“Wake up,” I said, not too loudly. “You’ve got a customer.”
Her eyes opened slowly, like cracks in swelling pastry. “What is this, you got no respect?” The words came out quickly, but she sounded too lethargic to register real alarm. “You ain’t come barging in here.”
“My money seemed to cut some ice with your assistant.” I dredged up another note and flashed it in front of her face. “How does this look to you?”
“I don’t know, I can’t see nothing. What wrong with your eyes? Why they like that?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” I said, and then wondered how convincing I sounded to her. After all, Lorant had said something similar. And it was a long time since I had experienced any difficulty seeing in the dark.
I extinguished that line of thought—unsettling as it was—and kept up the pressure on Dominika. “I need you to do a job for me, and to answer a few questions. That’s not asking too much, is it?”
She propelled her bulk from the couch, fitting her lower reaches into the steam-powered harness which waited by her side. I heard a hiss of leaking pressure as it took her bulk. Then Dominika moved away from the bed with all the grace of a barge.
“What kind job, what kind questions.”
“There’s an implant I need removing. Then I need to ask some questions about a friend of mine.”
“Maybe I ask you questions about friend too.” I had no idea what she meant by that, but before I could ask, she had turned on the tent’s interior light, exposing her waiting instruments, clustered around the couch which I now saw was spattered with faint rusty scabs of dried blood of varying vintage and hue. “But that cost too. Show me implant.” I did, and after examining it for a few moments, her sharp thimbled fingers digging into the side of my head, she seemed satisfied. “Like Game implant, but you still alive.”
Evidently that meant it could not possibly be a Game implant, and for a moment there was no faulting her logic. After all, how many of the hunted ever stood a chance of making it back to Madame Dominika and having the trace removed from their skulls?
“Can you remove it?”
“If neural connections shallow, no problem.” Saying this, she guided me to the couch and swung a viewing device in front of her eyes, chewing her lower lip as she peered into my skull. “No. Neural connections shallow; barely reach cortex. Good news for you. But look like Game implant. How it get there? Mendicants?” Then she shook her head, the rolls of flesh around her neck oscillating like counterweights. “No, not Mendicants, unless you lie to me yesterday, when you say you no have implants. And this insertion wound new. Not even day old.”
“Just get the damned thing out,” I said. “Or else I walk out of here with the money I’ve already given the kid.”
“That you can do, but you no find better than Dominika. That not threat, that promise.”
“Then do it,” I said.
“First you ask question,” she said, levitating around the couch to prep her other instruments, swapping her thimbles with impressive dexterity. She carried a pouch of them somewhere down in the infolded complexity of her waist, finding those she wanted by touch alone, without cutting or pricking her fingers in the process.
“I have a friend called Reivich,” I said. “He arrived a day or two ahead of me and we’ve lost touch. Revival amnesia, the Mendicants said. They could tell me he was in the Canopy, but no more than that.”
“And?”
“I think there was a good chance he sought your services.” Or could not avoid them, I thought. “He would have had implants that needed removing, like Mister Quirrenbach, the other gentleman I travelled with.” Then I described Reivich to her, aiming for the kind of vaguely correct level of recall which would imply friendship rather than an assassin’s phys iometric target profile. “It’s very important that we get in contact, and so far I haven’t succeeded.”
“What make you think I know this man?”
“I don’t know—how much do you think it would take? Another hundred? Would that jog your memory?”
“Dominika’s memory, it not so fast this time of morning.”
“Two hundred then. Now is Mister Reivich springing to mind?” I watched as a look of theatrical recollection appeared on her face. I had to hand it to her, she did it with style. “Oh, good. I’m so glad.” If only she knew exactly how much.
“Mister Reivich, he special case.”
Of course he was. An aristocrat like Reivich, even on Sky’s Edge, would have had almost as much ironmongery floating around in his body as a Belle Epoque high-roller; maybe more than some top-level Demarchists. And, like Quirrenbach, he would not even have heard of the Melding Plague until he arrived around Yellowstone. No time either to seek out the few remaining orbital clinics capable of doing the extraction work. He would have been in a hurry to get down to the surface and lose himself in Chasm City.
Dominika would have been his first and last chance at salvation.
“I know he was a special case,” I said. “And that’s why I know you’d have a means to contact him.”
“Why I want contact him?”
I sighed, realising that this was going to be hard work, or expensive, or both. “Supposing you removed something from him, and he seemed healthy, and then a day later you discovered that there was something anomalous with the implant you’d removed—that perhaps it had plague traces. You’d be obliged to contact him then, wouldn’t you?”
Her expression hadn’t changed during all this, so I decided a little harmless flattery ought to be brought into play.
“It’s what any self-respecting surgeon would do. I know not everyone around here would bother chasing up a client like that, but as you’ve just said, no one’s better than Madame Dominika.”
She grunted acknowledgement. “Client information, confidential,” Dominika added, but we both knew what that meant.
A few minutes later, I was a few dozen notes lighter, but I also had an address in the Canopy; something called Escher Heights. I had no idea how specific it was—whether it referred to a single apartment, or a single building, or simply some predefined region of the tangle.
“Now you close eyes,” she said, pushing a blunt thimbled fingertip against my forehead. “And Dominika work her magic.”
She adminstered a local anaesthetic before getting to work. It didn’t take her long, and I felt no real discomfort as she removed the hunt implant. She might as well have been excising a cyst. I wondered why Waverly had not thought to include an anti-tamper system in the implant, but perhaps that had been considered just a tiny bit too unsporting. In any case—in so far as I understood things, based on what I had gleaned from Waverly and Zebra—in the normal rules of play the implant’s telemetry was not meant to be accessed by the people actually doing the hunting. They were allowed to chase the prey using whatever forensic techniques they liked, but homing in on a buried neural transmitter was just too easy. The implant was purely for spectators, and for the people like Waverly who monitored the progress of the game.
Idly, as my mind free-associated on Dominika’s couch, I thought of the refinements I might have introduced if it had been up to me. For a start, I would have made the implant very much harder to remove, putting in the deep neural connections Dominika had worried about, and then an antitamper system; something which would fry the brain of the subject if anyone tried removing the implant ahead of time. I would also make sure that the hunters carried their own implants, equally difficult to remove. I’d arrange for the two types of implant—hunter and hunted—to emit some kind of coded signal which each recognised. And when the parties approached each other within some predefined radius—say a city block, or less—I would arrange for both implants to inform their wearers of the proximity of the other, via the deep neural connections I had already sewn. I would cut the voyeurs out of the loop completely; let them track the game in their own fashion. Make the whole thing more private, and limit the number of hunters to a nice roun
d number, like one. That way the whole thing would become infinitely more personal. And why limit the hunt to a mere fifty hours? In a city the size of this one, it struck me that the hunt could easily last tens of days, or longer, provided the target was allowed sufficient time to run and hide in the maze of the Mulch. For that matter, I saw no reason to limit the arena of play to the Mulch alone, or even to Chasm City. Why not every settlement on the planet, if they wanted a real challenge?
Of course, there was no way they’d go for it. What they wanted was a quick kill; a night’s blooding, with as little expense, danger and personal involvement as possible.
“Okay,” Dominika said, pressing a sterilised pad against the side of my head. “You done now, Mister Mirabel.” She held the implant between two fingers, glinting like a tiny grey jewel. “And if this not hunt implant, then Dominika skinniest woman in Chasm City.”
“You never know,” I said, “miracles do happen.”
“Not to Dominika.” Then she helped me from the couch. I felt a little lightheaded, but when I fingered the head wound it felt tiny and there was no sign of infection or scarring. “You no curious?” she asked, as I shrugged myself back into Vadim’s coat, anxious for the anonymity it afforded despite the heat and humidity.
“No curious—I mean not curious—about what?”
“I say I ask you questions about friend.”
“Reivich? We’ve already covered that.”
She began packing away her thimbles. “No. Mister Quirrenbach. Other friend, the one you with yesterday.”
“Actually, Mister Quirrenbach and I were more acquaintances than friends. What was it anyway?”
“He pay me not to tell you this, good money. So I say nothing. But you rich man now, Mister Mirabel. You make Mister Quirrenbach seem poor. You get Dominika’s drift?”
“You’re saying Quirrenbach bribed you into secrecy, but if I top his bribe I can bribe you out of it?”
“You smart cookie, Mister Mirabel. Dominika’s operations, they no give you brain damage.”
“Enthralled to hear it.” With a long-suffering sigh I reached into my pockets again and asked her to tell me what it was Quirrenbach had not wanted me to know. I was unsure exactly what it was I was expecting—very little, perhaps, since my mind had not really had time to dwell on the idea that Quirrenbach had ever had something to hide.
“He come in with you,” Dominika said. “Dressed like you, Mendicant clothes. Ask for implants out.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Dominika smiled then, a salacious smile, and I knew that whatever it was she was about to inflict on me, she was going to enjoy it.
“He no have implants, Mister Mirabel.”
“What do you mean? I saw him on your couch. You were operating on him. You’d shaved his hair.”
“He tell me make it look good. Dominika, she no ask questions. Just do what client says. Client always right. “Specially when client pay good, like Mister Quirrenbach. Client say fake surgery. Shave hair, go through motion. But I never open his head. No need. I scan him anyway—nothing in there. Him already clean.”
“Then why the hell would—”
And then suddenly it all made sense. Quirrenbach did not need to have his implants removed because—if he had ever had any to start with—they had been removed years earlier, during the plague. Quirrenbach was not from Grand Teton at all. He was not even from outside the system. He was local talent, and he had been recruited to follow me down and find out what was making me tick.
He had been working for Reivich.
Reivich had reached Chasm City ahead of me, travelling down while I was still having my memories reassembled by the Ice Mendicants. A few days’ lead was not much, but it had obviously been sufficient time to recruit some help. Quirrenbach might have been his first point of contact. And then Quirrenbach had returned to orbit and mingled with the immigrants who had just arrived from beyond the system. His mission would have been simple enough. Investigate the people revived from the Orvieto and find someone who might just possibly be a hired killer.
I thought back to how it had all happened.
First I had been accosted by Vadim in the commons of the Strelnikov. I had shrugged off Vadim, but a few minutes later I had seen him beating up Quirrenbach. I had crossed the commons sphere, forcing Vadim to give up on Quirrenbach, and then I had beaten up Vadim myself. I remembered well how it had been Quirrenbach who urged me not to kill him.
At the time, I put it down to forgiveness on his part.
Afterwards Quirrenbach and I had then crawled to Vadim’s quarters. I remembered again how Quirrenbach had at first seemed uneasy as we rifled through his belongings—Quirrenbach questioning the morality of what I was doing. I had argued with him, and then Quirrenbach had been forced to go along with the theft.
All along, I hadn’t seen the obvious: that Quirrenbach and Vadim were working together.
Quirrenbach had needed a way to get close to me without rousing my suspicions; a way to find out more about me. The two of them had set me up; Vadim undoubtedly hurting Quirrenbach in the commons, but only because they needed that realism. They must have known I would be unable to resist intervening, especially after my earlier brush with Vadim. Later, when we had been attacked in the carousel, I remembered how I had seen Quirrenbach standing to one side, restrained by the other man, while I took the brunt of Vadim’s punishment.
I should have seen it then.
Quirrenbach had latched onto me, which implied that he was very good at his job; that he had singled me out amongst all the passengers on the ship—but it was not necessarily like that. Reivich might have employed half a dozen other agents to tail other passengers, all using different strategems to get close to their targets. The difference was, the others were all shadowing the wrong person, and Quirrenbach—by luck or intuition or deduction—had hit the bullseye. But there was no way he could have known for sure. In all the conversations we had had, I had still been careful enough not to give away anything which would have established my identity as Cahuella’s security man.
I tried to put myself in Quirrenbach’s position.
It must have been very tempting for him and Vadim to kill me. But they could not do that; not until they had become totally certain that I was the real assassin. If they had killed me then, they would never know for sure that they had got the man they were after—and that doubt would always shadow them.
So Quirrenbach had probably been planning to tail me for as long as it took; as long as it took to establish a pattern; that I was after a man called Reivich for some purpose unspecified. Visiting Dominika’s was an essential part of his disguise. He must not have realised that as a soldier I would lack implants and would therefore not require the good Madame’s talents. But he had taken it calmly—trusting me with his belongings while he was under the knife. Nice touch, Quirrenbach, I thought. The goods had served to reinforce his story.
Except again, in hindsight, I should have realised. The broker had complained that Quirrenbach’s experientials were bootlegged; that they were copies of originals he had handled weeks earlier. And yet Quirrenbach said he had only just arrived. If I checked the manifests of lighthuggers arriving in the last week, would I even find that a ship had come in from Grand Teton? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It depended on how fastidious Quirrenbach had been in the manufacturing of his cover. I doubted that it went very deep, since he would have had only a day or two to manufacture the whole thing from scratch.
All things considered, he hadn’t done an entirely bad job.
It was sometime after noon, when I had finished with Dominika, that the next Haussmann episode happened. I was standing with my back against the wall of Grand Central Station, idly watching a skilled puppeteer entertain a small group of children. The puppeteer worked above a miniature booth, operating a tiny model of Marco Ferris, making the delicately jointed, spacesuited figurine descend a rockface formed from a heap of crumbled masonry. Ferris was
supposed to be climbing into the chasm, because there was a pile of jewels at the base of the slope guarded by a fierce, nine-headed alien monster. The children clapped and screamed as the puppeteer made the monster lunge at Ferris.
That was when my thoughts stalled and the episode inserted itself, fully formed.
Afterwards—when I’d had time to digest what had been revealed to me—I thought about the one that had come before it. The Haussmann episodes had begun innocently enough, reiterating Sky’s life according to the facts as I knew them. But they’d begun to diverge, at first in small details and then with increasing obviousness. The references to the sixth ship didn’t belong in any orthodox history that I’d ever heard of, and nor did the fact that Sky had kept alive the assassin who had murdered, or been given the means to murder, his father. But those were minor aspects of the story compared with the idea that Sky had actually murdered Captain Balcazar. Balcazar was just a footnote in our history; one of Sky’s predecessors—but no one had ever intimated that Sky had actually killed him.
Clenching my fist, blood raining against the floor of the concourse, I began to wonder what I’d really been infected with.
“There wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was sleeping there, not making a sound—I never suspected anything was wrong.”
The two medics examining Balcazar had come aboard the instant the ship was secure, after Sky had raised the alarm about the old man. Valdivia and Rengo had closed the airlock behind them so that they had space to work. Sky watched them intently. They both looked weary and sallow, with bags under their eyes from overwork.
“He didn’t cry out, gasp for air, anything like that?” said Rengo.
“No,” Sky said. “Not a peep.” He made a show of looking distraught, but was careful not to overdo it. After all, with Balcazar out of the way, the path to the Captaincy was suddenly much clearer than it had been before, as if a complicated maze had suddenly revealed itself to have a very simple route to its heart. He knew that; they knew it too—and it would have been even more suspicious if he had not tempered his grief with the merest hint of pleasure at his considerable good fortune.