name have anything to do with what the Mixmaster told you?’
‘That wouldn’t by any chance be the same one you visited with me, would it?’ It was Chanterelle speaking now, and it was all I could do to nod, as if in that gesture I made my final acceptance of the truth.
‘I know some local snake sellers,’ Quirrenbach said, almost to ease the tension. He leaned forward, over Zebra’s shoulder, and fed orders into the car. It lifted smoothly, quickly spiriting us above the stench and chaos of the rain-sodden Mulch.
‘I had to know what was wrong with my eyes,’ I told Chanterelle. ‘Why they seemed to have been tampered with genetically. What the Mixmaster told me when I returned with Zebra was that the work had probably been done by Ultras, and then undone — crudely, as it happened — by someone else; someone like the Black Geneticists.’
‘Go on.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t to find out that I must have been in some way complicit in the act.’
‘You think you willingly did this to your eyes?’
I nodded. ‘It wouldn’t be without its uses. Someone with an interest in hunting, perhaps, might consider it. I can see very well in the dark now.’
‘Who?’ Chanterelle said.
‘Good question,’ Zebra echoed. ‘But before you answer it, what about the full-body scan you had when we visited the Mixmaster? What was the significance of that?’
‘I was looking for evidence of old injuries,’ I said. ‘Both wounds were inflicted at about the same time. I was rather hoping to find one and rather hoping not to find the other.’
‘Any particular reason why?’
‘Tanner Mirabel had a foot shot off by Reivich’s gunmen. The foot could have been replaced by an organic prosthesis, or a cultured copy cloned from his own cells. But either way it would need to be surgically attached to the stump. Now, maybe with the best medical skills available on Yellowstone, that kind of work could be done invisibly. But not on Sky’s Edge. There’d be plenty of microscopic evidence — signs which should have easily shown up in a Mixmaster scan.’
Zebra nodded, accepting that much. ‘Maybe that’s true. But if you’re not Tanner — as you claim — how do you know it ever happened to him?’
‘Because I seem to have stolen his memories.’
Gitta dropped to the floor of the tent at almost the same moment as Cahuella.
Neither of them made much of a sound. Gitta had died — in as far as it mattered — the instant the beam from my weapon reached into her skull and turned her brain tissue into something resembling funereal ash; barely enough of it to cup in your hands and watch slipping in grey streams between your fingers. Her mouth opened slightly wider, but I doubted that she’d had any time to register my actions before thought itself failed. I hoped — devoutly — that the last thing Gitta thought, literally, was that I was about to do something which would save her. As she fell, the gunman’s knife etched deeper into her throat, but by then there was nothing left of her capable of feeling pain.
Cahuella — impaled by the beam which should have spared Gitta and killed the guard — exhaled softly, like the last sigh of someone falling gratefully into sleep. He had lost consciousness with the shock of the beam’s passage; a small mercy for him.
The gunman lifted his face to me. He did not understand, of course. What I had done had made no conceivable sense. I wondered how long it would take before he realised that the shot which had killed Gitta — with such geometric precision, bored straight through the forehead — had in fact been intended for him. How long would it take him before he realised the simple truth, which was that I was not quite the crack shot I had dared to imagine, and that I had killed the one person I was striving to save.
There was a moment of strained silence, during which time he might have come halfway to that realisation.
I did not give him time to finish the journey.
And this time, I neither missed nor stopped shooting when the task was obviously done. I emptied an ammo-cell into the man, and kept firing until the barrel was a cherry-red glow in the tent’s dim light.
For a moment I stood with three ostensibly dead bodies at my feet. Then some soldiering instinct snapped into play and I moved again, assimilating what I could.
Cahuella was breathing, though profoundly unconscious. I had reduced the Reivich gunman into an object lesson in cranial anatomy. I felt a spasm of remorse, guilt at having taken his execution well beyond any sensible limit. It was, I suppose, the last twitch of a dying professional soldier. In the exhaustion of that ammo-cell I had crossed some threshold into some less clinical realm where there were even fewer rules, and where the efficiency of a kill counted for infinitely less than the measure of hatred expended.
I put down the gun and knelt closer to Gitta.
I had no need of the medical kit to tell she was dead and irretrievably so, but I did it anyway: running the pocket neural imager across her head, watching as the little embedded screen turned red with messages of fatal tissue damage; deep cerebral injury; extensive cortical trauma. Even if we had a trawl in the tent, it would not have been able to skim her memories and thereby capture a ghost of her personality. I had ensured that she was too severely harmed for that; that the very biochemical patterns themselves were lost. I kept her alive, anyway: strapped a life-support cuirass across her chest and watched as it gave lie to the notion she was dead, colour flowing back into her cheeks as blood circulation resumed. It would keep her body intact until we got back to the Reptile House. Cahuella would kill me if I did anything less than that.
I turned to him, finally. His injuries were almost trivial; the beam had cut through him, but the pulse had been extremely brief and the beam width at its narrowest focus. Most of the internal damage would have been caused not by the beam itself but by the explosive vaporisation of water trapped in his cells, a series of tiny scalding concussions tracing the beam path. Cahuella’s entrance and exit wounds were so small they were hard to find. There should not be any internal bleeding; not if the beam had cauterised as it gnawed through him, as I intended. There would be harm, yes… but I had no reason to suppose he would not survive, even if the best I could do for him here was maintain his current coma with another cuirass.
I strapped the device on, left him resting peacefully next to his wife, then grabbed the gun, palmed in a fresh ammo-cell and secured the perimeter again, supporting myself with the improvised crutch of another rifle, trying not to think about what had been done to my foot, while knowing — on a level of abstract detachment which was anything but reassuring — that it was nothing that could not be fixed, given time.
It took me five minutes to satisfy myself that the rest of Reivich’s men were dead; as were almost all of our own except for Cahuella and myself. Dieterling was the only lucky one of us; the only one who had taken a minor wound. It looked worse than it was, and because the head-grazing shot had put him into unconsciousness, the enemy had assumed he was dead.
An hour later, close to collapse myself, blackouts fogging my vision like the awesome thunderhead which had preluded the night’s storm, I managed to get Cahuella and his wife into the vehicle. Then I managed to get Dieterling awake, though he was weak and confused by blood loss. At times, I remember, I screamed aloud because of the pain.
I slumped into the control seat of the vehicle and started it moving. Every part of me was fighting an agonised war to drag me into sleep, but I knew I had to move now — and start moving south — before Reivich sent another attack squad; something he would surely consider if the last squad failed to return on time.
Dawn seemed an eternity away, and when finally pinkish daylight oozed over the now cloudless seaward horizon, I had already hallucinated its coming a dozen times. Somehow I got us back to the Reptile House.
But it would have been better for everyone if I had never made it.
THIRTY-NINE
We stopped at three snake sellers before we found one who knew who we were talking about: a stranger —
