“You sound proud of it.”

“I’m not.”

She looked at me steadily. “Hence the ‘used to’?”

“Something like that.”

“So how does one stop being an Envoy?” I was wrong. This wasn’t conversation. Tanya Wardani was sounding me out. “Did you resign? Or did they throw you out?”

I smiled faintly. “I’d really rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”

“You’d rather not talk about it?” Her voice never rose, but it splintered into sibilant shards of rage. “Goddamn you, Kovacs. Who do you think you are? You come to this planet with your fucking weapons of mass destruction and your profession-of-violence airs, and you think you’re going to play the injured-child-inside with me. Fuck you and your pain. I nearly died in that camp, I watched other women and children die. I don’t fucking care what you went through. You answer me. Why aren’t you with the Envoys any more?”

The fire crackled to itself. I sought out an ember in its depths and watched it for a while. I saw the laser light again, playing against the mud and Jimmy de Soto’s ruined face. I’d been to this place in my mind countless times before, but it never got any better. Some idiot once said that time heals all wounds, but they didn’t have Envoys back when that was written down. Envoy conditioning carries with it total recall, and when they discharge you, you don’t get to give it back.

“Have you heard of Innenin?” I asked her.

“Of course.” It was unlikely she hadn’t—the Protectorate doesn’t get its nose bloodied very often, and when it happens the news travels, even across interstellar distances. “You were there?”

I nodded.

“I heard everybody died in the viral strike.”

“Not quite. Everybody in the second wave died. They deployed the virus too late to get the initial beachhead, but some of it leaked over through the communications net and that fried most of the rest of us. I was lucky. My comlink was down.”

“You lost friends?”

“Yes.”

“And you resigned?”

I shook my head. “I was invalided out. Psych-profiled unfit for Envoy duties.”

“I thought you said your comlink—”

“The virus didn’t get me; the aftermath did.” I spoke slowly, trying to keep a lock on the remembered bitterness. “There was a Court of Enquiry—you must have heard about that too.”

“They indicted the High Command, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, for about ten minutes. Indictment quashed. That’s roughly when I became unfit for Envoy duties. You might say I had a crisis of faith.”

“Very touching.” She sounded abruptly tired, the previous anger too much for her to sustain. “Pity it didn’t last, eh?”

“I don’t work for the Protectorate any more, Tanya.”

Wardani gestured. “That uniform you’re wearing says otherwise.”

“This uniform,” I fingered the black material with distaste, “is strictly a temporary thing.”

“I don’t think so, Kovacs.”

“Schneider’s wearing it too,” I pointed out.

“Schneider…” The word gusted out of her doubtfully. She obviously still knew him as Mendel. “Schneider is an asshole.”

I glanced down the beach to where Schneider was banging about in the shuttle with what seemed like an inordinate degree of noise. The techniques I’d used to bring Wardani’s psyche back to the surface hadn’t gone down well with him, and he’d liked it even less when I’d told him to give us some time alone by the fire.

“Really? I thought you and he…”

“Well.” She considered the fire for a while. “He’s an attractive asshole.”

“Did you know him before the dig?”

She shook her head. “Nobody knew anybody before the dig. You just get assigned, and hope for the best.”

“You got assigned to the Dangrek coast?” I asked casually.

“No.” She drew in her shoulders as if against cold. “I’m a Guild Master. I could have got work on the Plains digs if I’d wanted to. I chose Dangrek. The rest of the team were assigned Scratchers. They didn’t buy my reasons, but they were all young and enthusiastic. I guess even a dig with an eccentric’s better than no dig at all.”

“And what were your reasons?”

There was a long pause, which I spent cursing myself silently for the slip. The question had been genuine—most of my knowledge of the Archaeologue Guild was gleaned from popular digests of their history and occasional successes. I had never met a Guild Master before, and what Schneider had to say about the dig was obviously a filtered version of Wardani’s pillow talk, stepped on by his own lack of deeper knowledge. I wanted the full story. But if there was one thing that Tanya Wardani had seen a surplus of during her internment, it was probably interrogation. The tiny increment of incisiveness in my voice must have hit her like a marauder bomb.

I was marshalling something to fill the silence, when she broke it for me, in a voice that only missed being steady by a micron.

“You’re after the ship? Mende—” She started again. “Schneider told you about it?”

“Yeah, but he was kind of vague. Did you know it was going to be there?”

“Not specifically. But it made sense; it had to happen sooner or later. Have you ever read Wycinski?”

“Heard of him. Hub theory, right?”

She allowed herself a thin smile. “Hub theory isn’t Wycinski’s; it just owes him everything. What Wycinski said, among others at the time, is that everything we’ve discovered about the Martians so far points to a much more atomistic society than our own. You know—winged and carnivorous, originally from airborne predator stock, almost no cultural traces of pack behaviour.” The words started to flow—conversational patterns fading out as the lecturer in her tuned in unconsciously. “That suggests the need for a much broader personal domain than humans require and a general lack of sociability. Think of them as birds of prey if you like. Solitary and aggressive. That they built cities at all is evidence that they managed at least in part to overcome the genetic legacy, maybe in the same way humans have got a halfway lock on the xenophobic tendencies that pack behaviour has given us. Where Wycinski differs from most of the experts is in his belief that this tendency would only be repressed to the extent that it was sufficiently desirable to group together, and that with the rise of technology it would be reversible. You still with me?”

“Just don’t speed up.”

In fact, I wasn’t having a problem, and some of this more basic stuff I’d heard before in one form or another. But Wardani was relaxing visibly as she talked, and the longer that went on the better chance there was of her recovery remaining stable. Even during the brief moments it had taken her to launch into the lecture, she had grown more animated, hands gesturing, face intent rather than distant. A fraction at a time, Tanya Wardani was reclaiming herself.

“You mentioned hub theory, that’s a bullshit spin-off; fucking Carter and Bogdanovich whoring off the back of Wycinski’s work on Martian cartography. See, one of the things about Martian maps is, there are no common centres. No matter where the archaeologue teams went on Mars, they always found themselves at the centre of the maps they dug up. Every settlement put itself slap in the middle of its own maps, always the biggest blob, regardless of actual size or apparent function. Wycinski argued that this shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it tied in with what we’d already surmised about the way Martian minds worked. To any Martian drawing a map, the most important point on that map was bound to be where the map maker was located at the time of drawing. All Carter and Bogdanovich did was to apply that rationale to the astrogation charts. If every Martian city considered itself the centre of a planetary map, then every colonised world would in turn consider itself the centre of the Martian hegemony. Therefore, the fact that Mars was marked big and dead centre on all these charts meant nothing in objective terms. Mars might easily be a recently colonised backwater, and the real hub of Martian culture could be literally any other speck on the chart.” She pulled a disdainful face. “That’s hub theory.”