“Whatever you are, I want Sylvie Oshima back unharmed.” I jerked my head at Brasil. “I brought you these new friends you’ve got, but I’m not one of them. If I think you’ve done anything to damage Oshima, I’ll go through them all like angelfire just to get to you. You keep that in mind.”

She looked steadily back at me.

“Thank you,” she said without apparent irony. “I will.”

On deck, I found Sierra Tres propped in a steel frame chair, scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars. I came and stood behind her, cranking up the neurachem as I peered out in the same direction. It was a limited view—Boubin Islander was tucked away in the shade of a massive, jagged fragment of toppled Martian architecture that had hit the shoal below us, bedded there and fossilised into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogues, and now the view out from under the ruin was obscured by ropes of hanging foliage.

“See anything?”

“I think they’ve put up microlights.” Tres put aside the binoculars. “It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.”

“Still twitchy, then.”

“Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.”

“Well.” I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. “Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?”

“You don’t think he made four hundred metres either then?”

“I don’t know.” I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. “He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defences. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred metres off the water when it took them all out.”

She shot me an amused look. “I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.”

“Oh. Sorry. You seem older.”

“Thank you.”

“In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.”

“Or we got lucky.”

“Or we got lucky,” I echoed.