They had stripped him to the waist, spread his arms wide and fixed him to a cross-shaped alloy spar. His legs were bound together, but a nail had been driven through the wrist of his right hand (not the palm; that was a detail the stigma-inducing virus got wrong) and a much larger piece of metal had been rammed through the upper part of his severed left arm. These details, and the expression of numb agony on Haussmann’s face, had been rendered mercifully indistinct by the encasing process. But while it was not really possible to read his features, every nuance of his pain was written into the arc of his neck; the way his jaw was clenched as if in the throes of electrocution. They should have electrocuted him, I thought. It would have been kinder, no matter the crimes he had committed.
But that would have been too simple. They were not just executing a man who had done terrible things, but glorifying a man who had also given them a whole world. In crucifying him, they were showing their adoration as fervently as their hate.
It had been like that ever since.
The elevator tracked past Sky, coming within metres of him, and I felt myself flinching; wishing that we could be clear of him as quickly as possible. It was as if the vast space was an echo chamber, reverberating with endless pain.
My palm itched. I rubbed it against the hand-rail, closing my eyes until we were free of the anchorpoint terminal; rising through night.
‘More wine, Mr Mirabel?’ asked the foxlike wife of the aristocrat sitting opposite me.
‘No,’ I said, dabbing my lips politely with the napkin. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll retire. I’d like to watch the view while we climb.’
‘That’s a shame,’ the woman said, pursing her own lips in a pout of disappointment.
‘Yes,’ said her husband. ‘We’ll miss your stories, Tanner.’
I smiled. In truth, I’d done little more than grimace my way through an hour of stilted smalltalk while we dined. I had salted the conversation with the odd anecdote now and then, but only to fill the awkward silences which fell across the table when one or other of the participants made what might, within the ever-shifting loom of aristocratic etiquette, be construed as an indelicate remark. More than once I had to resolve arguments between the northern and southern factions, and in the process of doing so I had become the group’s default speaker. My disguise must not have been absolutely convincing, for even the northeners seemed to realise that there was not automatically any affiliation between me and the southerners.
It hardly mattered, though. The disguise had convinced the woman in the ticket booth that I was an aristocrat, making her reveal more than she might have done otherwise. It had allowed me to blend in with these aristocrats, too - but sooner or later I would be able to discard it. I was not a wanted man, after all - just someone with a shady past and a few shady connections. There had been no harm in calling myself Tanner Mirabel, either - it was a lot safer than trying to come up with a convincing aristocrat lineage out of thin air. It was, thankfully, a neutral name that had no obvious connotations, aristocratic or otherwise. Unlike the rest of my dinner companions, I couldn’t trace my lineage back to the Flotilla’s arrival, and it was more than likely that the Mirabel name had arrived on Sky’s Edge half a century after that. In aristocrat terms I was posing as a parvenu lout - but no one would have been gauche enough to allude to that. They were all long-lived, tracing their lineages not just back to the Flotilla, but to the passenger manifest, with only one or two intervening generations - and it was perfectly natural to assume that I possessed the same augmented genes and access to the same therapeutic technologies.
But while the Mirabels probably had arrived on Sky’s Edge sometime after the Flotilla, they hadn’t brought any kind of germline longevity fix with them. Perhaps the first generation had lived a longer-than-normal human lifespan, but that advantage had not been passed to their offspring.
I didn’t have the money to buy it off the shelf, either. Cahuella had paid me adequately, but not so well that I could afford to be stung by the Ultras to that extent. And it almost didn’t matter. Only one in twenty of the planet’s population had the fix anyway. The rest of us were mired in a war, or scraping a living in the war’s interstices. The main problem was how to survive the next month, not the next century.
Which meant that the conversation took a decidedly awkward turn as soon as the subject matter turned to longevity techniques. I did my best to just sit back and let the words flow around me, but as soon as there was any kind of dispute I was pushed into the role of adjudicator. ‘Tanner will know,’ they said, turning to me to offer some definitive statement on whatever had provoked the stalemate.
‘It’s a complicated issue,’ I said, more than once.
Or: ‘Well, obviously there are deeper issues at stake here.’
Or: ‘It would be unethical of me to speak further on this topic, I’m afraid - confidentiality agreements and all that. You do understand, don’t you?’
After an hour or so of that, I was ready for some time on my own.
I stood from the table, made my excuses and left, stepping up the spiral staircase which led to the observation deck above the habitation and dining levels. The prospect of shedding the aristocratic skin pleased me, and for the first time in hours I felt the tiniest glow of professional contentment. Everything was in hand. When I reached the top I had the compartment’s servitor prepare me a guindado. Even the way the drink fogged my normal clarity of mind was not unpleasing. There was plenty of time to become sober again: it would be at least seven hours before I needed an assassin’s edge.
We were ascending quickly now. The elevator had accelerated to a climb rate of five hundred kilometres per hour as soon as it cleared the terminal, but even at that rate it would still have taken forty hours to make it to the orbital terminal, many thousands of kilometres above our heads. However, the elevator had quadrupled its speed once it no longer had to punch through atmosphere, which had happened somewhere during our first course.
I had the observation deck to myself.
The other passengers, when they had finished dining, would disperse through the five compartments above the dining area. The elevator could comfortably carry fifty people and not appear crowded, but there were only seven of us today, including myself. The total trip time was ten hours. The station’s revolution around Sky’s Edge was synchronised to the planet’s own daily rotation so that it always hung exactly over Nueva Valparaiso, dead above the equator. They had starbridges on Earth, I knew, which reached thirty-six thousand kilometres high - but because Sky’s Edge rotated a little faster and had a slightly weaker gravitational pull, synchronous orbit was sixteen thousand kilometres lower. The thread, nonetheless, was still twenty thousand kilometres long - and that meant that the top kilometre of thread was under quite shocking tension from the deadweight of the nineteen thousand kilometres of thread below it. The thread was hollow, the walls a lattice of piezo-electrically reinforced hyperdiamond, but the weight of it, I had heard, was still close to twenty million tonnes. Every time I made a footfall, as I moved around the compartment, I thought of the tiny additional stress my motion was imparting to the thread. Sipping my guindado, I wondered how close to its breaking strain the thread was engineered; how much tolerance the engineers built into the system. Then a more rational part of my mind reminded me that the thread was carrying only a tiny fraction of the traffic it could handle. I stepped with more confidence around the picture window.
I wondered if Reivich was calm enough to take a drink now.
The view should have been spectacular, but even where night had yet to fall the Peninsula was hidden under a blanket of monsoon cloud. Since the world huddled close to Swan in its orbit, monsoon season came once every hundred days or so, lasting no more than ten or fifteen days each short year. Above the sharply curved horizon the sky had darkened through shades of blue towards a deep navy. I could see bright stars now, and overhead lay the single fixed star of the orbital station at the high end of the thread, still a
long way above us. I considered sleeping for a few hours, my soldiering years having given me an almost animal ability to snap into a state of total alertness. I swirled what remained of the drink and took another sip. Now that I had made up my mind, I felt fatigue rushing over me like a damburst. It was always there, waiting for the slightest relaxation in my guard.
‘Sir?’
I flinched again, only slightly this time, for I recognised the voice of the servitor. The machine’s cultured voice continued, ‘Sir, there is a call for you from the surface. I can have it sent through to your quarters, or you may view it here.’
I thought about going back to my room, but it was a shame to lose the view. ‘Put it through,’ I said. ‘But terminate the call should anyone else start coming up the stairs.’
‘Very well, sir.’
Dieterling, of course - it had to be. He wouldn’t have had time to get back to the Reptile House, although by my estimate he should have been about two-thirds of the way there. A shade early for him to try and contact me - and I hadn’t expected any contact anyway - but it was nothing to feel any anxiety about.
But instead, the face and shoulders that appeared in the elevator’s window belonged to Red Hand Vasquez. Somewhere in the room a camera must have been capturing me and adjusting my image to make it seem as if we were standing face to face, for he looked me straight in the eye.
‘Tanner. Listen to me, man.’
‘I’m listening,’ I said, wondering if the irritation I felt was obvious in my voice. ‘What was so important that you needed to reach me here, Red?’
‘Fuck you, Mirabel. You won’t be smiling in about thirty seconds. ’ But the way he said it made it seem less like a threat than a warning to prepare for bad news.
‘What is it? Reivich pulled another fast one on us?’
‘I don’t know. I had some guys make some more enquiries and I’m damn sure he’s on that thread, the way you think he is - a car or two ahead of you.’
‘Then that isn’t why you’re calling.’
‘No. I’m calling because someone’s killed Snake.’
I answered reflexively, ‘Dieterling?’
As if it could be anyone else.
Vasquez nodded. ‘Yeah. One of my guys found him about an hour ago, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with, so it took a while for the news to get back to me.’
My mouth seemed to form the words without conscious input from my mind. ‘Where was he? What had happened?’
‘He was in your car, the wheeler - still parked on Norquinco. You couldn’t see there was anyone in it from the street; you had to look inside deliberately. My guy was just checking out the machine. He found Dieterling slumped down inside. He was still breathing.’
‘What happened?’
‘Someone shot him. Must’ve waited near where the wheeler was parked, then hung around until Dieterling got back from the bridge. Dieterling must have just got in the wheeler, getting ready to leave.’
‘How was he shot?’
‘I don’t know man; it’s not like I’m running an autopsy clinic here, you know?’ Vasquez bit his lip before continuing, ‘Some kind of beam job, I think. Close range into the chest.’
I glanced down at the guindado I still held. It felt absurd to be standing here talking about my friend’s death with a cocktail drink in one hand, as if the matter was only a piece of easy smalltalk. But there was nowhere nearby to put the drink down.
I took a sip and answered him with a coldness that surprised me. ‘I prefer beam weapons myself, but they’re not what I’d use if I wanted to kill someone without making a fuss. A beam weapon creates more flash than most projectile weapons.’
‘Unless it’s very close range; like a stabbing. Look, I’m sorry, man, but it looks like that’s how it happened. The barrel must’ve been pushed right into his clothes. Hardly any light or noise - and what there was would’ve been hidden by the wheeler. There was a lot of partying going on anyway tonight. Somebody started a fire near the bridge, and that was all the excuse the locals needed for a wild night. I don’t think anyone would’ve noticed a beam discharge, Tanner.’
‘Dieterling wouldn’t have just sat back and let someone do that.’
‘Maybe he didn’t get much warning.’
I thought about that. On some level the fact of his death was beginning to register, but the implications - not to mention the emotional shock - would take a lot longer. But I could at least force myself to ask the right questions now. ‘If he didn’t get much warning, either he wasn’t paying attention or he thought the person who killed him was someone he knew. He was still breathing, did you say?’
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t conscious. I don’t think we could have done much for him, Tanner.’
‘You’re sure he didn’t say anything?’
‘Not to me or the guy who found him.’
‘The guy - the man - who found him. Was he someone we’d met tonight?’
‘No; he was one of the men I had tailing Reivich all day.’
This was how it was going to carry on, I thought: Vasquez just didn’t have the initiative to expand on an answer unless it was dragged kicking and screaming out of him. ‘And? How long had this man been in your service? Had Dieterling ever met him before?’
It was painfully slow, but he must have seen the way my questioning was running. ‘Hey, no way, man. No way did my guy have anything to do with this. I swear to you, Tanner.’
‘He’s still a suspect. That goes for anyone we met tonight - including you, Red.’
‘I wouldn’t have killed him. I wanted him to take me snake hunting.’
There was something so pathetically selfish about that answer that there was a good chance it was true.
‘Well, I guess you’ve blown your chance.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with it, Tanner.’
‘But it happened on your turf, didn’t it?’
He was about to answer, and I was about to ask him what he had done with the body and what he intended to do about it when Vasquez’s image dissolved into static. At the same instant there was a powerful flash that seemed to come from everywhere at once, bathing every surface in a sickly white radiance.
It lasted for only a fraction of a second.
It was enough, though. There was something unforgettable about that hard burst of tarnished light; something I had seen once before. Or was it more than once? For a moment I wondered: remembering carnations of white light blossoming against stellar blackness.
Nuclear explosions.
The elevator’s illumination dimmed for a few seconds, and I felt my weight grow less and then return to normal.
Someone had let off a nuke.
The electromagnetic pulse must have swept over us, momentarily interfering with the elevator. I hadn’t seen a nuke flash since my childhood, one of the war’s small sanities being that for the most part it had stayed in the conventional realm. I couldn’t estimate the burst yield without knowing how far away the flash had been, but the lack of a mushroom cloud suggested that the explosion had taken place well above the planet’s surface. It didn’t make much sense: a nuke deployment could only have been the prelude to a conventional assault, and this was the wrong season for it. Elevated bursts made even less sense - military communications networks were hardened against electromagnetic pulse warfare.
An accident, perhaps?
I thought about it for a few more seconds, then heard footsteps racing up the spiral staircase between the elevator’s vertically stacked compartments. I saw one of the aristocrats I had just been dining with. I hadn’t bothered remembering his name, but the man’s levantine bone structure and golden-brown skin almost certainly identified him as a northerner. He was dressed opulently, his knee-length coat dripping shades of emerald and aquamarine. But he was agitated. Behind him, his foxlike wife paused on the last step, eyeing both of us warily.
‘Did you see that?’ the man asked. ‘We came up here to get a better look; you’
ve got the best view from here. It looked pretty big. It almost looked like a . . .’
‘A nuke?’ I said. ‘I think it was.’ There were retinal ghosts, pink shapes etched across my vision.
‘Thank God it wasn’t any closer.’
‘Let me see what the public nets say,’ said the woman, glancing at a bracelet-shaped display device. It must have tapped into a less vulnerable data network than the one which Vasquez had been using, because she connected immediately. Images and text spilled across the device’s discreet little screen.
‘Well?’ said her husband. ‘Do they have any theories yet?’
‘I don’t know, but . . .’ She hesitated, her eyes lingering over something, then frowning. ‘No. That can’t be true. It just can’t be true.’
‘What? What are they saying?’
She looked to the man and then to me. ‘They’re saying they’ve attacked the bridge. They’re saying that the explosion’s severed the thread.’
In the unreal moments that followed, the elevator continued to climb smoothly.
‘No,’ the man said, doing his best to sound calm, but not quite managing it. ‘They must be wrong. They’ve got to be wrong.’
‘I hope to God they are,’ the woman said, her voice beginning to crack. ‘My last neural scan was six months ago . . .’
‘Damn six months,’ the man said. ‘I haven’t been scanned this decade!’
The woman breathed out hard. ‘Well, they absolutely have to be wrong. We’re continuing to have this conversation, aren’t we? We’re not all screaming as we drop towards the planet.’ She looked at her bracelet again, frowning.
‘What does it say?’ the man said.
‘Exactly what it said a moment ago.’
‘It’s a mistake, or a vicious lie, that’s all.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 72