Kompcho was all light, ramp after sloping evercrete ramp aswarm with Angier lamp activity around the slumped and tethered forms of the hoverloaders. The vessels sprawled in their collapsed skirts at the end of the autograpples, like hooked elephant rays dragged ashore. Loading hatches gleamed open on their flaring flanks and illuminum painted vehicles manoeuvred back and forth on the ramps, offering up forklift arms laden with hardware. There was a constant backdrop of machine noise and shouting that drowned out individual voices. It was as if someone had taken the tiny glowing cluster of the hosing station four kilometres east and cultured it for massive, viral growth. Kompcho ate up the night in all directions with glare and sound.

We threaded our way through the tangle of machines and people, across the quay space behind the loader ramps. Discount hardware retailers piled high with aisles of merchandise shone neon pale at the base of the reclaimed wharf frontages, interspersed with the more visceral gleaming of bars, whorehouses and implant clinics. Every door was open, providing step-up access in most cases as wide as the frontage itself. Knots of customers spilled in and out. A machine ahead of me cut a tight circle, backing up with a load of Pilsudski ground profile smart bombs, alert blaring Watch it, Watch it, Watch it. Someone stepped sideways past me, grinning out of a face half metal.

She took me in through one of the implant parlours, past eight work chairs where lean-muscled men and women sat with gritted teeth, seeing themselves get augmented in the long mirror opposite and the banks of close-up monitors above. Probably not pain as such, but it can’t be much fun watching the flesh you wear sliced and peeled and shoved aside to make room for whatever new internal toy your sponsors have told you all the deCom crews are wearing this season.

She stopped by one chair and looked in the mirror at the shaven-headed giant it barely held. They were doing something to the bones in the right shoulder—a peeled-back flap of neck and collar hung down on a blood soaked towel in front. Carbon black neck tendons flexed restlessly in the gore within.

“Hey, Orr.”

“Hey! Sylvie!” The giant’s teeth appeared to be ungritted, eyes a little vacant with endorphins. He raised a languid hand on the side that was still intact and knocked fists with the woman. “You doing?”

“Out for a prowl. You sure this is going to heal by the morning?”

Orr jerked a thumb. “Or I do the same to this scalpelhead before we leave. Without chemicals.”

The implant operative smiled a tight little smile and went on with what he was doing. He’d heard it all before. The giant’s eyes switched to me in the mirror. If he noticed the blood on me, it didn’t seem to bother him.

Then again, he was hardly spotless himself.

“Who’s the synth?”

“Friend,” said Sylvie. “Talk to you upstairs.”

“Be up in ten.” He glanced at the operative. “Right?”

“Half an hour,” said the operative, still working. “The tissue bond needs setting time.”

“Shit.” The giant fired a glance at the ceiling. “Whatever happened to Urushiflash. That stuff bonds in seconds.”

Still working. A tubular needle made tiny sucking sounds. “You asked for the standard tariff, sam. Military-issue biochem isn’t available at that rate.”

“Well, for fuck’s sake what’s it going to cost me to upgrade to deluxe then?”

“About fifty per cent more.”

Sylvie laughed. “Forget it, Orr. You’re almost done. You won’t even get to enjoy the ‘dorphs.”

“Fuck that, Sylvie. I’m bored rigid here.” The giant spittled his thumb and held it out. “Swipe me up, you.”

The implant operative looked up, shrugged minutely and set down his tools on the operating palette.

“Ana,” he called. “Get the Urushiflash.”

While the attendant busied herself in a footlocker with the new biochemicals, the operative took a DNA reader from amidst the clutter on the mirror shelf and rubbed the upsoak end across Orr’s thumb. The machine’s hooded display lit and shifted. The operative looked back at Orr.

“This transaction will put you in the red,” he said quietly.

Orr glared. “Never fucking mind. I’m shipping out tomorrow, I’m good for it and you know it.”

The operative hesitated. “It is because you are shipping out tomorrow,” he began, “that—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Read the sponsor screen, will you. Fujiwara Havel. Making New Hok safe for a New Century. We’re not some goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. I don’t come back, the enka payment covers it. You know that.”

“It isn’t—”

The exposed tendons in Orr’s neck tensed and lifted. “Thefack are you, my accountant?” He levered himself up in the chair and stared into the operative’s face. “Just put it through, will you. And get me some of those milissue endorphins while you’re about it. I’ll take them later.”

We stayed long enough to see the implant operative cave in, then Sylvie nudged me away towards the back.

“We’ll be upstairs,” she said.

“Yeah.” The giant was grinning. “See you in ten.”

Upstairs was a spartan set of rooms wrapped around a kitchen/lounge combination with windows out onto the wharf. The soundproofing was good. Sylvie shrugged off her jacket and slung it over the back of a lounger. She looked back at me as she moved to the kitchen space.

“Make yourself at home. Bathroom in the back over there if you need to clean up.”

I took the hint, rinsed the worst of the gore off my hands and face in a tiny mirrored basin niche and came back out to the main room. She was over at the kitchen worksurface, searching cabinets.

“Are you really with Fujiwara Havel?”

“No.” She found a bottle and cracked it open, pinched up two glasses in her other hand. “We’re a goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. And then some. Orr just has a datarat tunnel into FH’s clearance codes. Drink?”

“What is it?”

She looked at the bottle. “Don’t know. Whisky.”

I held out my hand for one of the glasses. “Tunnel like that’s got to cost in the first place.”

She shook her head. “Fringe benefits of deCom. We’re all wired better for crime than a fucking Envoy. Got electronic intrusion gear up the ass.”

She handed me the glass and poured for both of us. The neck of the bottle made a single tiny clink in the quiet of the room each time it touched down. “Orr’s been out on the town for the last thirty-six hours, whoring and shooting chemicals on nothing but credit and enka payment promises. Same thing every time we ship out. Views it as an art form, I reckon. Cheers.”

“Cheers.” It was a very rough whisky. “Uhh. You been crewing with him long?”

She gave me an odd look. “Long enough. Why?”

“Sorry, force of habit. I used to get paid to soak up local information.” I raised the glass again. “Here’s to a safe return, then.”

“That’s considered bad luck.” She didn’t lift her own glass. “You really have been away, haven’t you.”

“For a while.”

“Mind talking about it?”

“Not if we sit down.”

The furniture was cheap, not even automould. I lowered myself carefully into a lounger. The wound in my side seemed to be healing, to the extent that synth flesh ever did.

“So.” She seated herself opposite me and pushed her hair away from her face. A couple of the thicker strands flexed and crackled faintly at the intrusion. “How long you been gone?”

“About thirty years, give or take.”

“Pre-beard, huh?”

Sudden bitterness. “Before this heavy stuff, yeah. But I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of other places. Sharya. Latimer. Parts of Adoracion.”

“Oh. Catch those names.”

I shrugged. “It’s where I’ve been.”

Behind Sylvie, an interior door unfolded crankily and a slight, cocky looking woman wandered yawning into the room, wrapped in a lightweight black polalloy skinsuit half unseamed. She put her head on one side as she spotted me and came to lean on the back of Sylvie’s lounger, scrutinising me with unapologetic curiosity. There were kanji characters shaved into her stubble length hair.