The Revelation Space Collection (96 page)

Neither of us breathed for a few long moments, but it was Dieterling who chose to speak in the end.

‘I guess we’d be dead if you were really pissed off at us, Vasquez.’

‘You’re right, but it’s a fine line, Snake.’ He raised his voice. ‘Safe mode on.’ Then he made the same finger-clicking gesture he had done before. ‘You see that, man? It looked pretty similar to you, didn’t it? But not to the room it didn’t. If I hadn’t turned the system off, it would have interpreted that as an order to execute everyone here except myself and the fat fucks in the gaming seats.’

‘I’m glad you practised it,’ I said.

‘Yeah, laugh about it, Mirabel.’ He made the gesture again. ‘That looked the same as well, didn’t it? But that wasn’t quite the same command either. That would have told the sentries to blow your arms off, one at a time. The room’s programmed to recognise at least twelve more gestures - and believe me, after some of ’em I really get stung for the cleaning bill.’ He shrugged. ‘Can I consider my point adequately made?’

‘I think we’ve got the message.’

‘All right. Safe mode off. Sentries retire.’

The same blur of motion; the same breeze. It was as if the machines had simply snapped out of existence.

‘Impressed?’ Vasquez asked me.

‘Not really,’ I said, feeling prickles of sweat across my brow. ‘With the right security set-up, you’d already have screened anyone who’d got this far. But I suppose it breaks the ice at parties.’

‘Yeah, it does that.’ Vasquez looked at me amusedly, evidently satisfied that he’d achieved the desired effect.

‘What it also does is make me wonder why you’re so touchy.’

‘You were in my shoes, you’d be a fuck of a lot more than touchy.’ Then he did something that surprised me, taking his hand from his pocket, slowly enough that I had time to see there was no weapon there. ‘You see this, Mirabel?’

I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but the clenched fist he showed me looked normal enough. There was nothing deformed or unusual about it. Nothing, in fact, particularly red about it.

‘It looks like a hand, Vasquez.’

He clenched the fist even harder and then something odd happened. Blood began to trickle out of his grip; slowly at first, but in an increasingly strong flow. I watched it spatter on the floor, scarlet on green.

‘That’s why they call me what they do. Because I bleed from my right hand. Fucking original, right?’ He opened the fist, revealing blood pouring out of a small hole somewhere near the middle of his palm. ‘Here’s the deal. It’s a stigma; like a mark of Christ.’ With his good hand he reached into his other pocket and pulled out a kerchief, wadding it into a ball and pressing it against the wound to staunch the flow. ‘I can almost will it to happen sometimes.’

‘Haussmann cultists got to you, didn’t they,’ Dieterling said. ‘They crucified Sky as well. They drove a nail into his right hand.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Shall I tell him?’

‘Be my guest, Snake. The man clearly needs educating.’ Dieterling turned to me. ‘Haussmann’s cultists split up into a number of different sects over the last century or so. Some of them took their ideas from penitential monks, trying to inflict on themselves some of the pain Sky must have gone through. They lock themselves away in darkness until the isolation almost drives them insane, or makes them start seeing things. Some of them cut off their left arms; some even crucify themselves. Sometimes they die in the process.’ He paused and looked at Vasquez, as if seeking permission to continue. ‘But there’s a more extreme sect that does all that and more. And they don’t stop there. They spread the message, not by word of mouth, or writing, but by indoctrinal virus.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘It must have been engineered for them; probably by Ultras, or maybe one of them even took a trip to see the Jugglers and they screwed around with his neurochemistry. It doesn’t matter. All that does is that the virus is contagious, transmittable through the air, and it infects almost everyone.’

‘Turning them into cultists?’

‘No.’ It was Vasquez speaking now. He had found a fresh cigarette for himself. ‘It fucks with you, but it doesn’t turn you into one of them, got that? You get visions, and you have dreams, and you sometimes feel the need . . .’ He paused, and nodded towards the dolphin jutting from the wall. ‘You see that fish skull? Cost me a fucking arm and a leg. Used to belong to Sleek; one of the ones on the ship. Having shit like that around comforts me; stops me shaking. But that’s as far as it goes.’

‘And the hand?’

Vasquez said, ‘Some of the viruses make physical changes happen. I was lucky, in a way. There’s one that makes you go blind; another that makes you scared of the dark; another that makes your left arm wither away and drop off. You know, a little blood now and again, it doesn’t bother me. At first, before many people knew about the virus, it was cool. I could really freak people out with it. Walk into a negotiation, you know, and start bleeding all over the other guy. But then people started finding out what it meant; that I’d been infected by cultists. ’

‘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 mean, 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.