N-FACT MESSAGE: EPIDERMAL GROWTH 65 % COMPLETE.

What was that? It seemed to come from that cold part of himself. He tried to move and encountered resistance. His body moved, but it was not moving how he wanted it to move. What this all meant was too painful to contemplate, so he concentrated on the task in hand.

The man in Klader claimed he had seen Rimsc and knew where he now was. The man’s information would cost, but that did not matter to Keech: he would have readily paid for it himself if he had not had ECS funding. Rimsc had to die for the things he had done — just as all of them had to die.

N-FACT MESSAGE: HEART RESTART.

A sudden thumping drowned out all coherent thought. It was his heart, of course, yet something was telling him that he hadn’t heard it in a long while. He felt sick now, and there was a huge pressure growing in his head. A sudden swirling all about him made him aware that he was submerged in some kind of fluid. I’m in a tank, I’m injured, he told himself. But surely that was wrong? He was dead. He knew he was dead.

Suddenly the fluid was draining away from all around him. As it went, he found himself lying at the bottom of a slimy hollow in a tangle of tubes. He stared up at the two faces hovering above him and he could feel the machinery attached to his body. This wasn’t right. Who were these people?

ERROR MESSAGE: PHYSICAL RESISTANCE TO CYBPLANT.

DISCONNECT.

Keech tried to ask them who they were, and what was going on. A colder part of himself already knew, and it tried to tell him as fluid jetted from his lungs and from his mouth. He felt he was drowning, and started to struggle

You are the reification Sable Keech. You have been dead for seven hundred years.

Keech gave a liquid gasp, and the sound he next made was more of a croak than a scream. The cold part of himself acknowledged that there was only one thing to do.

MEMPLANT MESSAGE: FULL DOWNLOAD TO ORGANIC BRAIN.

The memories began to return. As they returned, Keech could no longer fight: he was paralysed. A door opened before him and he walked into the apartment, drawing his EC-issue thin-gun. The stink he recognized from Spatterjay: the almost savoury smell of charred flesh. He only recognized his contact because the man was still wearing the bright green shirt he was wearing when he’d left the com message. The face itself wasn’t recognizable, as there was no face. Whoever had done this had obviously taken pleasure in it: they’d tied the man to the chair and done it slowly. This much was evident by the way the man had torn off his own nails by clawing at the chair arms.

Keech moved on into the room, then checked all the doors leading off from it. Nothing he could do here now; he’d come back with the forensic team and go through this room at microscopic level. But he didn’t need the evidence they’d find to know who had been here earlier. He stepped out of the apartment and closed the door behind him, as well as he could, the lock being broken. Holstering his thin-gun he moved to the elevator, stepped inside, and descended the twenty floors to street level. Outside the building, one of those heavy rains that seemed to fall only in Klader was shining the hydrocar streets and running streams past the pavements. Keech folded up his collar and headed for his battered police hydrocar. Would this be another dead end, in more ways than one?

His answer stepped out of the alley next to his car.

‘Sable Keech,’ the man sneered.

He was short, thin-faced, and bald-headed, the heavy coat he wore not concealing the fact that he possessed a physique that appeared boosted. But it wasn’t boosted, not in the usual sense. Keech didn’t bother to respond with words. He pulled his gun and fired, and Alphed Rimsc went over backwards, with a smoking hole through his middle. Keech walked over, his thin-gun down at his side. Just like that: got him.

Rimsc sat up and smiled, and casually lifted the gun he had been holding all the time. There was a flash, but Keech heard no sound. Something smashed into his side and spun him around. Next thing he knew, he was sitting on the pavement in the rain, broken, and unable to move his hand to retrieve his gun that had fallen next to him. The virus: the damned virus. Keech managed to find the strength to tilt his head and glare upwards at Rimsc. The man was still smiling as he narrowed the aperture on his heavy pulse-gun. Last thing: the snout of the weapon cold against Keech’s head, a blow, blackness. That was all for a while.

Out of blackness, Keech woke to the grey. He was not alive and he knew precisely what had happened. He had prepared for this: he was now a reif. I am dead. The years of searching came back to him: the killings and the questionings, the terrible purpose that was empty of feeling. He had hunted down Hoop’s crew with the tenacity of a mining machine digging into a cliff. Rimsc first — it had been a simple thing to rig his suit once he had located him. There had been no restraining morality then as Keech had not considered himself a monitor any more. Killing Corbel Frane had been a high point. In between there had been lesser kills; many of those who had worked for the Eight, and those sent by Frane and perhaps by Hoop himself. So many of them, and so many years. Keech wanted to cry and felt the circuit that activated his eye irrigator becoming live, then going off again. The years of it all continued to download into his newly repaired and activated brain.

In the darkness, Windcheater observed Ambel unsteadily leaving his cabin. All but the helmsman, Boris, were back below decks. When Ambel walked over to Windcheater’s food barrel and methodically pulled out steak after steak and munched them down, the sail considered, then rejected, the idea of complaining. He just watched as Boris spotted the Captain then, with a lantern hung from his belt, climbed down from the forecabin and walked across.

‘You better now, Captain?’ Boris asked.

Ambel wiped purple blood from round his mouth before replying. ‘Bad memories,’ he said.

‘Happens like that sometimes. Got shot with a vis gun ‘bout twenty years back. The wound healed in a day but I was real nasty for months after.’

Ambel just looked at him and waited for him to continue — as he did.

‘It was on account of me first wife shooting me with one, ye see.’

Ambel nodded. ‘You remember it all?’ he asked.

‘Mostly,’ said Boris.

‘I don’t. I’ve got a piece missing as long as you’re old, and I don’t want it back. I know what it is, but I don’t want it.’ Ambel looked very closely at Boris. ‘There’s bits, though. Bits keep coming back.’

‘How’d you lose it?’ Boris asked.

‘Lost it in the sea, Boris. In the sea.’

Windcheater blinked and remained utterly still. Unlike most human conversations, this one he did not understand at all. He recognized the expression of disbelieving horror on the helmsman’s face, and understood that the man had not shuddered because of being cold. But beyond that…

After a long silence Ambel said, ‘In the morning we’ll be at the atolls, and there we’ll refine us some sprine. With that, I’ll free meself of one of those bits. Time the Skinner went to his locker for good.’ He took another steak out of the barrel and began eating it.

‘You shoulda done that long ago. Don’t know why you didn’t. You know it whispers in the night?’ said Boris.

‘I know. Does it to Peck, mainly. Makes him all skittery.’

‘That don’t take much.’

‘Yeah.’

They both eyed each other knowingly, then Boris nodded and turned to walk away, swinging his lantern in the night. Its light glinted on the open eyes of Windcheater as the sail watched Ambel move to the rail.

‘What was that all about?’ the sail queried through his aug.

‘Memory loss through intense pain,’ replied the Warden.