“What’s going on?” asked Sylvie casually.

“Oh—Beards.” The steward shuffled the scanned documentation back together. “They’ve been prowling up and down the waterfront all morning. Apparently they had a run-in last night with a couple of deComs in some place way east of here. You know how they are about that stuff.”

“Yeah. Fucking throwbacks.” Sylvie took the paperwork and stowed it in her jacket. “They got descriptions, or will any two deComs do?”

The steward smirked. “No vid, they say. Place was using up all its capacity on holoporn. But they got a witness description. A woman. And a man. Oh, yeah, and the woman had hair.”

“Christ, that could be me.” laughed Sylvie.

Orr gave her a strange look. Behind us, the clamour intensified. The steward shrugged.

“Yeah, could be any of a couple of dozen command heads I passed through here this morning. Hey, what I want to know is, what are a bunch of priests doing in a place runs holoporn anyway?”

“Jerking off?” suggested Orr.

“Religion,” said Sylvie, with a sudden click in her throat as if she was going to vomit. At my side, Jadwiga swayed unsteadily, and twisted her head more abruptly than people generally do. “Has it occurred to anybody that—”

She grunted, gut deep. I shot a glance at Orr and Kiyoka, saw their faces go tight. The steward looked on, curious, not yet concerned.

“—that every human sacrament is a cheap evasion, that—”

Another choked sound. As if the words were being wrenched up out of somewhere buried in hard-packed silt. Jadwiga’s swaying worsened. Now the steward’s face began to change as he picked up the scent of distress.

Even the deComs in the queue behind us were shifting their attention from the brawl at the top of the ramp, narrowing in on the pale woman and the speech that came sputtering up out of her.

“—that the whole of human history might just be some fucking excuse for the inability to provide a decent female orgasm?

I trod on her foot, hard.

“Quite.”

The steward laughed nervously. Quellist sentiments, albeit early poetic ones, were still marked handle with care in the Harlan’s World cultural canon. Too much danger that any enthusiasm for them might spill over into her later political theory and, of course, practice. You can name your hoverloaders after revolutionary heroes if you want, but they need to be far enough back in history that no one can remember what they were fighting for.

“I—” said Sylvie, puzzled. Orr moved to support her.

“Let’s have this argument later, Sylvie. We’d better get stowed first. Look.” He nudged her. “Jad’s dead on her feet, and I don’t feel much better. Can we—”

She caught it. Straightened and nodded.

“Yeah, later,” she said. Jadwiga’s corpse stopped swaying, even lifted the back of one hand realistically to its brow.

“Comedown blues,” I said, winking at the steward. His nervousness ironed out and he grinned.

“Been there, man.”

Jeering from the top of the ramp. I heard the shouted word abomination, then the sound of electrical discharge. Probably power knuckles.

“Think they’ve reeled in more than they can stow up there,” said the steward, peering past us. “Should have come heavy, they’re going to mouth off like that to a dock full of deCom. Okay, that’s us. You can go through.”

We made it through the hatch without further stumbling from anybody, and went down metal-echoing corridors in search of the cabins. At my back, Jad’s corpse kept mechanical pace. The rest of the team acted like nothing had happened.

“So what the fuck was that?”

I finally got round to asking the question about half an hour later.

Sylvie’s crew stood around in her cabin, looking uncomfortable. Orr had to stoop below the reinforcing joists of the ceiling. Kiyoka stared out of the tiny one-way porthole, finding something of great interest in the water outside. Jadwiga lay face down on a bunk. Still no sign of Lazlo.

“It was a glitch,” said Sylvie.

“A glitch.” I nodded. “Does this kind of glitch happen often?”

“No. Not often.”

“But it has happened before.”

Orr ducked under a joist to loom over me. “Why don’t you give it a rest, Micky. No one forced you to come along. You don’t like the terms, you can just fuck off, can’t you.”

“I’m just curious to know what we do if Sylvie drops out of the loop and starts spouting Quellisms in the middle of a mimint encounter, that’s all.”

“Let us worry about the mimints,” said Kiyoka tonelessly.

“Yeah, Micky.” Orr sneered. “It’s what we do for a living. You just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

“All I want to—”

“You shut the fuck up if you—”

“Look.” She said it very quietly, but Orr and Kiyoka both hooked round towards the sound of her voice. “Why don’t you two leave me and Micky alone to talk about this?”

“Ah, Sylvie, he’s just—”

“He’s got a right to know, Orr. Now you want to give us some space?”

She watched them out, waited for the cabin door to fold, then went past me back to her seat.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Look.” It took me a moment to realise she meant it literally this time.

She reached into the mass of her hair and lifted the centre cord. “You know how this works. There’s more processing capacity in this than in most city databases. Has to be.”

She let the cord go and shook her hair across it. A small smile flickered around her mouth. “Out there, we can get a viral strike flung at us hard enough to scrape out a human mind like fruit pulp. Or just mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces.” She shivered a little. “Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.”

“Sounds like it’s time for some fresh hardware.”

“Yeah,” she grinned sourly. “I just don’t have that much loose change right now. Know what I mean?”

I did know. “Recent tech. It’s a fucker, huh?”

“Yeah. Recent tech, fucking indecent pricing. They take the Guild subsidies, the Protectorate defence funding and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R&D to people like me.”

I shrugged. “Price of progress.”

“Yeah, saw the ad. Assholes. Look, what happened back there is just gunge in the works, nothing to worry about. Maybe something to do with trying to hotwire Jad. That’s something I don’t do usually, it’s unused capacity. And that’s usually where the data management systems dump any trace junk. Running Jad’s CNS must have flushed it out.”

“Do you remember what you were saying?”

“Not really.” She rubbed at the side of her face, pressed fingertips against one closed eye. “Something about religion? About the Beards?”

“Well, yeah. You lifted off from there, but then you started paraphrasing early Quellcrist Falconer. Not a Quellist, are you?”

“Fuck, no.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She thought about it for a while. Under our feet, the Guns for Guevara’s engines began to thrum gently. Departure for Drava, imminent.

“Could be something I caught off a dissemination drone. There’s still a lot of them out in the east—not worth the bounty to decommission, so they get left alone unless they’re fucking up local comlinks.”

“Would any of them be Quellist?”

“Oh, yeah. At least four or five of the factions who fucked up New Hok were Quellist-inspired. Shit, from what I hear she was fighting up there herself back when the Unsettlement kicked off.”

“That’s what they say.”

The door chimed. Sylvie nodded at me, and I went to open it. Out in the faintly shuddering corridor stood a short, wiry figure with long black hair bound back in a ponytail. He was sweating heavily.