“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”

She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:

They come to me with

>Progress Reports<

But all I see is change and bodies burnt;

They come to me with

>Targets Achieved<

But all I see is blood and chances lost;

They come to me with

Choral flicking approval of every thing I do

But all I see is cost.

Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily-blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer real death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.

“So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,” I said after a while. “This weapon you sold the yakuza.”

She twitched. Didn’t look at me. “You know about that, huh?”

“I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?”

She stared down at the water for a while.

“It’s taking a lot for granted,” she said slowly. “Thinking I should trust you with this.”

“Why? Is it reversible?”

She grew very still.

“I don’t think so.” I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. “I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.”

“So what is it?”

Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.