Understanding dawned across her face. “Oh, okay. So that’s how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction IV. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.”

“It wasn’t just that,” I lied.

“Alright.” Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway.

“So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?”

“North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?”

“They converted?”

“He fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.”

“Really? Was she that much of a victim?”

“Virginia, she was fucking indentured!” I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable.

Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. “Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New anti-engineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing but the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.”

“She could have left.”

“They had a fucking child, alright?” Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. “They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.”

Vidaura nodded. “And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.”

“Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.”

“So what happened? She upset some venerable male?”