“Wo, come on.” I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the table top with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes.

“Have you no self respect, woman? Stay for one more.”

So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.

And I never see her again.

“Sachilowska?” Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. “Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai street.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again what, to spite her?”

Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.

“It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d got out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.”

“So were you.”

“Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.”

“Okay,” Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. “So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.”

Behind the sound of the waves, I heard Japaridze again.

There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.

“Yeah, that’s right. It happens all the time.” I turned back to face her across the filtered cool of the screen-shaded table. “But I didn’t lose her in the differential, Virginia. I let her go. I let her go with that piece of shit, Josef, and I just walked away.”

Understanding dawned across her face. “Oh, okay. So that’s how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction IV. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.”

“It wasn’t just that,” I lied.

“Alright.” Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway.

“So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?”

“North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?”

“They converted?”

“He fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.”

“Really? Was she that much of a victim?”

“Virginia, she was fucking indentured!” I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable.

Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. “Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New anti-engineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing but the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.”

“She could have left.”

“They had a fucking child, alright?” Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. “They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.”

Vidaura nodded. “And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.”

“Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.”

“So what happened? She upset some venerable male?”

“No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable.” The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. “Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.”

The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earthbound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, prehuman, interstellar civilisation cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels; God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Re-sleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.

I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. “She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the centre of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.”

I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicoloured idiot tide it was.

“Afterwards, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometres out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.”

“That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.”

“Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.”

I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.

“So you’ve been there,” she murmured.

I nodded. “Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, snivelling by her grave. I got the story out of him.” My face twitched with the memory. “Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.”

“And then?”

“And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.”