The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.

“All yours. See you in the bar.”

We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.

Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ‘fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.

“Oshima’s ill?” he asked flatly.

“Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands.” Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. “Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?”

“The highlands.” Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. “Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work cleanup.”

Lazlo shrugged. “Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have—”

“You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.”

“We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.” The lie came out, Envoy smooth.

Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight—it had been a while since I’d done this. “Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.”

Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.

“You are Serendipity?”

“Yes.”

“The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?”

Tag the pressure point, go after it. “I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.”

“Yes. So I see.” Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. “Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.”

This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. “Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.”

“And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.”

“Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.”