techniques. You can bet the Captain sent down the two weirdest specimens he had, just to put us ill at ease.’
‘He did a good job, in that case.’
‘Trust me; I’ve dealt with Ultras. They’re pussies, really.’
We ambled up the ramp. The woman, the one leaning against the doorframe, pulled herself upright and studied us with impassively pursed lips. ‘You’re Cahuella?’ she said.
‘Yeah, and this is Tanner. Tanner goes with me. That’s not open to negotiation.’
She looked me over. ‘You’re armed.’
‘Yes,’ I said, only slightly unnerved that she had seen the gun through my clothes. ‘You’re telling me you’re not?’
‘We have our means. Step aboard, please.’
‘The gun isn’t a problem?’
The woman’s smirk was the first emotional response she had shown. ‘I don’t seriously think so, no.’
Once we were aboard they retracted the ramp and closed the door. The ship had a cool medical ambience, all pale pastels and glassy machines. Two other Ultras waited aboard it, reclined in a pair of enormous command couches, nearly buried under readouts and delicate control stalks. The pilot and co-pilot were both naked, purple- skinned beings with impossibly dexterous fingers. They had the same stiff dreadlocks as the other two, but rather more per head.
The woman with a hole in her gut said, ‘Take us up nice and easy, Pellegrino. We don’t want our guests blacking out on us.’
I mouthed in Cahuella’s direction, ‘We’re going up?’
He nodded back.
‘Enjoy it, Tanner. I’m going to. Word is I won’t be able to leave the surface before too long — even the Ultras won’t want to touch me.’
We were shown to a pair of vacant couches. Almost as soon as we were buckled in, the ship pulled itself aloft. Through transparent patches arranged around the walls I saw the jungle clearing dropping below until it looked like a single footprint, bathed in a smudge of light. There, far off towards one horizon, was a single spot of light which had to be the Reptile House. The rest of the jungle was ocean-black.
‘Why did you pick that clearing for our meeting?’ asked the Ultra woman.
‘You’d have looked pretty stupid parking on top of a tree.’
‘That’s not what I mean. We could have provided our own landing space with minimal effort. But that clearing was significant, wasn’t it?’ The woman sounded as if the resolution to this line of enquiry could be of only passing interest to her. ‘We scanned it on our approach. There was something buried beneath it; a regularly-sided hollow space. Some kind of chamber, filled with machines.’
‘We all have our little secrets,’ Cahuella said.
The woman looked at him carefully, then flicked her wrist, dismissing the matter.
Then the ship surged higher, the gee-force crushing me into my seat. I made a stoic effort not to show any kind of discomfort, but there was nothing pleasant about it. The Ultras all looked cool as ice, softly mouthing technical jargon at each other; airspeed and ascent vectors. The two who had met us had plugged themselves into their seats with thick silver umbilicals which presumably assisted their breathing and circulation during the ascent phase. We shrugged off the planet’s atmosphere and kept climbing. By then we were over dayside. Sky’s Edge looked blue-green and fragile; deceptively serene, just as it must have looked the day the Santiago first made orbit. From here there was no sign of war at all, until I saw the featherlike black trails of burning oilfields near the horizon.
It was the first time I had ever seen such a view. I’d never been in space before now.
‘On finals for the Orvieto,’ reported the pilot called Pellegrino.
Their main ship came up fast. It was as dark and massive as a sleeping volcano; a chiselled cone four kilometres long. A lighthugger; that was what Ultras called their ships — sleek engines of night, capable of slicing through the void at only the tiniest of fractions below the speed of light. It was hard not to be impressed. The mechanisms which made that ship fly were more advanced than almost anything I would ever have experienced on Sky’s Edge; more advanced than almost anything I could imagine.
To the Ultras our planet must have seemed like some kind of experiment in social engineering: a time- capsule imperfectly preserving technologies and ideologies which were three or four centuries out of date. That was not all our own fault, of course. When the Flotilla had left Mercury at the end of the twenty-first century, the technologies on board had been cutting-edge. But the ships took a century and a half to crawl across space to Swan’s system — during which time technology stampeded back around Sol, but remained locked in stasis aboard the Flotilla.
By the time we landed, other worlds had developed near-light space travel, making our entire journey look like some pathetic, puritanical gesture of self-inflicted punishment.
Eventually the fast ships arrived at Sky’s Edge, their data caches pregnant with the technological templates that could have leapfrogged us into the present, had we wished.
But by then we were at war.
We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. The only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only very rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nanotech-inspired gadgetry.
No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.
We docked inside the Orvieto.
Inside, it was like a much larger version of the shuttle, all twisting pastel passages reeking of antiseptic purity. The Ultras had arranged gravity by spinning parts of their ship within the outer hull; it was slightly heavier than on Sky’s Edge, but the effort was no worse than walking around with a heavy backpack. The lighthugger was also a ramliner: a passenger-carrying vessel outfitted with thousands of reefersleep berths in her belly. Some people were already being brought aboard; wide-awake aristocrats complaining loudly about the way they were being treated. The Ultras seemed not to care. The aristocrats must have paid well for the privilege of riding the Orvieto to wherever its next destination was, but to the Ultras they were still savages — just marginally cleaner and richer ones.
We were shown to the Captain.
He sat on an enormous powered throne, suspended on an articulated boom so that he could move throughout the bridge’s vast three-dimensional space. Other senior crew were riding similar seats, but they carefully steered away from us when we entered, moving towards displays set into the walls which showed intricate schematics. Cahuella and I stood on a low-railed extensible catwalk which jutted halfway into the bridge.
‘Mister… Cahuella,’ said the man in the throne, by way of greeting. ‘Welcome aboard my vessel. I am Captain Orcagna.’
Captain Orcagna was only slightly less impressive than his ship. He was dressed from neck to foot in glossy black leather, his feet in knee-length black boots with pointed toes. His hands, which he steepled beneath his chin, were gloved in black. His head was perched above the high collar of his black tunic like an egg. Unlike his crew he was completely bald, utterly hairless. His unlined, characterless face could almost have belonged to a child — or a corpse. His voice was high, almost feminine.
‘And you are?’ he said, nodding in my direction.
‘Tanner Mirabel,’ Cahuella said, before I had a chance to speak. ‘My personal security specialist. Where I go, Tanner goes. That’s not…’
‘… open to negotiation. Yes, I gathered.’ Absently, Orcagna glanced at something in mid-air, which only he could see. ‘Tanner Mirabel… yes. A soldier once, I see — until you moved into Cahuella’s employment. Confide in me: are you a man entirely without ethics, Mirabel, or are you only gravely ignorant of the kind of man you work for?’
Again, Cahuella answered. ‘It’s not his job to lose sleep, Orcagna.’
