Rimsc sat up and smiled, and casually lifted the gun he had been holding all the time. There was a flash, but Keech heard no sound. Something smashed into his side and spun him around. Next thing he knew, he was sitting on the pavement in the rain, broken, and unable to move his hand to retrieve his gun that had fallen next to him. The virus: the damned virus. Keech managed to find the strength to tilt his head and glare upwards at Rimsc. The man was still smiling as he narrowed the aperture on his heavy pulse-gun. Last thing: the snout of the weapon cold against Keech’s head, a blow, blackness. That was all for a while.

Out of blackness, Keech woke to the grey. He was not alive and he knew precisely what had happened. He had prepared for this: he was now a reif. I am dead. The years of searching came back to him: the killings and the questionings, the terrible purpose that was empty of feeling. He had hunted down Hoop’s crew with the tenacity of a mining machine digging into a cliff. Rimsc first - it had been a simple thing to rig his suit once he had located him. There had been no restraining morality then as Keech had not considered himself a monitor any more. Killing Corbel Frane had been a high point. In between there had been lesser kills; many of those who had worked for the Eight, and those sent by Frane and perhaps by Hoop himself. So many of them, and so many years. Keech wanted to cry and felt the circuit that activated his eye irrigator becoming live, then going off again. The years of it all continued to download into his newly repaired and activated brain.

* * * *

In the darkness, Windcheater observed Ambel unsteadily leaving his cabin. All but the helmsman, Boris, were back below decks. When Ambel walked over to Windcheater’s food barrel and methodically pulled out steak after steak and munched them down, the sail considered, then rejected, the idea of complaining. He just watched as Boris spotted the Captain then, with a lantern hung from his belt, climbed down from the forecabin and walked across.

‘You better now, Captain?’ Boris asked.

Ambel wiped purple blood from round his mouth before replying. ‘Bad memories,’ he said.

‘Happens like that sometimes. Got shot with a vis gun ‘bout twenty years back. The wound healed in a day but I was real nasty for months after.’

Ambel just looked at him and waited for him to continue - as he did.

‘It was on account of me first wife shooting me with one, ye see.’

Ambel nodded. ‘You remember it all?’ he asked.

‘Mostly,’ said Boris.

‘I don’t. I’ve got a piece missing as long as you’re old, and I don’t want it back. I know what it is, but I don’t want it.’ Ambel looked very closely at Boris. ‘There’s bits, though. Bits keep coming back.’