“The? Oh, I thought I was a real fucking free spirit. Stormriders, Standing Wave, Vchira Dawn Chorus. Some others, I don’t remember them all now.” He shook his head. ”So fucking stupid.”

We watched the waves.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked him.

He stretched and tipped his head back towards the sun, eyes clenched shut. A sound like a cat purring made its way up out of his chest, broke finally into a chuckle.

“Here on Vchira? I don’t know, I don’t keep track. Got to be close to a century by now, I guess. On and off.”

“And Virginia says the Bugs folded two decades back.”

“Yeah, near enough. Like I said, Sierra still gets out and about occasionally. But most of the rest of us haven’t been in worse than a beach brawl for ten, twelve years.”

“Let’s hope you haven’t got rusty then.”

He flipped another grin at me. “You take a lot for granted.”

I shook my head. “No, I just listen carefully. This will affect us all, one way or the other? You got that right. You’re going to go with this, whatever the others do. You think it’s for real.”

“Oh yeah?” Brasil lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes. “Well, here’s something you might want to think about then. Something you probably don’t know. Back when the Quellists were fighting the First Families for continental dominance of New Hokkaido, there was a lot of talk about government death squads targeting Quell and the other Contingency Committee names. Sort of counterblow to the Black Brigades. So you know what they did?”

“Yeah, I know.”

He squinted an eye open. “You do?”

“No. But I don’t like rhetorical questions. You’re going to tell me something, get on and tell me.”

He closed his eyes again. I thought something like pain passed over his face.

“Alright. Do you know what data shrapnel is?”

“Sure.” It was an old term, almost outmoded. “Cheap virals. Stone-Age IF stuff. Bits of cannibalised standard code in a broadcast matrix. You lob them into enemy systems and they try to carry out whatever looped functions they were for originally. Clogs up the operating code with inconsistent commands. That’s the theory, anyway. I hear it doesn’t work all that well.”

In fact, I knew the limitations of the weapon pretty well at first hand.

Final resistance on Adoracion a hundred and fifty years ago had broadcast data shrapnel to slow down the Envoy advance across the Manzana Basin, because it was all they had left. It hadn’t slowed us down all that much.

The furious hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the covered streets of Neruda had hurt us far more. But Jack Soul Brasil, with his adopted name and passion for a culture whose planet he’d never seen, didn’t need to hear about that right now.