indicated any kind of reciprocal attraction towards me. But some of the things she’d said had made me wonder. Maybe she was just getting lonely, out here in the jungle.
Dieterling came out behind Cahuella and escorted Gitta back into the building, while another man dismantled the field generator. Cahuella and I walked away towards the wall around the terrace. The air was warm and clammy, with no hint of a breeze. During the day it could be almost unbearably humid; nothing like Nuevo Iquique’s balmy coastal climate where I had spent my childhood. Cahuella’s tall, broad-shouldered frame was wrapped in a black kimono patterned with interlocked dolphins, his feet bare against the terrace’s chevroned tiles. His face was broad, with what always struck me as a touch of petulance around the lips. It was the look of a man who would never accept defeat gracefully. His thick black hair was permanently slicked back from his brow; brilliant grooves like beaten gold in the light from the hamadryad flames. He fingered the damaged statue, then bent down to pick up a few shards of gold from the floor. The shards were leaf-thin, like the foil which illuminators once used to decorate sacred texts. He rubbed them sadly between his fingers, then tried to place the gold back into the statue’s wound. The snake was depicted curling around its tree, in its last phase of motility before the arboreal fusion-phase.
‘I’m sorry about the damage,’ I said. ‘But you did ask for a demonstration.’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter; I’ve got dozens of them in the basement. Maybe I’ll even leave it as a feature, right?’
‘Deterrence?’
‘Has to be worth something, hasn’t it?’ Then his voice lowered. ‘Tanner, something’s come up. I need you to come with me tonight. ’
‘Tonight?’ It was already late, but then Cahuella tended to keep unusual hours. ‘What are you planning — a late-night hunting trip?’
‘I’m in the mood, but this is something else entirely. We’ve got visitors coming in. We need to go and meet them. There’s a clearing about twenty klicks up the old jungle road. I want you to drive me there.’
I thought about that carefully before answering. ‘What kind of visitors are we talking about here?’
He stroked the hamadryad’s pierced head, almost lovingly. ‘Not the usual kind.’
Cahuella and I were on our way from the Reptile House within half an hour, driving one of the ground-effect vehicles. It had just been enough time for Cahuella to dress for the trip, donning khaki trousers and shirt, under an elaborately pocketed tan hunting jacket. I nosed the car between the shells of derelict, vine-enshrouded buildings around the Reptile House until I found the old trail, just before it plunged into the forest. In another few months the journey would not have been possible at all — the jungle was slowly healing the wound cut through the heart of it. It would take flame-throwers to scythe it clear again.
The Reptile House and its environs had once been part of a zoological garden, built during one of the hopeful ceasefires. That particular ceasefire had only lasted a decade or so — but at the time it must have seemed that there was a good chance of peace enduring; enough for people to build something as militarily valueless and as civically improving as a zoo. The idea had been to house Terran and native specimens in similar exhibits, emphasising the similarities and differences between Earth and Sky’s Edge. But the zoo had never been properly completed, and now the only intact part of it was the Reptile House, which Cahuella had made into his personal residence. It served him well: isolated and easily fortified. He had ambitions to restock its basement vivaria with a private collection of captured animals, prime amongst which would be the pre-adult hamadryad he had yet to catch. The juvenile took up a large volume already; he would need a whole new basement for a large one — not to mention extensive new expertise in the care of a creature with a substantially different biochemistry than its younger phase. Elsewhere, the House was already filled with the skins and teeth and bones of animals he had brought home as dead prizes. He had no love for living things, and the only reason that he wanted live specimens was because it would be obvious to his visitors that greater skill had been required in their capture than if they had been killed in the field.
Branches and vines slapped against the car’s bodywork as I gunned it down the track, the howl of the turbines out-screeching every other living thing for miles around.
‘Tell me about these visitors,’ I said, my throat-mike relaying my words to Cahuella through the headphones which clamped his skull.
‘You’ll see them soon enough.’
‘Did they suggest this clearing as a meeting place?’
‘No — that was my idea.’
‘And they know which clearing you were talking about?’
‘They don’t have to.’ He nodded upwards. I risked a glance towards the forest canopy, and when the canopy thinned for a moment — revealing sky — I saw something painfully bright loitering above us, like a triangular wedge cut out of the firmament. ‘They’ve been following us ever since we left the House.’
‘That’s not a native aircraft,’ I said.
‘It’s not an aircraft, Tanner. It’s a spaceship.’
We reached the clearing after an hour’s drive through thickening forest. Something must have burned the clearing away a few years earlier — a seriously rogue missile, probably. It might even have been intended for the Reptile House; Cahuella had enough enemies to make that a reasonable possibility. Fortunately, most of them had no idea where he lived. Now the clearing was beginning to grow back, but the ground was still level enough to permit a landing.
The spacecraft stopped above us, silent as a bat. It was delta-shaped, and now that it had sunk lower, I saw that the underside was quilted by thousands of glaringly bright heat elements. It was fifty metres wide; half the width of the clearing. I felt the first slap of warmth, and then — at the edge of audibility — the first trace of an almost subsonic humming.
The jungle around us fell into silence.
The deltoid came in lower, three inverted hemispheres puckering gracefully from the apex points. Now it was below the treeline. The heat was making me sweat. I held up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun-bright glare.
Then the glare shut down, dimming to a dull brick-red, and the vehicle dropped the last few metres under its own weight, settling down on the hemispheres which cushioned the impact with muscle-like smoothness. For a few moments, silence, and then a ramp slid down like a tongue from the front. Blue-white glare from the doorway at the top of the ramp threw the surrounding vegetation into stark relief. In my peripheral vision I saw things scurrying and slithering for shadow.
Two spindly, elongated figures stepped into the light at the top of the ramp.
Cahuella stepped ahead of me, towards the ramp.
‘You’re going aboard that thing?’
He looked back, silhouetted by the light. ‘Damn right I am. And I want you with me.’
‘I’ve never dealt with Ultras before.’
‘Well, now’s your big chance.’
I left the car and followed him. I had a gun with me, but it felt ridiculous just to be holding it. I slipped it into my belt and never touched it again the whole time we were away. The two Ultras at the top of the ramp waited silently, standing in faintly bored postures, one leaning against the doorway’s surround. When Cahuella was halfway to the parked ship he knelt down and fingered the ground, brushing aside undergrowth. I glanced down and thought I saw something exposed, like a sheet of battered metal — but before I could pay it any more attention, or wonder what it had been, Cahuella was urging me on.
‘C’mon. They’re not known for their immense reserves of patience. ’
‘I didn’t even know there was an Ultra ship in orbit,’ I said, keeping my voice low.
‘Not many people do.’ Cahuella started up the ramp. ‘They’re keeping very dark for now, so they can conduct certain types of business which wouldn’t be possible if everyone knew they were here.’
The two Ultras were a man and a woman. They were both very thin, their near-skeletal frames encased in looms of exo-support machinery and prosthetics. They were both pale and high-cheekboned, with black lips and eyes that appeared to be outlined in kohl, lending them a doll-like, cadaverous look. Both had elaborate dark hair worked in a viper’s nest of stiff locks. The man’s arms were smoked glass, inlaid with glowing machines and luminous pulsing feedlines, while the woman had an oblong hole right through her abdomen.
‘Don’t let them freak you out,’ Cahuella whispered. ‘Freaking people out is part of their armoury of business
