“Into the ship?” Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

“No.” He shook his head, “Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.”

“Or a shuttle.” I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. “What were you flying?”

He grimaced. “Piece of shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.”

“What?” I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. “Wouldn’t fit?”

“Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,” said Schneider morosely. “Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole programme.”

“No one had a spacesuit?”

“What for?” Schneider spread his hands. “It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ‘cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?”

“Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?”

“Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?”

I shrugged. “Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.”