I slipped from the bunk. No more than a second or two had passed since I had first become consciously aware of the attack.
‘Tanner?’ I called, hardly able to hear my own voice against the storm’s threnody. ‘Tanner, where the hell are you?’
I left Gitta under the thin caul of a blanket, shivering despite the heat and humidity.
‘Tanner?’
My night-vision began to come online, the interior details of the ruined tent creeping into greyish clarity. It was a good modification; worth what it had cost to obtain from the Ultras. Dieterling had persuaded me to have it, after having the same mod himself. The gene splice led to a layer of reflective material — an organic substance called tapetum — being laid down behind my retinae. The tapetum reflected light back, maximising absorption. It even shifted the wavelength of the reflected light, fluorescing at the optimum sensitivity of the retinae. The Ultras had said the only drawback of the splice — if you could call it a drawback — would be that my eyes would seem to flash back at anyone who shone a bright light in my face.
Eyeshine, they called it.
But I rather liked the idea of that. Long before anyone saw my eyeshine, I would have already seen them.
The splice went deeper than that, of course. They had packed my retinae with gene-tinkered rods with a photon-detection efficiency close to optimal, thanks to modified forms of the basic photosensitive chromoprotein pigments; a simple matter of tweaking a few genes on the X chromosome. I had a gene normally inherited only by women which allowed me to differentiate nuances of the colour red I had never imagined before. I even had a cluster of snake-derived cells, pits spaced around the rim of my corneas, which were capable of registering near infrared and ultraviolet, and which had grown neuronal connections back into my optic centre so that I processed the information as a visual overlay on my normal field of view, the way snakes do. But I had yet to activate the snake vision. Like all my faculties, it could be activated and suppressed by tailored retroviruses, triggering brief, controlled cancers which erected or dismantled the necessary cellular structures in a matter of days. I needed time, though, to learn the proper use of each faculty. First, enhanced night-vision. Then, later, colours beyond normal sight.
I pushed through the partition which divided the tent, into Tanner’s part, where our chess table was still set up; still displaying the checkmate I had won against him, as I always did.
Tanner — naked but for a pair of khaki shorts — was kneeling down at the side of his bunk, like a man tying his shoes or examining a blister on his foot.
‘Tanner?’
He looked up toward me, his hands engulfed in something black. A moan drifted from his mouth, and as my vision sharpened I saw why. He had very little foot below the ankle, and what remained looked more like charcoal than human flesh, just as liable to shatter into black shards at the merest touch.
Now I recognised the stink of incinerated human meat.
He stopped moaning, quite suddenly, as if a subroutine in his mind had judged the gesture inessential to his immediate survival, cancelling the pain. And then he spoke, with ridiculous calm and accuracy.
‘I’m hurt, quite badly, as you can probably see. I don’t think I’m going to be much use to you.’ And then: ‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’
A figure stepped through a gash in one wall. His night-vision goggles hung around his neck and the flashlight rigged to his gun played across us, coming to rest on my face. His chameleoflage stammered towards compatibility with the interior.
I blasted his guts open.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,’ I said when the after-image of my weapon discharge had dissolved to a thumb-shaped pink bruise in my visual field. I stepped over the corpse of the attacker, carefully refraining from placing my unshod foot in the spreading entrails. I walked over to the rifle rack, pulled down a huge but currently superfluous bosonic beam weapon — too heavy to be used against enemy this close — and tossed it onto Tanner’s bunk. ‘Nothing wrong with my eyes at all. Now use that as a crutch and start earning your pay. We’ll get you a new foot if we get out of it, so just think of it as a temporary loss.’
Tanner looked from his wound to the gun and then back to the wound, as if weighing one against the other.
Then I moved.
I put my weight on the stock of the boser-rifle and tried to put the pain into some sealed compartment at the back of my head. My foot was ruined, but what Cahuella said was right. I could live without it — the blast had done a very professional job of cauterisation — and if I managed to survive the attack, obtaining a new foot would be a matter of a few weeks’ discomfort. In terms of mortality, I had sustained worse injuries when I was regular soldier fighting against the NCs. But my mind didn’t see it that way. What it saw was that part of me was simply not there any more, and it did not quite know how to process that absence.
Light — hard and blue and artificial — impaled the tent. Two of the enemy — I had counted three before the dead one shot me — were still out there. Our tent was big enough that it might look as if we were a larger force than we really were, so the other two might be laying down a suppressing fire before moving in to mop up anyone they had not already taken out.
I made my way over to the body, my vision darkening at the edges, as if seen through a tube of foreboding clouds. I knelt down until I could reach the dead man, unclipping his torch and taking his night-vision goggles. Cahuella had shot him blind, in near total darkness, and while the shot was a fraction low for my tastes, it had done the job. I remembered how, only a few hours earlier, I had watched him pump shots into the night, as if there was something there only he could see.
‘They did something to you and Dieterling,’ I said, clenching my teeth as I spoke and hoping that I was comprehensible. ‘The Ultras…’
‘It’s nothing to them,’ he said, his broad frame turning towards me like a wall. ‘They all have it. They live in nearly total darkness on their ships, so that they can bathe in the glories in the universe more easily, when they’ve left sunlight behind. Are you going to live, Tanner?’
‘If any of us do.’ I snapped the night-vision goggles over my eyes and saw the room brighten in hues of choleric green. ‘There wasn’t much blood loss, but I can’t do anything about shock. That’s bound to set in soon, and then I’m not going to be very much use to you.’
‘Get yourself a gun, something useful at close range. We’ll go and see what damage we can do.’
‘Where’s Dieterling?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead.’
Automatically, barely having to think about it, I tugged a compact pistol from the rack, flicking its ammo-cell to readiness and hearing the shrill whine as its condensers charged up.
Gitta screamed from the next partition.
Cahuella pushed through ahead of me and then stopped dead just beyond the drape. I nearly knocked him over, the stock of the boser-rifle scuffling against the floor as I tried to approximate walking. I had no need for the goggles now, since the room was already lit by the tent’s glowlamp, which Gitta must have ignited. She was standing up in the middle of the space, clutching a dun-coloured blanket around her.
One of the attackers stood behind her, one hand drawing her head back by a clump of scalp-hair, the other holding a wickedly serrated knife to the convex whiteness of her throat.
She made no scream now. The only sounds she allowed herself were small and snatched, like someone choking.
The man holding her had removed his helmet. He was not Reivich, just some mildly competent thug who might have fought with or against me during the war, or against both sides. His face was lined and his black hair was tied back in a topknot, like a Samurai. He was not exactly grinning — the situation was too tense for that — but there was something in his expression which suggested he was enjoying it.
‘You can stop or you can take a step closer,’ he said, his rough voice accentless and surprisingly reasonable. ‘Either way I’m going to kill her. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘Your friend’s dead,’ Cahuella said, needlessly. ‘If you kill Gitta, I’ll kill you as well. Except for every second she suffers, I’ll make it an hour for you. How’s that for generosity?’
