“Nothing to write home about. No sign of anything that might have been responsible for the missing log data. Nothing even plausibly man-made in Coltrane’s atmosphere or on any of the moons; if Tjssin was here, he didn’t leave much for us to go on.”

Melano leaned into the vibration field; panned in on Cannonball’s rusted surface.

“Maybe that was his plan.”

“I don’t think so. Why have us chase him halfway across the galaxy just to hide in a hole in the ground? There must be a thousand places he could stay hidden down there for the next million years, if he really wanted to, but I don’t think that’s his style.”

Melano amped the mag to max, bringing Cannonball’s pockmarked face into high relief.

“There’s nothing on the scan?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel like the place.”

“You and your feelings.”

“I think he’s here. In the system. But not here.”

“You dreamt?”

I nodded slowly.

“He’s here.”

We who are reborn, regenerated, recycled through the eye of the quantum needle, come to share a certain bond. An affinity with the void that births us. Entangled.

It’s hard to describe. You can think of a mind as a complex quantum phase state. Given enough dimensions, an entire personality can be encoded as a single informational matrix. That’s how coldtime works. But when a mind is compressed to the point of geometry—when it slips outside of time and space, and more importantly, when it comes back again—it begins to pick up resonances: structural commonalities; shared memories, feelings. Things become blurred.

It’s hard to describe. Some are more sensitive to it than others. Melano, for instance, barely blinks. But some of us feel it deep. It comes to us in the quiet places between thoughts, when we are closest to the void.

Into sleep, come dreams.

Phjolca crouched by the skylight, her absolute concentration fixed on the laser cutter in her hand. The cutter inserted a reflective filament into the glass as it went, ensuring that the security beams within the pane would continue to believe that it remained unbroken even as the centre portion was lifted clean out.

She insisted on doing it freehand; three sides were now cut away and she was half way through the fourth without incident. I was quietly impressed.

Our disembodied heads bobbed waist-high behind a rattling ventilation duct, camo-suits mimicking the dull gradient of weathered steel. We had all removed our masks to better breathe in the sultry city air; there were no cameras nearby.

Of course, they could easily have laced the whole compound with the sort of nanoscale surveillance dust that would have rendered any intrusion almost impossible, but the people of Aurelia valued their privacy. They valued it enough to have well enforced laws which ensured that the manufacture and use of such nanotechnologies was severely punishable. This small fact had been a not insignificant consideration in the planning of our visit to the system.

Phjolca killed the laser tool and carefully lifted the centre of the skylight out by the suction pads attached at the corners.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Tjssin crooned, pulling the featureless fabric down over his smooth chin.

We left Coltrane behind for the second time, this time falling inward against the pressure of Gillespie’s feeble rays.

We slept; woke. Dreamt.

Parker loomed massive, blue and green in our field of view. The colour was amplified, but true to life. I realised with unease that I had known it would be blue and green, long before the computer had calculated its exact chemical composition.

“Fourteen moons. Only four of them more than a thousand clicks across.” said Melano, reading from the simulation.

The numbers were eerily familiar. What was stranger, so were the names:

Mingus.

Pastorius.

Evans.

But there were more; other names, lurking just beneath the surface like smooth stones, ungraspable.

“The resonance is getting stronger.” I said.

“I know.”

I turned to Melano close beside me, feeling the tension in her face with my hand. Our faces were still the same, despite everything we’d put ourselves through.

“You dreamt too?”

Melano nodded, reluctantly.

“It seemed like more than a dream. It was like really being there again. But different. Like …”

“Like you were someone else: me, or Tjssin.”

“Yes.”

“Then you know as well as I do that Tjssin isn’t anywhere within a million miles of Parker.”

“... yes.”

It wasn’t about the money. We had money; as much as anyone could want. We’d heard about Tjssin and Phjolca through the sort of channels you might expect. Heard they were good. Some said the best. And so, we just had to see for ourselves, didn’t we?

It was supposed to be an easy hit, just a warm up. Only a little Wydhiji funeral urn, barely worth ten million drossi. It would have been easy too, if it weren’t for the fucking security guard being where he wasn’t supposed to be.

The guy was supposed to knock off at three; go home to his wife and kids, and leave the place running on automatic until his replacement came in at half five. Supposed to—except of course that his wife had taken the kids, the house and the car the week before and left the poor bastard without so much as a thousand drossi for a hotel room. He’d been sleeping in the museum—just until he managed to get together enough for the deposit on a room somewhere, you know. The morning guard sympathised with his situation and promised not to tell the management; even helped him hang his fucking hammock and woke him each morning at seven so he’d be out before the boss arrived.

It was hard not to feel sorry for the guy, really, when the police chief explained it all to us afterwards. The stress of it all was bound to take its toll.

His first shot took Phjolca clean through the gut; split her damn near in two.

The second missed me by a hand’s width and reduced the Casaguan marble behind me to a long streak of expensive rubble. I threw myself behind a bulletproof case of 4th Colony silverware, feeling frantically for the pistol at my ankle, and realised the third shot had been a lot closer than I’d have liked.

The pistol was gone, along with my right leg from six inches below the knee.

The case exploded above my head. Whatever he was carrying, it sure as shit wasn’t standard issue.

From across the hall I heard the report of return fire; the whang of Melano’s miniature coil gun chewing through several million drossi worth of ancient tapestry. I saw her crouched behind a pillar ten feet away. Her almost-invisible suit was sugared with marble dust; the guard systematically blowing chunks out of the pillar above her head, working his way down one shot at a time.