“Well.” He rubbed vigorously at his cropped hair so fine spray flew out of it. The hint of a grin surfaced, as if the return to practical topics of conversation was some kind of reunion with an old friend. “That’s a little problematic, but we’ll sort something out. Way things are these days back on Earth, they’d probably want me to bring you both in, or wipe you both out. Renegade Envoys don’t profile well under the current administration.”

I nodded wearily. “And so?”

The grin powered up. “And so fuck ‘em. You’re an Envoy, Tak. So is she. Just because you lost your clubhouse privileges, doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Just walking away from the Corps doesn’t change what you are. You think I’m going to write that off because a greasy little gang of Earth politicians are looking for scapegoats.”

I shook my head. “That’s your employers you’re talking about there, Tod.”

“Fuck that. I answer to Envoy Command. We don’t EMP our own people.” He caught his lower lip in his teeth, glanced at Virginia Vidaura and then back at me. His voice dropped to a mutter. “But I’m going to need some co-operation to swing this, Tak. She’s taking the whole thing too hard. I can’t turn her loose with that attitude. Not least because she’s likely to put a plasmafrag bolt through the back of my head as soon as I turn around.”

Impaler drifted in sideways towards an unused section of the dock.

Her grapples fired and chewed holes in the evercrete. A couple of them hit rotten patches and tugged loose as soon as they started to crank taut.

The hoverloader backed off slightly in a mound of stirred-up water and shredded belaweed. The grapples wound back and fired again.

Something behind me wailed.

At first, some stupid part of me thought it was Virginia Vidaura finally venting her pent-up grief. A fraction of a second later I caught up with the machine tone of the sound and identified it for what it was—an alarm.

Time seemed to slam to a halt. Seconds turned into ponderous slabs of perception, everything moved with the lazy calm of motion underwater.

—Liebeck, spinning away from the water’s edge, lit spliff tumbling from her open mouth, bouncing off the upper slope of her breast in a brief splutter of embers—

—Murakami, yelling at my ear, moving past me towards the grav sled—

—The monitor system built into the sled screaming, a whole rack of datacoil systems flaring to life like candles along one side of Sylvie Oshima’s suddenly twitching body—

—Sylvie’s eyes, wide open and fixed on mine as the gravity of her stare drags my own gaze in—

—The alarm, unfamiliar as the new Tseng hardware, but only one possible meaning behind it—