Brasil was crouched there, frag rifle cradled in both arms. He nodded grimly forward. I followed the look and the rage took a new twist inside me. Sierra Tres lay with one leg smashed to red glinting fragments. Isa was down near her, drenched in blood. Her breath was coming in tight little gasps. A couple of metres off, the frag rifle she’d brought up on deck lay abandoned.

I ran to it, scooped it up like a loved child.

Brasil opened fire from the other side of the deck. His frag rifle went off with a ripping, cracking roar and muzzle flash stabbed out a metre from the end of the barrel. The swoopcopter swung in from the right, flinching upward as the pilot spotted the fire. More machine-gun slugs ripped across Boubin Islander’s masts with a pinging sound, too high to worry about. I braced myself against the gently pitching deck and put the stock to my shoulder. Lined up, and started shooting as the Dracul drifted back. The rifle roared in my ear. Not much hope of a hit, but standard frag load is proximity fused and maybe, just maybe—

Maybe he’ll slow down enough for you to get close? Come on, Micky.

For a moment, I remembered the Sunjet, dropped on the parapet as I lifted Sylvie Oshima. If I’d had it now I could have this motherfucker out of the sky as easy as spitting.

Yeah, instead, you’re stuck with one of Brasil’s museum pieces. Nice going,

Micky. That mistake is about to kill you.

The second source of ground fire seemed to have rattled the pilot slightly, for all that nothing we were throwing into the sky had touched him. Maybe he wasn’t a military flyer. He passed over us again at a steep, side-slipping angle, almost snagging on the masts. He was low enough that I saw his masked face peering downward as he banked the machine. Teeth gritted in fury, face soaked with the upcast spray of the maelstrom, I followed him with frag fire, trying to keep him in the sight long enough to get a hit.

And then, in the midst of the gunsnarl and drifting mist, something exploded near the Dracul’s tail. One of us had managed to put a frag shell close enough for proximity fusing. The swoopcopter staggered and pivoted about. It seemed undamaged, but the near miss must have scared the pilot. He kicked his craft upward again, backing around us in a wide, rising arc. The silent machine-gun fire kicked in again, came ripping across the deck towards me. The magazine of the frag gun emptied, locked open. I threw myself sideways, hit the deck and slid towards the rail on spray-slick wood—

And the angelfire reached down.

Out of nowhere, a long probing finger of blue. It stabbed out of the clouds, sliced across the spray-soaked air and abruptly the swoopcopter was gone. No more machine-gun fire scuttling greedily at me, no explosion, no real noise outside the crackle of abused air molecules in the path of the beam. The sky where the Dracul had been caught fire, flared up and then faded into the glow of an afterimage on my retina.

—and I slammed into the rail.

For a long moment there was only the sound of the maelstrom and the slap of wavelets against the hull just below me. I craned my head up and stared. The sky remained stubbornly empty.

“Got you, you motherfucker,” I whispered to it.

Memory slotted. I got myself upright and ran to where Isa and Sierra Tres both lay in running swipes of spray-diluted blood. Tres had propped herself against the side of the fairweather cockpit, and was tying herself a tourniquet from shreds of blood-soaked cloth. Her teeth gritted as she pulled it tight—a single grunt of pain got past her. She caught my eye and nodded, then rolled her head to where Brasil crouched beside Isa, hands frantic over the teenager’s sprawled body. I came and peered over his shoulder.

She must have taken six or seven slugs through the stomach and legs.

Below the chest, it looked as if she’d been savaged by a swamp panther.

Her face was still now, and the panting breaths from before had slowed.

Brasil looked up at me and shook his head.

“Isa?” I got on my knees beside her in her blood. “Isa, talk to me.”

“Kovacs?” She tried to roll her head towards me, but it barely moved. I leaned closer, put my face close to hers.

“I’m here, Isa.”

“I’m sorry Kovacs,” she moaned. Her voice was a little girl’s, barely above a high whisper. “I didn’t think.”

I swallowed. “Isa—”

“I’m sorry—”

And, abruptly, she stopped breathing.

THIRTY-FOUR

At the heart of the maze-like group of islets and reefs wryly named Eltevedtem, there was once a tower over two kilometres high. The Martians built it directly up from the seabed, for reasons best known to themselves, and just short of half a million years ago, equally inexplicably, it fell into the ocean. Most of the wreckage ended up littered across the local seabed, but in places you can still find massive, shattered remnants on land. Over time, the ruins became part of the landscape of whichever islet or reef they had smashed down onto, but even this subliminal presence was enough to ensure that Eltevedtem remained largely unpeopled. The fishing villages on the northern arm of the Millsport Archipelago, at a couple of dozen kilometres distant, were the closest human habitation. Millsport itself lay over a hundred kilometres further south. And Eltevedtem (lost in one of the pre-Settlement Magyar dialects) could have swallowed a whole flotilla of shallow-draught vessels, if said flotilla didn’t want to be found. There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.

It was a good place to hide.

From external pursuers, anyway.

I leaned on Boubin Islander’s rail and stared down into limpid waters.

Five metres below the surface, a brightly-coloured mix of native and colonial fish nosed around the white spraycrete sarcophagus we’d buried Isa in. I had some vague idea about contacting her family once we got clear, to let them know where she was, but it seemed a pointless gesture.

When a sleeve is dead, it’s dead. And Isa’s parents weren’t going to be any less sick with worry when a recovery team cracked open the spraycrete and found someone had carved the stack out of her spine.

It lay in my pocket now, Isa’s soul, for want of a better descriptor, and I could feel something changing in me with the solitary weight it made against my fingers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t dare leave it for anyone else to find either. Isa was solidly implicated in the Millsport raid, and that meant a virtual interrogation suite up at Rila Crags if she was ever retrieved. For now, I would have to carry her, the way I’d carried dead priests southward to punishment, the way I’d carried Yukio Hirayasu and his gangster colleague in case I needed them to bargain with.

I’d left the yakuza stacks buried in the sand under Brasil’s house on Vchira Beach, and I hadn’t expected the pocket to fill again so soon. Had even, on the voyage east to Millsport, caught myself taking occasional, momentary pleasure in the strange new lack of carriage, until the memories of Sarah and the habit of hatred came searing back.

Now the pocket was weighted again, like some fucked-up modern day variant on the Ebisu-cursed trawl net in the Tanaka legend, destined forever to bring up the bodies of drowned sailors and nothing much else.

There didn’t seem to be any way for it to stay empty, and I didn’t know what I felt any more.

For nearly two years, it hadn’t been that way. Certainty had coloured my existence a grained monochrome. I’d been able to reach into my pocket and weigh its varying contents in my palm with a dark, hardened satisfaction.