“Go on,” I said.

“It must have been engineered for them; probably by Ultras, or maybe one of them even took a trip to see the Jugglers and they screwed around with his neurochemistry. It doesn’t matter. All that does is that the virus is contagious, transmittable through the air, and it infects almost everyone.”

“Turning them into cultists?”

“No.” It was Vasquez speaking now. He had found a fresh cigarette for himself. “It fucks with you, but it doesn’t turn you into one of them, got that? You get visions, and you have dreams, and you sometimes feel the need…” He paused, and nodded towards the dolphin jutting from the wall. “You see that fish skull? Cost me a fucking arm and a leg. Used to belong to Sleek; one of the ones on the ship. Having shit like that around comforts me; stops me shaking. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“And the hand?”

Vasquez said, “Some of the viruses make physical changes happen. I was lucky, in a way. There’s one that makes you go blind; another that makes you scared of the dark; another that makes your left arm wither away and drop off. You know, a little blood now and again, it doesn’t bother me. At first, before many people knew about the virus, it was cool. I could really freak people out with it. Walk into a negotiation, you know, and start bleeding all over the other guy. But then people started finding out what it meant; that I’d been infected by cultists.

“They started wondering if you were as razor-sharp as they’d heard,” Dieterling said.

“Yeah. Right.” Vasquez looked at him suspiciously. “You build up a reputation like mine, it takes time.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Dieterling said.

“Yeah. And a little thing like this, man, it can really hurt it.”

“Can’t they flush out the virus?” I said, before Dieterling pushed his luck.

“Yeah, Mirabel. In orbit, they’ve got shit that can do it. But orbit’s not currently on my list of safe places to visit, you know?”