“I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your haiduci pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from haiduci experia flics like Friends of Ireni Cozma and Outlaw Voices. It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the druglike grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.

“Alright, fuck it. Fifteen per cent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen per cent, right?”

I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. “Alright, fifteen per cent. Do you still want these?”

He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight-of-hand and pocketed them.

“You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,” he growled. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

“That’s a compliment, right?”

He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.

“DeCom vet,” he mumbled. “Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—”

“No, I haven’t got any money,” said Segesvar impatiently. “Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.”

He caught my glance.

“What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?”

Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied grey turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.