“Sch—”

Schneider, whatever his other failings, was a good flyer. He flung the shuttle on its tail before the syllable was out of my mouth. My head snapped back against the seat as we leapt into the sky, trailing a swarm of surface-to-air missiles.

“I’m jammed.”

“I know,” he said tautly.

“Tinsel them,” I yelled, competing with the proximity alerts that screamed in my ears. The altitude numerals flashed over the kilometre mark.

“On it.”

The shuttle boomed with the tinsel bombs’ launch. They detonated two seconds in our wake, sowing the sky with tiny electronic appetisers. The surface-to-air fire spent itself amongst the decoys. On the weapons board at the side of my vision, a cleared light flashed green, and as if to prove the point the launcher executed its last jammed command and launched the two waiting micros into the targetless space ahead of us. Beside me, Schneider whooped and spun the shuttle about. With the high-manoeuvre fields belatedly compensating, I felt the turn slop through my guts like choppy water and had time to hope that Tanya Wardani hadn’t eaten recently.

We hung for an instant on the wings of the shuttle’s AG fields, then Schneider killed the lift and we plunged a steep line back towards the surface of the sea. From the water, a second wave of missiles rose to meet us.

“Tinsel!!!”

The bomb racks banged open again. Sighting on the three undamaged mines below, I emptied the shuttle’s magazines and hoped, breath held back. The micros launched clean. At the same moment, Schneider threw on the grav fields again and the little vessel shuddered from end to end. The tinsel bombs, now falling faster than the crash-reversed shuttle that had launched them, exploded fractionally ahead and below us. My virtual vision flooded with crimson sleet from the storm of decoy broadcast, and then the explosions of the surface-to-air missiles as they destroyed themselves amidst it. My own micros were away, fired through the tiny window of opportunity before the tinsel blew and locked onto the mines somewhere below.

The shuttle spiralled down behind the debris of tinsel and misled missiles. Scant moments before we hit the surface of the sea, Schneider fired one more, carefully doctored pair of tinsel bombs. They detonated just as we slipped below the waves.

“We’re under,” said Schneider.

On my screen, the pale blue of the sea deepened as we sank, nose down. I twisted around, searching for the mines and found only a satisfying array of wreckage. I let out the last breath I’d drawn somewhere up in the missile-strewn sky and rolled my head back in the seat.

“That,” I said to no one in particular. “Was a mess.”

We touched bottom, stuck for a moment and then drifted fractionally upward again. Around us, the shrapnel from the doctored tinsel bombs settled slowly to the seabed. I studied the pink fragments with care and smiled. I’d packed the last two bombs myself—less than an hour’s work the night before we came to get Wardani, but it had taken three days reconnoitering deserted battlezones and bombed-out landing fields to gather the necessary pieces of hull casing and circuitry to fill them.

I peeled off the gunner’s mask and rubbed at my eyes.

“How far off are we?”

Schneider did something to the instrument display. “About six hours, maintaining this buoyancy. If I help the current along with the gravs we could do it in half that.”

“Yeah, and we could get blown out of the water too. I didn’t go through the last two minutes for target practice. You keep the fields banked all the way, and use the time to figure out some way to wipe the face off this bucket.”

Schneider gave me a mutinous look.

“And what are you going to be doing all that time?”

“Repairs,” I said shortly, heading back for Tanya Wardani.

The fire threw leaping shadows, making her face into a camouflage mask of light and dark. It was a face that might have been handsome before the camp swallowed her, but the rigours of political internment had left it a gaunt catalogue of bones and hollows. The eyes were hooded, the cheeks sunken. Deep inside the wells of her gaze, firelight glittered on fixed pupils. Stray hair fell across her forehead like straw. One of my cigarettes slanted between her lips, unlit.

“You don’t want to smoke that?” I asked after a while.

It was like talking on a bad satellite link—a two-second delay before the glitter in her eyes shifted upward to focus on my face. Her voice ghosted out, rusty with disuse.

“What?”

“The cigarette. Site Sevens, best I could get outside Landfall.” I handed the packet across to her and she fumbled it, turning it over a couple of times before she found the ignition patch and touched it to the end of the cigarette in her mouth, Most of the smoke escaped and was carried away on the soft breeze, but she took some down and grimaced as it bit.

“Thanks,” she said quietly, and held the packet in cupped hands, looking down at it as if it were a small animal she had rescued from drowning. I smoked the rest of my own cigarette in silence, gaze flickering along the treeline above the beach. It was a programmed wariness, not based on any real perception of danger, the Envoy analogue of a relaxed man beating time to music with his fingers. In the Envoys you’re aware of potential hazards in the surroundings, the way most people are aware that things will fall out of their hands if they let them go. The programming goes in at the same instinctual level. You don’t let down your guard ever, any more than a normal human being would absent-mindedly let go of a filled glass in mid-air.

“You’ve done something to me.”

It was the same low voice she had used to thank me for the cigarette, but when I dropped my gaze from the trees to look at her, something had kindled in her eyes, She was not asking me a question. “I can feel it,” she said, touching the side of her head with splayed fingers. “Here. It’s like. Opening.”

I nodded, feeling cautiously for the right words. On most worlds I’ve visited, going into someone’s head uninvited is a serious moral offence, and only government agencies get away with it on a regular basis. There was no reason to assume the Latimer sector, Sanction IV or Tanya Wardani would be any different. Envoy co-option techniques make rather brutal use of the deep wells of psychosexual energy that drive humans at a genetic level. Properly mined, the matrix of animal strength on tap in those places will speed up psychic healing by whole orders of magnitude. You start with light hypnosis, move into quick-fix personality engagement and thence to close bodily contact that only misses definition as sexual foreplay on a technicality. A gentle, hypnotically induced orgasm usually secures the bonding process, but at the final stage with Wardani, something had made me pull back. The whole process was uncomfortably close to a sexual assault as it was.

On the other hand, I needed Wardani in one psychic piece, and under normal circumstances that would have taken months, maybe years, to achieve. We didn’t have that kind of time.

“It’s a technique,” I offered tentatively “A healing system. I used to be an Envoy.”

She drew on her cigarette. “I thought the Envoys were supposed to be killing machines.”

“That’s what the Protectorate wants you to think. Keeps the colonies scared at a gut level. The truth is a lot more complex, and ultimately it’s a lot more scary, when you think it through.” I shrugged. “Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.”

“Really? And what are those?”

I felt the conversation gathering itself for flight, and leaned forward to the heat of the fire.

“Sharya. Adoracion. The big bad high-tech Envoys, riding in on hypercast beams and decanting into state-of-the-art biotech sleeves to crush all resistance. We used to do that too, of course, but what most people don’t realise is that our five most successful deployments ever were all covert diplomatic postings, with barely any bloodshed at all. Regime engineering. We came and went, and no one even realised we’d been there.”