In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.

Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger. Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.

The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.

Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.

“Did you kill her?” I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter—cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.

He stared away across the dock. “Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.”

“Real death?”

He nodded. “For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty eight hours of her life.”

“And the ones we lost?”

His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.

“Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.”

He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. “I don’t know. Probably they got them.”

Neither of us needed to follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation.

Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.

“Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.”

“Yes.”