“Yeah, so did I. But after she left, I tried to—” He stops. Click in his throat as he swallows. “We still had joint accounts. She paid hard-class passage south on a Kossuth speed freighter, bought herself a new sleeve when she got there. Surfer specs. Cleaned out her account to make the price. Burnt it all. She’s, I know she’s down there with fucking—”

It chokes off. Thick silence. Some corroded vestige of decency makes me wince.

Keeps my voice gentle.

“So you think Brasil’s still around, huh?”

“What changes on Vchira Beach?” he asks bitterly.

“Alright, Yaros. That’s all I need. Thanks, man.” A cranked eyebrow at my own words. “You take it easy, huh.”

He grunts. Just as I’m about to kill the connection, he clears his throat and starts to speak.

“Listen, if you see her. Tell her …”

I wait.

Ah, fuck it.” And he hangs up.

Daylight fading.

Below me, lights were starting to come on across Tekitomura as night breathed in from the sea. Hotei sat fatly on the western horizon, painting a dappled orange path across the water towards the shore. Marikanon hung coppery and bitten at one edge overhead. Out to sea, the running lights of sweepers already studded the deeper gloom. Faintly, the sounds of the port floated up to me. No sleep at deCom.

I glanced back towards the archaeologue cabin and the Martian eyrie caught at the corner of my eye. It rose massive and skeletal into the darkening sky on my right, like the bones of something long dead. The copper-orange mix of moonlight fell through apertures in the structure and emerged at sometimes surprising angles. There was a cold breeze coming in with the night and the dangling cables stirred idly on it.

We avoid them because we can’t make much use of them on a world like this, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. I knew an archaeologue once who told me human settlement patterns avoid the relics of Martian civilisation like this on every world in the Protectorate. It’s instinctive, she told me. Atavistic fear. Even the dig towns start to die as soon as the excavations stop. No one stays around from choice.

I stared into the maze of shattered moonlight and shadow made by the eyrie, and I felt a little of that atavistic fear seeping into me. It was all too easy to imagine, in the failing light, the slow-paced strop of broad wings and a spiral of raptor silhouettes turning against the evening sky above, bigger and more angular than anything that had flown on earth in human memory.

I shrugged off the thought, irritably.

Let’s just focus on the real problems we’ve got, eh, Micky? It’s not like there aren’t enough of them.

The door of the cabin flexed open and light spilled out, making me abruptly aware of how chilly the air had turned.