“Truth is,” he told me, as we stood at the centre of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, “we can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it ‘til it breaks.”

“Seems overly rational.”

He laughed. “You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.”

“I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.”

“Yeah, that’s the song.” A wry grimace. “They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?”

I stared at the darkening horizon. “I don’t know.”

“Got to think past that stuff, sam. Got to. It’ll kill you if you don’t.”

On the other side of one of the bubblefabs, someone went past in the thickening gloom and called something out in Stripjap. Oishii grinned and yelled back. Laughter rattled back and forth. Behind us, I caught the scent of woodsmoke as someone kindled a fire. It was a standard deCom camp temporary‘fabs blown and hardened from stock that would dissolve down just as rapidly as soon as it was time to move on. Barring occasional stopovers in abandoned buildings like the Quellist listening post, I’d been living in similar circumstances with Sylvie’s crew for most of the last five weeks. Still, there was a relaxed warmth around Oishii Eminescu that was at odds with most of the deComs I’d run into so far. A lack of the usual racing-dog edginess.

“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.

“Oh, a while. While longer than I’d like, but—”

A shrug. I nodded.

“But it pays. Right?”

He grinned sourly. “Right. I’ve got a younger brother studying Martian artefact tech in Millsport, parents both coming up on needing re-sleeves they can’t afford. Way the economy’s going right now, nothing else I could do would pay enough to cover the outlay. And the way Mecsek’s butchered the education charter and the sleeve pension system, these days, you don’t pay, you don’t get.”

“Yeah, they’ve really fucked things up since I was last here.”