“That’s some cool shit; hunting snakes.” With his cigarette hand he mimed aiming and firing a gun, doubtless drawing a bead on an imaginary hamadryad. “Think you can squeeze me in on your next hunting trip?”
“I don’t know,” Dieterling said. “We tend not to use live bait. But I’ll talk to the boss and see what we can arrange.”
Red Hand Vasquez flashed his pointed teeth at us. “Funny guy. I like you, Snake. But then again you work for Cahuella, I gotta like you. How is he anyway? I heard Cahuella got it just as badly as you did, Mirabel. In fact I’m even hearing some vicious rumours to the effect that he didn’t make it.”
Cahuella’s death wasn’t something we were planning on announcing right now; not until we had given some thought to its ramifications—but news had evidently reached Nueva Valparaiso ahead of us.
“I did my best for him,” I said.
Vasquez nodded slowly and wisely, as if some sacred belief of his had just been proved valid.
“Yeah, that’s what I heard.” He put his left hand on my shoulder, keeping his cigarette away from the coat’s pearl-coloured fabric. “I heard you drove halfway across the planet with a missing leg, just so you could bring Cahuella and his bitch home. That’s some heroic shit, man, even for a white-eye. You can tell me all about it over some pisco sours, and Snake can pencil me in for his next field trip. Right, Snake?”
We continued walking in the general direction of the bridge. “I don’t think there’s time for that,” I said. “Drinks, I mean.”
“Like I said, chill.” Vasquez strolled ahead of us, still with one hand in his pocket. “I don’t get you guys. All it would take is a word from you, and Reivich wouldn’t even be a problem any more, just a stain on the floor. The offer’s still open, Mirabel.”
“I have to finish him myself, Vasquez.”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard. Like some kind of vendetta deal. You had something going with Cahuella’s bitch, didn’t you?”
“Subtlety’s not your strong point, is it, Red?”
I saw Dieterling wince. We walked on in silence for a few more paces before Vasquez stopped and turned to face me.
“What did you say?”
“I heard they call you Red Hand Vasquez behind your back.”
“And what the fuck business of yours would it be if they did?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. On the other hand, what business is it of yours what went on between me and Gitta?”
“All right, Mirabel.” He took a longer than usual drag on his cigarette. “I think we understand each other. There are things I don’t like people asking about, and there are things you don’t like people asking about. Maybe you were fucking Gitta, I don’t know, man.” He watched as I bridled. “But like you said, it wouldn’t be my business. I won’t ask again. I won’t even think about it again. But do me a favour, right? Don’t call me Red Hand. I know that Reivich did something pretty bad to you out in the jungle. I hear it wasn’t much fun and you nearly died. But get one thing clear, all right? You’re outnumbered here. My people are watching you all the time. That means you don’t want to upset me. And if you do upset me, I can arrange for shit to happen to you that makes what Reivich did seem like a fucking teddy bears’ picnic.”
“I think,” Dieterling said, “that we should take the gentleman at his word. Right, Tanner?”
“Let’s just say we both touched a nerve,” I said, after a long hard silence.
“Yeah,” Vasquez said. “I like that. Me and Mirabel, we’re hair-trigger guys and we gotta have some respect for each other’s sensibilities. Copacetic. So let’s go drink some pisco sours while we wait for Reivich to make a move.”
“I don’t want to get too far from the bridge.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Vasquez cleaved a path before us, pushing through the evening strollers with insouciant ease. Accordion music ground out of the lowest floor of one of the freight pod buildings, slow and stately as a dirge. There were couples out walking—locals rather than aristocrats, for the most part, but dressed as well as their means allowed: genuinely at ease, good-looking young people with smiles on their faces as they looked for somewhere to eat or gamble or listen to music. The war had probably touched their lives in some tangible way; they might have lost friends or loved ones, but Nueva Valparaiso was sufficiently far from the killing fronts that the war did not have to be uppermost in their thoughts. It was hard not to envy them; hard not to wish that Dieterling and I could walk into a bar and drink ourselves into oblivion; forgetting the clockwork gun; forgetting Reivich; forgetting the reason I had come to the bridge.
There were, of course, other people out tonight. There were soldiers on furlough, dressed in civilian clothes but instantly recognisable, with their aggressively cropped hair, galvanically boosted muscles, colour-shifting chameleoflage tattoos on their arms, and the odd asymmetric way their faces were tanned, with a patch of pale flesh around one eye where they normally peered through a helmet-mounted targeting monocle. There were soldiers from all sides in the conflict mingling more or less freely, kept out of trouble by wandering DMZ militia. The militia were the only agency allowed to carry weapons within the DMZ, and they brandished their guns in starched white gloves. They weren’t going to touch Vasquez, and even if we hadn’t been walking with him, they wouldn’t have bothered Dieterling and me. We might have looked like gorillas stuffed into suits, but it would be hard to mistake us for active soldiers. We both looked too old, for a start; both of us pushing middle age. On Sky’s Edge that meant essentially what it had meant for most of human history: two to three-score years.
Not much for half a human life.
Dieterling and I had both kept in shape, but not to the extent that would have marked us as active soldiers. Soldier musculature never looked exactly human to begin with, but it had definitely become more extreme since I was a white-eye. Back then you could just about argue that you needed boosted muscles to carry around your weapons. The equipment had improved since then, but the soldiers on the street tonight had bodies that looked as if they had been sketched in by a cartoonist with an eye for absurd exaggeration. In the field the effect would be heightened by the lightweight weapons which were now in vogue: all those muscles to carry guns a child could have held.
“In here,” Vasquez said.
His place was one of the structures festering around the base of the bridge itself. He steered us into a short, dark alley and then through an unmarked door flanked by snake holograms. The room inside was an industrial-scale kitchen filled with billowing steam. I squinted and wiped perspiration from my face, ducking under an array of vicious cooking utensils. I wondered if Vasquez had ever used them in any extra-culinary activities.
I whispered to Dieterling, “Why is he so touchy about being called Red Hand anyway?”
“It’s a long story,” Dieterling said, “and it isn’t just the hand.”
Now and then a bare-chested cook would emerge from the steam on some errand, face half-concealed behind a plastic breathing mask. Vasquez spoke to two of them while Dieterling picked up something from a pan—dipping his fingers nimbly into the boiling water—and nibbled it experimentally.
“This is Tanner Mirabel, a friend of mine,” Vasquez said to the senior cook. “Guy used to be a white-eye, so don’t fuck with him. We’ll be here for a while. Bring us something to drink. Pisco sours. Mirabel, you hungry?”
“Not really. And I think Miguel’s already helping himself.”
“Good. But I think the rat’s a touch off tonight, Snake.”
Dieterling shrugged. “I’ve tasted a lot worse, believe me.” He popped another morsel into his mouth. “Mm. Pretty good rat, actually. Norvegicus, right?”
Vasquez led us beyond the kitchen into an empty gambling parlour. At first I thought we had the place to ourselves. Discreetly lit, the room was sumptuously outfitted in green velvet, with burbling hookahs situated on strategic pedestals. The walls were covered in pai
ntings all done in shades of brown—except that when I looked closer I realised they were not paintings at all, but pictures made of different pieces of wood, carefully cut and glued together. Some of the pieces even had the slight shimmer which showed that they had been cut from the bark of a hamadryad tree. The pictures were all on a common theme: scenes from the life of Sky Haussmann. There were the five ships of the Flotilla crossing space from Earth’s system to ours. There was Titus Haussmann, torch in hand, finding his son alone and in the darkness after the great blackout. There was Sky visiting his father in the infirmary aboard the ship, before Titus died of the injuries he had sustained defending the Santiago against the saboteur. There, also rendered exquisitely, was Sky Haussmann’s crime and glory; the thing he had done to ensure that the Santiago reached this world ahead of the other ships in the Flotilla, the ship’s sleeper modules falling away like dandelion seeds. And, in the last picture of all, was the punishment the people had wrought on Sky: crucifixion.
Dimly I remembered that it had happened near here.
But the room was more than simply a shrine to Haussmann. Alcoves spaced around the room’s perimeter contained conventional gambling machines, and there were half-a-dozen tables where games would obviously take place later that night, although no one was actually playing at the moment. All I heard was the scurrying of rats somewhere in the shadows.
But the room’s centrepiece was a hemispherical dome, perfectly black and at least five metres wide, surrounded by padded chairs mounted on complicated telescopic plinths, elevated three metres above the floor. Each chair had an arm inset with gambling controls, while the other held a battery of intravenous devices. About half the chairs were occupied, but by figures so perfectly still and deathlike that I hadn’t even registered them when I entered the room. They were slumped back in their seats, their faces slack and their eyes closed. They all bore that indefinable aristocrat glaze: an aura of wealth and untouchability.
“What happened?” I said. “Forgot to throw them out after you locked up this morning?”
“No. They’re pretty much a permanent fixture, Mirabel. They’re playing a game that lasts months; betting on the long term outcome of ground campaigns. It’s quiet now due to the rains. Almost like there isn’t a war after all. But you should see it when the shit starts flying around.”
There was something about the place I didn’t like. It wasn’t just the display of Sky Haussmann’s story, though that was a significant part of it.
“Maybe we should be moving on, Vasquez.”
“And miss your drinks?”
Before I had decided what to say the head cook came in, still breathing noisily through his plastic mask. He propelled a little trolley loaded with drinks. I shrugged and helped myself to a pisco sour, then nodded at the décor.
“Sky Haussmann’s a big deal round here, isn’t he?”
“More than you realise, man.”
Vasquez did something and the hemisphere flicked into life, suddenly no longer fully dark but an infinitely detailed view of one half of Sky’s Edge, with an edge of black rising from the floor like a lizard’s nictitating membrane. Nueva Valparaiso was a sparkle of lights on the Peninsula’s western coastline, visible through a crack in the clouds.
“Yeah?”
“People around here can be quite religious, you know. You can easily tread on their beliefs, you’re not careful. Gotta be respectful, man.”
“I heard they based a religion around Haussmann. That’s about as far as my knowledge goes.” Again, I nodded at the décor, noticing for the first time what looked like the skull of a dolphin stuck to one wall, oddly bumped and ridged. “What happened? Did you buy this place from one of Haussmann’s nutcases?”
“Not exactly, no.”
Dieterling coughed. I ignored him.
“What, then? Did you buy into it yourself?”
Vasquez extinguished his cigarette and pinched the bridge of his nose, furrowing what little forehead he had. “What’s going on here, Mirabel? Are you trying to wind me up, or are you just an ignorant cocksucker?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was just making polite conversation.”
“Yeah, right. And you just happened to call me Red earlier on; like it just slipped out.”
“I thought we were over that.” I sipped my pisco. “I wasn’t trying to rile you, Vasquez. But it strikes me that you’re an unusually touchy fellow.”
He did something. It was a tiny gesture which he made with one hand, like someone clicking their fingers once.
What happened next was too fast for the eye to see; just a subliminal blur of metal and a breezelike caress of air currents being pushed around the room. Extrapolating backwards, I concluded that a dozen or so apertures must have slid or irised open around the room—in the walls, the floor and the ceiling, most likely—releasing machines.
They were automated sentry drones, hovering black spheres which split open along their equators to reveal three or four gun barrels apiece, which locked onto Dieterling and me. The drones orbited slowly around us, humming like wasps, bristling with belligerence.
Neither of us breathed for a few long moments, but it was Dieterling who chose to speak in the end.
“I guess we’d be dead if you were really pissed off at us, Vasquez.”
“You’re right, but it’s a fine line, Snake.” He raised his voice. “Safe mode on.” Then he made the same finger-clicking gesture he had done before. “You see that, man? It looked pretty similar to you, didn’t it? But not to the room it didn’t. If I hadn’t turned the system off, it would have interpreted that as an order to execute everyone here except myself and the fat fucks in the gaming seats.”
“I’m glad you practised it,” I said.
“Yeah, laugh about it, Mirabel.” He made the gesture again. “That looked the same as well, didn’t it? But that wasn’t quite the same command either. That would have told the sentries to blow your arms off, one at a time. The room’s programmed to recognise at least twelve more gestures—and believe me, after some of ’em I really get stung for the cleaning bill.” He shrugged. “Can I consider my point adequately made?”
“I think we’ve got the message.”
“All right. Safe mode off. Sentries retire.”
The same blur of motion; the same breeze. It was as if the machines had simply snapped out of existence.
“Impressed?” Vasquez asked me.
“Not really,” I said, feeling prickles of sweat across my brow. “With the right security set-up, you’d already have screened anyone who’d got this far. But I suppose it breaks the ice at parties.”
“Yeah, it does that.” Vasquez looked at me amusedly, evidently satisfied that he’d achieved the desired effect.
“What it also does is make me wonder why you’re so touchy.”
“You were in my shoes, you’d be a fuck of a lot more than touchy.” Then he did something that surprised me, taking his hand from his pocket, slowly enough that I had time to see there was no weapon there. “You see this, Mirabel?”
I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but the clenched fist he showed me looked normal enough. There was nothing deformed or unusual about it. Nothing, in fact, particularly red about it.
“It looks like a hand, Vasquez.”
He clenched the fist even harder and then something odd happened. Blood began to trickle out of his grip; slowly at first, but in an increasingly strong flow. I watched it spatter on the floor, scarlet on green.
“That’s why they call me what they do. Because I bleed from my right hand. Fucking original, right?” He opened the fist, revealing blood pouring out of a small hole somewhere near the middle of his palm. “Here’s the deal. It’s a stigma; like a mark of Christ.” With his good hand he reached into his other pocket and pulled out a kerchief, wadding it into a ball and pressing it against the wound to stanch the flow. “I can almost will it to happen sometimes.”
“Haussmann cultists got to you, didn’t they,
” Dieterling said. “They crucified Sky as well. They drove a nail into his right hand.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Shall I tell him?”
“Be my guest, Snake. The man clearly needs educating.”
Dieterling turned to me. “Haussmann’s cultists split up into a number of different sects over the last century or so. Some of them took their ideas from penitential monks, trying to inflict on themselves some of the pain Sky must have gone through. They lock themselves away in darkness until the isolation almost drives them insane, or makes them start seeing things. Some of them cut off their left arms; some even crucify themselves. Sometimes they die in the process.” He paused and looked at Vasquez, as if seeking permission to continue. “But there’s a more extreme sect that does all that and more. And they don’t stop there. They spread the message, not by word of mouth, or writing, but by indoctrinal virus.”
“Go on,” I said.
“It must have been engineered for them; probably by Ultras, or maybe one of them even took a trip to see the Jugglers and they screwed around with his neurochemistry. It doesn’t matter. All that does is that the virus is contagious, transmittable through the air, and it infects almost everyone.”
“Turning them into cultists?”
“No.” It was Vasquez speaking now. He had found a fresh cigarette for himself. “It fucks with you, but it doesn’t turn you into one of them, got that? You get visions, and you have dreams, and you sometimes feel the need . . .” He paused, and nodded towards the dolphin jutting from the wall. “You see that fish skull? Cost me a fucking arm and a leg. Used to belong to Sleek; one of the ones on the ship. Having shit like that around comforts me; stops me shaking. But that’s as far as it goes.”
“And the hand?”
Vasquez said, “Some of the viruses make physical changes happen. I was lucky, in a way. There’s one that makes you go blind; another that makes you scared of the dark; another that makes your left arm wither away and drop off. You know, a little blood now and again, it doesn’t bother me. At first, before many people knew about the virus, it was cool. I could really freak people out with it. Walk into a negotiation, you know, and start bleeding all over the other guy. But then people started finding out what it meant; that I’d been infected by cultists.”