I twisted about awkwardly in the confined space.

“Is it safe to go up on deck?”

“Yeah, sure. This is a sweet ship, it runs weather exclusion screens from generators in the rigging, I’ve got them up on partial opaque for incoming. Anyone out there nosy enough to be looking, like your little blonde friend, say, your face is just going to be a blob in the scope.”

“Good.”

I ducked out of the cockpit, moved to the stern and heaved myself into the seating area, then up onto the deck proper. This far north, the Reach was running light and the trimaran was almost steady on the swell. I picked my way forward to the fairweather cockpit, seated myself in one of the pilot chairs and dug out a fresh Erkezes cigar. There was a whole humicrate of them below, I figured the owners could spare more than a few.

Revolutionary politics—we all have to make sacrifices. Around me, the yacht creaked a little. The sky had darkened, but Daikoku stood low over the spine of Tadaimako and painted the sea with a bluish glow. The running lights of other vessels sat about, neatly separated from each other by the traffic software. Bass lines thumped faintly across the water from the glimmering shore lights of New Kanagawa and Danchi. The party was in full swing.

Southward, Rila speared up out of the sea, distant enough to appear slim and weaponish—a dark, crooked blade, unlit but for the cluster of lights from the citadel at the top.

I looked at it and smoked in silence for a while.

He’s up there.

Or somewhere downtown, looking for you.

No, he’s there. Be realistic about this.

Alright, he’s there. And so is she. So for that matter is this Aiura, and a couple of hundred hand-picked Harlan family retainers. Worry about stuff like that when you get to the top.

A launch barge slid past in the moonlight, on its way out to a firing position further up the Reach. At the rear, the deck was piled high with tumbled packages, webbing and helium cylinders. The sawn-off forward superstructure thronged with figures at rails, waving and firing flares into the night. A sharp hooting lifted from the vessel as it passed, the Harlan birthday hymn picked out in harsh collision alert blasts.

Happy birthday, motherfucker.

“Kovacs?”

It was Sierra Tres. She’d reached the cockpit without me noticing, which said either a lot for her stealth skills or as much for my lack of focus. I hoped it was the former.

“You okay?”

I considered that for a moment. “Do I not look okay?”

She made a characteristically laconic gesture and seated herself in the other pilot chair. For quite a long time, she just looked at me.

“So what’s going on with the kid?” she asked finally. “You looking to recapture your long lost youth?”

“No.” I jerked a thumb southward. “My long lost fucking youth is out there somewhere, trying to kill me. There’s nothing going on with Isa. I’m not a fucking paedophile.”

Another long, quiet spell. The launch barge slipped away into the evening. Talking to Tres was always like this. Under normal circumstances, I’d have found it irritating, but now, caught in the calm before midnight, it was curiously restful.

“How long do you think they had that viral stuff tagged to Natsume?”

I shrugged. “Hard to tell. You mean, was it long-term shadowing or a trap set specifically for us?”

“If you like.”

I knocked ash off the cigar and stared at the ember beneath. “Natsume’s a legend. Granted a dimly remembered one, but I remember him. So will the copy of me the Harlans have hired. He probably also knows by now that I talked to people back in Tekitomura, and that I know they’re holding Sylvie at Rila. He knows what I’d do, given that information. A little Envoy intuition would do the rest. If he’s in tune, then yeah, maybe he had them clip some viral watchdogs to Natsume, waiting for me to show up. With the backing he’s got now, it wouldn’t be hard to write a couple of shell personalities, have them wired in with faked credentials from one of the other Renouncer monasteries.”

I drew on the cigar, felt the bite of the smoke and let it up again.

“Then again, maybe the Harlan family had Natsume tagged from way back anyway. They’re not a forgiving lot, and him climbing Rila like that made them look stupid, even if wasn’t much more than a Quellboy poster stunt.”

Sierra was silent, staring ahead through the cockpit windscreen.

“Comes to the same thing in the end,” she said at last.

“Yes, it does. They know we’re coming.” Oddly enough, saying it made me smile. “They don’t know exactly when or exactly how, but they know.”

We watched the boats around us. I smoked the Erkezes down to a stub.

Sierra Tres sat silent and motionless.

“I guess Sanction IV was hard,” she said later.

“You guess right.”

For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.

“Ado blames you,” she told me. “So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.”

“Well, I’m a likeable guy.”

A smile bent her mouth. “So it seems.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.

“I saw you, Kovacs.”

“Saw me where?”

“Saw you with Vidaura.”

That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.

“See anything you liked?”

“I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.”

“No.” Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. “No, we weren’t.”

More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa.

Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the north eastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.

“Does Brasil know?” I asked.

Now it was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Have you told him?”

“No.”

“Has she?”

And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.

This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.

I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amidst bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.

Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.

Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started.

It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.

Hey, she was there too.

After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.

“Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,” she said cryptically, and wandered off towards the stern.

A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fairweather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock—from several of our nearest neighbours, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.