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This won’t take long.”
    The commandant’s office was in a double-story ’fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early-millennium gargoyles, and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the ’fab, and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly, and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.
    Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a molded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens, and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways-slumped figure behind the desk.
    â€œCommandant?”
    The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.
    â€œWhat is it, Sergeant?”
    The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom, and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armor but wasn’t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist-and-forearm section was set with half a dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.
    I stood in front of the desk and saluted.
    â€œLieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,” I said softly.
    â€œWell.” The commandant struggled upright in his chair. “Perhaps you’d like more light in here, Lieutenant. I like the dark, but then”—he chuckled behind closed lips—“I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.”
    He groped across the keyboard, and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine-featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.
    â€œIs that better?” The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. “I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.” The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. “A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, Lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?”
    My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.
    â€œI’d like to have your full attention, Commandant.”
    For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical to look at the jacked-in cable.
    â€œOh,” he whispered. “This.”
    Abruptly, he lurched around to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the