‘Orcagna might not have known that the assassin was aimed at us,’ I said. ‘Someone affiliated to Reivich just presented them with a man who needed his appearance changed; another man who needed his memories transferred into the first…’
‘And you think it didn’t even occur to Orcagna to ask questions? ’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, even my own argument sounding weak.
Southey sighed. I knew what he was thinking. It was what I was thinking myself. ‘Tanner, I think we need to play it very carefully from here on in.’
‘At least one good thing’s come out of it,’ I said. ‘Now that the doctor’s dead, Cahuella’s had to abandon his snake quest. He just hasn’t realised it yet.’
Southey forced a thin smile. ‘We’ve already dug half the new pit.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about finishing the rest by the time we get back.’ I paused and checked the map again, the blinking dot which represented Reivich’s progress. ‘We’ll camp again tonight, about sixty klicks north of here. Tomorrow we’ll be on our way home.’
‘Tonight’s the night?’
With Rodriguez and the doctor dead, we would be undermanned when it came to the ambush. But there would be still be enough of us to make victory a near-mathematical certainty.
‘Tomorrow morning. Reivich should enter our trap two hours before noon, if he maintains his progress.’
‘Good luck, Tanner.’
I nodded and closed the connection with the Reptile House. Outside, I found Cahuella and told him what I had learned from Southey. Cahuella had calmed down a little since our last conversation, while his men worked around us packing up the rest of the camp. He was strapping a black leather bandolier from waist to shoulder, with numerous little leather pockets for cartridges, clips, ammo-cells and other paraphernalia.
‘They can do that kind of shit as well? Memory transfer?’
‘I’m not sure how permanent it would have been, but — yes — I’m reasonably sure they could have trawled Rodriguez so that Reivich’s man had enough of his knowledge not to arouse our suspicions. You’re less surprised that they could change his shape so convincingly?’
He seemed unwilling to answer me immediately. ‘I know they can… change things, Tanner.’
There were times when I felt I knew Cahuella as well as anyone; that at times we were as close as brothers. I knew him to be capable of a cruelty more imaginative and instinctive than anything I could devise. I had to work at being cruel, like a hard-working musician who lacked the easy, virtuoso flair of the true-born genius. But we saw things similarly, judged people with the same jaundiced eye and were both possessed of an innate skill with weapons. Yet there were times, like now, that it was as if Cahuella and I had never met; that there were infinite secrets he would never share with me. I thought back to what Gitta had told me the night before; her implication that what I knew about him was only the tip of the iceberg.
An hour later and we were on our way, with the two bodies — Vicuna and the bipartite Rodriguez — in refrigerated coffins, stowed in the last vehicle. The hard-shelled coffins had doubled as rations stores until now. Predictably enough, the hunting trip no longer felt like much of a holiday. I had never seen it like that, of course, but Cahuella certainly had, and I could read the tension in the muscles of his neck as he strained to look forward along the trail. Reivich had been a step ahead of us.
Later, when we stopped to fix a turbine, he said, ‘I’m sorry I blamed you back there, Tanner.’
‘I’d have done the same.’
‘That’s not the point, is it? I trust you like a brother. I did and I still do. You saved us all when you killed Rodriguez.’
Something green and leathery flapped over the road. ‘I prefer not to think of that impostor as Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a good man.’
‘Of course… it was just verbal shorthand. You — um — don’t think there are likely to be any more of them, do you?’
I had given the matter some thought. ‘We can’t rule it out, but I don’t think it’s very likely. Rodriguez had come back from a trip, whereas everyone else on the expedition hasn’t left the Reptile House for weeks — apart from you and me, of course, when we visited Orcagna. I think we can remove ourselves from suspicion. Vicuna might have been a possibility, but he’s neatly removed himself as well.’
‘All right. One other thing.’ He paused, casting a wary eye over his men as they hammered at something under an engine cowling with what looked like less than professional care. ‘You don’t think that might have actually been Reivich, do you?’
‘Disguised as Rodriguez?’
Cahuella nodded. ‘He did say he was going to get me.’
‘Yes… but my guess is he’s with the main party. That’s what Orcagna told us. The imposter might even have planned to lie low with us, not compromising his cover until the rest of the party came through.’
‘It could have been him, though.’
‘I don’t think so; not unless the Ultras are even cleverer than we thought. Reivich and Rodriguez were nowhere near the same size. I can believe they altered his face, but I can’t see them having the time to change his entire skeleton and musculature — not in a few days. Then they’d still have to adjust his body-image so he didn’t keep bumping into ceilings. No; their assassin must have been a man of similar build to Rodriguez.’
‘It’s possible he got a warning through to Reivich, though?’
‘Possible, yes — but if he did, Reivich isn’t acting on it. The weapons traces are still moving at the normal rate towards us.’
‘Then — essentially — nothing’s changed, right?’
‘Essentially nothing,’ I said, but we both knew that neither of us felt it.
Shortly afterwards his men made the turbine sing again and we were on our way. I had always taken the security of the expedition seriously, but now I had redoubled my efforts and rethought all my arrangements. No one was leaving camp unless they were armed, and no one was to leave alone — except, of course, for Cahuella himself, who would still insist on his nocturnal prowls.
The camp we set tonight would form the basis of our ambush, so I was determined to spend more than the usual amount of time searching for the best place to pitch the bubbletents. The camp had to be nearly invisible from the road, but close enough that we could mount an attack on Reivich’s group. I did not want us to become too separated from our munitions stores, which meant placing the tents no more than fifty or sixty metres into the trees. Before nightfall, we could scythe out strategic lines of fire through the wood and arrange fall-back routes for ourselves in case Reivich’s men laid down a heavy suppressing fire. If time allowed we would set deadfalls or mines along other, more obvious paths.
I was drawing a map in my mind, crisscrossing it with intersecting lines of death, when the snake began to cross our path.
My attention had wandered slightly from the route ahead, so it was Cahuella shouting ‘Stop!’ which first alerted me that something was happening.
Turbines cut; our vehicles bellied down.
Two or three hundred metres down the trail, just where the trail began to curve out of sight, the hamadryad had poked its head out of the curtain of greenery which marked the edge of the jungle. The head was a pale, sickly green, under the olive folds of its photosensitive cowl, retracted like a cobra’s hood. It was crossing from right to left; towards the sea.
‘Near-adult,’ Dieterling said, as if what we were looking at was a bug stuck to the windshield.
The head was nearly as big as one of our vehicles. Behind it came the first few metres of the creature’s snakelike body. The patterning was the same as I had seen on the helical structure wrapped around the hamadryad tree, very snakelike.
‘How big do you think it is?’ I asked.
‘Thirty, thirty-five metres. Not the biggest I’ve ever seen — that has to be a sixty-metre snake I saw back in ’71 — but this isn’t any juvenile. If it can find a tree which reaches the canopy and isn’t much higher than its length, it’ll probably begin fusion.’
The head had reached the other side of the road. It moved slowly, creeping past us.
‘Take us closer,’ Cahuella said.
