The two surfers traded a look. I nodded again.

“Yeah. And where does that leave Sylvie Oshima? She didn’t choose this. She wasn’t a free agent. She was a fucking innocent bystander. And she’ll be just the first of many if you get what you want.”

More silence. Finally, Brasil shrugged.

“So why did you come to us in the first place?”

“Because I rucking misjudged you, Jack. Because I remembered you all as better than this sad wish-fulfillment shit.”

Another shrug. “Then you remember wrong.”

“So it seems.”

“I think you came to us out of lack of options,” said Sierra Tres soberly.

“And you must have known that we would value the potential existence of Nadia Makita above the host personality.”

“Host?”

“No one wants to harm Oshima unnecessarily. But if a sacrifice is necessary, and this is Makita—”

“But it isn’t. Open your fucking eyes, Sierra.”

“Maybe not. But let’s be brutally honest, Kovacs. If this is Makita, then she’s worth a lot more to the people of Harlan’s World than some mercenary deCom bounty hunter you happen to have taken a shine to.”

I felt a cold, destructive ease stealing up through me as I looked at Tres.

It felt almost comfortable, like homecoming.

“Maybe she’s worth a lot more than some crippled neoQuellist surf bunny too. Did that ever occur to you? Prepared to make that sacrifice, are you?”

She looked down at her leg, then back at me.

“Of course I am,” she said gently, as if explaining to a child. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

An hour later, the covert channel broke open into sudden, excited transmission.

Detail was confused but the gist was jubilantly clear. Soseki Koi and a small group of survivors had fought their way clear of the Mitzi Harlan debacle. The escape routing out of Millsport had held up.

They were ready to come and get us.

THIRTY-FIVE

As we steered into the village harbour and I looked around me, the sense of déjá vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.

I could almost see myself.

Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.

It didn’t. But it was the same loosely-gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline and the same working harbour complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big ocean-going rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances.

Men did not.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.

We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago, Boubin Islander’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in to any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags and headed up the main street. It was a slow process—Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up too.

No one spoke to us.

We found the village’s only hotel, overlooking the main square, and booked rooms for a week, using two pristine ID datachips from among the selection we’d brought with us from Vchira. As women, Tres and Makita were our charges and didn’t rate ID procedure of their own. A scarfed and robed receptionist nonetheless greeted them with a warmth that, when I explained that my aged aunt had suffered a hip injury, became solicitous enough to be a problem. I snapped down an offer of a visit from the local woman’s doctor, and the receptionist retreated before the display of male authority. Lips tight, she busied herself with running our ID. From the window beside her desk, you could look down into the square and see the raised platform and fixing points for the community’s punishment chair. I stared bleakly down at it for a moment, then locked myself back into the present. We handprinted for access on an antique scanner and went up to our rooms.

“You have something against these people?” Makita asked me, stripping off her head garb in the room. “You seem angry. Is this why you’re pursuing a vendetta against their priests?”

“It’s related.”

“I see.” She shook out her hair, pushed fingers up through it and regarded the cloth-and-metal masking system in her other hand with a quizzical curiosity at odds with the blunt distaste Sylvie Oshima had shown when forced to wear a scarf in Tekitomura. “Why under three moons would anybody choose to wear something like this?”

I shrugged. “It’s not the most stupid thing I’ve seen human beings commit themselves to.”

She eyed me keenly. “Is that an oblique criticism?”

“No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.”

She matched my shrug. “Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.”

I drew a hard breath.

“Assume what you want. I’m going out.”

Down at the commercial end of the harbour, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl offish ramen, carried it to a window seat and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-aged local wandered across to my table with his tray.

“Mind if I sit here? It’s kind of crowded.”

I glanced around the ‘fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.

“Suit yourself.”

“Thanks.” He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence, then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.

“Not from around here then?”

I felt a light tautening across my nerves. “Makes you say that?”

“Ah, see.” He grinned again. “If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.”

“Good for you.”

“Not off that rayhunter though, are you?”

I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. “What are you, a detective?”

“No!” He laughed delightedly. “What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t any more.”

“So why’d you stay?”

“Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.”

The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.