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he’ll want to get started.”
    “Sure.” I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. “I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.”
    “You’ll see.”
    “Party trick, huh?”
    She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamor of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.
    “Why don’t you come with us, Micky?”
    I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. “What?”
    “Come with us.”
    “To
Drava
?”
    “Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?”
    I freed the blade and finished the incision. “I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.”
    “What if I could set that up for you?”
    “Sylvie.” I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward. “Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?”
    She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realization that there was something here.
    “Last time we were out,” she said slowly, “we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete resleeving unit, and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.”
    “Well, that’d make sense. That’s where you’re taking Jadwiga?”
    She nodded.
    I looked pensively at the chunk of spine in my hand, the ragged-lipped wound it had come out of. I thought about what the yakuza would do to me if they caught up with me in this sleeve.
    “How long are you going over for?”
    She shrugged. “Long as it takes. We’re provisioned for three months, but last time we filled our quota in half that time. You could come back sooner if you like. The ’loaders run out of Drava all the time.”
    “And you’re sure this stuff in the bunker is still functional?”
    She grinned and shook her head.
    “What?”
    “It’s New Hok, Micky. Over there,
everything’s
still functional. That’s the whole problem with the fucking place.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    The hoverloader
Guns for Guevara
was exactly what she sounded like—a low-profile, heavily armored shark of a vessel, spiking weaponry along her back like dorsal spines. In marked contrast with the commercial ’loaders that plied the routes between Millsport and the Saffron Archipelago, she had no external decks or towers. The bridge was a snubbed blister on the forward facings of the dull gray superstructure, and her flanks swept back and out in smooth, featureless curves. The two loading hatches, open on either side of her nose, looked built to disgorge flights of missiles.
    “You sure this is going to work?” I asked Sylvie as we reached the downward slope of the docking ramp.
    “Relax,” growled Orr, behind me. “This isn’t the Saffron Line.”
    He was right. For an operation that the government claimed was being run under stringent security guidelines, deCom embarkation struck me as sloppy in the extreme. At the side of each hatch, a steward in a soiled blue uniform was taking
hardcopy
documentation and running the authorization flashes under a reader that wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a Settlement-years experia flick. The ragged queues of embarking personnel snaked back and forth across the ramp, ankle deep in carry-on baggage. Bottles and pipes passed back and forth in the cold, bright air. There was highly strung hilarity and mock-sparring up and down the lines, repeated jokes over the antique reader. The stewards smiled back repeatedly, wearily.
    “And where the fuck is Las?” Kiyoka wanted to know.
    Sylvie shrugged.