She shrugged. “Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.”

“And it isn’t?”

A wry grin. “No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.”

“The Initiative can’t last forever.”

“No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.”

“Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.”

“Well, spot the fucking offworlder.” She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. “Might not be big by your standards—I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Round here it’s a little different.”

I smiled. “I’m from here, Sylvie.”

“Oh, yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.”

In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.

You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar System with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

Well, wouldn’t you?

“I’m going to bed,” slurred Sylvie. “Busy day tomorrow.”

I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the

Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.

“Sylvie, it is tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated.

“ ‘loader doesn’t lift ‘til lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.”

“Thanks.”