“Yes, it does. They know we’re coming.” Oddly enough, saying it made me smile. “They don’t know exactly when or exactly how, but they know.”

We watched the boats around us. I smoked the Erkezes down to a stub.

Sierra Tres sat silent and motionless.

“I guess Sanction IV was hard,” she said later.

“You guess right.”

For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.

“Ado blames you,” she told me. “So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.”

“Well, I’m a likeable guy.”

A smile bent her mouth. “So it seems.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.

“I saw you, Kovacs.”

“Saw me where?”

“Saw you with Vidaura.”

That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.

“See anything you liked?”

“I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.”

“No.” Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. “No, we weren’t.”

More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa.

Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the north eastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.

“Does Brasil know?” I asked.

Now it was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Have you told him?”

“No.”

“Has she?”

And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.

This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.

I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amidst bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.

Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.

Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started.

It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.

Hey, she was there too.

After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.

“Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,” she said cryptically, and wandered off towards the stern.