Cormac paused, about to ask what she meant. But a certain honesty, integrity, made him close the impulse down. The conversation was about to progress away from the business at hand, and he repressed the urge to abandon it. He sat down on the sofa next to her.

‘Physically I am in good shape but bad condition,’ he said.

‘Curious description.’

Cormac smiled. ‘Everything is healed, everything is there, but my bone and muscle mass is low. Presently I’m on regrowth factors, steroids, and induction stressing of my bones while I sleep.’ He gestured vaguely to the door leading into his sleeping area. ‘It will be weeks before I’m back in condition.’

‘And your mind?’ Mika asked, leaning closer.

‘Fragile, Jerusalem tells me. Apparently, the last time I asked, I have a tendency to over-focus on the task in hand, with an exclusivity that is borderline autistic’

‘But isn’t that how you have always been? I’ve worked with you intermittently, for some years now, yet I know very little about you. How do you relax—do you socialize, do you have family? With you it has always been the job and nothing else. But I know there’s more . . . Chaline for example?’

Cormac felt he wanted to get up, draw this encounter to a close . . . run away. He repressed that urge too.

‘We had a brief liaison at Samarkand, that was all. I was damaged goods then as well—too long gridlinked and apparently losing my humanity.’

‘No inclination to continue where you left off?’

‘The Celedon survivors are heading back to Solsystem.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

‘None.’

‘What about your family?’

‘Are you trying to psychoanalyse me, Mika?’

‘No, this is what is called social intercourse. You might have encountered it before on those occasions when you weren’t shooting someone.’

Cormac could feel something twisted up inside his chest. Exercising rigid control, he chuckled. ‘My family ... my father was a soldier who did not come back from the Prador War, my mother is an archaeologist, on Earth. I have not seen her in forty years. I have two brothers who work in the ECS medical service. I have not seen them in forty years either.’ He waved a hand towards the window. ‘They might even be here, I don’t know. Perhaps we all possess the same narrow focus on our own interests which is why our ways parted. There’s a network family site that I check occasionally, and last time I looked I learned I now also have a sister-in-law, two nieces and a nephew, a grand niece. Also, thirty years back I acquired a stepfather, then a half brother and half sister . . . shall I go on?’

‘No contact at all?’