“You still can’t win,” I told Armesto.
Armesto deigned to reply, though I’d half expected the other ships to maintain radio silence from here on in. “We can and we will.”
“You said it yourself. You don’t have as many dead as us. No matter how many you throw away, it’ll never be sufficient.”
“We’ll find a way to make it sufficient.”
Later, I guessed at what kind of strategy that might be. No matter what happened next, the ships were no more than two or three months from Journey’s End. With carefully rationed supplies, some colonists could be woken ahead of schedule. The revived momios could be kept alive on board the ship with the crew, albeit in conditions which would border on the dehumanising, but it might be sufficient. Every ten colonists that were woken meant a sleeper ring which could be ejected, and a concomitant reduction in ship’s mass, allowing a sharper deceleration profile.
It would be slow and dangerous—and I expected that they would lose perhaps one in ten that they tried to revive under such suboptimal conditions—but it might be just enough to offset the mass difference.
Enough to give them, if not an edge over me, then at least parity.
“I know what you intend,” I told Armesto.
“I doubt it very much,” the old man answered.
But I soon saw that he was right. After the initial flurry of sleeper ring ejections, there followed a pattern: one ejection every ten hours or so. That was exactly what I would have expected, ten hours to thaw every colonist in a ring. There would only be a handful of people on each ship with the expertise to do that, so they would have to work sequentially.
“It won’t save you,” I said.
“I think it will, Sky… I think it will.”
Which was when I knew what had to be done.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“What do you mean, you killed her?” Zebra asked, the five of us still studying the grotesque tableau of Dominika’s death.
“That’s not what I said,” I answered. “I said Tanner Mirabel killed her.”
“And you are?” Chanterelle said.
“If I told you, I’m not completely sure you’d believe me. As a matter of fact I’m having a little trouble dealing with it myself.”
Pransky, who had been listening to our exchange, raised his voice and spoke with solemn surety. “Dominika’s still warm. And rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. If your whereabouts can be accounted for over the last few hours—which I suspect is strongly the case—you’re hardly a prime suspect.”
Zebra tugged at my sleeve. “What about the two people I said were after you, Tanner? They acted like outsiders, according to Dominika. They might have killed her for snitching about them.”
“I don’t even know who they are,” I said. “At least, I can’t be sure. Not about the woman, anyway, but I’m willing to hazard a guess about the man.”
“Who do you think it is?” Zebra said.
Quirrenbach cut in, “I really don’t think we should spend too long here; not unless you want to tangle with what passes for authority here. And believe me, that’s not especially high on my agenda.”
“Much as it grieves me to agree with him,” Chanterelle said, “he has a fairly good point, Tanner.”
“I don’t think you should call me that any more,” I said.
Zebra shook her head slowly. “Who do we call you, then?”
“Not Tanner Mirabel, anyway.” I nodded at Dominika’s body. “It must have been Mirabel who killed her. The man who’s following me is Mirabel. He did this; not me.”
“This is insane,” Chanterelle said, to general nods of agreement, although no one much looked like they were enjoying proceedings. “If you’re not Tanner Mirabel, then who are you?”
“A man called Cahuella,” I said, knowing that this was only half of the truth.
Zebra placed her hands against her hips. “And you didn’t feel like telling any of us this until now?”
“Until recently I didn’t realise it.”
“No? Just slipped your mind, did it?”
I shook my head. “I think Cahuella altered my memories—his memories—to suppress his own identity. He needed to do it temporarily, to escape from Sky’s Edge. His own memories and face would have incriminated him. Except when I say ‘he’, I mean ‘me’, really.”
Zebra squinted at me, as if trying to tell if her earlier judgements had been fatally incorrect. “You actually believe this, don’t you?”
“It’s taken me a little while to come to terms with it, believe me.”
“He’s clearly snapped,” Quirrenbach said. “The odd thing is, I assumed it would take rather more than the sight of one dead fat woman to push him over the edge.”
I punched him. It was quick; I allowed him no warning at all, and in any case, under the permanent threat of Chanterelle’s gun, he was in no position to fight back. I watched him fall, slipping on the floor which was slick with some spilled medical fluid, one hand rising to nurse his jaw before he even hit the ground.
Quirrenbach slipped into the shadow beneath the couch, yelping as he made contact with something.
For a moment I wondered if he had touched a snake which had found its way to the floor. But in-stead, something much larger emerged from the shadow. It was Dominika’s kid, Tom.
I reached a hand out towards him. “Come here. You’re safe with us.”
She had been killed by the same man who had visited her before, asking questions about me. An offworlder, yes—much like you, Tom said, casually at first, and then repeating himself in a tone that was altogether more suspicious. Not just much like Tanner—but very like him indeed.
“It’s all right,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “The man who killed Dominika only looked like me. It doesn’t mean I’m him.”
Tom nodded his head slowly. “You no sound like him.”
“He talked differently?”
“You talk fancy, mister. The other man—the man who look like you—he don’t use so many words.”
“The strong silent type,” Zebra said. Then she drew the kid away from me, wrapping her long lean limbs around him protectively. I was touched, for a moment. It was the first time I had seen any hint of compassion shown by someone from the Canopy for a Mulch-born; the first time I had seen any hint that either party regarded the other as human. Of course I knew what Zebra believed—that the game was evil—but it was another matter to see that belief acted out in a simple gesture of giving comfort. “We’re sorry about Dominika,” she said. “You have to believe it wasn’t us.”
Tom sniffed. He was upset, but the shock of her death had yet to set in, and he was still reasonably coherent and eager to help us. At least I hoped it was because the shock had not set in; the other possibility—that he was just immunised against that kind of pain—was too unpleasant to contemplate. I could handle it in a soldier, but not in a kid.
“Was he alone?” I asked. “I was told that two people were looking for me; a man and a woman. Do you know if this was the same man?”
“Same guy,” the kid said, turning his face away from the suspended corpse of Dominika. “And he not alone this time either. Woman with him, but she no look happy this time.”
“She looked happy the first time?” I said.
“Not happy, but…” The kid faltered, and I could see that we were making unreasonable demands on his vocabulary. “She look like she comfortable with guy; like friends. He nicer then—more like you.”
It made sense. The first time he’d paid a trip to Dominika’s would have been a fishing trip; gathering what information he could about the city and—hopefully—where he could find the man he wanted to kill, whether that man was me or Reivich or both of us. It might have made sense to kill Dominika there and then, but he must have suspected she could be of use to him in the future. So he had let her live, until he returned, with the snakes he must have bought in the bazaar.
And then he had killed her in a manner which he
knew would speak to me; a private code of ritual murder which opened seams into the heart of my being.
“The woman,” I said. “She was offworld too?”
But Tom seemed no wiser than I about that.
* * *
Using Zebra’s phone, I called Lorant, the pig whose kitchen I had half-destroyed during my descent from the Canopy, an eternity ago. I told him I had a final huge favour to ask of him and his wife, which was only that they look after Tom until things quietened down. A day, I said, although in truth I plucked the figure from my head at random.
“I look after myself,” Tom said. “No want stay with pig.”
“They’re good people, trust me. You’ll be much safer there. If word gets out that someone witnessed Dominika being killed, the same man will come back. If he finds you, he’ll kill you,” I said.
“I always got to hide?”
“No,” I said. “Only for as long as it takes for me to kill the man who did this. And believe me, I’m not planning on spending the rest of my life doing it.”
The concourse was still quiet when we left the tent, meeting the pig and his wife just beyond the cataract of greasy rain which fell endlessly down the building’s overhung side, like a curtain of yellowing calico. The kid went with them, nervously at first, but then Lorant scooped him aboard and their balloon-wheeled vehicle vanished into the murk like an apparition.
“He’ll be safe, I think,” I said.
“You think he’s in that much danger?” Quirrenbach said.
“More than you can imagine. The man who killed Dominika isn’t exactly overburdened with a conscience.”
“You sound like you know him.”
“I do,” I said.
Then we returned to Chanterelle’s car.
“I’m confused,” Quirrenbach said, as he climbed into the vehicle’s bubble of dryness and light. “I don’t know who I’m dealing with any more. I feel like you’ve just pulled the carpet from under me.”
He was looking at me.
“All because I found the dead woman?” Pransky said. “Or because Mirabel has started going mad?”
“Quirrenbach,” I said, “I need to know of places where someone might buy snakes; probably not far from here.”
“Did you hear anything of what we just said?”
“I heard,” I said. “I just don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“Tanner,” Zebra said, then stopped herself. “Or whoever you say you are. Does this business about your name have anything to do with what the Mixmaster told you?”
“That wouldn’t by any chance be the same one you visited with me, would it?” It was Chanterelle speaking now, and it was all I could do to nod, as if in that gesture I made my final acceptance of the truth.
“I know some local snake sellers,” Quirrenbach said, almost to ease the tension. He leaned for-ward, over Zebra’s shoulder, and fed orders into the car. It lifted smoothly, quickly spiriting us above the stench and chaos of the rain-sodden Mulch.
“I had to know what was wrong with my eyes,” I told Chanterelle. “Why they seemed to have been tampered with genetically. What the Mixmaster told me when I returned with Zebra was that the work had probably been done by Ultras, and then undone—crudely, as it happened—by someone else; someone like the Black Geneticists.”
“Go on.”
“That wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t to find out that I must have been in some way complicit in the act.”
“You think you willingly did this to your eyes?”
I nodded. “It wouldn’t be without its uses. Someone with an interest in hunting, perhaps, might consider it. I can see very well in the dark now.”
“Who?” Chanterelle said.
“Good question,” Zebra echoed. “But before you answer it, what about the full-body scan you had when we visited the Mixmaster? What was the significance of that?”
“I was looking for evidence of old injuries,” I said. “Both wounds were inflicted at about the same time. I was rather hoping to find one and rather hoping not to find the other.”
“Any particular reason why?”
“Tanner Mirabel had a foot shot off by Reivich’s gunmen. The foot could have been replaced by an organic prosthesis, or a cultured copy cloned from his own cells. But either way it would need to be surgically attached to the stump. Now, maybe with the best medical skills available on Yellow-stone, that kind of work could be done invisibly. But not on Sky’s Edge. There’d be plenty of microscopic evidence—signs which should have easily shown up in a Mixmaster scan.”
Zebra nodded, accepting that much. “Maybe that’s true. But if you’re not Tanner—as you claim—how do you know it ever happened to him?”
“Because I seem to have stolen his memories.”
* * *
Gitta dropped to the floor of the tent at almost the same moment as Cahuella.
Neither of them made much of a sound. Gitta had died—in as far as it mattered—the instant the beam from my weapon reached into her skull and turned her brain tissue into something resembling funereal ash; barely enough of it to cup in your hands and watch slipping in grey streams between your fingers. Her mouth opened slightly wider, but I doubted that she’d had any time to register my actions before thought itself failed. I hoped—devoutly—that the last thing Gitta thought, literally, was that I was about to do something which would save her. As she fell, the gunman’s knife etched deeper into her throat, but by then there was nothing left of her capable of feeling pain.
Cahuella—impaled by the beam which should have spared Gitta and killed the guard — exhaled softly, like the last sigh of someone falling gratefully into sleep. He had lost consciousness with the shock of the beam’s passage; a small mercy for him.
The gunman lifted his face to me. He did not understand, of course. What I had done had made no conceivable sense. I wondered how long it would take before he realised that the shot which had killed Gitta—with such geometric precision, bored straight through the forehead—had in fact been intended for him. How long would it take him before he realised the simple truth, which was that I was not quite the crack shot I had dared to imagine, and that I had killed the one person I was striving to save.
There was a moment of strained silence, during which time he might have come halfway to that realisation.
I did not give him time to finish the journey.
And this time, I neither missed nor stopped shooting when the task was obviously done. I emptied an ammo-cell into the man, and kept firing until the barrel was a cherry-red glow in the tent’s dim light.
For a moment I stood with three ostensibly dead bodies at my feet. Then some soldiering instinct snapped into play and I moved again, assimilating what I could.
Cahuella was breathing, though profoundly unconscious. I had reduced the Reivich gunman into an object lesson in cranial anatomy. I felt a spasm of remorse, guilt at having taken his execution well beyond any sensible limit. It was, I suppose, the last twitch of a dying professional soldier. In the exhaustion of that ammo-cell I had crossed some threshold into some less clinical realm where there were even fewer rules, and where the efficiency of a kill counted for infinitely less than the measure of hatred expended.
I put down the gun and knelt closer to Gitta.
I had no need of the medical kit to tell she was dead and irretrievably so, but I did it anyway: running the pocket neural imager across her head, watching as the little embedded screen turned red with messages of fatal tissue damage; deep cerebral injury; extensive cortical trauma. Even if we had a trawl in the tent, it would not have been able to skim her memories and thereby capture a ghost of her personality. I had ensured that she was too severely harmed for that; that the very bio-chemical patterns themselves were lost. I kept her alive, anyway: strapped a life-support cuirass across her chest and watched as it gave lie to the notion she was dead, colour flowing back into her cheeks as blood circulation re
sumed. It would keep her body intact until we got back to the Reptile House. Cahuella would kill me if I did anything less than that.
I turned to him, finally. His injuries were almost trivial; the beam had cut through him, but the pulse had been extremely brief and the beam width at its narrowest focus. Most of the internal damage would have been caused not by the beam itself but by the explosive vaporisation of water trapped in his cells, a series of tiny scalding concussions tracing the beam path. Cahuella’s entrance and exit wounds were so small they were hard to find. There should not be any internal bleeding; not if the beam had cauterised as it gnawed through him, as I intended. There would be harm, yes… but I had no reason to suppose he would not survive, even if the best I could do for him here was maintain his current coma with another cuirass.
I strapped the device on, left him resting peacefully next to his wife, then grabbed the gun, pal-med in a fresh ammo-cell and secured the perimeter again, supporting myself with the improvised crutch of another rifle, trying not to think about what had been done to my foot, while knowing—on a level of abstract detachment which was anything but reassuring—that it was nothing that could not be fixed, given time.
It took me five minutes to satisfy myself that the rest of Reivich’s men were dead; as were almost all of our own except for Cahuella and myself. Dieterling was the only lucky one of us; the only one who had taken a minor wound. It looked worse than it was, and because the head-grazing shot had put him into unconsciousness, the enemy had assumed he was dead.
An hour later, close to collapse myself, blackouts fogging my vision like the awesome thunder-head which had preluded the night’s storm, I managed to get Cahuella and his wife into the vehicle. Then I managed to get Dieterling awake, though he was weak and confused by blood loss. At times, I remember, I screamed aloud because of the pain.
I slumped into the control seat of the vehicle and started it moving. Every part of me was fighting an agonised war to drag me into sleep, but I knew I had to move now—and start moving south—before Reivich sent another attack squad; something he would surely consider if the last squad failed to return on time.
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