“I don’t fucking care.” There was anger in his tone now. “I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.”

“Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.”

“My life’s easy enough,” he growled. “Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.”

“You get a stack out of Aiura?”

“Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. “You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.”

He grinned unpleasantly. “Everybody cracks in the end, Tak. You know that. Virtual interrogation, it’s crack or go insane, and these days we can even bring them back from that.” The grin faded out to something harder and no less unpleasant. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Our beloved leader-in perpetuity Konrad will never know what we do or don’t get out of her. He’ll just assume the worst and cringe to heel. Or I’ll call in an assault force, torch Rila Crags around him and then feed him and his whole fucking family to the EMP.”

I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. “You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.” Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. “Is it?”

“Sorry?” But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been running for about four years, which ties in rather too neatly with the start of the Mecsek initiative. You’re not here for the Quellists, you’re here to keep an eye on the deCom technology.”

The grin crept out. “Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.”