“I’m going for a swim,” she called back to us. “Anyone coming?”

I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.

I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen metres out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred metres from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s reef.

I angled right and set off along the beach towards the site of the bonfire.

People nodded at me, some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.

“Strong stuff,” I wheezed and handed it back.

“Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.” He gestured muzzily. “Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.”

Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand amongst them.

Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.

“Just want to say,” she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic. “Thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.”

Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity.

“That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.”

Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.

“Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,” said Hiro.

I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.

“What’s she like?” asked Andrea.

“Uh.” An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. “She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.”

Andrea nodded, smiling happily. “You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.”

“You’ll get your chance, And.” Daniel said, slurring a little. “Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.”

A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.

Hiro nodded grimly. “Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.”

“It’ll be so good,” said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. “To have someone again who knows what to do.”

PART 4

THIS IS ALL THAT MATTERS

TWENTY-EIGHT

North-eastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Mills port Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, aeons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometres across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fuelled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast to other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation.

Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plantlife.

Later still, humans came and did the same.

At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendour. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometres in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.

“I hate the fucking place,” Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffee house called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. “Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.”

It was a standard rant—one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

“You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“So?” She swung a glare on me. “Does that mean I’ve got to like it?”

“No, I guess not.”

We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbour quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafes. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death—others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets further down seemed to have been sanitised—there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbour was full of yachts.

In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun and inside the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workmanlike little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system. Millsport Sessions, Dream of Weed.

At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d greysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect and her eyes were dusted with some haemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

I smiled as I sat down. “We’re fashionably late, Isa. This is Mari. Mari, Isa. So how are we doing?”