“Tak, what fucking choice do we have?” Desperation edged his voice. “You know the weird shit that’s been going down in New Hok. Mimints doing things they’re not supposed to, mimints built to specs no one remembers from the Unsettlement. Everyone thinks that’s some kind of machine evolution, basic nanotech all grown up, but what if it’s not? What if it’s deCom that’s triggering this? What if the orbitals are waking up because they’ve got a whiff of the command software, and they’re doing something to the mimints in response? That stuff was designed to appeal to Martian machine systems, as near as we understand them, and the word out of Latimer is that it works. So why wouldn’t it work here?”

I stared at Sylvie Oshima and Jad’s voice echoed back through my head.

—all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post Lyamon—

—handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other—

My mind went spinning off down the avenues Murakami’s own Envoy intuition had opened for me. What if they hadn’t been fighting each other?

Or what if—

Sylvie, semi-conscious on a bunk in Drava, muttering. It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—

The woman who called herself Nadia Makita, lying in another bunk aboard Boubin Islander.

Grigori. There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.

“Those people you’ve got in your pocket,” I said quietly to Murakami. “The ones you murdered for the sake of a more stable tomorrow for us all. They all believed this was Quellcrist Falconer.”

“Well, belief is a funny thing, Tak.” He was staring away past the grav sled and there was no humour in his tone at all. “You’re an Envoy, you know that.”

“Yeah. So what do you believe?”

For a couple of moments he was silent. Then he shook his head and looked at me directly.

“What do I believe, Tak? I believe that if we’re about to decode the keys to Martian civilisation, then the Really Dead coming back to life is going to seem like a small and relatively unremarkable event.”

“You think it’s her?”

“I don’t care if it’s her. It doesn’t change a thing.”

A shout from Tomaselli. Impaler came forging round the side of Segesvar’s devastated farm like some huge thuggish cyborg elephant ray. At the risk of throwing up again, I worked the neurachem gingerly and made out Mallory standing in the conning tower with his coms officer and a couple of other pirates I didn’t recognise. I stood closer to Murakami.

“I’ve got one other question, Tod. What are you planning to do with us? Virginia and me?”