Prologue

The office sat two hundred and eleven floors above Neo Tokyo, and from that height the city looked finished.

Rain had come in off the bay an hour before dawn. It ran down the window wall in long clean sheets, and through it the lights of the old center spread in every direction until the haze swallowed them. Transit lines threaded between the towers. Air traffic moved in orderly lanes at three altitudes, every craft on its licensed corridor and every corridor owned by the same company. You could stand at that glass for an hour and never see a single thing out of place. The people who worked on the upper floors of the Shinsei megatower said the view was the point. It reminded visitors where they were.

The glass ran floor to ceiling along the entire east wall. Where it met the ceiling, a thin dark seam ran the length of the frame. Nobody who came into the room ever looked at it. Everyone looked at the city.

The rest of the office belonged to someone who understood that empty space costs more than furniture. A desk of black stone stood a few paces in front of the glass, with a display set flush into its surface. Two chairs faced it. A low cabinet sat against the far wall with a single bonsai on top, pruned with total precision. The floor was pale wood polished until it held reflections like still water. The air smelled faintly of cedar. There were no photographs anywhere. No awards, no art, nothing on the walls at all.

A third chair stood in the open floor between the desk and the door, where no chair had any reason to be. Dax Harlan sat in it.

He fit the room the way a wrench fits a gallery. Worn cargo pants. Boots scuffed grey at the toes. A canvas jacket faded to no particular color. Dark hair that needed cutting and three days of scruff that would never become a beard. An old scar ran along the left side of his jaw, and it pulled a little when he smiled. He was smiling now. It didn’t seem to cost him anything.

His hands rested in his lap. Two matte black bands circled his wrists, each an inch wide and seamless, with no lock anyone could see. A magnetic field held them together so tightly that his wrists pressed bone to bone. A small indicator on the right band glowed a steady red. When he shifted his weight, the bands read the movement and drew tighter. He had stopped shifting some time ago.

His pistol lay on the corner of the desk. It was a heavy frame projectile weapon, old and well kept, with a small reader plate set into the grip. Someone had placed it square to the edge of the stone, the way you would place a document you meant to file.

Yuki Shinsei stood behind the desk with her back to the room, facing the rain.

She was not tall. She wore a dark suit with a high collar, cut close, and her black hair was pinned up with the kind of precision that comes from doing something exactly the same way every morning for years. At her left hip hung a katana in a black lacquered saya. It looked like an heirloom. It looked like the sort of thing a powerful family gives its daughter so that visitors understand whose daughter she is.

The man standing beside Dax’s chair had looked at the sword once when he came in. Then he had stopped looking at it.

He was tall and broad through the shoulders, somewhere in his middle forties, grey at the temples with a beard trimmed close. Charcoal coat. Good shoes. His knuckles were thick and pale with old scar tissue, the hands of a man who had done this kind of work for a long time and still kept them conditioned. He had come up in the private lift twenty minutes earlier with two colleagues. All three had passed through the scanners in the lift lobby, and again through the scanners built into the office door, because the Head of Security for Shinsei Dynamics did not take anyone’s word for what they carried. The scanners had found a communications implant behind his left ear, a set of reflex boosters in his forearms, and nothing else. His colleagues now waited in the outer office with four men from Yuki’s personal detail. The arrangement satisfied everyone.

His name was Callum Pryce. He ran a field team for Crucible Group, and he had been looking for something for a very long time.

“Your vessel entered Neo Tokyo airspace at two fourteen this morning,” Yuki said. She didn’t turn from the glass. Her English was exact and carried almost no accent. “It was eleven kilometers outside its licensed corridor. It failed to answer three hails. The decision was made to bring it down.”

“Bring it down,” Dax said. “That’s one way to put it. Your people put two interceptors on my nose and a tow lock on my hull and dragged her onto a pad like a stray on a leash. I’ve had smoother landings in a debris field.”

“Your ship was not damaged.”

“My pride was damaged.”

“Your pride is not registered with the Lane Authority.”

Dax laughed. It sounded real.

Yuki turned from the window then. She looked at him the way she might look at a line item that refused to balance.

“Your ship has been searched,” she said. “My people opened every panel and every container aboard. Mr. Pryce’s people were permitted to observe. Nothing of interest to Mr. Pryce was found. Your vessel is now held under Shinsei transit authority, and it will remain held until I decide otherwise. There is also the matter of a warrant on Mars. Thirteen years old, for the theft of that same vessel.”

“Shinsei doesn’t do business on Mars.”

“Shinsei maintains no presence on Mars,” Yuki said. “That is not the same thing as having no friends there.”

Dax said nothing to that.

“Mr. Pryce has asked for an opportunity to speak with you,” she went on. “Shinsei has agreed to provide it. It is a courtesy between companies.”

“Generous of you.”

“Courtesies are recorded, Mr. Harlan. Everything in this building is recorded.”

She turned back to the glass. Pryce stepped around in front of the chair so that Dax had to look up at him.

“Where is our hardware, Mr. Harlan?”

His voice was London, flat and unhurried.

“I haul a lot of hardware.” Dax tilted his head as though he were giving it honest thought. “Reactor housings. Coolant pumps. Last month I ran forty crates of plumbing fixtures out to Cassini. You’d be amazed what people pay for a decent toilet that far from the sun.”

Pryce hit him.

He did it with no windup at all, a short straight punch that started at his hip and ended against the side of Dax’s face. Dax’s head snapped right. The chair rocked on its legs and settled. For a second he stayed turned away, looking at the cabinet and the bonsai, and then he worked his jaw from side to side and faced front again.

“Okay,” he said. “Not plumbing.”

Yuki glanced down at the display in her desk. Whatever it showed her, nothing changed in her face.

“You can end this whenever you like,” she said. “Tell Mr. Pryce what he wants to know. Your ship is released. The Mars inquiry goes nowhere. You are out of Neo Tokyo airspace by tonight.”

“And if I don’t know?”

“Then I expect this will take longer.”

Pryce leaned in. “Two weeks ago, at three in the morning, you stood on a loading deck in Earth orbit and let something onto your ship that belongs to my client.”

“Lot of things get onto my ship. Stowaways. Rats. Once a goat.” Dax shrugged as much as the bands allowed. “That’s a long story, actually. You’d like it. There’s a customs officer in it who looks a lot like you.”

The second punch came harder. It caught him at the corner of the mouth and split his lip against his teeth. Dax rocked sideways, his hands jerked, and the bands bit down on his wrists. He made a small sound through his nose. When he straightened, the indicator on the right band flickered. Red. Then amber. Then red again.

Dax looked down at it for less than a second. Then he looked back up at Pryce and spat blood onto the polished floor between Pryce’s good shoes.

Yuki looked at the blood.

“That floor came out of a temple in Kyoto,” she said. “It is older than either of you.”

“Tell him,” Dax said. “He’s the one making the mess.”

Yuki looked down at the display again and read from it in the same even voice.

“Dax Harlan. Born in Harlan Block 7, outside Olympus City. Forty two years old. Wanted by the Martian Provisional Authority for the theft of a heavy cargo rig from a municipal impound yard. No arrests since. No convictions anywhere.” She looked up. “Thirteen years working the gaps between jurisdictions, and no one has ever held you to account for any of it.”

“I’m very polite at checkpoints.”

“You have been lucky,” Yuki said. “Luck is a resource, Mr. Harlan. It runs out like any other.”

Pryce crouched until his face sat level with Dax’s. He studied him the way a mechanic studies an engine that won’t turn over. Close up, under the office lights, Dax’s eyes caught the light wrong. Grey green and almost human, with something under the color that reflected like the back of a cat’s eye.

“Mars eyes,” Pryce said. “You’re one of the radiation kids.”

“You should see the other kids.”

Pryce drove his fist into Dax’s stomach.

Dax folded forward as far as the bands would let him. He stayed there with his head down, and for a while the only sounds in the room were his breathing and the rain on the glass. A thin line of blood ran from his lip and dripped onto his knee.

Pryce straightened, flexed his hand, and walked to the desk. He picked up the pistol and weighed it in his palm. Then he turned, pointed it at Dax’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The reader plate in the grip blinked once and went dark.

Dax lifted his head. He was laughing again, though it came out mostly as air. “It’s coded,” he said. “Took me a month to get it to like me. It’s never going to like you.”

Pryce looked at the gun. He set it back down on the desk, not quite square to the edge this time, and Yuki’s eyes followed it there.

“Your client,” Dax said. He eased back in the chair, slowly, finding out what hurt. “How long have they been paying you? Three years, isn’t it? Three years and all the money in London, and every time you get close, you’re one station late.” He smiled with the split lip. “Your hardware’s had three years to learn how to run, Pryce. It got good at it.”

Pryce didn’t hit him that time.

He reached inside his coat and drew a pistol.

It was small and matte grey, with no metal anywhere on it that anyone could see. The lines looked almost unfinished, like something printed rather than machined. It sat in his hand as though it had been shaped for it.

For a moment nobody in the room moved.

Dax looked at the gun. Then, for the first time since he had been brought in, he looked past Pryce to Yuki. He held the look for perhaps a second. Then he looked back at the gun.

Yuki looked at it too, for a long time. Her expression didn’t move. When she spoke, her voice was exactly what it had been when she told him about the hails.

“Mr. Pryce. Everything in this room is the property of Shinsei Dynamics. Any damage will be compensated in full.”

Pryce kept his eyes on Dax. “Send me the bill.”

“I will.”

She turned a little from the window, the way people turn from something they would rather not watch. Her left hand came to rest on the saya at her hip. It looked like habit. Her eyes settled on the gun, on the hand around it, on where that hand was in the room. They stayed there.

Pryce raised the pistol until the muzzle sat a hand’s width from Dax’s forehead.

“Last time,” he said. “Where is it?”

For the first time since he sat down in that chair, Dax Harlan had nothing to say.

The rain ran down the glass. Two hundred and eleven floors below, the city went on with its morning. Pryce’s finger settled against the trigger and began to tighten.

Dax closed his eyes.