“Yes.” My voice softened a fraction. I’d misread the tension in him. It wasn’t hostility. “I’ve spoken to her.”

Inside the hoverloader, there was an unexpected sense of space and natural light. Combat vessels of this sort are usually pretty cramped, but Soseki Koi had had a lot of time to change all that. Bulkheads had been ripped out and in places the upper level deck had been peeled back to create five metre light wells. The sun poured in through the few vision ports and the opened dorsal hatches, blasted its way elsewhere between cracked armouring that might have been battle damage or deliberate modification. A riot of plantlife clustered about these opened areas, spilling out of hung baskets and twining up exposed struts in the skeleton of the fuselage. Illuminum panelling had been carefully replaced in some areas, left to decay in others.

Somewhere not visible, waterflow over rocks chuckled in patient counterpoint to the bassline pounding of the surf outside.

Koi got us seated on padded matting around a low, formally-set table at the bottom of one of the light wells. He served us with traces of old school ceremony from the ‘loader’s autochef, which sat on a shelf behind him and still seemed to be working pretty well. To the selection of grilled meat and pan noodles, he added a pot of belaweed tea and fruit grown from the plants overhead—vine plums and thick, thirty-centimetre lengths of Kossuth chainberry. Brasil dug into everything with the enthusiasm of a man who’d been in the water all day. I picked at my food, took just enough to be polite apart from the chainberry, which was some of the best I’d ever tasted. Koi held himself rigidly back from questions while we ate.

Eventually, Brasil tossed the stripped threads of his last piece of chainberry onto his plate, wiped his fingers on a napkin and nodded at me.

“Tell him. I gave him the highlights, but it’s your story.”

“I—” I looked across the table of devastated food and saw the hunger that sat there. ”Well. It’s a while back now. A few months. I was up in Tekitomura, on. Business. I was in this bar down on the waterfront, Tokyo Crow. She was—”

It felt strange, telling it. Strange, and if I was honest, very distant.

Listening to my own voice now, I suddenly had a hard time myself believing the path I’d tracked from that night of splattered blood and screaming hallucinations, out across the machine-haunted wastes of New Hok and back south again, running from a doppelgänger. Quixotic chivalry in wharfside bars, frantic schizophrenic sex and repeated waterborne flight in the company of a mysterious and damaged woman with hair of living steel, mountainside gunbattles with the shards of myself amidst the ruins of our Martian heritage. Sylvie was right when she christened me Micky in the shadows of the crane. It was pure experia.