Someone muttered, someone else guffawed. Still cranked tight, my neurachem hearing caught a crude joke about packages. In the coil, my younger self paused. His eyes flickered to the man with the broken lip.

“You. Come here.”

The enforcer didn’t want to. You could see it in his stance. But he was yakuza, and in the end it’s all face with them. He straightened up, met Kovacs’ eyes and stepped forward with a filed-tooth sneer. Kovacs looked back at him neutrally and nodded.

“Show me your right hand.”

The yakuza tipped his head to one side, gaze still locked on Kovacs’ eyes. It was a gesture of pure insolence. He flipped up his hand, extended fingers making it a loosely bent blade. He inclined his head again, the other way, still staring deep into this tani piece of shit’s eyes.

Kovacs moved like whiplash on a broken trawler cable.

He snatched the offered hand at the wrist and twisted downward, blocking the other man’s response options with his body. He held the captured arm straight out and his other hand arced over the wrestling lock of both bodies, blaster pointed. A beam flared and sizzled.

The enforcer shrieked as his hand went up in flames. The blaster must have been powered down—most beam weapons will take a limb clean off, vaporised across the width of the blast. This one had only burnt away skin and flesh to the bone and tendon. Kovacs held the man a moment longer, then turned him loose with an elbow-strike cuff across the side of the head. The enforcer collapsed across the floor with his scorched hand clamped under his armpit and his trousers visibly stained. He was weeping uncontrollably.

Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.

“Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a god to you. Is that clear?”

Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.

“Mistress Oshima. If you’d like to follow me, please.”

She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and followed him out of the cabin. The yakuza filed after them, leaving their captain and the man on the floor. The captain stared at his injured enforcer for a moment, then booted him savagely in the ribs, spat on him and stalked out.

Outside, they’d loaded the three men I’d killed in the eyrie onto a fold down grav stretcher rack. The yakuza captain detailed a man to drive it, then took point ahead of a protective phalanx around Kovacs and Sylvie.