“Not me. She knew it, she recognised something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.” She shivered. “There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells, it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.

“But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?”

“I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years, that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.”

I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angel fire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outwith their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.

Pilot error?

“Sylvie?”

“What?” She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.

“Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?”

“Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?”

“There was a firelight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think …?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.” She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. “I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.”

Todor Murakami, vaporised. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armoured body of the lmpaler and the hundreds of cubic metres of water she floated on, even—I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each—the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands.