A new increment of rage twisted his face. “It didn’t fucking matter, because we had Rad anyway. We were covered from the start. Why do you think you got away so fucking easily?”

“Uh, because the orbitals shot down your swoopcopter, and the rest of you were too fucking incompetent to track us into the Northern arm perhaps?”

“Fuck you. You think we looked hard for you? We knew where you were going, man, right from the start. We’ve been on you right from the fucking start.”

Enough. It was a hard pellet of decision in the centre of my chest, and it drove me forward, hands raised.

“Well then,” I said softly. “All you’ve got to do now is finish it. Think you can manage that all on your own?”

There was a long moment when we stared at each other, and the inevitability of the fight dripped down behind our eyes. Then he rushed me.

Shattering blows to throat and groin, unwrapping from a tightly gathered line of attack that drove me back a full two metres before I could contain it. I turned the groin strike on a sweeping block downward with one arm and dropped low enough to take the throat chop on the forehead.

My own counter exploded at the same time, directly up and into the base of his chest. He staggered, tried to hook my arm with a favourite aikido move I recognised so well that I nearly laughed. I broke free of it and stabbed at his eyes with stiffened fingers. He swept a tight, graceful circle out of reach and unleashed a side kick into my ribs. It was too high, and it wasn’t fast enough. I grabbed the foot and twisted savagely. He rolled with it, took the fall and kicked for my head with his other foot as momentum rolled him through the air. His instep cracked me across the face—I was already backing off, rapidly to avoid the full force of the kick. I lost my hold on his foot and my vision flew briefly apart. I staggered back against the grav sled as he hit the ground. It bobbed on its fields and held me up. I shook my head to get the airy lightness out of it.

It wasn’t quite as savage as it should have been. We were both tired and relying inevitably on the conditioned systems in the sleeves we wore. We were both making mistakes that under other circumstances might have been lethal. And, perhaps, we were neither of us really sure what we were doing here in the quiet, mist-tinged unreality of the empty dock.

The aspirants believe …

Sylvie’s voice, brooding in the capacity vault.

Everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it.

That’s comforting, isn’t it.