I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset—I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.

I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines—if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.

Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between.

Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground—might as well see some of it, I reasoned at the time.

And then Innenin.

When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime.

Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the Innenin debacle, I ended up back on Harlan’s World running rings around local law enforcement and the petty criminals they played tag with. We carved out reputations, stayed ahead of the game, went through anyone who opposed us like angelfire.

An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.