The shaft threaded the ship from top to bottom; she had kilometres to fall before she hit the bottom. And for a few almost heart-stopping moments, she had assumed that was exactly what would happen. She would drop until she hit — and whether it took a few seconds or the better part of a minute was of no consequence at all. The walls of the shaft were sheer and frictionless; there was no way to gain a purchase or arrest her fall in any way whatsoever.
She was going to die.
Then — with a detachment which later shocked her — part of her mind had re-examined the problem. She had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary: floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her. She was not accelerating at all now — and the only thing that made the ship accelerate was its thrust.
Which she could control from her bracelet.
Volyova had not had time to ponder the details. An idea had formed — exploded — in her mind, and she knew that either she executed the idea almost immediately or accepted her fate. She could stop her fall — her apparent fall — by ramping the ship’s thrust into reverse for however long it took to achieve the desired effect. Nominal thrust was one gee, which was why Nagorny had found it so easy to mistake the ship for something like a very tall building. She had fallen for perhaps ten seconds while her mind processed things. What was it to be, then? Ten second of reverse thrust at one gee? No — too conservative. She might not have enough shaft to fall through. Better to ramp up to ten gees for a second — she knew the engines were capable of that. The manoeuvre would not harm the other crew, safely cocooned in reefersleep. It would not harm her, either — she would just see the rushing walls of the shaft slow down rather violently.
Nagorny, though, was not so well protected.
It had not been easy — the rush of air had almost drowned out her voice as she screamed the appropriate instructions into the bracelet. Agonising moments had followed before the ship seemed to take any notice of her.
Then — dutifully — it had moved to her whim.
Later, she had found Nagorny. The ten gees of thrust, sustained for a second, would not ordinarily have been fatal. Volyova had, however, not whittled her speed down to zero in one go. She had achieved that through trial and error, and with each impulse Nagorny had been flung between ceiling and floor.
She had been hurt herself; the impacts with the side of the shaft as she fell had broken one leg, but that was healed now and the pain no more than a foggy memory. She remembered using the laser-curette to remove Nagorny’s head, knowing that she would need to open it to get at the dedicated implants buried in his brain. They were delicate, those implants, and because they had come into being through laborious processes of mediated molecular growth, she would not be best pleased if they had to be duplicated.
Now it was time to remove them.
She took the head out of the helmet, immersing it in a bath of liquid nitrogen. Then she pushed her hands into two pairs of gauntlets suspended above the workbench within a scaffold of pistons. Tiny, glistening medical instruments whirred into life and descended on the skull, ready to slice it open in pieces which would later lock back together with fiendish precision. Before reassembling the head, Volyova would insert dummy implants so that — if the head were ever examined — it would not seem as if she had removed anything from it. It would have to be re- attached to the body, too — but there was no need to worry herself too much over that. By the time the others found out what had happened to Nagorny — what she was going to convince them had happened — they would not be in a hurry to examine him in any kind of detail. Sudjic might be a problem, of course — she and Nagorny had been lovers, until Nagorny went insane.
Like many others that remained before her, Ilia Volyova would cross that bridge when she came to it.
In the meantime, as she delved deep into Nagorny’s head for what was hers, she began to give the first thought to who was going to replace him.
Certainly no one now aboard the ship.
But perhaps around Yellowstone she would find a new recruit.
‘Case, are we getting warm?’
The voice came back, blurred and trembly through the mass of the building above her. ‘So warm we’re incandescent, dear girl. Just hold on and make sure you don’t waste those toxin darts.’
‘Yes, about those, Case, I—’
Khouri dived aside as three New Komuso trooped past, their heads enveloped in basketlike wicker helmets. Shakuhachi — bamboo flutes — cut the air ahead of them like majorettes’ staffs, dispersing a gang of capuchin monkeys into the shadows. ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘what if we take out a collateral?’
‘It can’t happen,’ Ng said. ‘The toxin’s keyed directly to Taraschi’s biochemistry. Hit anyone else on the planet and what they’ll have to show for it is a nasty puncture wound.’
‘Even if I hit Taraschi’s clone?’
‘You think you might?’
‘Just a question.’ It struck her that Case was unusually jumpy.
‘Anyway, if Taraschi had a clone, and we killed him by mistake, that would be Taraschi’s problem, not ours. It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.’
‘When I’m gripped by existential boredom,’ Khouri said, ‘I might try it.’
She stiffened, then, because all of a sudden it was different. Ng was silent, and in place of his voice was a clear pulsing tone. It was soft and evil, like the echolocation pulse of a predator. She had heard that tone a dozen times in the last six months, each time signifying her proximity to the target. It meant that Taraschi was no more than five hundred metres away. That fact, coupled with the onset of the pulse, strongly suggested that he was within the Monument itself.
The moves of the game were now public property. Taraschi would know it, for an identical device — implanted in a secure Canopy clinic — was generating similar pulses in his own head. Across Chasm City, the various media networks which concentrated on Shadowplay would even now be sending their field teams across town to the location of the kill. A lucky few would already be in the vicinity.
The tone hastened as they walked further under the Monument’s concourse, but not quickly. Taraschi must have been overhead — actually in the Monument — so that the relative distance between them was not changing swiftly.
The concourse beneath was cracked by land subsidence, lying perilously close to the chasm. Originally there had been an underground mall complex beneath the structure, but the Mulch had infiltrated it. The lowest levels were flooded, sunken walkways emerging from water the colour of caramel. The tetrahedron of the Monument was elevated well above the concourse and the flooded plaza by a smaller inverted pyramid abutted deep into rock foundations. There was only one entrance to the structure. That meant that Taraschi was as good as dead already, if she caught him aside. But to reach it she had to cross a bridge across the plaza, and her approach would be obvious to the man inside. She wondered what kind of primal thoughts were slipping through his mind now. In her dreams, she had often found herself in some half-deserted city being chased by some implacable hunter, but Taraschi was experiencing that terror in reality. She remembered that in those dreams the hunter never had to move quickly. That was part of its unpleasantness. She would run desperately, as if through thickened air with weighted-down legs, and the hunter would move with a slowness born of great patience and wisdom.
The pulsing quickened as she crossed the bridge, the ground beneath her feet wet and gritty. Occasionally the pulsing would slow and requicken, evidence that Taraschi was moving around in the structure. But there was no real escape for him now. He could arrange to be met on the roof of the Monument, perhaps, but in utilising aerial transport he would forfeit the terms of the contract. In the parlours of the Canopy, the shame of that might be less desirable than being killed.
She walked through into the atrium within the Monument’s supporting pyramid. It was dark inside and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. She slipped the toxin gun out of her coat and checked the exit in case Taraschi had planned to sneak out. His absence was unsurprising, the atrium almost empty, ransacked by looters. Rain drummed on metal. She looked up into a suspended cloud of rusted, damaged sculptures hung on copper cables from the ceiling. A few had fallen to the marbled terrazzo, metal birds’ wings stabbing into the ground with the impact. They were softly defined in dust, its whiteness like mortar between the primary feathers.
She looked towards the ceiling.
