“I am fucking calm!”

My shout sank into the nilvibe muffling like pain drowned in IV endorphin. No one said anything for a while. Mari Ado looked pointedly away, out of the window. Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow. Brasil examined the floor with elaborate care. I grimaced and tried again. Quietly.

“Guys, this is my problem, and I would like to deal with it myself.”

“No.” It was Koi. “There is no time for this. We have already spent two days that we can ill afford in preparation. We cannot delay further. Your private vendettas will have to wait.”

“It isn’t going to take—”

“I said no. By tomorrow morning your bearded friend will in any case be looking in entirely the wrong place for you.” The ex-Black Brigade commando turned away, dismissing me the way Virginia Vidaura would sometimes do when we’d performed badly in Envoy training sessions. “Sierra, we’ll need to up the realtime ratio on the construct. Though I don’t imagine it ramps that high anyway, does it?”

Tres shrugged. “Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.”

“That’s fine.” Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. “It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels—the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.”

Tres nodded, already moving. “I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.”

She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.

“Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.”

I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.

“You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?”

Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.

“Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.”

“Yeah, I think we should.”