“Takeshi Kovacs,” said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic “ch” at the end of the name correct. “Welcome to the recuperation stack.”

“Very nice.” I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. “Am I still aboard the hospital?”

The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. “Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.”

I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. “And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“How did I guess?”

“Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—”

“Skip it. I was being rhetorical.” I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

“What ratio are you running all this on?”

“Real time equivalence,” said the woman promptly. “Though I can speed it up if you prefer.”

The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was going to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.