“Let’s go then, come on.” He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honour guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed, chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris, and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarised windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.

Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still …

I remembered the voyage aboard the Angelfire Flirt, the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.

And then everything came tumbling down.

“Hello Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?”

Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.

“Didn’t see that one coming, huh?” he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?”

“Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?” He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. “Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there too.”

I felt Jad bristle at my back.

“She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.”

He shrugged and nodded at my newly-acquired pirate friends. “Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.”

It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.

“That was a joke,” he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.