To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.

An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more to it than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.

“Weed trade’s been bad, huh?” I shouted over the turbines.

Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.

“Say what?”

“The weed trade,” I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. “Been bad recently, right?”

She shrugged.

“Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.”

It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics was some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.

I went back to watching the skyline.

After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment, then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing and pressed it to my ear.

“Yeah, what?”

The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear there isn’t much time left

“Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.” can’t hold them back much longer …

“Yeah, I’m working on it.” working now … It sounded like a question.

“Yeah, I said—” there are wings out there … a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked …

It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again cracked open from edge to edge … it’s beautiful, Micky …

And gone.

I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.

Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.

“Bad news?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?”