can drug it while we’re still out in the jungle. We know what tranquillisers work on snake biochemistry from our work on the juvenile. Once the thing’s out cold, Vicuna can climb up and implant the same hardware, rigged to another control unit like this one. Then all we’ve got to do is point the snake towards the Reptile House and tell it there’s food in front of its nose. It’ll slither all the way home.’
‘Through a few hundred kilometres of jungle?’
‘What’s to stop it? If the thing starts showing signs of malnutrition, we feed it. Otherwise, we just let the bastard slither — isn’t that right, Rodriguez?’
‘He’s right, Tanner. We can follow it in our vehicles; protect it from any other hunters who might want to take a pot at it.’
Cahuella nodded. ‘And when it gets here we park it in a new snakepit and tell it to curl up and sleep for a while.’
I smiled, reaching for an obvious technical objection — and came back emptyhanded. It sounded insane, but when I tried to pick a hole in any single aspect of it, Cahuella’s plan was difficult to fault. We knew enough about the behaviour of near-adults to at least have a good idea where to begin hunting one, and we could increase our tranquilliser dosages accordingly, multiplying by the ratio of body volumes. We would also have to scale up our needles — they would need to be more like harpoons now, but again, that was within our capabilities. Somewhere in his cache of weapons, Cahuella was bound to have harpoon guns.
‘We’ll still need to dig a new pit,’ I said.
‘Get your men working on it. They can have it ready by the time we get back.’
‘Reivich is just a detail in all this, isn’t he? Even if Reivich turned back tomorrow, you’d still find an excuse to go up there and look for your adult.’
Cahuella sealed the control box away and leaned with his back to the wall, studying me critically. ‘No. What do you think I am, some kind of obsessive? If it meant that much to me, we’d have been up there already. I’m just saying it’d be stupid to waste an opportunity like this.’
‘Two birds with one stone?’
‘Two snakes,’ he said, with careful emphasis on the last word. ‘One literally, one metaphorically.’
‘You don’t really think of Reivich as a snake, do you? In my book he’s just a scared rich kid doing what he thinks is right.’
‘What do you care what I think?’
‘I think we need to be clear about what’s driving him. That way we understand him and can predict his actions.’
‘What does it matter? We know where the kid’s going to be. We set the ambush and that’s that.’
Beneath us, the snake rearranged itself. ‘Do you hate him?’
‘Reivich? No. I pity him. Sometimes I even think I might sympathise with him. If he was going up against anyone else because they’d killed his family — which, incidentally, I did not do — I might even wish him the best of luck.’
‘Is he worth all this?’
‘You got an alternative in mind, Tanner?’
‘We could deter him. Hit first and take out a few of his men, just to demoralise him. Maybe even that wouldn’t be necessary. We could just set some kind of physical barrier — start a forest fire, or something. The monsoons won’t arrive for a few weeks. There must be a dozen other things we could do. The kid doesn’t necessarily have to die.’
‘No; that’s where you’re wrong. No one goes up against me and lives. I don’t give a shit if they’ve just buried their whole family and their fucking pet dog. It’s a point I’m making, understand? If we don’t make it now, we’ll have to make it over and again in the future, every time some aristocrat cocksucker starts feeling lucky.’
I sighed, seeing that this was not an argument I was going to win. I had known it would come to this: that Cahuella would not be talked out of his hunting expedition. But I had felt some show of disagreement was necessary. I was senior enough in his employment that I was almost obliged to question his orders. It was part of what he paid me for: to play his conscience in the moments when he searched for his own and found only an abscessive hole where one had been.
‘But it doesn’t have to be personal,’ I said. ‘We can take out Reivich cleanly, without turning it into some kind of recriminatory bloodbath. You thought you were joking when you said I went for specific areas of brain function when I shot people in the head. But you weren’t. I can do that, if it suits the situation.’ I thought of the soldiers on my own side I had been forced to assassinate; innocent men and women whose deaths served some inscrutable higher plan. Though it was no kind of absolution from the evil that I had perpetrated, I had always tried to take them out as quickly and painlessly as my expertise allowed. I felt — then — that Reivich deserved something of the same kindness.
Now, in Chasm City, I felt something else entirely.
‘Don’t worry, Tanner. We’ll make it nice and quick on him. A real clinical job.’
‘Good. I’ll be hand-picking my own team, of course… is Vicuna coming with us?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then we’ll need two tents. I’m not eating from the same table as the ghoul, no matter what tricks he’s learned to do with snakes.’
‘There’ll be more than two tents, Tanner. Dieterling’ll be with us, of course — he knows snakes better than anyone — and I’m taking Gitta as well.’
‘There’s something I want you to understand,’ I said. ‘Just going up into the jungle carries some risk. The instant Gitta leaves the Reptile House, she’s automatically in greater danger than if she remained. We know some of our enemies keep a close watch on our movements, and we know there are things in the jungle that are best avoided.’ I paused. ‘I’m not abdicating responsibility, but I want you to know I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety on this expedition. All I can do is my best — but my best might not be good enough.’
He patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure your best will suffice, Tanner. You’ve never let me down before.’
‘There’s always a first time,’ I said.
Our small hunting convoy consisted of three armoured ground-effect vehicles. Cahuella, Gitta and I rode in the lead vehicle, along with Dieterling. He had his hands on the joystick, guiding us expertly along the overgrown trail. He knew the terrain and was also an expert on hamadryads. It hurt me to think he was dead as well now.
Behind, Vicuna and three other security people rode in the second vehicle: Letelier, Orsono and Schmidt; all with expertise in deep-country work. The third vehicle carried heavy weapons — amongst them the ghoul’s harpoon guns — together with ammunition, medical supplies, food and water rations and our deflated bubbletents. It was driven by one of Cahuella’s old trustees, while Rodriguez rode shot-gun in the rear, sweeping the path in case anyone tried to attack us from behind.
On the dashboard was a map of the Peninsula divided into grid sections, with our current position marked by a pulsing blue dot. Several hundred kilometres to the north, but on what would eventually become the same track as us, was a red pulse which moved a little south each day. That was Reivich’s squad; thinking they were moving covertly, but betrayed by the signatures of their weapons which Orcagna was tracking. They made about fifty or sixty kilometres a day, which was about as good a rate as anyone was capable of maintaining through the jungle. Our plan was to set up camp a day’s travel south of Reivich.
In the meantime, we were passing through the lower extent of the hamadryad range. You could see the excitement in Cahuella’s eyes as he peered deep into the jungle for a hint of large, slow movement. Near-adults moved so ponderously — and were so invulnerable to any kind of natural predation — that they had never evolved any flight response. The only thing that made a hamadryad move was hunger or the migratory imperative of their breeding cycle. Vicuna said they did not even have what we would think of as a survival instinct. They had no more need of one than a glacier did.
‘There’s a ham tree,’ Dieterling said, towards the end of the day. ‘Newly fused, by the look of it.’ He pointed off to one side, into what looked like impenetrable gloom. My eyesight was good, but Dieterling’s was apparently superhuman.
‘God…’ Gitta said, slipping a pair of camouflaged image-amplifier goggles to her eyes. ‘It’s huge.’
