She let the cord go and shook her hair across it. A small smile flickered around her mouth. “Out there, we can get a viral strike flung at us hard enough to scrape out a human mind like fruit pulp. Or just mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces.” She shivered a little. “Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.”

“Sounds like it’s time for some fresh hardware.”

“Yeah,” she grinned sourly. “I just don’t have that much loose change right now. Know what I mean?”

I did know. “Recent tech. It’s a fucker, huh?”

“Yeah. Recent tech, fucking indecent pricing. They take the Guild subsidies, the Protectorate defence funding and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R&D to people like me.”

I shrugged. “Price of progress.”

“Yeah, saw the ad. Assholes. Look, what happened back there is just gunge in the works, nothing to worry about. Maybe something to do with trying to hotwire Jad. That’s something I don’t do usually, it’s unused capacity. And that’s usually where the data management systems dump any trace junk. Running Jad’s CNS must have flushed it out.”

“Do you remember what you were saying?”

“Not really.” She rubbed at the side of her face, pressed fingertips against one closed eye. “Something about religion? About the Beards?”

“Well, yeah. You lifted off from there, but then you started paraphrasing early Quellcrist Falconer. Not a Quellist, are you?”

“Fuck, no.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She thought about it for a while. Under our feet, the Guns for Guevara’s engines began to thrum gently. Departure for Drava, imminent.

“Could be something I caught off a dissemination drone. There’s still a lot of them out in the east—not worth the bounty to decommission, so they get left alone unless they’re fucking up local comlinks.”

“Would any of them be Quellist?”

“Oh, yeah. At least four or five of the factions who fucked up New Hok were Quellist-inspired. Shit, from what I hear she was fighting up there herself back when the Unsettlement kicked off.”

“That’s what they say.”

The door chimed. Sylvie nodded at me, and I went to open it. Out in the faintly shuddering corridor stood a short, wiry figure with long black hair bound back in a ponytail. He was sweating heavily.

“Lazlo,” I guessed.

“Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”

“Long story. You want to talk to Sylvie?”