Chasm City

EIGHT

Argent Reivich.

There must have been a time when the name meant nothing to me, but it was hard to believe now. For too long the name—his name; his continued existence—had been the defining fact of my universe. I well remembered when I’d first heard it, however. It was the night at the Reptile House I taught Gitta how to handle a gun. I thought back to that time as I showed Amelia how to defend herself against Brother Alexei.

Cahuella’s palace on Sky’s Edge was a long, low H-shaped building surrounded by overgrown jungle on all sides. Rising from the roof of the palace was another H-shaped storey, but slightly smaller in all its dimensions, so that it was surrounded on all sides by a flat, walled terrace. From the vantage point of the terrace, the hundred metres or so of cleared land surrounding the Reptile House were not visible at all unless you stood at the wall and looked over the edge. The jungle, rising high and dark, seemed to be on the point of inundating the terrace’s wall like a thick green tide. At night the jungle was a black immensity drained of any colour, filled with the alien sounds of a thousand native lifeforms. There was no other human settlement of any kind for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.

The night I taught Gitta was unusually clear, the sky flecked with stars from tree-top to zenith. Sky’s Edge had no large moons, and the few bright habitats which orbited the planet were below the horizon, but the terrace was lit by scores of torches, burning in the mouths of golden hamadryad statues set on stone pedestals along the wall. Cahuella had an obsession with hunting. His ambition was to catch himself a near-adult hamadryad, rather than the single immature specimen he’d managed to bag the previous year and which now lived deep below the Reptile House.

I hadn’t long been in his employment on that hunting trip, and that was the first time I had seen his wife. Once or twice she had handled one of Cahuella’s hunting rifles, but with no sign that she had ever touched a weapon before that trip. Cahuella had asked me to give her a few impromptu shooting lessons while we were in-country, which I had, and while she had improved, it was clear that Gitta was never going to be any kind of expert shot. It hardly mattered; she had no interest in hunting and while she had endured the trip with quiet stoicism, she could not share Cahuella’s primal enthusiasm for killing.

Soon even Cahuella realised that he was wasting his time trying to turn Gitta into another hunter. But he still wanted her to know how to use a gun—something smaller now, for the purposes of self-defence.

“Why?” I said. “You hire people like me so people like Gitta won’t have to worry about their own safety.”

We had been alone at the time, down in one of the empty vivarium chambers. “Because I’ve got enemies, Tanner. You’re good, and the men under you are good as well—but they’re not infallible. A single assassin could still break through our defences.”

“Yes,” I said. “But anyone that good would also be good enough to take out either of you without you even knowing it was about to happen.”

“Someone as good as you, Tanner?”

I thought about the defences I had arranged around and within the Reptile House. “No,” I answered. “They’d need to be a hell of a lot better than me, Cahuella.”

“And are there people like that out there?”

“There’s always someone better than you. It’s just a question of whether anyone’s prepared to pay them for their services.”

He rested a hand on one of the empty amphibian cases. “Then she needs this more than ever. A chance at self-defence is better than none at all.”

I had to concede there was a kind of logic there. “I’ll show her, then… if you insist.”

“Why are you so reluctant?”

“Guns are dangerous things.”

Cahuella smiled in the wan yellow light spilling from the tubes set into the empty cases.

“That’s the idea, I think.”

We began soon after. Gitta was a perfectly willing student, but nowhere near as quick as Amelia. It was nothing to do with her intelligence; just a fundamental deficit in her motor skills; a basic weakness in hand-to-eye coordination which would never have manifested itself had not Cahuella insisted on this tuition. Which was not to say that she was beyond hope, but what Amelia could have mastered in an hour, it took Gitta all day to just stumble through at the most basic level of competence. Had she been a trainee soldier back in my old unit, I would never have been forced through this rigmarole. It would have been someone else’s problem to find a task better suited to her skills—intelligence-gathering, or something.

But Cahuella wanted Gitta to know how to use a gun.

So I followed orders. I had no problem with this. It was up to Cahuella how he used me. And spending time with Gitta was not exactly the most onerous of tasks. Cahuella’s wife was a lovely woman: a striking high-cheekboned beauty of Northern ancestry, lithe and lissom, with a dancer’s musculature. I had never touched her until this shooting lesson, had hardly had good cause to speak to her, though I had fantasised often enough.

Now, whenever I had to straighten her posture by applying gentle pressure to her arm or her shoulders or the small of her back, I felt my heart race ridiculously. When I spoke, I tried to keep my voice as soft and calm as I felt the situation demanded, but to my ears what came out sounded strained and adolescent. If Gitta noticed anything in my behaviour, she gave no sign of it. Her attention was focused tightly on the lesson at hand.

I had installed a radio-frequency field-generator around this part of the terrace which addressed a processor in the anti-flash goggles Gitta wore. It was standard military training equipment; part of the vast cache of stolen or black-market equipment Cahuella had hoarded over the years. Ghosts would appear in the goggles, mapped into Gitta’s field of view as if they were moving around the terrace. Not all of the ghosts would be hostile, but Gitta would have only a fraction of a second to decide for herself who needed shooting.

It was a joke, really. Only a very skilled assassin would stand any chance of getting inside the Reptile House to begin with, and anyone that good would never give Gitta those precious moments to make her mind up.

But Gitta wasn’t doing too badly by her fifth lesson. She was at least pointing and firing the gun at the right targets ninety per cent of the time, a margin of error I could live with for now, hoping that I would never have the misfortune to be the one victim in ten who was not planning to kill her.

But she was still not taking down her targets with any kind of efficiency. We were using live projectile ammo since the beam-weapons we had access to were just too bulky and heavy for self-defence. For the sake of safety, I could have arranged matters so that the gun would only fire when either Gitta or myself was out of the line of fire, not to mention any of Cahuella’s valuable hamadryad statues. But I felt that the instants when the gun was disabled would have rendered the session too inauthentic to be much use. Instead, I’d loaded the gun with smart ammo, each slug holding a buried processor addressed by the same training field which spoke to Gitta’s goggles. The processor controlled tiny spurts of gas which would shove the bullet off-course if the trajectory was deemed dangerous. If the required deflection angle was too sharp, the bullet would self-destruct into a speeding cloud of hot metal vapour—not exactly harmless, but a lot better than a small-calibre slug if it happened to be headed straight for your face.

“How am I doing?” Gitta asked, when we had to reload the gun.

“Your target acquisition’s improving. You still need to aim lower—go for the chest rather than the head.”

“Why the chest? My husband said you could kill a man with a single shot to the head, Tanner.”

“I’ve had more practice than you.”

“But it’s true, though—what they say about you? That when you shot someone, you…”

I finished it for her. “Took out specific areas of brain function, yeah. You shouldn’t believe everything they tell you, Gitta. I could probably put a slug into one hemisphere rather than the other, but beyond that…”

“Still, it isn’t a bad reputation to live with.”

“I suppose not, no. But that’s all it is.”

“If it was my husband they were saying that about, he’d milk it for all it was worth.” She cast a wary eye back to the upper storey of the house. “But you always try and play it down. That makes it seem more likely to me, Tanner.”

“I try and play it down because I don’t want you to think I’m something I’m not.”

She looked at me. “I don’t think there’s any danger of that, Tanner. I think I know exactly who you are. A man with a good conscience who happens to work for someone who doesn’t sleep quite so well at night.”

“My conscience isn’t exactly pristine, believe me.”

“You should see Cahuella’s.” She locked eyes with me for a few moments; I broke it and looked down at the gun. Gitta raised her voice an octave. “Oh; speak of the devil.”

“Talking about me again?” He was stepping onto the terrace from the upper storey of the building. Something glinted in his hand: a glass of pisco sour. “Well, I can’t blame you for that, can I? So. How are the lessons coming along?”

“I think we’re making reasonable progress,” I said.

“Oh, don’t believe a word he says,” Gitta said. “I’m abysmal, and Tanner’s too polite to say so.”

“Nothing worthwhile’s ever easy,” I answered. To Cahuella, I said, “Gitta can fire a gun now and discriminate between friend and foe most of the time. There isn’t anything magical about it, though she’s worked hard to achieve what she has and deserves credit. But if you want more than that, it might not be so easy.”

“She can always keep learning. You’re the master teacher, after all.” He nodded down at the gun, into which I’d just slipped a fresh clip. “Hey. Show her that trick you do.”

“Which one would that be?” I said, trying to keep my temper under control. Normally Cahuella knew better than to label my painfully acquired skills as tricks.

Cahuella took a sip of his drink. “You know the one I mean.”

“Fine; I’ll take a guess.”

I reprogrammed the gun so that the bullets would no longer be deflected if they were on hazardous trajectories. If he wanted a trick, he was going to get one—whether it cost him or not.

Normally when I shot a small weapon, I adopted the classic marksman’s stance: legs slightly spread for balance, gun’s grip held in one hand, supported by the other hand from beneath; arms outstretched at eye-level, locked against recoil if the gun fired slugs rather than energy. Now I held the gun single-handed at waist-height, like an oldtime quick-draw gunfighter with a six-shooter. I was looking down on the gun, not sighting along it. But I had practised this position so thoroughly that I knew exactly where the bullet would go.

I squeezed the trigger and put a slug into one of his hamadryad statues.

Then walked to inspect the damage.

The statue’s gold had flowed like butter under the impact of the bullet, but it had flowed with beautiful symmetry around the entrance point, like a yellow lotus. And I had placed the shot with beautiful symmetry as well—mathematically centred on the hamadryad’s brow; between the eyes if the creature’s eyes had not been situated inside its jaw.

“Very good,” Cahuella said. “I think. Have you any idea what that snake cost?”

“Less than you pay me for my services,” I said, programming the gun back into safe mode before I forgot.

He looked at the ruined statue for a moment before shaking his head, chuckling. “You’re probably right. And I guess you’ve still got the edge, right, Tanner?” He clicked his fingers at his wife. “Okay; end of lesson, Gitta. Tanner and I need to talk about something—that’s why I came out here.”

“But we’ve only just begun.”

“There’ll be other times. You wouldn’t want to learn everything right away, would you?”

No; I thought—I hoped that never happened, because then I would have no reason to be around her. The thought was dangerous—was I seriously thinking about trying something on with her, while Cahuella was no further away than another room in the Reptile House? Crazy too, because until tonight nothing Gitta had done had indicated any kind of reciprocal attraction towards me. But some of the things she’d said had made me wonder. Maybe she was just getting lonely, out here in the jungle.

Dieterling came out behind Cahuella and escorted Gitta back into the building, while another man dismantled the field generator. Cahuella and I walked away towards the wall around the terrace. The air was warm and clammy, with no hint of a breeze. During the day it could be almost unbearably humid; nothing like Nuevo Iquique’s balmy coastal climate where I had spent my childhood. Cahuella’s tall, broad-shouldered frame was wrapped in a black kimono patterned with interlocked dolphins, his feet bare against the terrace’s chevroned tiles. His face was broad, with what always struck me as a touch of petulance around the lips. It was the look of a man who would never accept defeat gracefully. His thick black hair was permanently slicked back from his brow; brilliant grooves like beaten gold in the light from the hamadryad flames. He fingered the damaged statue, then bent down to pick up a few shards of gold from the floor. The shards were leaf-thin, like the foil which illuminators once used to decorate sacred texts. He rubbed them sadly between his fingers, then tried to place the gold back into the statue’s wound. The snake was depicted curling around its tree, in its last phase of motility before the arboreal fusion-phase.

“I’m sorry about the damage,” I said. “But you did ask for a demonstration.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter; I’ve got dozens of them in the basement. Maybe I’ll even leave it as a feature, right?”

“Deterrence?”

“Has to be worth something, hasn’t it?” Then his voice lowered. “Tanner, something’s come up. I need you to come with me tonight.”

“Tonight?” It was already late, but then Cahuella tended to keep unusual hours. “What are you planning—a late-night hunting trip?”

“I’m in the mood, but this is something else entirely. We’ve got visitors coming in. We need to go and meet them. There’s a clearing about twenty klicks up the old jungle road. I want you to drive me there.”

I thought about that carefully before answering. “What kind of visitors are we talking about here?”

He stroked the hamadryad’s pierced head, almost lovingly. “Not the usual kind.”

Cahuella and I were on our way from the Reptile House within half an hour, driving one of the ground-effect vehicles. It had just been enough time for Cahuella to dress for the trip, donning khaki trousers and shirt, under an elaborately pocketed tan hunting jacket. I nosed the car between the shells of derelict, vine-enshrouded buildings around the Reptile House until I found the old trail, just before it plunged into the forest. In another few months the journey would not have been possible at all—the jungle was slowly healing the wound cut through the heart of it. It would take flame-throwers to scythe it clear again.

The Reptile House and its environs had once been part of a zoological garden, built during one of the hopeful ceasefires. That particular ceasefire had only lasted a decade or so—but at the time it must have seemed that there was a good chance of peace enduring; enough for people to build something as militarily valueless and as civically improving as a zoo. The idea had been to house Terran and native specimens in similar exhibits, emphasising the similarities and differences between Earth and Sky’s Edge. But the zoo had never been properly completed, and now the only intact part of it was the Reptile House, which Cahuella had made into his personal residence. It served him well: isolated and easily fortified. He had ambitions to restock its basement vivaria with a private collection of captured animals, prime amongst which would be the pre-adult hamadryad he had yet to catch. The juvenile took up a large volume already; he would need a whole new basement for a large one—not to mention extensive new expertise in the care of a creature with a substantially different biochemistry than its younger phase. Elsewhere, the House was already filled with the skins and teeth and bones of animals he had brought home as dead prizes. He had no love for living things, and the only reason that he wanted live specimens was because it would be obvious to his visitors that greater skill had been required in their capture than if they had been killed in the field.

Branches and vines slapped against the car’s bodywork as I gunned it down the track, the howl of the turbines out-screeching every other living thing for miles around.

“Tell me about these visitors,” I said, my throat-mike relaying my words to Cahuella through the headphones which clamped his skull.

“You’ll see them soon enough.”

“Did they suggest this clearing as a meeting place?”

“No—that was my idea.”

“And they know which clearing you were talking about?”

“They don’t have to.” He nodded upwards. I risked a glance towards the forest canopy, and when the canopy thinned for a moment—revealing sky—I saw something painfully bright loitering above us, like a triangular wedge cut out of the firmament. “They’ve been following us ever since we left the House.”

“That’s not a native aircraft,” I said.

“It’s not an aircraft, Tanner. It’s a spaceship.”

We reached the clearing after an hour’s drive through thickening forest. Something must have burned the clearing away a few years earlier—a seriously rogue missile, probably. It might even have been intended for the Reptile House; Cahuella had enough enemies to make that a reasonable possibility. Fortunately, most of them had no idea where he lived. Now the clearing was beginning to grow back, but the ground was still level enough to permit a landing.

The spacecraft stopped above us, silent as a bat. It was delta-shaped, and now that it had sunk lower, I saw that the underside was quilted by thousands of glaringly bright heat elements. It was fifty metres wide; half the width of the clearing. I felt the first slap of warmth, and then—at the edge of audibility—the first trace of an almost subsonic humming.

The jungle around us fell into silence.

The deltoid came in lower, three inverted hemispheres puckering gracefully from the apex points. Now it was below the treeline. The heat was making me sweat. I held up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun-bright glare.

Then the glare shut down, dimming to a dull brick-red, and the vehicle dropped the last few metres under its own weight, settling down on the hemispheres which cushioned the impact with muscle-like smoothness. For a few moments, silence, and then a ramp slid down like a tongue from the front. Blue-white glare from the doorway at the top of the ramp threw the surrounding vegetation into stark relief. In my peripheral vision I saw things scurrying and slithering for shadow.

Two spindly, elongated figures stepped into the light at the top of the ramp.

Cahuella stepped ahead of me, towards the ramp.

“You’re going aboard that thing?”

He looked back, silhouetted by the light. “Damn right I am. And I want you with me.”

“I’ve never dealt with Ultras before.”

“Well, now’s your big chance.”

I left the car and followed him. I had a gun with me, but it felt ridiculous just to be holding it. I slipped it into my belt and never touched it again the whole time we were away. The two Ultras at the top of the ramp waited silently, standing in faintly bored postures, one leaning against the doorway’s surround. When Cahuella was halfway to the parked ship he knelt down and fingered the ground, brushing aside undergrowth. I glanced down and thought I saw something exposed, like a sheet of battered metal—but before I could pay it any more attention, or wonder what it had been, Cahuella was urging me on.

“C’mon. They’re not known for their immense reserves of patience.”

“I didn’t even know there was an Ultra ship in orbit,” I said, keeping my voice low.

“Not many people do.” Cahuella started up the ramp. “They’re keeping very dark for now, so they can conduct certain types of business which wouldn’t be possible if everyone knew they were here.”

The two Ultras were a man and a woman. They were both very thin, their near-skeletal frames encased in looms of exo-support machinery and prosthetics. They were both pale and high-cheekboned, with black lips and eyes that appeared to be outlined in kohl, lending them a doll-like, cadaverous look. Both had elaborate dark hair worked in a viper’s nest of stiff locks. The man’s arms were smoked glass, inlaid with glowing machines and luminous pulsing feedlines, while the woman had an oblong hole right through her abdomen.

“Don’t let them freak you out,” Cahuella whispered. “Freaking people out is part of their armoury of business techniques. You can bet the Captain sent down the two weirdest specimens he had, just to put us ill at ease.”

“He did a good job, in that case.”

“Trust me; I’ve dealt with Ultras. They’re pussies, really.”

We ambled up the ramp. The woman, the one leaning against the doorframe, pulled herself upright and studied us with impassively pursed lips. “You’re Cahuella?” she said.

“Yeah, and this is Tanner. Tanner goes with me. That’s not open to negotiation.”

She looked me over. “You’re armed.”

“Yes,” I said, only slightly unnerved that she had seen the gun through my clothes. “You’re telling me you’re not?”

“We have our means. Step aboard, please.”

“The gun isn’t a problem?”

The woman’s smirk was the first emotional response she had shown. “I don’t seriously think so, no.”

Once we were aboard they retracted the ramp and closed the door. The ship had a cool medical ambience, all pale pastels and glassy machines. Two other Ultras waited aboard it, reclined in a pair of enormous command couches, nearly buried under readouts and delicate control stalks. The pilot and co-pilot were both naked, purple-skinned beings with impossibly dexterous fingers. They had the same stiff dreadlocks as the other two, but rather more per head.

The woman with a hole in her gut said, “Take us up nice and easy, Pellegrino. We don’t want our guests blacking out on us.”

I mouthed in Cahuella’s direction, “We’re going up?”

He nodded back.

“Enjoy it, Tanner. I’m going to. Word is I won’t be able to leave the surface before too long—even the Ultras won’t want to touch me.”

We were shown to a pair of vacant couches. Almost as soon as we were buckled in, the ship pulled itself aloft. Through transparent patches arranged around the walls I saw the jungle clearing dropping below until it looked like a single footprint, bathed in a smudge of light. There, far off towards one horizon, was a single spot of light which had to be the Reptile House. The rest of the jungle was ocean-black.

“Why did you pick that clearing for our meeting?” asked the Ultra woman.

“You’d have looked pretty stupid parking on top of a tree.”

“That’s not what I mean. We could have provided our own landing space with minimal effort. But that clearing was significant, wasn’t it?” The woman sounded as if the resolution to this line of enquiry could be of only passing interest to her. “We scanned it on our approach. There was something buried beneath it; a regularly-sided hollow space. Some kind of chamber, filled with machines.”

“We all have our little secrets,” Cahuella said.

The woman looked at him carefully, then flicked her wrist, dismissing the matter.

Then the ship surged higher, the gee-force crushing me into my seat. I made a stoic effort not to show any kind of discomfort, but there was nothing pleasant about it. The Ultras all looked cool as ice, softly mouthing technical jargon at each other; airspeed and ascent vectors. The two who had met us had plugged themselves into their seats with thick silver umbilicals which presumably assisted their breathing and circulation during the ascent phase. We shrugged off the planet’s atmosphere and kept climbing. By then we were over dayside. Sky’s Edge looked blue-green and fragile; deceptively serene, just as it must have looked the day the Santiago first made orbit. From here there was no sign of war at all, until I saw the featherlike black trails of burning oilfields near the horizon.

It was the first time I had ever seen such a view. I’d never been in space before now.

“On finals for the Orvieto,” reported the pilot called Pellegrino.

Their main ship came up fast. It was as dark and massive as a sleeping volcano; a chiselled cone four kilometres long. A lighthugger; that was what Ultras called their ships—sleek engines of night, capable of slicing through the void at only the tiniest of fractions below the speed of light. It was hard not to be impressed. The mechanisms which made that ship fly were more advanced than almost anything I would ever have experienced on Sky’s Edge; more advanced than almost anything I could imagine.

To the Ultras our planet must have seemed like some kind of experiment in social engineering: a time-capsule imperfectly preserving technologies and ideologies which were three or four centuries out of date. That was not all our own fault, of course. When the Flotilla had left Mercury at the end of the twenty-first century, the technologies on board had been cutting-edge. But the ships took a century and a half to crawl across space to Swan’s system—during which time technology stampeded back around Sol, but remained locked in stasis aboard the Flotilla.

By the time we landed, other worlds had developed near-light space travel, making our entire journey look like some pathetic, puritanical gesture of self-inflicted punishment.

Eventually the fast ships arrived at Sky’s Edge, their data caches pregnant with the technological templates that could have leapfrogged us into the present, had we wished.

But by then we were at war.

We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. The only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only very rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nanotech-inspired gadgetry.

No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.

We docked inside the Orvieto.

Inside, it was like a much larger version of the shuttle, all twisting pastel passages reeking of antiseptic purity. The Ultras had arranged gravity by spinning parts of their ship within the outer hull; it was slightly heavier than on Sky’s Edge, but the effort was no worse than walking around with a heavy backpack. The lighthugger was also a ramliner: a passenger-carrying vessel outfitted with thousands of reefersleep berths in her belly. Some people were already being brought aboard; wide-awake aristocrats complaining loudly about the way they were being treated. The Ultras seemed not to care. The aristocrats must have paid well for the privilege of riding the Orvieto to wherever its next destination was, but to the Ultras they were still savages—just marginally cleaner and richer ones.

We were shown to the Captain.

He sat on an enormous powered throne, suspended on an articulated boom so that he could move throughout the bridge’s vast three-dimensional space. Other senior crew were riding similar seats, but they carefully steered away from us when we entered, moving towards displays set into the walls which showed intricate schematics. Cahuella and I stood on a low-railed extensible catwalk which jutted halfway into the bridge.

“Mister… Cahuella,” said the man in the throne, by way of greeting. “Welcome aboard my vessel. I am Captain Orcagna.”

Captain Orcagna was only slightly less impressive than his ship. He was dressed from neck to foot in glossy black leather, his feet in knee-length black boots with pointed toes. His hands, which he steepled beneath his chin, were gloved in black. His head was perched above the high collar of his black tunic like an egg. Unlike his crew he was completely bald, utterly hairless. His unlined, characterless face could almost have belonged to a child—or a corpse. His voice was high, almost feminine.

“And you are?” he said, nodding in my direction.

“Tanner Mirabel,” Cahuella said, before I had a chance to speak. “My personal security specialist. Where I go, Tanner goes. That’s not…”

“… open to negotiation. Yes, I gathered.” Absently, Orcagna glanced at something in mid-air, which only he could see. “Tanner Mirabel… yes. A soldier once, I see—until you moved into Cahuella’s employment. Confide in me: are you a man entirely without ethics, Mirabel, or are you only gravely ignorant of the kind of man you work for?”

Again, Cahuella answered. “It’s not his job to lose sleep, Orcagna.”

“But would he anyway, if he knew?” Orcagna looked at me again, but there was nothing much to be read into his expression. We might even have been talking to a puppet driven by a disembodied intelligence running on the ship’s computer net. “Tell me, Mirabel… are you aware that the man you work for is regarded as a war criminal in some quarters?”

“Only by hypocrites happy to buy weapons from him, as long as he doesn’t sell to anyone else.”

“A level killing field is so much better than the alternative,” Cahuella said. It was one of his favourite sayings.

“But you don’t just sell weapons,” Orcagna said. Once again he seemed to be viewing something hidden from us. “You steal and kill for them. Documentary evidence implicates you in at least thirty murders on Sky’s Edge, all connected with the arms black market. On three occasions you were responsible for the redistribution of weapons which had been decommissioned under peace agreements. Indirectly, you can be shown to have prolonged—even reignited—four or five local territorial disputes which had been close to negotiated settlement. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost through your actions.” Cahuella started to protest at that point, but Orcagna was having none of it. “You are a man driven utterly by profit; completely devoid of morals or any fundamental sense of right and wrong. You are a man enthralled by the reptilian… perhaps because in reptiles you see your own reflected self, and at heart you are infinitely vain.” Orcagna stroked his chin, and then allowed a faint smile. “In short, therefore, you are a man much like myself… someone with whom I believe I can do business.” His gaze snapped to me again. “But tell me, Mirabel—why do you work for him? I’ve seen nothing in your history to suggest that you have much in common with your employer.”

“He pays me.”

“That’s all?”

“He’s never asked me to do anything I wouldn’t do. I’m his security specialist. I protect him and those around him. I’ve taken bullets for him. Laser impacts. Sometimes I set up deals and meet potential new suppliers. That’s dangerous work, too. But what happens to the guns after they’ve changed hands is no concern of mine.”

“Mm.” He touched his little finger to the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps it should be.”

I turned to Cahuella. “Is there a point to this meeting?”

“Yes, as always,” Orcagna snapped. “Trade, of course, you tiresome man. Why else do you think I would risk contaminating my ship with planetary dirt?”

So it was a business meeting after all.

“What are you selling?” I asked.

“Oh, the usual—weaponry. That’s all your master ever wants from us. It’s the usual local attitude. Time and again, my trading associates have offered your planet access to the longevity techniques commonplace on other worlds, but on each occasion the offer has been declined in favour of sordid military goods…”

“That’s because what you ask for the longevity tech would bankrupt half the Peninsula,” Cahuella said. “It’d put quite a dent in my assets, too.”

“Not as big a dent as death,” Orcagna mused. “Still; it’s your funeral. Something I have to say, though: whatever we give you, look after it, will you? It would be quite unfortunate if it were to fall into the wrong hands again.”

Cahuella sighed. “It’s not my fault if terrorists rob my clients.”

The incident he was talking about had happened a month earlier. Amongst those who knew something about the transactional web of black market commerce on Sky’s Edge, it was something of a talking point even now. I had set up the deal with a legitimate, treaty-abiding military faction. The exchange had been conducted through an elaborate series of fronts, with the ultimate source of the arms—Cahuella—discreetly concealed. I had handled the swap, too, conducted in a clearing similar to the one where the Ultras had met us—and that was where my involvement ended. But someone had tipped off one of the less-legitimate factions about the arms transfer, and they had ambushed the first faction on their way home from the deal.

Cahuella called the new faction terrorists, but that was to place too great a distinction between them and their legitimate victims. In a war in which the rules of engagement and the definitions of criminality changed by the week, what distinguished a legitimate faction from a less-legitimate one was often only the quality of the former’s legal advice. Alliances were always shifting, past actions constantly being rewritten to cast a revisionist light on the participants. It was true that Cahuella was regarded as a war criminal now by many observers. In a century, they might be feting him as a hero… me his trusty man-at-arms.

Stranger things had happened.

But it would be very hard to see the outcome of that terrorist ambush in anything but a negative light. Within a week of the ambush, they had used the same stolen weapons to murder most of an aristocratic family in Nueva Santiago.

“I don’t remember the family’s name.”

“Reivich, or something,” Cahuella said. “But listen. Those terrorists were animals, agreed. If I could, I’d skin them for wallpaper and make furniture out their bones. But that doesn’t mean I’m overflowing with sympathy for Reivich’s clan. They were rich enough to get offworld. The whole planet’s a shithole. They want somewhere safe to live, there’s a whole galaxy out there.”

“We have some intelligence that might interest you,” said Orcagna. “The youngest surviving son—Argent Reivich—has sworn vengeance against you.”

“Sworn vengeance. What is this, a morality play?” Cahuella held out a hand in front of him. “Hey, look. I’m trembling.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “If I had thought it was worth bothering you about, you’d already have known. That’s another thing you pay me for: so you don’t have to worry about every crank with a grudge against us.”

“But we don’t think the fellow is, as you say, a crank.” Orcagna examined his black-gloved fingers, pulling each sequentially until there was a tiny pop. “Our intelligence suggests that the gentleman has recovered weapons from the same militia which murdered his family. Heavy-particle armaments—suitable for a full-scale assault against a fortified stronghold. We’ve detected signatures from these devices, indicating that they are still operational.” The Ultra paused, then added, almost casually, “It may amuse you to know that the signatures are moving south, down the Peninsula, towards the Reptile House.”

“Give the positions to me,” I said. “I’ll meet the kid and find out what he wants. It’s possible he just wants to negotiate more arms—he may not have fingered you as the supplier.”

“Yeah,” Cahuella said. “And I deal in fine wines. Forget it, Tanner. You think I need someone like you to handle a louse like Reivich? You don’t send a pro against an amateur.” To Orcagna, he said, “He’s up country, you say? How far, what kind of territory?”

“That information can, of course, be provided.”

“Fucking bloodsucker.” For a moment his face was blank, then he smiled and pointed at the Ultra. “I like you, I really like you. You’re a fucking leech. Name your price, then. I don’t need to know exactly where he is. Give me a positional fix accurate to—oh—a few kilometres. Otherwise it just wouldn’t be fun, would it?”

“What the hell are you thinking of?” The words had jumped out of my mouth before I had time to censor them. “Reivich may be inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous—especially if he has the kind of weapons the militia used against his family.”

“So it’ll be sporting, then. A real safari. Maybe we’ll catch us a hamadryad while we’re at it.”

“You like sport,” Orcagna said, knowingly.

I understood it, then. If Cahuella had not had this audience, he would never have acted like this. If we’d been back in the Reptile House, alone, he would have done the logical thing: ordered me or one of the men under me to take Reivich out with no more ceremony than flushing a toilet. It would have been beneath him to waste his time with someone like Reivich. But in front of the Ultras he could not be seen to show any weakness. He had to play the hunter.

When all was over; when our ambush against Reivich had failed, and when Gitta had been murdered, Cahuella with her, and Dieterling and myself injured, one thing became clearer than anything I had ever known in my life.

It was my fault.

I had allowed Gitta to die through my ineptitude. I had allowed Cahuella to die at the same time. The two deaths were horribly wedded. And Reivich, his hands bloodied with the wife of the man he had really sworn vengeance against, had walked away unharmed, valiant. He must have thought Cahuella would survive, too—his wounds couldn’t have seemed as life-threatening as mine. Had Cahuella survived, Reivich would have inflicted maximum pain on him over the maximum span of time; a victory far less trivial than simply killing the man. In Reivich’s plan, Cahuella would have had the rest of his life to miss Gitta. The pain of that loss would have been beyond words. I think she was the only living creature in the universe he was capable of loving.

But Reivich had taken her from me instead.

I thought of the way Cahuella had laughed at Reivich swearing vengeance. There had always been a fine line between the absurd and the chivalric. But that was exactly what I did: swearing that I would dedicate the rest of my life to killing Reivich; avenging Gitta. If someone had told me then that I would have to die before bringing death to Reivich, I think I would have quietly accepted that as part of the bargain.

In Nueva Valparaiso he had slipped through my fingers. At that point I’d been forced to take the gravest of decisions—whether to abandon Reivich or continue chasing him beyond the system entirely.

In hindsight, it hadn’t been too difficult.

“I don’t remember there being any particular problems with Mister Reivich,” Amelia said. “He had some transient amnesia, but it wasn’t as severe a case as yours—it only lasted a few hours and then he began to piece himself back together. Duscha wanted him to stay and have his implants attended to, but he was in quite a hurry to leave.”

“Really?” I did my best to sound surprised.

“Yes. God only knows what we did to offend him.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t anything.” I wondered what it was about his implants that needed fixing, but decided the question could wait. “I suppose there’s a good chance he’s already on Yellowstone, or nearly there. I wouldn’t want to be too late following him down. I can’t let him have all the fun, can I?”

She eyed me judiciously. “You were friends with him, Tanner?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Travelling companions, then?”

“I suppose that about sums it up, yes.”

“I see.” Her face was serenely impassive, but I could imagine what she was thinking: that Reivich had never mentioned travelling with anyone else, and that if our friendship had existed at all, it must have been lopsided.

“Actually, I was rather hoping he’d have waited for me.”

“Well, he probably didn’t want to burden the infirmary with someone who had no need of its ministrations. Either that, or there was some amnesia after all. We can try and contact him, of course. It won’t be simple, but we do our best to keep tabs on those we revive—just in case there are complications.”

And, I thought, because some of them repay the Idlewild hospitality, when they are rich and secure on Yellowstone, and they see the Mendicants as a means of gaining influence over newcomers.

But I only said, “No, that’s kind but not at all necessary. Best if I meet him in person, I think.”

She regarded me carefully before answering. “You’ll be wanting his address on the surface, then.”

I nodded. “I appreciate there are matters of confidentiality to be considered, but…”

“He’ll be in Chasm City,” Amelia said, as if the utterance itself was a heresy; as if the place was the vilest pit of degradation imaginable. “That’s our largest settlement; the oldest one.”

“Yes; I’ve already heard of Chasm City. Can you narrow it down slightly?” I did my best not to sound sarcastic. “A district would help.”

“I can’t really help you very much—he didn’t tell us exactly where he was going. But you could start in the Canopy, I suppose.”

“The Canopy?”

“I’ve never been there. But they say you can’t miss it.”

I discharged myself the day after.

I wasn’t under any illusion that I was totally well, but I knew that if I waited any longer the chances of my picking up Reivich’s trail again would dwindle to zero. And while some parts of my memory had still not come back into absolutely sharp focus, there was enough there to function with; enough to let me get on with the job in hand.

I went back into the chalet to gather my things—the documents, the clothes they had given me and the pieces of the diamond gun—and once again found my attention drawn to the alcove in the wall which had so disturbed me upon waking. I’d managed to sleep in the chalet since then, and while I wouldn’t have described my dreams as restful, the images and thoughts that had raced through them were of Sky Haussmann. The blood on my sheets each morning testified to that. But when I woke, there was still something about the alcove that chilled me, and which was as irrational as ever. I thought of what Duscha had told me about the indoctrinal virus, and wondered if there was anything in my infection which could cause such a baseless phobia—the virally generated structures linking to the wrong brain centres, perhaps. But at the same time I wondered if the two things might not be connected at all.

Afterwards, Amelia met me and walked with me up the long, meandering trail which led to heaven, climbing higher and higher towards one of the habitat’s conic end-points. The gradient was so mild that walking was barely an effort, but there was a feeling of euphoric relief as my weight diminished and each step seemed to send me a little higher and further.

When we had walked in silence for ten or fifteen minutes, I said, “Is it true what you hinted at earlier, Amelia? That you were once one of us?”

“A passenger, you mean? Yes, but I was just a child when it happened—I barely knew how to speak. The ship which brought us in had been damaged, and they’d lost most of the identifying records for their sleepers. They’d been picking up passengers in more than one system, too, so there was no real way to tell where I’d ever come from.”

“You mean you don’t know what world you were born on?”

“Oh, I can make a few guesses—not that it interests me greatly these days.” The path steepened momentarily, and Amelia suddenly bounded ahead of me to take the rise. “This is my world now, Tanner. It’s a blessedly small place, but it isn’t a bad one, I think. Who else can say that they’ve seen all their world has to offer?”

“That must make it very boring.”

“Not at all. Things always change.” She pointed across the curve of the habitat. “That waterfall wasn’t always there. Oh, and there was a little hamlet down there once, where we’ve made a lake now. It’s like that all the time. We keep having to change these paths to stop erosion—every year it’s like I have to remember the place anew. We have seasons, and years when our crops don’t grow as well as in other years. Some years we get a glut, too, God willing. And there’s always something to explore. We get new people coming through all the time, of course—and some of them do join the Order.” She lowered her voice. “Thankfully, they’re not all like Brother Alexei.”

“There’s always one bad apple.”

“I know. And I shouldn’t say this… but after what you’ve taught me, I’m almost hoping Alexei tries it on again.”

I understood how she must have felt. “I doubt that he will, but I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes if he does.”

“I’ll be gentle with him, don’t worry.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which we scaled the last slope towards the end of the cone. My weight had probably dropped to a tenth of what it had been in the chalet, but walking was still possible—it just felt like the ground was receding beneath each footfall. Ahead, discreetly veiled by a copse of trees which had grown haphazardly in the low gravity, was an armoured door leading out of the chamber.

“You’re serious about leaving, aren’t you?” Amelia said.

“The sooner I get to Chasm City the better.”

“It won’t be all that you’re expecting, Tanner. I wish you’d stay with us a little longer, just so that we could bring you up to speed…” She trailed off, evidently realising that I was not going to be persuaded.

“Don’t worry about me; I’ll catch up on my history.” I smiled at her; hating myself at the same time for the way I had been forced to lie to her, but knowing there was no other way. “Thank you for your kindness, Amelia.”

“It was my pleasure, Tanner.”

“Actually…” I looked around to see if anyone was observing us, but we were alone. “There’s something I’d be happy if you were to accept from me.” I reached into the pocket of my trousers and pulled out the fully assembled clockwork gun. “It’s probably best if you don’t ask why I was carrying this, Amelia. It won’t do me much good to carry it any further, I think.”

“I don’t think I should take that from you, Tanner.”

I pushed it into her palm. “Then confiscate it.”

“I should, I suppose. Does it work?”

I nodded; there was no need to go into details. “It will do you some good if you ever get into real trouble.”

She slipped the gun away. “I’m confiscating it, that’s all.”

“I understand.”

She reached out and shook my hand. “God go with you, Tanner. I hope you find your friend.”

I turned away before she could see my face.