I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. “I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.”

“Natsume,” said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. “Name mean anything to you?”

The look she got back was answer enough.

“Nikolai Natsume.” Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. “Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.”

“That’s a real story?” I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. “I thought it was a propaganda myth.”

Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. “Hey, Natsume never got inside.”

“Yeah, he did,” said Ado. “You don’t want to believe that crap they sell in school these days. He—”

“We can discuss Natsume’s achievements later,” said Brasil mildly.

“For now it’s enough that if we have to crack Rila, the precedent already exists.”

There was a brief pause. The surfer who hadn’t believed in Natsume’s existence outside legend was whispering in Daniel’s ear.

“Okay, that’s fine,” said someone else finally, “But if the Harlan family have got this woman, whoever she is, is there any point in mounting a raid? Interrogation tech they’ve got up at Rila, they’ll have cracked her by now.”

“Not necessarily.” Virginia Vidaura leaned forward across her cleared plate. Small breasts moved under her sprayon. It was strange seeing her in the surfer uniform too. “DeCom are running state-of-the-art gear and more capacity than most AI mainframes. They’re built as well as the wetware engineers know how. Supposed to be able to beat Martian naval intelligence systems, remember. I think even good interrogation software is going to look pretty sick against that.”

“They could just torture her,” said Ado, returning to her seat. “This is the Harlans we’re talking about.”

I shook my head. “If they try that, she can just withdraw into the command systems. And besides, they need her coherent at complicated levels. Inflicting short-term pain isn’t going to get them there.”

Sierra Tres lifted her head.

“You say she’s talking to you?”

“I think so, yes.” I ignored a couple more disbelieving noises from down the table. “At a guess, I’d say she’s managed to use her deCom gear to hook into a phone I used to call one of her crew a while back. Probably a residual trace in the team net system, she could run a search for it. But he’s dead now and it’s not a good connection.”

Hard laughter from a couple of the company, Daniel included. I memorised their faces.

Maybe Brasil noticed. He gestured for quiet.

“Her team are all dead, right?”

“Yes. That’s what I was told.”