This whole tendering angle’s fucked anyway. Todor plumed fresh smoke out over the rail. No one can afford us, no one trusts us. Can’t see the point, can you?

I thought it was about offsetting non-operational costs while you guys were sitting on your arses undeployed.

Oh, yeah. Which is when?

Really? I heard it was all pretty quiet right now. Since Hun Home, I mean.

Going to tell me some covert insurgency tales?

Hey, sam. He passed me the pipe. You’re not on the team any more.

Remember?

I remembered.

Innenin!

It bursts on the edges of memory like a downed marauder bomb going up distant, but not far enough off to be safe. Red laser fire and the screams of men dying as the Rawling virus eats their minds alive.

I shivered a little and drew on the pipe. With Envoy-tuned sensitivity, Todor spotted it and shifted subject.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime.

Yeah. I looked at him bleakly. Where’d you hear that then?

A shrug. Around. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?

The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu’s neck.

Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now.

Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior too, presumably.

Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuck-up he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan’s World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right. Organised crime is like that. Radul Segesvar’s Newpest haiduci mafia or the yak, north or south, they’re all the fucking same.