“She told you that?”

We were eye to eye, a scant half metre of seawind between us. “Yes, she told me that.”

“I don’t fucking believe you.”

She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged.

“What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off! You’re going to hand me that tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?”

“No, it wasn’t.” For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. “None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?”

“Then,” I said evenly. “You should have planned it better.”

“Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.”

Silence.

I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and Angelfire Flirt flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost-aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.

But not about this conversation.

That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.

“Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking funny,” the woman at my side said sourly.

I shook my head. “Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshippers.”

“Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.”

“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”

She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:

Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily-blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer real death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.

“So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,” I said after a while. “This weapon you sold the yakuza.”

She twitched. Didn’t look at me. “You know about that, huh?”

“I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?”

She stared down at the water for a while.

“It’s taking a lot for granted,” she said slowly. “Thinking I should trust you with this.”

“Why? Is it reversible?”

She grew very still.

“I don’t think so.” I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. “I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.”

“So what is it?”

Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.

“It’s a genetic weapon,” she said clearly. “In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones that survived, would pass it on to their children and those children would pass it on to theirs.”

“Nice.”

“It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?”

“Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.”

“Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?”

I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.

“Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,” I said flatly.

The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. “I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal make-up that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality—in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything to hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.”

“Genetically encoded insurgency.” I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm, descending. “Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great grandchildren and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?”

“I don’t know.” She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had lent her. “Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I … After it ended. Maybe no one was left.”

I nodded again. “Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.”

She shot me a weary look.

“It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporised because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns levelled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed in their hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor.”