“Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?”

I shrugged. “Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?”

“Oh.” She looked away. “I don’t remember doing that.”

“Well you did.” I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was.

I nodded at what she was wearing. “Clothes are dry, I see.”

“Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.” Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, “I’ll get yours for you.”

We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed.

We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.

“We’d better get you covered up,” I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. “No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.”

She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. “I thought the idea was to leave traces.”

“Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.”

“Alright.”

The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct—a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.

“How may I help you?”

“I have vital information for you,” I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. “I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hover loader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.”

The construct smiled again. “That’s impossible, sir.”