MICHELANGELO OSIRIS LEARY KUSANAGI-JONES HAD BEEN drinking since fourteen hundred. He didn’t plan on stopping soon.
He occupied a bubbleport on the current observation deck of Kaiwo Maru, where he had been since he started drinking, watching a yellow main-sequence star grow. The sun had the look of a dancer swirling in veils, a Van Gogh starscape. Eons before, it had blundered into a cloud of interstellar gas and was still devouring the remains. Persistent tatters glowed orange and blue against a backdrop of stars, a vast, doomed display of color and light. Kusanagi-Jones could glimpse part of the clean-swept elliptical path that marked the orbit of New Amazonia: a darker streak like a worm tunnel in a leaf.
Breathtaking. Ridiculously named. And his destination. Or rather, their destination. Which was why he was drinking, and why he didn’t intend to stop.
As if the destination—and the mission—weren’t bad enough, there was the little issue of Vincent to contend with. Vincent Katherinessen, the Old Earth Colonial Coalition Cabinet’s velvet-gloved iron hand, far too field-effective to be categorized as a mere diplomatic envoy no matter how his passport was coded. Vincent, whom Kusanagi-Jones had managed to avoid for the duration of the voyage by first taking to cryo—damn the nightmares—and then restricting himself to the cramped comforts of his quarters…and whom he could avoid no longer.
