She gave me a faded smile. “Hey, Micky. Least I can do. G’night.”

“ ‘night.”

I watched her wander to her room, checked my time chip and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.

That was the last conscious thought I had.

Fucking synth sleeves.

FOUR

The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering.

Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.

Shit.

Bang bang.

I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.

Bang, bang, bang.

“Fuck is that?” yelled someone from an inner room.

Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.

“Door,” I said, feeling foolish.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.”

The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.

“Will someone fucking answer that!” It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.

“Got it,” Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. “Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.”

She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.

“You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?” she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. “We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!”

There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad.

He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.