There was another pause. Aboard the skimmer, Brasil disappeared into the cabin. I only caught the tail end of the motion, but it seemed abrupt and impatient. Tracking back, I saw Virginia Vidaura staring up at me.

“Then,” said the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita, “it would seem I’m wasting my time with you.”

“Yeah. I would think you are.”

If it made her angry, she didn’t show it. She just shrugged again, got up and gave me a curious smile, then wandered away along the sunset drenched dock, peering occasionally over the edge into the soupy water.

Later, I saw her talking to Koi, but she left me alone for the duration of the ride to Segesvar’s place.

As a final destination, the farm was not impressive. It broke the surface of the Expanse resembling nothing so much as a collection of waterlogged helium blimps sunk among the ruins of yet another U-shaped baling station. In fact, before the advent of the combines, the place had seen service as an independent belaweed dock, but unlike the other stations we’d stopped at, it hadn’t sold to the incoming corporate players and was derelict within a generation. Radul Segesvar had inherited the bare bones as part-payment of a gambling debt and must not have been too happy when he saw what he’d won. But he put the space to work, refitted the decaying station in deliberately antique style and extended the whole installation across what was previously the commercial capacity harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. Now the complex boasted a small, exclusive brothel, elegant casino facilities and the blood-rich heart of it all, the thing that gave customers a frisson they couldn’t duplicate in more urban surroundings, the fight pits.

There was a party of sorts when we arrived. Haiduci pride themselves on their hospitality and Segesvar was no exception. He’d cleared a space on one of the covered docks at the end of the old station and laid on food and drink, muted music, fragrant real-wood torches and huge fans to shift the swampy air. Handsome men and women drawn either from the brothel downstairs or one of Segesvar’s Newpest holoporn studios circulated with heavily-laden trays and limited clothing. Their sweat was artfully beaded in patterns across their exposed flesh and scented with tampered pheromones, their pupils were blasted open on some euphoric or other, their availability subtly hinted at. It was perhaps not ideal for a gathering of neoQuell activists, but that may have been deliberate on Segesvar’s part.

He’d never had much patience with politics.