“I’m sorry about the damage,” I said. “But you did ask for a demonstration.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter; I’ve got dozens of them in the basement. Maybe I’ll even leave it as a feature, right?”
“Deterrence?”
“Has to be worth something, hasn’t it?” Then his voice lowered. “Tanner, something’s come up. I need you to come with me tonight.”
“Tonight?” It was already late, but then Cahuella tended to keep unusual hours. “What are you planning—a late-night hunting trip?”
“I’m in the mood, but this is something else entirely. We’ve got visitors coming in. We need to go and meet them. There’s a clearing about twenty klicks up the old jungle road. I want you to drive me there.”
I thought about that carefully before answering. “What kind of visitors are we talking about here?”
He stroked the hamadryad’s pierced head, almost lovingly. “Not the usual kind.”
Cahuella and I were on our way from the Reptile House within half an hour, driving one of the ground-effect vehicles. It had just been enough time for Cahuella to dress for the trip, donning khaki trousers and shirt, under an elaborately pocketed tan hunting jacket. I nosed the car between the shells of derelict, vine-enshrouded buildings around the Reptile House until I found the old trail, just before it plunged into the forest. In another few months the journey would not have been possible at all—the jungle was slowly healing the wound cut through the heart of it. It would take flame-throwers to scythe it clear again.
The Reptile House and its environs had once been part of a zoological garden, built during one of the hopeful ceasefires. That particular ceasefire had only lasted a decade or so—but at the time it must have seemed that there was a good chance of peace enduring; enough for people to build something as militarily valueless and as civically improving as a zoo. The idea had been to house Terran and native specimens in similar exhibits, emphasising the similarities and differences between Earth and Sky’s Edge. But the zoo had never been properly completed, and now the only intact part of it was the Reptile House, which Cahuella had made into his personal residence. It served him well: isolated and easily fortified. He had ambitions to restock its basement vivaria with a private collection of captured animals, prime amongst which would be the pre-adult hamadryad he had yet to catch. The juvenile took up a large volume already; he would need a whole new basement for a large one—not to mention extensive new expertise in the care of a creature with a substantially different biochemistry than its younger phase. Elsewhere, the House was already filled with the skins and teeth and bones of animals he had brought home as dead prizes. He had no love for living things, and the only reason that he wanted live specimens was because it would be obvious to his visitors that greater skill had been required in their capture than if they had been killed in the field.
Branches and vines slapped against the car’s bodywork as I gunned it down the track, the howl of the turbines out-screeching every other living thing for miles around.
“Tell me about these visitors,” I said, my throat-mike relaying my words to Cahuella through the headphones which clamped his skull.
“You’ll see them soon enough.”
“Did they suggest this clearing as a meeting place?”
“No—that was my idea.”
“And they know which clearing you were talking about?”
“They don’t have to.” He nodded upwards. I risked a glance towards the forest canopy, and when the canopy thinned for a moment—revealing sky—I saw something painfully bright loitering above us, like a triangular wedge cut out of the firmament. “They’ve been following us ever since we left the House.”
“That’s not a native aircraft,” I said.
“It’s not an aircraft, Tanner. It’s a spaceship.”
We reached the clearing after an hour’s drive through thickening forest. Something must have burned the clearing away a few years earlier—a seriously rogue missile, probably. It might even have been intended for the Reptile House; Cahuella had enough enemies to make that a reasonable possibility. Fortunately, most of them had no idea where he lived. Now the clearing was beginning to grow back, but the ground was still level enough to permit a landing.
The spacecraft stopped above us, silent as a bat. It was delta-shaped, and now that it had sunk lower, I saw that the underside was quilted by thousands of glaringly bright heat elements. It was fifty metres wide; half the width of the clearing. I felt the first slap of warmth, and then—at the edge of audibility—the first trace of an almost subsonic humming.
The jungle around us fell into silence.
The deltoid came in lower, three inverted hemispheres puckering gracefully from the apex points. Now it was below the treeline. The heat was making me sweat. I held up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun-bright glare.
Then the glare shut down, dimming to a dull brick-red, and the vehicle dropped the last few metres under its own weight, settling down on the hemispheres which cushioned the impact with muscle-like smoothness. For a few moments, silence, and then a ramp slid down like a tongue from the front. Blue-white glare from the doorway at the top of the ramp threw the surrounding vegetation into stark relief. In my peripheral vision I saw things scurrying and slithering for shadow.
Two spindly, elongated figures stepped into the light at the top of the ramp.
Cahuella stepped ahead of me, towards the ramp.
“You’re going aboard that thing?”
He looked back, silhouetted by the light. “Damn right I am. And I want you with me.”
“I’ve never dealt with Ultras before.”
“Well, now’s your big chance.”
I left the car and followed him. I had a gun with me, but it felt ridiculous just to be holding it. I slipped it into my belt and never touched it again the whole time we were away. The two Ultras at the top of the ramp waited silently, standing in faintly bored postures, one leaning against the doorway’s surround. When Cahuella was halfway to the parked ship he knelt down and fingered the ground, brushing aside undergrowth. I glanced down and thought I saw something exposed, like a sheet of battered metal—but before I could pay it any more attention, or wonder what it had been, Cahuella was urging me on.
“C’mon. They’re not known for their immense reserves of patience.”
“I didn’t even know there was an Ultra ship in orbit,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“Not many people do.” Cahuella started up the ramp. “They’re keeping very dark for now, so they can conduct certain types of business which wouldn’t be possible if everyone knew they were here.”
The two Ultras were a man and a women. They were both very thin, their near-skeletal frames encased in looms of exo support machinery and prosthetics. They were both pale and high-cheekboned, with black lips and eyes that appeared to be outlined in kohl, lending them a doll-like, cadaverous look. Both had elaborate dark hair worked in a viper’s nest of stiff locks. The man’s arms were smoked glass, inlaid with glowing machines and luminous pulsing feed-lines, while the woman had an oblong hole right through her abdomen.
“Don’t let them freak you out,” Cahuella whispered. “Freaking people out is part of their armoury of business techniques. You can bet the Captain sent down the two weirdest specimens he had, just to put us ill at ease.”
“He did a good job, in that case.”
“Trust me; I’ve dealt with Ultras. They’re pussies, really.”
We ambled up the ramp. The woman, the one leaning against the doorframe, pulled herself upright and studied us with impassively pursed lips. “You’re Cahuella?” she said.
“Yeah, and this is Tanner. Tanner goes with me. That’s not open to negotiation.”
She looked me over. “You’re armed.”
“Yes,” I said, only slightly unnerved that she had seen the gun through my clothes. “You’re telling me you’re not?”
“We have our means. Step aboard, ple
ase.”
“The gun isn’t a problem?”
The woman’s smirk was the first emotional response she had shown. “I don’t seriously think so, no.”
Once we were aboard they retracted the ramp and closed the door. The ship had a cool medical ambience, all pale pastels and glassy machines. Two other Ultras waited aboard it, reclined in a pair of enormous command couches, nearly buried under readouts and delicate control stalks. The pilot and co-pilot were both naked, purple-skinned beings with impossibly dexterous fingers. They had the same stiff dreadlocks as the other two, but rather more per head.
The woman with a hole in her gut said, “Take us up nice and easy, Pellegrino. We don’t want our guests blacking out on us.”
I mouthed in Cahuella’s direction, “We’re going up?”
He nodded back.
“Enjoy it, Tanner. I’m going to. Word is I won’t be able to leave the surface before too long—even the Ultras won’t want to touch me.”
We were shown to a pair of vacant couches. Almost as soon as we were buckled in, the ship pulled itself aloft. Through transparent patches arranged around the walls I saw the jungle clearing dropping below until it looked like a single footprint, bathed in a smudge of light. There, far off towards one horizon, was a single spot of light which had to be the Reptile House. The rest of the jungle was ocean-black.
“Why did you pick that clearing for our meeting?” asked the Ultra woman.
“You’d have looked pretty stupid parking on top of a tree.”
“That’s not what I mean. We could have provided our own landing space with minimal effort. But that clearing was significant, wasn’t it?” The woman sounded as if the resolution to this line of enquiry could be of only passing interest to her. “We scanned it on our approach. There was something buried beneath it; a regularly-sided hollow space. Some kind of chamber, filled with machines.”
“We all have our little secrets,” Cahuella said.
The woman looked at him carefully, then flicked her wrist, dismissing the matter.
Then the ship surged higher, the gee-force crushing me into my seat. I made a stoic effort not to show any kind of discomfort, but there was nothing pleasant about it. The Ultras all looked cool as ice, softly mouthing technical jargon at each other; airspeed and ascent vectors. The two who had met us had plugged themselves into their seats with thick silver umbilicals which presumably assisted their breathing and circulation during the ascent phase. We shrugged off the planet’s atmosphere and kept climbing. By then we were over dayside. Sky’s Edge looked blue-green and fragile; deceptively serene, just as it must have looked the day the Santiago first made orbit. From here there was no sign of war at all, until I saw the featherlike black trails of burning oilfields near the horizon.
It was the first time I had ever seen such a view. I’d never been in space before now.
“On finals for the Orvieto,” reported the pilot called Pellegrino.
Their main ship came up fast. It was as dark and massive as a sleeping volcano; a chiselled cone four kilometres long. A lighthugger; that was what Ultras called their ships—sleek engines of night, capable of slicing through the void at only the tiniest of fractions below the speed of light. It was hard not to be impressed. The mechanisms which made that ship fly were more advanced than almost anything I would ever have experienced on Sky’s Edge; more advanced than almost anything I could imagine.
To the Ultras our planet must have seemed like some kind of experiment in social engineering: a time-capsule imperfectly preserving technologies and ideologies which were three or four centuries out of date. That was not all our own fault, of course. When the Flotilla had left Mercury at the end of the twenty-first century, the technologies on board had been cutting-edge. But the ships took a century and a half to crawl across space to Swan’s system—during which time technology stampeded back around Sol, but remained locked in stasis aboard the Flotilla.
By the time we landed, other worlds had developed near-light space travel, making our entire journey look like some pathetic, puritanical gesture of self-inflicted punishment.
Eventually the fast ships arrived at Sky’s Edge, their data caches pregnant with the technological templates that could have leap-frogged us into the present, had we wished.
But by then we were at war.
We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. The only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only very rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nano tech-inspired gadgetry.
No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.
We docked inside the Orvieto.
Inside, it was like a much larger version of the shuttle, all twisting pastel passages reeking of antiseptic purity. The Ultras had arranged gravity by spinning parts of their ship within the outer hull; it was slightly heavier than on Sky’s Edge, but the effort was no worse than walking around with a heavy backpack. The lighthugger was also a ramliner: a passenger-carrying vessel outfitted with thousands of reefersleep berths in her belly. Some people were already being brought aboard; wide-awake aristocrats complaining loudly about the way they were being treated. The Ultras seemed not to care. The aristocrats must have paid well for the privilege of riding the Orvieto to wherever its next destination was, but to the Ultras they were still savages—just marginally cleaner and richer ones.
We were shown to the Captain.
He sat on an enormous powered throne, suspended on an articulated boom so that he could move throughout the bridge’s vast three-dimensional space. Other senior crew were riding similar seats, but they carefully steered away from us when we entered, moving towards displays set into the walls which showed intricate schematics. Cahuella and I stood on a low-railed extensible catwalk which jutted halfway into the bridge.
“Mister . . . Cahuella,” said the man in the throne, by way of greeting. “Welcome aboard my vessel. I am Captain Orcagna.”
Captain Orcagna was only slightly less impressive than his ship. He was dressed from neck to foot in glossy black leather, his feet in knee-length black boots with pointed toes. His hands, which he steepled beneath his chin, were gloved in black. His head was perched above the high collar of his black tunic like an egg. Unlike his crew he was completely bald, utterly hairless. His unlined, characterless face could almost have belonged to a child—or a corpse. His voice was high, almost feminine.
“And you are?” he said, nodding in my direction.
“Tanner Mirabel,” Cahuella said, before I had a chance to speak. “My personal security specialist. Where I go, Tanner goes. That’s not . . .”
“. . . open to negotiation. Yes, I gathered.” Absently, Orcagna glanced at something in mid-air, which only he could see. “Tanner Mirabel . . . yes. A soldier once, I see—until you moved into Cahuella’s employment. Confide in me: are you a man entirely without ethics, Mirabel, or are you only gravely ignorant of the kind of man you work for?”
Again, Cahuella answered. “It’s not his job to lose sleep, Orcagna.”
“But would he anyway, if he knew?” Orcagna looked at me again, but there was nothing much to be read into his expression. We might even have been talking to a puppet driven by a disembodied intelligence running on the ship’s computer net. “Tell me, Mirabel . . . are you aware that the man you work for is regarded as a war criminal in some quarters?”
“Only by hypocrites happy to buy weapons from him, as long as he doesn’t sell to anyone else.”
“A level killing field is so much better than the alternative,” Cahuella said. It was one o
f his favourite sayings.
“But you don’t just sell weapons,” Orcagna said. Once again he seemed to be viewing something hidden from us. “You steal and kill for them. Documentary evidence implicates you in at least thirty murders on Sky’s Edge, all connected with the arms black market. On three occasions you were responsible for the redistribution of weapons which had been decommissioned under peace agreements. Indirectly, you can be shown to have prolonged—even reignited—four or five local territorial disputes which had been close to negotiated settlement. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost through your actions.” Cahuella started to protest at that point, but Orcagna was having none of it. “You are a man driven utterly by profit; completely devoid of morals or any fundamental sense of right and wrong. You are a man enthralled by the reptilian . . . perhaps because in reptiles you see your own reflected self, and at heart you are infinitely vain.” Orcagna stroked his chin, and then allowed a faint smile. “In short, therefore, you are a man much like myself . . . someone with whom I believe I can do business.” His gaze snapped to me again. “But tell me, Mirabel—why do you work for him? I’ve seen nothing in your history to suggest that you have much in common with your employer.”
“He pays me.”
“That’s all?”
“He’s never asked me to do anything I wouldn’t do. I’m his security specialist. I protect him and those around him. I’ve taken bullets for him. Laser impacts. Sometimes I set up deals and meet potential new suppliers. That’s dangerous work, too. But what happens to the guns after they’ve changed hands is no concern of mine.”