He hesitated.
I swung the scythe through him.
As the realisation of what had happened dawned on him — there could have been no immediate pain, for the cut was surgically clean — he dropped the gun. There was a terrible frozen moment, one in which I wondered if I had not made a mistake as grave as his hesitation, and that I had somehow failed to extend the scythe’s invisible line as far as I had imagined.
But there had been no mistake.
Rodriguez toppled to the ground, twice.
‘He’s dead,’ Dieterling said, when we were back in the one tent in the camp which had not been deflated. Three hours had passed since the incident by the tree, and now Dieterling was leaning over the body of Doctor Vicuna. ‘If only I had understood how these tools of his worked…’ Dieterling had spread a pile of the ghoul’s advanced surgical toys next to him, but their subtle secrets had refused to yield to him. The normal medical supplies had not been sufficient to save him from Rodriguez’s shot, but we had hoped that the doctor’s own magic — gleaned at considerable expense from Ultra traders — would have been powerful enough. Perhaps, in the right hands, it would have been — but the one man who could have used those tools profitably had been the one who most needed them.
‘You did your best,’ I said, a hand on Dieterling’s shoulder.
Cahuella looked down at the body of Vicuna with unconcealed fury. ‘Typical of that bastard to die on us before we could use him properly. How the hell are any of us going to be able to put those implants into a snake?’
‘Maybe catching the snake isn’t our absolute top priority now,’ I said.
‘You think I don’t know that, Tanner?’
‘Then try acting like it.’ He glared at me for my insubordination, but I continued anyway, ‘I didn’t like Vicuna, but he risked his life for you.’
‘And whose fucking fault was it that Rodriguez was an impostor? I thought you screened your recruits, Mirabel.’
‘I did screen him,’ I said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘The man I killed couldn’t have been Rodriguez. Vicuna seemed to agree with me, too.’
Cahuella looked at me as if I was something he had found stuck to the bottom of his shoe, then stormed out, leaving me alone with Dieterling.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘I hope you have some idea what happened out there, Tanner.’ He pulled a sheet over the dead Vicuna, then began to gather up the neatly glistening surgical tools.
‘I don’t. Not yet. It was Rodriguez… at least it looked like him.’
‘Try calling the Reptile House again.’
He was right; it was an hour since I had last tried, and I had not been able to get a call through then. As always, the girdle of comsats around Sky’s Edge was patchy and subject to constant military interference, elements mysteriously breaking down and coming back online for the nefarious purposes of other factions.
This time, however, the link worked.
‘Tanner? You’re all okay?’
‘More or less.’ I would elaborate on our loss later; for now I needed to know what Doctor Vicuna had been told. ‘What was the warning you relayed to us about Rodriguez?’
The man I was dealing with was called Southey; someone I had known for years. But I had never seen him look as disconcerted as he did now. ‘Tanner, I hope to God… we got a warning ourselves, from one of Cahuella’s allies. A tip-off about Rodriguez.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rodriguez is dead! They found his body in Nueva Santiago. He’d been murdered, then dumped.’
‘You’re sure it was him?’
‘We have his DNA on file. Our contact in Santiago ran an analysis on the body — it was a one-to-one match.’
‘Then the Rodriguez who came back from Santiago must have been someone else, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes. Not a clone, we think, but an assassin. He would have been surgically modified to look like Rodriguez; even his voice and smell must have been altered.’
I thought about that for a few moments before replying, ‘There’s no one on Sky’s Edge with the skill to do something like that. Especially not in the few days that Rodriguez was away from the Reptile House.’
‘No, I agree. But the Ultras could have done it.’
That much I knew, Orcagna having practically rubbed our faces in his superior science. ‘It would have to be more than just cosmetic,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Rodriguez — the impostor — still behaved like himself. He knew things only Rodriguez really knew. I know — I talked to him often in the last few days.’ Now that I considered those conversations, there had at times been something evasive about Rodriguez, but obviously nothing serious enough to rouse my suspicions at the time. There had been much that he had been perfectly willing to discuss.
‘So they used his memories as well.’
‘You think they trawled Rodriguez?’
Southey nodded. ‘It must have been done by experts, because there was no sign that it was the trawl itself that killed him. But again, they were Ultras.’
‘And you think they have the means to implant the memories into their assassin?’
‘I’ve heard of such things,’ Southey said. ‘Tiny machines which swarm through the subject’s mind, laying down new neural connections. Eidetic imprinting, they call it. The NCs tried it for training purposes, but they never got it to work really well. But if Ultras were involved…’
‘It would have been child’s play. It wasn’t just that the man had access to Rodriguez’s memories, though — it went deeper than that. Like he had almost become Rodriguez in the process.’
‘Maybe that’s why he was so convincing. Those new memory structures would have been fragile, though — the assassin’s own personality would have begun to emerge sooner or later. But by then Rodriguez would have gained your confidence.’
Southey was right: it was only in the last day or so that Rodriguez had seemed more than usually evasive. Was that the point when the assassin’s buried mind began to shine through the veil of camouflaging memories?
‘He gained it pretty well,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for Vicuna warning us…’ I told him about what had happened around the tree.
‘Bring the bodies back,’ Southey said. ‘I want to see how well they really disguised their man — whether it was cosmetic, or whether they tried to change his DNA as well.’
‘You think they went to that much trouble?’
‘That’s the point, Tanner. If they went to the right kind of people, it wouldn’t have been much trouble at all.’
‘To the best of my knowledge, there’s only one group of Ultras in orbit around the planet at the moment.’
‘Yes. I’m fairly sure that Orcagna’s people must have been involved in this. You met them, didn’t you? Did you think they could be trusted?’
‘They were Ultras,’ I said, as if that were answer enough. ‘I couldn’t read them like one of Cahuella’s usual contacts. That doesn’t mean they’d automatically betray us, though.’
‘What would they have to gain by not betraying us?’
That, I realised, was the one question I had never really asked. I had made the error of treating Orcagna like any other of Cahuella’s business contacts — someone who would not want to exclude dealing with Cahuella again in the future. But what if Orcagna’s crew had no intention of returning to Sky’s Edge for decades, even centuries? They could burn all their bridges with impunity.
