Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
We are all learning to put these things away, to live with our losses and to worry instead about something we can change.
Oishii Eminescu once told me there was no point in toppling the First Families because it would only bring the Protectorate and the Envoys down on Harlan’s World. He thought Quellism would have failed if the Envoys had existed during the Unsettlement. I think he was probably right, and even Quell herself has a hard time arguing it any other way, though when the sun is going down over a burnished evening ocean and we sit on deck with tumblers of whisky, she likes to try.
It doesn’t really matter. Because down in the capacity vault, stretching minutes into months, Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals. By the time we get to Tekitomura, Sylvie at least thinks they’ll have it down. And from there she thinks they can teach the same trick to Oishii and maybe some other like-minded deComs.
And then we’ll be ready.
The mood aboard Haiduci’s Daughter is quiet and grim, but there’s an undercurrent of hope to it whose unfamiliar edges I’m still feeling my way around. It isn’t going to be glorious, it isn’t going to be bloodless. But I’m beginning to think it can be done. I think, given the circumstances and a little angelfire, we may be able to bring down the First Families, chase out the yakuza and the haiduci or at least bring them to heel. I think we may be able to warn off the Protectorate and the Envoys, and then, if there’s anything left, we’ll maybe give Quell’s demodynamic nanotech a shot.
And I can’t help believing—hoping, maybe—that an orbital platform that can reach down and wipe out at one and the same time a hoverloaderfull of people and the minute bindings on two individual humans’ hands, that can destroy and record at the same time, that can decant whole minds back into datasystems on the ground
—I can’t help believing that the same system may be able some day to look dawn at the fringes of the Nurimono Ocean and find a pair of decades-abandoned weed grown cortical stacks.
And bring back to life what they hold.