“They started wondering if you were as razor-sharp as they’d heard,” Dieterling said.
“Yeah. Right.” Vasquez looked at him suspiciously. “You build up a reputation like mine, it takes time.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Dieterling said.
“Yeah. And a little thing like this, man, it can really hurt it.”
“Can’t they flush out the virus?” I said, before Dieterling pushed his luck.
“Yeah, Mirabel. In orbit, they’ve got shit that can do it. But orbit’s not currently on my list of safe places to visit, you know?”
“So you live with it. It can’t be that infectious any more, can it?”
“No; you’re safe. Everyone’s safe. I’m barely infectious now.” Now that he was smoking again he was calming down a little. The bleeding had stopped and he was able to slip his wounded hand back in his pocket. He took a sip from his pisco sour. “Sometimes I wish it was still infectious, or that I’d saved some of my blood from back when I got infected. It would have made a nice going-away present, a little shot of that in someone’s vein.”
“Except you’d be doing what the cultists always wanted you to do,” Dieterling said. “Spreading their creed.”
“Yeah, when instead I should be spreading the creed that if I ever catch the sick fuck who did this to me . . .” He trailed off, distracted by something. He stared into the middle distance, like a man undergoing some kind of paralytic seizure, then spoke. “No. No way, man. I don’t believe it.”
“What is it?” I said.
Vasquez’s voice dropped subvocal, though I could see the way his neck muscles kept on moving. He must have been wired for communication with one of his people.
“It’s Reivich,” he said finally.
“What about him?” I asked.
“The fucker’s outsmarted me.”
TWO
A maze of dark, damp passages connected Red Hand’s establishment to the interior of the bridge terminal, threading right through the structure’s black wall. He led us through the labyrinth with a torch, kicking rats out of the way.
“A decoy,” he said wonderingly. “I never figured he’d set up a decoy. I mean, we’ve been following this fucker for days.” He said the last word as if it should have been months at the very least; implying superhuman foresight and planning.
“The lengths some people’ll go to,” I said.
“Hey, ease off, Mirabel. It was your idea not to waste the guy the instant we saw him, which could easily have been arranged.” He shouldered through a set of doors into another passageway.
“It still wouldn’t have been Reivich, would it?”
“No, but when we examined the body we might have figured out it wasn’t him, and then we could have started looking around for the real one.”
“Guy’s got a point,” Dieterling said. “Much as it pains me to admit it.”
“One I owe you, Snake.”
“Yeah, well, don’t let it go to your head.”
Vasquez sent another rat scurrying for the shadows. “So what really did happen out there, that made you want to get into this vendetta shit in the first place?”
I said, “You seemed reasonably well informed already.”
“Well, word gets around, that’s all. Especially when someone like Cahuella buys the big one. Talk of a power-vacuum, that kind of shit. Thing is, I’m surprised either of you two made it out alive. I heard some extreme shit went down in that ambush.”
“I wasn’t badly injured,” Dieterling said. “Tanner was a lot worse off than me. He’d lost a foot.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. “The beam weapon cauterised the wound and stopped the bleeding.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Vasquez said. “Just a flesh wound, then. I can’t get enough of you guys, I really can’t.”
“Fine, but can we talk about something else?”
My reticence was more than simply an unwillingness to discuss the incident with Red Hand Vasquez. That was part of it, but an equally important factor was that I just didn’t remember the details with any clarity. I might have before I was put under for the recuperative coma—the one in which my foot was regrown—but now the whole incident felt like it had happened in the remote past, rather than a few weeks ago.
I’d sincerely believed that Cahuella would make it, though. At first he seemed to have been the lucky one: the laser pulse had gone right through him without cleaving any vital organs, just as if its trajectory had been mapped in advance by a skilled thoracic surgeon. But complications had set in, and without the means to reach orbit—he would have been arrested and executed as soon as he left the atmosphere—he was forced to accept the best black market medicine he could afford. It had been good enough to repair my leg, but that was exactly the kind of injury the war made commonplace. Complex damage to internal organs required an additional level of expertise which could simply not be bought on the black market.
So he’d died.
And here I was, chasing the man who’d killed Cahuella and his wife; aiming to take him down with a single diamond flèchette from the clockwork gun.
Back before I became a security expert in the employment of Cahuella; back when I was still a soldier, they used to say that I was such a proficient sniper that I could put a slug into someone’s head and take out a specific area of brain function. It wasn’t true; never had been. But I’d always been good, and I did like to make it clean and quick and surgical.
I sincerely hoped Reivich wouldn’t let me down.
To my surprise, the secret passageway opened directly into the heart of the anchorpoint terminal, emerging in a shadowed part of the main concourse. I looked back at the security barrier which we’d avoided; watching the guards scan people for concealed weapons; checking identities in case a war criminal was trying to get off the planet. The clockwork gun, still snug in my pocket, wouldn’t have shown up in those scans, which was one of the reasons why I’d opted for it. Now I felt a tinge of irritation that my careful planning had been partially wasted.
“Gents,” Vasquez said, lingering on the threshold, “this is as far as I go.”
“I thought this place would be right up your street,” Dieterling said, looking around. “What’s wrong? Scared you’d never want to leave again?”
“Something like that, Snake.” Vasquez patted the two of us on the back. “All right. Go and bring down that postmortal shit-smear, boys. Just don’t tell anyone I brought you here.”
“Don’t worry,” Dieterling said. “Your role in things won’t be overstated.”
“Copacetic. And remember, Snake . . .” He mimed firing a gun again. “That hunt we talked about . . . ?”
“Consider yourself pencilled in, at least on a provisional basis.”
He vanished back into the tunnel, leaving Dieterling and me standing together in the terminal. For a few moments neither of us said anything, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place.
We were in the surface-level concourse, a ring-shaped hall which encircled the embarkation and disembarkation chamber at the base of the thread. The concourse’s ceiling was many levels above, the intervening space criss-crossed by suspended walkways and transit tubes, with what had once been luxury shops, boutiques and restaurants set into the outer wall. Most of them were closed now, or had been converted into minor shrines or places where religious material could be purchased. There were very few people moving around, with hardly anyone arriving from orbit and only a handful of people walking towards the elevators. The concourse was darker than its designers must have intended, the ceiling scarcely visible, and the whole place had the quality of a cathedral in which, unseen but sensed, some sacred ceremony was taking place; an atmosphere that invited neither haste nor raised voices. At the very edge of hearing was a constant low hum, like a basement full of generators. Or, I thought, like a room full of chanting monks holding the same sepulchral note.
“Has it always been like this?” I said.
“No. I m
ean, it’s always been a shithole, but it’s definitely worse than the last time I was here. It must have been different a month or so ago. The place would have been heaving. Most of the people for the ship would have had to come through here.”
The arrival of a starship around Sky’s Edge was always something of an event. Being a poor and moderately backwards planet compared with many of the other settled worlds, we were not exactly a key player in the shifting spectrum of interstellar trade. We didn’t export much, except the experience of war itself and a few uninteresting bio-products culled from the jungles. We would have happily bought all manner of exotic technological goods and services from the Demarchist worlds, but only the very wealthiest people on Sky’s Edge could afford them. When ships paid us a visit, speculation usually had it that they had been been frozen out of the more lucrative markets—the Yellowstone-Sol run, or the Fand-Yellowstone-Grand Teton run—or they had to stop anyway to make repairs. It happened about once every ten standard years, on average, and they always screwed us.
“Is this really where Haussmann died?” I asked Dieterling.
“It was somewhere near here,” he said as we crossed the concourse’s great, echoing floor. “They’ll never know exactly where because they didn’t have accurate maps back then. But it must have been within a few kilometres of here; definitely within the outskirts of Nueva Valparaiso. At first they were going to burn the body, but then they decided to embalm him; make it easier to hold him up as an example to others.”
“But there was no cult then?”
“No. He had a few fruitcake sympathisers, of course—but there was nothing ecclesiastical about it. That came afterwards. The Santiago was largely secular, but they couldn’t engineer religion out of the human psyche that easily. They took what Sky had done and fused his deeds with what they chose to remember from home; saving this and discarding that as they saw fit. It took a few generations until they had all the details worked out, but then there was no stopping them.”
“And after the bridge was built?”
“By then one of the Haussmann cults had gained possession of the body. The Church of Sky, they called themselves. And—for reasons of convenience, if nothing else—they’d decided that he must have died not just near the bridge but right under it. And that the bridge was not really a space elevator at all—or if it was, that was just a superficial function—but really a sign from God: a ready-made shrine to the crime and glory of Sky Haussmann.”
“But people designed and built the bridge.”
“Under God’s will. Don’t you understand? It’s nothing you can argue with, Tanner. Give up now.”
We passed a few cultists moving in the opposite direction, two men and a woman. I felt a jolt of familiarity when I saw them, but I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen any in the flesh before. They wore ash-coloured smocks and both sexes tended to wear their hair long. One man had a kind of mechanical coronet fixed on his skull—maybe some kind of pain-inducing device—while the other man’s left sleeve was pinned flatly to his side. The woman had a small dolphin-shaped mark on her forehead, and I remembered the way in which Sky Haussmann had befriended the dolphins aboard the Santiago; spending time with the creatures that the other crew shunned.
Recollection of that detail struck me as odd. Had someone told it to me before?
“Have you got that gun ready?” Dieterling said. “You never know. We might walk round the corner and find the bastard tying his shoelaces.”
I patted the gun to reassure myself that it was still there, then said, “I don’t think it’s our day to be lucky, Miguel.”
We stepped through a door set into the concourse’s inner wall, the sound of chanting monks now quite unmistakably human; sustaining a note that was almost but not quite perfect.
For the first time since entering the anchorpoint terminal, we could see the thread. The embarkation area into which we’d stepped was a huge circular room encircled by a balcony on which we stood. The true floor was hundreds of metres below us, and the thread plunged from above, emerging through the ceiling via an irised entrance door, then stretching down towards the point where it was truly anchored and where servicing machinery lurked to refurbish and repair the elevators. It was somewhere down there that the sound of the chanting was coming from; voices carried higher by the odd acoustics of the place.
The bridge was a single thin thread of hyperdiamond stretching all the way from ground to synchronous orbit. For almost its entire length it was only five metres in diameter (and most of that was hollow), except for the very last kilometre which dropped into the terminal itself. The thread here was thirty metres wide, tapering subtly as it rose. The extra width served a purely psychological function: too many passengers had baulked at taking the journey to orbit when they saw how slender the thread they would be riding really was, so the bridge owners made the visible portion in the terminal much wider than it needed to be.
Elevator cars arrived and departed every few minutes or so, ascending and descending on opposite sides of the column. Each was a sleek cylinder curved to grip nearly half the thread, attached magnetically. The cars were multi-storeyed, with separate levels for dining, recreation and sleeping. They were mostly empty, their passenger compartments unlit as they glided up or down. There were a handful of people in only every fifth or sixth car. The empty cars were symptomatic of the bridge’s economic woes, but not a great problem in themselves. The expense of running them was tiny compared with the cost of the bridge; they had no impact on the schedule of the inhabited cars, and from a distance they looked as full as the others, conveying an illusion of busy prosperity which the bridge owners had long given up hoping would one day approach reality, since the Church had assumed tenancy. And the monsoon season may have given the illusion that the war was in its dog days, but plans were already drawn for the new season’s campaigns: the pushes and incursions already simulated in the battle-planners’ wargame computers.
A dizzyingly unsupported tongue of glass reached from the balcony to a point just short of the thread, leaving enough space for an elevator to arrive. Some passengers were already waiting on the tongue with their belongings, including a group of well-dressed aristocrats. But no Reivich, and no one in the party who resembled any of Reivich’s associates. They were talking amongst themselves or watching news reports on screens which floated around the chamber like square, narrow-bodied tropical fish, flickering with market reports and celebrity interviews.
Near the base of tongue was a booth where elevator tickets were being sold; a bored-looking woman was behind the desk.
“Wait here,” I said to Dieterling.
The woman looked up at me as I approached the desk. She wore a crumpled Bridge Authority uniform and had purple crescents under her eyes, which were themselves bloodshot and swollen.
“Yes?”
“I’m a friend of Argent Reivich. I need to contact him urgently.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”
It was no more than I was expecting. “When did he leave?”
Her voice was nasal; the consonants indistinct. “I’m afraid I can’t give out that information.”
I nodded shrewdly. “But you don’t deny that he passed through the terminal.”
“I’m afraid I . . .”
“Look, give it a rest, will you?” I softened the remark with what I hoped was an accommodating smile. “Sorry, it wasn’t my intention to sound rude, but this happens to be very urgent. I have something for him, you see—a valuable Reivich family heirloom. Is there any way I can speak to him while he’s still ascending, or am I going to have to wait until he reaches orbit?”
The woman hesitated. Almost any information she divulged at this point would have contravened protocol—but I must have seemed so honest, so genuinely distressed by my friend’s omission. And so clearly rich.
She glanced down at a display. “You’ll be able to place a message for him to contact you when he arrives at the orbital terminus.?
?? Implying that he hadn’t yet arrived; that he was still somewhere above me, ascending the thread.
“I think perhaps I’d better just follow him,” I said. “That way, there’ll be the minimum of delay when he reaches orbit. I can just deliver the relevant item and return.”
“I suppose that would make sense, yes.” She looked at me, perhaps sensing something in my manner that was not as it should have been, but not trusting her own instincts sufficiently to obstruct my progress. “But you’ll have to hurry. The next departure’s almost ready for boarding.”
I looked back to the point where the tongue extended out to the thread, seeing an empty elevator slide up from the servicing area.
“You’d better issue me with a ticket then.”
“You’ll be needing a return, I presume?” The woman rubbed at her eyes. “That’ll be five hundred and fifty Australs.”
I opened my wallet and pinched out the money, printed in crisp Southlander bills. “Scandalous,” I said. “The amount of energy it actually costs the Bridge Authority to carry me to orbit, it should be a tenth the price. But I suppose some of that gets skimmed off by the Church of Sky.”
“I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but you shouldn’t speak ill of the Church, sir. Not here.”
“No; that was what I heard. But you’re not one of them, are you?”
“No,” she said, handing me the change in smaller bills. “I just work here.”
The cultists had taken over the bridge a decade or so back, after they had convinced themselves that this place was where Sky had been crucified. They had stormed the place one evening before anyone realised quite what was happening. Haussmann’s followers claimed to have rigged the whole terminal with booby-trapped canisters primed with their virus, threatening to discharge them if there was any attempt at an eviction. The virus would carry far enough on the wind to infect half the Peninsula, if there was as much of it in the bridge as the cultists said. They might have been bluffing, but no one was prepared to take the risk of the cult forcing itself on millions of bystanders. So they held the bridge, and allowed the Bridge Authority to continue running it, even if it meant that the staff had to be constantly inoculated against any trace contamination. Given the side-effects of the anti-viral therapy, it obviously wasn’t the most popular work on the Peninsula—especially as it meant listening to the endless chanting of the cultists.