Chasm City

THIRTY

The expedition to the ghost ship almost never left the Santiago. Sky and his two associates, Norquinco and Gomez, had made it as far as the cargo bay when Constanza appeared out of the shadows.

She looked much older now, Sky thought, prematurely aged compared to himself. It was hard to believe that the two of them had once been near-equals; children exploring the same dark and labyr-inthine wonderland. Now the shadows etched themselves unflatteringly into her face, emphasising the wrinkles and folds of her habitual expression.

“Do you mind if I ask where you’re planning to go?” Constanza said, standing between them and the shuttle that they had gone to great trouble to make ready. “I’m not aware that anyone was supposed to be leaving the Santiago.”

“I’m afraid you weren’t in the loop on this one,” Sky said.

“I’m still a member of security, you supercilious little worm. How does that put me outside the loop?”

Sky glanced at the others, willing them to let him do the talking. “I’ll be blunt, then. It’s a matter that exceeds even the usual security channels. I can’t be specific, but the nature of this mission is both delicate and diplomatic.”

“Then why isn’t Ramirez with you?”

“It’s a high-risk mission; a possible trap. If I’m caught, Ramirez loses his second-in-command, but the routine functioning of the Santiago won’t be greatly affected. And if it is a genuine attempt to improve relations, the other ship can’t complain that we aren’t sending a senior officer.”

“Captain Ramirez would still know about this, though?”

“I should imagine so. He authorised it.”

“We’ll just check then, shall we?” She elevated her cuff, ready to speak to the Captain.

Sky allowed himself an instant of indecision before acting, weighing the outcome of two equally hazardous strategies. Ramirez did genuinely think there was a diplomatic operation in progress; an excuse that would enable Sky to leave the Santiago for a couple of days without too many questions being asked. It had taken years to lay the groundwork for that deception, faking messages from the Palestine, doctoring the real messages as they came in. But Ramirez was a clever man, and his suspicions might be raised if Constanza started showing too much interest in the validity of the mission.

So he rushed her, knocking her to the hard, polished floor of the bay. Her head whacked against the ground and she went deathly still.

“Have you killed her?” Norquinco said.

“I don’t know,” Sky said, kneeling down.

Constanza was still alive.

They dragged her unconscious body across the cargo bay and arranged it artfully next to a pile of smashed freight pallets. It looked as if she had been exploring the bay on her own and had been knocked out when a tower of pallets had toppled over, catching her on the head.

“She won’t remember the encounter,” Sky said. “And if she doesn’t come round of her own accord before we’re back, I’ll find her myself.”

“She’ll still have her suspicions,” Gomez said.

“That won’t be a problem. I’ve set up evidence trails which’ll make it look like Ramirez and Constanza were complicit in authorising—ordering—this expedition.” He looked at Norquinco, who had actually done much of the work of which he spoke, but the other man’s expression was impassive.

They left before there was any chance of Constanza coming round. Normally Sky would have fired up the shuttle’s engines as soon as he was free of the docking bay, but that would have made their leaving all the more obvious. Instead, he gave the shuttle a small kick of thrust while it was hidden behind the Santiago —just enough to push it up to one hundred metres per second relative to the Flotilla—and then turned the engines off. With the cabin lights dimmed and maintaining strict comms silence, they fell backwards away from the mother ship.

Sky watched the hull slide by like a grey cliff. He had taken measures to conceal his own absence from the Santiago —and in the current atmosphere of paranoia very few people would ask awkward questions anyway—but there was no way that the departure of a small ship could ever be completely concealed from the other vessels. But Sky knew from experience that their radar scans were focused on detecting missiles moving between ships, rather than something falling slowly behind. In fact, now that the race was on to strip mass from all the ships, it was common for surplus equipment to be discarded. Junk was usually sent drifting forward, so that the Flotilla would never run into it while decelerating, but that was a minor detail.

“We’ll drift for twenty-four hours,” Sky said. “That’ll put us nine thousand kilometres behind the last ship in the Flotilla. Then we can turn on engines and radar and make a dash to the Caleuche. Even if they notice our thrust flame, we’ll still get there ahead of any other shuttle they send after us.”

“What if they do send something?” Gomez said. “We might still only have a few hours of grace. Maybe a day at best.”

“Then we’d better use our time wisely. A few hours will be enough to get aboard and establish what happened to her. A few hours more will give us the time we need to find any intact supplies she’s carrying—medical equipment, sleeper berth parts, you name it. We can fit enough aboard the shuttle to make a difference. If we find too much to bring back, we’ll hold her until the Santiago can dispatch a larger fleet of shuttles.”

“You’re talking as if we’d go to war over her.”

Sky Haussmann answered, “Maybe she’d be worth it, Gomez.”

“Or maybe she was cleaned out years ago by one of the other ships. Considered that, haven’t you?”

“Yes. And I’d regard that as reasonable grounds for war as well.”

Norquinco, who had barely spoken since the departure, was examining a bewilderingly complex general schematic of one of the Flotilla ships. It was the kind of thing he could get lost in for hours, his eyes glazed, ignoring sleep and food until he had solved some problem to his satisfaction. Sky envied him that singleminded devotion to one task, while flinching from the idea of ever allowing himself to become that obsessive. Norquinco’s value to him was highly specific: a tool that could be applied to certain well-defined problems with predictable results. Give Norquinco something complicated and arcane and he was in his element. Coming up with a plausible model for what the Caleuche’s internal data networks might be like was exactly that kind of problem. It could never be more than an educated guess, but there was no one Sky would rather have had doing the guessing.

He replayed what little they knew about the ghost ship. What was clear enough was that the Caleuche must once have been an acknowledged part of the Flotilla, built and launched with the other ships from Mercury orbit. Her construction and launch could never have been kept secret, even if she must have once had some more prosaic name than that of the mythical ghost ship. She would have accelerated up to cruising speed with the other five ships, and for a time—many years, perhaps—she would have travelled with them.

But something had happened during those early decades of the crossing to Swan. As political and social upheavals racked the home system, the Flotilla had become steadily more isolated. The home system had become months and then years of light-travel time away, until true communication became difficult. Technical updates had continued to arrive from home, and the Flotilla had continued to send reports back, but the intervals between these transmissions had become longer and longer, the messages increasingly desultory. Even when messages from home did arrive, they were often accompanied by contradictory ones; evidence of squabbling factions with different agendas, not all of which involved the Flotilla arriving safely at Journey’s End. Now and then a general news report was picked up, and the ships of the Flotilla even learned the unsettling truth that there were factions back home who were denying that they had ever existed. By and large these attempts to rewrite history were not taken seriously, but it was disconcerting to hear that they had gained even a toehold.

Too much time and distance, Sky thought, the words playing in his head like a mantra. So much boiled down to that, in the end.

And what it also meant was that the ships of the Flotilla became less and less accountable to any other parties save themselves; that it became easier to collectively suppress the truth of whatever had happened to the Caleuche.

Sky’s grandfather—or rather, Titus Haussmann’s father—must have known exactly what had happened. He had probably imparted some of that truth to Titus, but perhaps not all of it. It might also have been the case that by the time Titus’s father had died even he had not been entirely sure what had happened. Sky could only guess at the depth of Old Man Balcazar’s knowledge, as well. The Captain had evidently believed that the sixth ship existed, but he had seemed unwilling or unable to speculate as to its origin. There were, in Sky’s opinion, two likely scenarios. In the first, there had been some dispute between the ships which had culminated in an attack on the Caleuche. It could even have extended to the use of the harbourmakers; the landscaping nuclear weapons. Balcazar had revealed little other than that the ship was dark. Very probably the radar echo matched the profile of a Flotilla vessel, but there could still have been crippling damage. Afterwards, the other ships might have been so shamed by their actions that they had chosen to blank them from the historical record. One generation would have to live with the shame, but not the one that followed.

The other idea, and the one Sky favoured, was less dramatic but perhaps even more shaming. What if something had gone terribly wrong with the Caleuche —a plague aboard her, say—and the other ships had chosen to offer no assistance? Worse things had happened in history, and who could blame the others for fearing contamination themselves?

Shameful, perhaps. But also perfectly understandable.

What it also meant was that they would have to be very careful. He would assume nothing except that every situation was potentially lethal. Equally, he would accept the risks involved because the prize was so great. He thought of the antimatter which she had to be carrying, still dormant in her penning reservoir, waiting for the day when it should have been used to slow her down. That day might still come, but not in the way her designers had ever anticipated.

Or, for that matter, any of the other ships.

Within a few hours they had escaped the main body of the Flotilla. Once a radar beam from the Brazilia lingered over them, like the fingers of a blind person probing an unfamiliar object. The moment was tense, and while they were being scrutinised Sky wondered if this had not, after all, been a fatal misjudgement. But the beam moved on and never returned. If the Brazilia had assumed anything it must have accepted that the radar echo signified only a chunk of receding debris; some useless, irreparable machine jettisoned into the void.

After that they were alone.

It was tempting to fire up the thrusters, but Sky kept his nerve and maintained the drift for the twenty-four hours he had promised. No transmissions came from the Santiago, satisfying him that their absence had not yet become problematic. Had it not been for the company of Norquinco and Gomez, he would have been more alone now—further from human company—than at any point in his life. How terrifying this isolation would once have been to the small boy who had been so terrified of the dark when he had been trapped in the nursery. Almost unthinkable, to have willingly drifted this far from home.

Now, though, it was for a purpose.

He waited until the exact second, then turned on the engines again. The flame burned a deep lilac: clean and pure against the stars. He was careful to avoid shining the thrust beam directly back towards the Flotilla, but there was no way he could hide it completely. It hardly mattered; they had the edge now, and whatever the other ships chose to do, Sky would reach the Caleuche first. It would give him, he thought, a small foretaste of what the greater victory would be like, when he brought the Santiago to Journey’s End ahead of the others. It was as well to remember that every-thing he did now was only part of that larger plan.

But there was a difference, of course. Journey’s End was definitely out there; definitely a world which he knew to be real. He still had only Balcazar’s word that the Caleuche existed at all.

Sky turned on the long-range phased-array radar and—much like the Brazilia had done—extended a hand gropingly into the darkness.

If it was out there, he would find it.

“Can’t you just leave him alone?” Zebra said.

“No. Even if I was ready to forgive him—which I’m not—I still have to know why he taunted me the way he did; what he was hoping to get out of it.”

We were in Zebra’s apartment. It was late morning; the cloud cover over the city was sparse, the sun was high and the place looked melancholy rather than Satanic; even the more warped buildings assumed a certain dignity, like patients who’d learned to live with gross deformity.

Which did nothing to make me feel any less disturbed; convinced more than ever that there was something fundamentally wrong with my memories. The Haussmann episodes hadn’t stopped, yet the bleeding from my hand had become much less severe than it had been at the start of the infection cycle. It was almost as if the indoctrinal virus had catalysed the unlocking of memories which were already present; memories at stark odds with the official version of events on the Santiago. The virus might have been close to burning itself out, but the other Haussmann memories were coming on more strongly than ever, my association with Sky becoming more complete. Originally it had been like watching a play; now it was like playing him; hearing his thoughts; feeling the acrid taste of his hatred.

But that wasn’t all of it. The dream I’d had the afternoon before, of looking down on the injured man in the white enclosure, had troubled me more than I could easily explain at the time, but now, having had time to think about it, I thought I knew why.

The injured man could only have been me.

And yet my viewpoint had been that of Cahuella, looking down into the hamadryad pit at the Reptile House. I could have put that down to tiredness, but it hadn’t been the only time I’d seen the world through his eyes. In the last few days there’d been odd snatches of memory and dream where I’d been more intimate with Gitta than I thought had ever been the case; instants when I felt I could bring to mind every hidden curve and pore of her body; instants when I imagined tracing my hand across the hollow of her back or the swell of her buttocks; instants when I thought I knew the taste of her. But there was something else about Gitta, too—something my thoughts couldn’t or wouldn’t home in on; something too painful.

All I knew was that it had something to do with the way she’d died.

“Listen,” Zebra said, refilling my coffee cup, “could it just be that Reivich has a death wish?”

I tried to focus on the here and now. “I could have satisfied that for him on Sky’s Edge.”

“Well, a specific type of death wish, then. Something that has to be satisfied here.”

She looked lovely, her fading stripes permitting the natural geometry of her face to show more clearly, like a statue deprived of gaudy paint. But sitting face to face with each other over breakfast was as close as we had come since Pransky had brought us together. We hadn’t shared a bed, and it was not just because I’d been inhumanly tired. Zebra hadn’t invited it, and nothing in the way she behaved or dressed had suggested that our relationship had ever been anything other than coolly professional. It was as if in changing her exterior markings she had also shed an entire mode of behaviour. I felt no real loss, not just because I was still fatigued and incapable of focusing my thoughts on anything as simple and devoid of conspiracy as physical intimacy, but also because I sensed her earlier actions had somehow been part of an act.

I tried to feel betrayal, but nothing came. It wasn’t as if I’d been honest with Zebra myself, after all.

“Actually,” I said, looking at Zebra’s face again, and thinking how easily she’d changed herself, “there is another possibility.”

“Which is?”

“That the man I saw wasn’t Reivich at all.” And then I put down the empty coffee cup and stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

We cabled to Escher Heights.

The car nudged down, its retractable legs kissing the rain-slick ground of the ledge. There was more traffic now than when I had last visited the place—it was daytime, after all—and the costumes and anatomies of the strollers were fractionally less ostentatious, as if I was seeing a different cross-section of Canopy society, the more reserved citizens who eschewed nights of delirious pleasure-fulfilment. But they were still extreme by any standards I had defined before arriving here, and while there was no one whose proportions deviated radically from the basic adult human norm, within that boundary every possible permutation was on display. Once you got beyond the obvious cases of outlandish skin pigmentation and body hair, it was not always possible to tell what was hereditary and what was the work of Mixmasters or their shadier kin.

“I hope there’s a point to this excursion,” Zebra said as we disembarked. “In case you’ve forgotten, there are two people following you. You say they might be working for Reivich, but don’t forget Waverly had his friends as well.”

“Would Waverly’s friends be arriving from offworld?”

“Probably not. Unless they were just posing as offworlders, like Quirrenbach.” She closed the door of the car behind her and the vehicle immediately took itself off on some other errand. “He might have come back with reinforcements. It would make sense for him to try and pick up the trail in Dominika’s, if that’s where you lost Quirrenbach in the first place. Wouldn’t it?”

“It would make perfect sense,” I said, hoping that I had kept the edge from my voice.

We walked to the rim of the landing ledge, to one of the pedestalmounted telescopes. The railing which encircled the ledge was chesthigh, but the telescopes all had little plinths at their bases, which meant that one was standing further from the ground, the drop all the more vertiginous. I cupped the end of the telescope to my eyes and panned around an arc of the city, struggling with the focus wheel until I realised that nothing would ever be in focus when there was so much murk in the air. Compressed by perspective, the tangle of the Canopy looked ever more complex and vegetative, like a cross-section through densely veined tissue. Reivich was out there, I knew, somewhere in that tangle; a single corpuscle caught in the pulmonary flow of the city.

“See anything?” Zebra asked.

“Nothing yet.”

“You sound tense, Tanner.”

“Wouldn’t you be tense, in my position?” I slammed the scope round on its pedestal. “I’ve been sent here to kill someone who probably doesn’t deserve it, and my only justification for it is some absurd adherence to a code of honour no one here understands or even respects. The man I’ve been sent to kill might be taunting me. Two other people might be trying to kill me. I’ve got one or two problems with my memories. And on top of that one of the people I thought I could trust has been lying to me all along.”

“I don’t follow,” Zebra said, but it was obvious from the tone of her voice that she did; more than sufficiently. She did not necessarily understand, but she did follow.

“You aren’t who you say you are, Zebra.”

The wind whipped at us, almost snatching her answer away. “What?”

“You’re working for Reivich, aren’t you?”

She shook her head angrily, almost laughing at the ludicrousness of the assertion, but she overdid it. I was not the world’s best liar, but neither was Zebra. The two of us should have started a self-help group.

“You’re mad, Tanner. I always thought you were a little on the edge, but now I know. You’re over it. Way over.”

“The night you found me,” I said, “you were working for him even then, from the very first moment we met. The sabotage story was a cover—a pretty good one, I have to say, but a cover nonetheless.” I stepped down from the plinth, suddenly feeling vulnerable, as if a particularly strong gust might cast me over for the long fall down to the Mulch. “Maybe I really was kidnapped by Gameplayers. But you already had your eye on me before then. I’d assumed I’d shaken the tail Reivich put on me—Quirrenbach—but there must have been someone else, keeping more distance so they weren’t so obvious. But you lost me until Waverly put the hunt implant in my skull. Then you had a way of tracking me again. How am I doing so far?”

“Insane, Tanner.” But there was no conviction in her words.

“Do you want to know how I realised? Apart from all the little details which just didn’t add up?”

“Astonish me.”

“You shouldn’t have mentioned Quirrenbach. I never said his name. In fact, I was very careful not to, just in case you made a slip and it came out. Seems my luck was in.”

“You bastard.” She said it sweetly, so that—to anyone watching us from a distance—it might have been a term of affection, the kind lovers give themselves. “You sly bastard, Tanner.”

I smiled. “You could have used an excuse if you’d wanted. You could have said that Dominika mentioned his name when you asked who I’d been travelling with. I was half expecting you to do that, and I’m not quite sure I know how I’d have reacted. But it’s all moot now, isn’t it? Now we know just who you are.”

“What were the little details, out of curiosity?”

“Professional pride?”

“Something like that.”

“You made it far too easy for me, Zebra. You left your vehicle active so I could steal it. You left your weapon where I could find it, and enough money to make a difference. You wanted me to do it, didn’t you? You wanted me to steal those things, because then you’d know for sure who I was. That I’d come to kill Reivich.”

She shrugged. “Is that all?”

“Not really, no.” I drew Vadim’s coat tighter around myself. “It didn’t escape my attention that we made love the first time we met, despite the fact that you barely knew me. It was good too, for what it’s worth.”

“Oh, don’t flatter me. Or yourself, for that matter.”

“But the second time, although you seemed relieved, I wouldn’t say you were particularly happy to see me. And I didn’t feel anything sexual pass between us at all. At least not from you. It took me a while to work out why, but I think I understand now. The first time you needed intimacy, because you were hoping it would lead me into saying something incriminating. So you invited me to sleep with you.”

“There’s such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn’t have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn’t get the impression you regretted any of that.”

“Probably because I didn’t. I’d have been too tired if you had made any overtures the second time—but that was never on the cards, was it? You knew all you needed to by then. And the first time was strictly professional. You slept with me for information.”

“Which I didn’t get.”

“No, but that hardly mattered. You got it later, when I skipped with your gun and car.”

“It’s a real sob story, isn’t it?”

“Not from where I’m standing.” I glanced over the edge. “From where I’m standing it’s a story that might just end with you taking a very long fall, Zebra. You know I’ve come a long way to kill Reivich. Did it occur to you that I might not have too many qualms about killing anyone who tries to stop me?”

“There’s a gun in your pocket. Use it if it’ll make you feel any better.”

I reached for the gun to check it was still there, then kept my hand in my pocket. “I could kill you now.”

To her credit, she managed not to flinch. “Without taking your hand out of your pocket?”

“You’re welcome to try me.” It felt like a charade; like a scripted piece we had fallen into rehearsing. It also felt like we had no choice but to follow the script to its conclusion, whatever that happened to be.

“Do you really think you could hit me like that?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve killed someone firing from this angle.” But, I thought, it would be the first time I had meant to do it. After all, I had not intended to kill Gitta. I was also unsure I really wanted to kill Zebra.

Had not meant to kill Gitta…

I’d been trying not to think about it, but like a maze with only one exit, my thoughts always meandered back to that one moment. Now, after long repression, they welled up and exploded like a gang of rowdy gatecrashers. I had not remembered it before now. Gitta had died, yes, but I had comfortably avoided thinking too closely about the manner of her death. She had died in the attack—so what else was there to think about? Nothing.

Except the simple fact that I had killed her.

This is what I remembered.

Gitta awoke first. She was the first to hear the attackers as they swept past the cordon, concealed in the strobe-lighting of the electrical storm. Her yelps of fear woke me, her naked body tensing against me. I saw three of them: three silhouetted shapes cast against the fabric of the tent, like grotesqueries in a shadow theatre. When each pulse of lightning flashed, they were somewhere else—sometimes one of them, sometimes two, sometimes all three. I could hear screaming—recognising in the timbre of each exclamation one of our own people. The screams were very short and concentrated, like trumpet blasts.

Ionisation-trails scythed through the tent and the force of the storm reached through the gashes like a creature of rain and wind. I cupped my hand across Gitta’s mouth and felt under my pillow for the gun I had placed there before retiring, satisfied when my hand detected its cool presence and found its contoured grip.

I slipped from the bunk. No more than a second or two had passed since I had first become consciously aware of the attack.

“Tanner?” I called, hardly able to hear my own voice against the storm’s threnody. “Tanner, where the hell are you?”

I left Gitta under the thin caul of a blanket, shivering despite the heat and humidity.

“Tanner?”

My night-vision began to come online, the interior details of the ruined tent creeping into greyish clarity. It was a good modification; worth what it had cost to obtain from the Ultras. Dieterling had persuaded me to have it, after having the same mod himself. The gene splice led to a layer of reflective material—an organic substance called tapetum—being laid down behind my retinae. The tapetum reflected light back, maximising absorption. It even shifted the wavelength of the reflected light, fluorescing at the optimum sensitivity of the retinae. The Ultras had said the only drawback of the splice—if you could call it a drawback—would be that my eyes would seem to flash back at anyone who shone a bright light in my face.

Eyeshine, they called it.

But I rather liked the idea of that. Long before anyone saw my eyeshine, I would have already seen them.

The splice went deeper than that, of course. They had packed my retinae with gene-tinkered rods with a photon-detection efficiency close to optimal, thanks to modified forms of the basic photosensitive chromoprotein pigments; a simple matter of tweaking a few genes on the X chromosome. I had a gene normally inherited only by women which allowed me to differentiate nuances of the colour red I had never imagined before. I even had a cluster of snake-derived cells, pits spaced around the rim of my corneas, which were capable of registering near infrared and ultraviolet, and which had grown neuronal connections back into my optic centre so that I processed the information as a visual overlay on my normal field of view, the way snakes do. But I had yet to activate the snake vision. Like all my faculties, it could be activated and suppressed by tailored retroviruses, triggering brief, controlled cancers which erected or dismantled the necessary cellular structures in a matter of days. I needed time, though, to learn the proper use of each faculty. First, enhanced night-vision. Then, later, colours beyond normal sight.

I pushed through the partition which divided the tent, into Tanner’s part, where our chess table was still set up; still displaying the checkmate I had won against him, as I always did.

Tanner—naked but for a pair of khaki shorts—was kneeling down at the side of his bunk, like a man tying his shoes or examining a blister on his foot.

“Tanner?”

He looked up toward me, his hands engulfed in something black. A moan drifted from his mouth, and as my vision sharpened I saw why. He had very little foot below the ankle, and what remained looked more like charcoal than human flesh, just as liable to shatter into black shards at the merest touch.

Now I recognised the stink of incinerated human meat.

He stopped moaning, quite suddenly, as if a subroutine in his mind had judged the gesture inessential to his immediate survival, cancelling the pain. And then he spoke, with ridiculous calm and accuracy.

“I’m hurt, quite badly, as you can probably see. I don’t think I’m going to be much use to you.” And then: “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

A figure stepped through a gash in one wall. His night-vision goggles hung around his neck and the flashlight rigged to his gun played across us, coming to rest on my face. His chameleoflage stammered towards compatibility with the interior.

I blasted his guts open.

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” I said when the afterimage of my weapon discharge had dissolved to a thumb-shaped pink bruise in my visual field. I stepped over the corpse of the attacker, carefully refraining from placing my unshod foot in the spreading entrails. I walked over to the rifle rack, pulled down a huge but currently superfluous bosonic beam weapon—too heavy to be used against enemy this close—and tossed it onto Tanner’s bunk. “Nothing wrong with my eyes at all. Now use that as a crutch and start earning your pay. We’ll get you a new foot if we get out of it, so just think of it as a temporary loss.”

Tanner looked from his wound to the gun and then back to the wound, as if weighing one against the other.

Then I moved.

I put my weight on the stock of the boser-rifle and tried to put the pain into some sealed compartment at the back of my head. My foot was ruined, but what Cahuella said was right. I could live without it—the blast had done a very professional job of cauterisation—and if I managed to survive the attack, obtaining a new foot would be a matter of a few weeks’ discomfort. In terms of mortality, I had sustained worse injuries when I was regular soldier fighting against the NCs. But my mind didn’t see it that way. What it saw was that part of me was simply not there any more, and it did not quite know how to process that absence.

Light—hard and blue and artificial—impaled the tent. Two of the enemy—I had counted three before the dead one shot me—were still out there. Our tent was big enough that it might look as if we were a larger force than we really were, so the other two might be laying down a suppressing fire before moving in to mop up anyone they had not already taken out.

I made my way over to the body, my vision darkening at the edges, as if seen through a tube of foreboding clouds. I knelt down until I could reach the dead man, unclipping his torch and taking his night-vision goggles. Cahuella had shot him blind, in near total darkness, and while the shot was a fraction low for my tastes, it had done the job. I remembered how, only a few hours earlier, I had watched him pump shots into the night, as if there was something there only he could see.

“They did something to you and Dieterling,” I said, clenching my teeth as I spoke and hoping that I was comprehensible. “The Ultras…”

“It’s nothing to them,” he said, his broad frame turning towards me like a wall. “They all have it. They live in nearly total darkness on their ships, so that they can bathe in the glories in the universe more easily, when they’ve left sunlight behind. Are you going to live, Tanner?”

“If any of us do.” I snapped the night-vision goggles over my eyes and saw the room brighten in hues of choleric green. “There wasn’t much blood loss, but I can’t do anything about shock. That’s bound to set in soon, and then I’m not going to be very much use to you.”

“Get yourself a gun, something useful at close range. We’ll go and see what damage we can do.”

“Where’s Dieterling?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead.”

Automatically, barely having to think about it, I tugged a compact pistol from the rack, flicking its ammo-cell to readiness and hearing the shrill whine as its condensers charged up.

Gitta screamed from the next partition.

Cahuella pushed through ahead of me and then stopped dead just beyond the drape. I nearly knocked him over, the stock of the boser-rifle scuffling against the floor as I tried to approximate walking. I had no need for the goggles now, since the room was already lit by the tent’s glowlamp, which Gitta must have ignited. She was standing up in the middle of the space, clutching a dun-coloured blanket around her.

One of the attackers stood behind her, one hand drawing her head back by a clump of scalp-hair, the other holding a wickedly serrated knife to the convex whiteness of her throat.

She made no scream now. The only sounds she allowed herself were small and snatched, like someone choking.

The man holding her had removed his helmet. He was not Reivich, just some mildly competent thug who might have fought with or against me during the war, or against both sides. His face was lined and his black hair was tied back in a topknot, like a Samurai. He was not exactly grinning—the situation was too tense for that—but there was something in his expression which suggested he was enjoying it.

“You can stop or you can take a step closer,” he said, his rough voice accentless and surprisingly reasonable. “Either way I’m going to kill her. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Your friend’s dead,” Cahuella said, needlessly. “If you kill Gitta, I’ll kill you as well. Except for every second she suffers, I’ll make it an hour for you. How’s that for generosity?”

“Fuck you,” the man said, and drew the blade across her throat. A caterpillar of blood formed beneath the track of the incision, but he had been careful not to draw too deeply. Good with his knife, I thought. How many ways had he practised to cut with such precision?

Gitta, to her credit, hardly flinched.

“I’ve got a message for you,” he said, lifting the blade slightly from her skin, so that the scarlet bloom on its edge was clearly visible. “It’s from Argent Reivich. Does that surprise you in any way? It shouldn’t, because I understand you were expecting him. Only just not so soon.”

“The Ultras lied to us,” Cahuella said.

The man smiled now, but only briefly. The pleasure was all in his eyes, narrowed to ecstatic slits. I realised we were dealing with a psychopath and that his actions were essentially random.

There was not going to be a negotiated settlement.

“There are factions amongst them,” the man said. “Especially between crews. Orcagna lied to you. You needn’t take it personally.” His fist tensed on the knife again. “Now, would you be so good as to put down that gun, Cahuella?”

“Do it,” I whispered, still standing behind him. “No matter how good your vision is, there’s only a tiny area of him not covered by Gitta, and I doubt you’re that confident of your aiming just yet.”

“Don’t you know it’s rude to whisper?” the man said.

“Do it,” I hissed. “I can still save her.”

Cahuella dropped the gun.

“Good,” I said, still whispering. “Now listen carefully. I can hit him from her, without harming Gitta. But you’re in the way.”

“Talk to me, you fuck.” The man pushed the knife against her skin so that the blade depressed a valley of flesh without actually breaking it. It would only take a flick now and he would sever her carotid artery.

“I’m going to shoot through you,” I said to Cahuella. “It’s a beam weapon, so it’s only the line of sight that matters. From the angle where I’m going to fire, I won’t hit any vital organs. But be ready for it.”

The man’s hand brought the knife deeper, so that the valley was suddenly rivened, and blood welled from its depths. Time slowed down, and I watched him begin to drag the knife across her throat.

Cahuella started to speak.

I fired.

The pencil-thin particle beam chewed through him, entering his back an inch or so to the left of his spine, in the upper lumbar region, around the twentieth or twenty-first vertebra. I hoped I missed the right common iliac vein, and that the beam angle would direct its energies between the left lung and the stomach. But it was not precision surgery, and I knew that Cahuella would have to count himself lucky if this did not actually kill him. I also knew that, if it were a question of dying to save Gitta, he would accept that wholeheartedly, and would even order me to make it so. I paid very little attention to Cahuella anyway, since Gitta’s position effectively limited the range of angles I could select. It was simply a matter of saving her, no matter what it did to her husband.

The particle beam fired for less than a tenth of a second, although the ion trail lingered long after, in addition to the track it had seared on my vision. Cahuella fell to the ground in front of me, like a sack of corn dropped from the ceiling.

And so did Gitta, with a hole bored neatly in her forehead, her eyes still open and seemingly alert, and the blood still oozing from the partial throat-wound.

I had missed.

There was no avoiding that; no softening or sweetening of that one acidic message. I had meant to save her, but intention meant nothing. What mattered was the red weal above her eyes where I had hit her, meaning to hit the man holding a knife to her throat.

The beam had missed him completely.

I had failed. In the one moment where failure mattered most; in the one moment of my life where I actually thought I could win—I had failed. Failed myself, and Cahuella, by betraying the terrible burden of trust he had implicitly placed in me, without saying a word. His wound was serious, but with the proper attention, I had had little doubt that he would live.

But there was no saving Gitta. I wondered who was the luckier.

“What’s wrong?” Zebra asked. “Tanner, what’s wrong? Don’t look at me like that, please. I’m beginning to think you might actually do it.”

“Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Only the truth.”

I shook my head minutely. “Sorry, but you’ve just given it to me, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough.”

“It wasn’t everything.” Her voice was quiet and somehow relieved. “I’m not working for him any more, Tanner. He thinks I am, but I’ve betrayed him.”

“Reivich?”

She nodded, face down, so that I could barely see her eyes. “Once you stole from me, I knew you were the man Reivich was running from. I knew you were the assassin.”

“It didn’t take a great deal of deduction, did it?”

“No, but it was important to be sure. Reivich wanted the man isolated and removed from the picture. Killed, not to put too fine a point on it.”

I nodded. “That would make sense.”

“I was meant to do it as soon as I had definite evidence you were the killer. That way Reivich would be able to put the matter out of his mind for good—he wouldn’t have to worry that the wrong man had been killed and that the real assassin was still out there somewhere.”

“You had more than a few opportunities to kill me.” My hand softened on the gun now. “So why didn’t you?”

“I almost did.” Zebra was talking quicker now, voice hushed even though no one was remotely within earshot. “I could have done it in the apartment, but I hesitated. You can’t blame me. So then I let you take the gun and the car, knowing I could trace either.”

“I should have realised. It seemed easy at the time.”

“Credit me with more sense than to let that happen by accident. Of course, there was another way to trace you if that failed. You still had the Game implant.” She paused. “But then you crashed the car, had the implant taken out. That only left the gun, and I wasn’t getting a very clear trace from it. Maybe you damaged it in the car crash.”

“Than I called you from the station, after I’d visited Dominika.”

“And told me where you’d be later on. I hired Pransky to help me. He’s good, don’t you think? Admittedly his socials skills could use a little work, but you don’t pay people like that for their charm and diplomacy.” Zebra took a breath and wiped a film of accumulated rain from her brows, exposing a strip of clean flesh beneath the caul of sooty water. “Not as good as you, though. I saw you attack the Gamers—the way you injured three of them and then kidnapped the fourth, the woman. I had you targeted the whole time that was happening. I could have opened your cranium from a kilometre away, and you wouldn’t have felt an itch before your brains hit the street. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just kill you like that. And that’s when I betrayed Reivich.”

“I felt someone watching me. I never guessed it was you.”

“And even if you had, would you have guessed I was a twitch of an eyelid away from killing you?”

“Eyelid-triggered sniper’s rifle? Now what would a nice girl like you be doing with something like that?”

“What now, Tanner?”

I withdrew my empty hand from my pocket, like a conjuror whose trick had gone spectacularly wrong.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s wet out here and I need a drink.”