I smeared her a brief smile. “Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?”

They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.

I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.

“Is that her?” asked Tres tautly.

I lifted my free hand. “Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?”

“I would advise against overreaction.” But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were.

“The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.”

My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.

“Have you fed her?” I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.

“Intravenously.” Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. “You must understand that—”

“We understand perfectly,” said Brasil, “We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.”

He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle.

Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.

“Stand down. All of you.”

I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, “You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.”