging to a firm of marine architects whose commercial management techniques wouldn’t bear too much close legal scrutiny. They weren’t overjoyed about the loan, but that’s what happens when you cosy up with the haiduci.

“Have you ever actually seen a forest fire, Koi?”

Because they sure as hell aren’t common on a world that’s ninety five per cent ocean.

“No.” He gestured. “It was a metaphor. But I have seen what happens when injustice finally triggers retribution. And it lasts for a long time.”

“Yes, I know that.”

I stared away towards the waters of the southern Reach. The construct had reproduced the maelstrom there in miniature, gurgling and grinding and tugging at my legs beneath the surface. If the depth of the water had been to the same scale as the rest of the construct, it probably would have dragged me off my feet.

“And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?”

“Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.” I went on looking into the maelstrom. “During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.”