“You think they’ve got one of you too, don’t you?”

A wry grin. “There’s something special about you, you’d be the only one they copied? Come on, Tak. Does that make any sense? I checked the records. That intake, there were about a dozen of us recruited from Harlan’s World. Whoever decided on this brilliant little piece of insurance back then, they would have copied us all. We need Aiura alive long enough to tell us where in the Harlan datastacks we can find them.”

“Alright. What else?”

“You know what else,” he said quietly.

I went back to watching the Expanse. “I’m not going to help you slaughter Brasil and the others, Tod.”

“I’m not asking you to. For Virginia’s sake alone, I’ll try to avoid that. But someone has to pay the Bugs’ bill. Tak, they murdered Mitzi Harlan on the streets of Millsport!”

“Big loss. Across the globe, skullwalk editors weep.”

“Alright,” he said grimly. “They also killed fuck knows how many other incidental victims in the process. Law enforcement. Innocent bystanders. I’ve got the latitude to seal this operation up afterwards, marked regime unrest stabilised, no need for further deployment. But I’ve got to show scapegoats, or the Corps auditors are going to be all over it like livewire. You know that, you know how it works. Someone has to pay.”

“Or be seen to.”

“Or be seen to. But it needn’t be Virginia.”

“Ex-Envoy heads planetary rebellion. No, I can see how that wouldn’t play too well with the Corps’ public relations people.”

He stopped. Stared at me with sudden hostility.

“Is that really what you think of me?”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “No. I’m sorry.”

“I’m doing my best to nail this shut with a minimum of pain to people who matter, Tak. And you’re not helping.”

“I know.”

“I need someone for Mitzi Harlan’s murder, and I need a ringleader. Someone who’ll play well as the evil genius behind all this shit. Maybe a couple of others to bulk up the arrest list.”

If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.

Koi’s words in the beached and stalled-out hoverloader on Vchira Beach. The words and the flicker of passion around his face as he spoke them, the passion, perhaps, of a martyr who had missed his moment once before and did not intend to again.

Koi, ex-Black Brigade.

But Sierra Tres had said much the same thing while we hid in the channels and fallen ruins of Eltevedtem. And Brasil’s demeanour said it for him, all the time. Maybe what they all wanted was martyrdom in a cause older and greater and weightier than themselves.