“You think it’s vile,” Cahuella said, reading Gitta’s thoughts expertly. “But there are life-cycles amongst terrestrial animals which are just as unpleasant, if not more so. The Australian social spider turns to mush as her spiderlings mature. You have to admit it has a kind of Darwinian purity to it. Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage. Normally adult animals have to stick around long enough to raise their young and safeguard them from predators, but hamadryads aren’t constrained by those factors. Even juveniles are nastier than any other indigenous animals, which means there’s nothing to protect them against. And they don’t need to learn anything they don’t already have hardwired into them. There’s almost no selection pressure to prevent the adults from dying the instant they’ve given birth. It makes perfect sense for the juveniles to gorge themselves on their mothers.”
It was my turn to smile. “You almost sound like you admire it.”
“I do. The purity of it—who couldn’t admire that?”
I am not sure quite what happened then. I was looking at Cahuella, with half an eye on Gitta, when Vicuna did something. But the first flash of movement seemed to have come not from Vicuna but from my own man Rodriguez.
Vicuna had reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
“Rodriguez,” he said. “Step away from the tree.”
I had no idea what was happening, but I saw now that Rodriguez’s own hand was buried in his pocket, as if he had been on the point of reaching for something. Vicuna waggled the end of his gun emphatically.
“I said step away.”
“Doctor,” I said, “would you mind explaining why you are threatening one of my men?”
“Gladly, Mirabel. After I’ve dealt with him.”
Rodriguez looked at me, eyes wide in what looked like confusion. “Tanner, I don’t know what he’s on about. I was just going for my rations pack . . .”
I looked at Rodriguez, then at the ghoul.
“Well, doctor?”
“He has no rations pack in that pocket. He was reaching for a weapon.”
It made no sense. Rodriguez was already armed—he had a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder, just like Cahuella.
The two of them faced each other, frozen.
I needed to make a decision. I nodded at Cahuella. “Let me handle this. Get yourself and Gitta away from here; away from any possible line of fire. I’ll meet you back at the camp.”
“Yes!” Vicuna hissed. “Get away from here, before Rodriguez kills you.”
Cahuella took his wife and stepped hesitantly away from the tableau. “Are you serious, doctor?”
“He seems adequately serious to me,” Dieterling murmured. He was already edging away himself.
“Well?” I said, towards the ghoul.
Vicuna’s hand was trembling. He was no gunman—but no kind of marksmanship would have been necessary to take out Rodriguez at the distance that spaced them. He spoke slowly and with forced calm. “Rodriguez is an imposter, Tanner. I received a message from the Reptile House while you were here.”
Rodriguez shook his head. “I don’t need to listen to this!”
I realised that it was entirely possible that he had received some kind of message from the Reptile House. Normally I snapped on a comms bracelet before I left camp, but I had forgotten it in my haste this morning. Someone calling from the House would only have been able to get as far as the camp.
I turned to Rodriguez. “Then take your hand slowly out of your pocket.”
“Don’t tell me you believe the bastard!”
“I don’t know what I believe. But if you’re telling the truth, all you’ve got in there is a rations pack.”
“Tanner, this is—”
I raised my voice. “Just do it, damn you!”
“Careful,” Vicuna hissed.
Rodriguez drew his hand from the pocket with majesterial slowness, glancing to myself and then Vicuna all the while. What came out, gripped between thumb and forefinger, was slim and black. The way he held it, in the perpetual gloom of the forest floor, it was almost possible to believe it was a rations pack. For a moment I did.
Until I saw that it was a gun, small and elegant and vicious; engineered for assassination.
Vicuna fired. Perhaps I had underestimated the skill that it would take to seriously incapacitate someone even when they stood so close, for the doctor’s slug only hit Rodriguez in the shoulder of his other arm, causing him to stagger back and grunt, but no more than that. Rodriguez’s gun flashed and the doctor fell backwards into the mulch.
On the edge of the clearing, Cahuella shrugged off his rifle and was on the point of bringing it to bear.
“No!” I started to shout, willing my master to save himself by getting as far away as possible from Rodriguez, but—as I belatedly realised—Cahuella was not the kind to walk away from a fight, even one in which his own life might be contested.
Gitta screamed for her husband to follow her.
Rodriguez levelled the gun towards Cahuella and fired . . .
And missed, his slug slicing through the bark of a nearby tree.
I tried to find some sense in what was happening, but there was no time. Vicuna appeared to have been correct. Everything that Rodriguez had done in the last few moments was consistent with the ghoul’s statement . . . which meant that Rodriguez was—what?
An imposter?
“This is for Argent Reivich,” Rodriguez said, drawing his aim again.
This time, I knew, he would not miss.
I raised the monofilament scythe, thumbed the invisibly fine cutting thread to its maximum, piezo-electrically maintained length: a hyper-rigid monomolecular line extending fifteen metres ahead of me.
Rodriguez, out of the corner of his eye, caught what I was about to do, and made the one mistake which marked him as an amateur, rather than a professional assassin.
He hesitated.
I swung the scythe through him.
As the realisation of what had happened dawned on him—there could have been no immediate pain, for the cut was surgically clean—he dropped the gun. There was a terrible frozen moment, one in which I wondered if I had not made a mistake as grave as his hesitation, and that I had somehow failed to extend the scythe’s invisible line as far as I had imagined.
But there had been no mistake.
Rodriguez toppled to the ground, twice.
“He’s dead,” Dieterling said, when we were back in the one tent in the camp which had not been deflated. Three hours had passed since the incident by the tree, and now Dieterling was leaning over the body of Doctor Vicuna. “If only I had understood how these tools of his worked . . .” Dieterling had spread a pile of the ghoul’s advanced surgical toys next to him, but their subtle secrets had refused to yield to him. The normal medical supplies had not been sufficient to save him from Rodriguez’s shot, but we had hoped that the doctor’s own magic—gleaned at considerable expense from Ultra traders—would have been powerful enough. Perhaps, in the right hands, it would have been—but the one man who could have used those tools profitably had been the one who most needed them.
“You did your best,” I said, a hand on Dieterling’s shoulder.
Cahuella looked down at the body of Vicuna with unconcealed fury. “Typical of that bastard to die on us before we could use him properly. How the hell are any of us going to be able to put those implants into a snake?”
“Maybe catching the snake isn’t our absolute top priority now,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that, Tanner?”
“Then try acting like it.” He glared at me for my insubordination, but I continued anyway, “I didn’t like Vicuna, but he risked his life for you.”
“And whose fucking fault was it that Rodriguez was an imposter? I thought you screened your recruits, Mirabel.”
“I did screen him,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“The man I k
illed couldn’t have been Rodriguez. Vicuna seemed to agree with me, too.”
Cahuella looked at me as if I was something he had found stuck to the bottom of his shoe, then stormed out, leaving me alone with Dieterling.
“Well?” he said. “I hope you have some idea what happened out there, Tanner.” He pulled a sheet over the dead Vicuna, then began to gather up the neatly glistening surgical tools.
“I don’t. Not yet. It was Rodriguez . . . at least it looked like him.”
“Try calling the Reptile House again.”
He was right; it was an hour since I had last tried, and I had not been able to get a call through then. As always, the girdle of combats around Sky’s Edge was patchy and subject to constant military interference, elements mysteriously breaking down and coming back online for the nefarious purposes of other factions.
This time, however, the link worked.
“Tanner? You’re all OK?”
“More or less.” I would elaborate on our loss later; for now I need to know what Doctor Vicuna had been told. “What was the warning you relayed to us about Rodriguez?”
The man I was dealing with was called Southey; someone I had known for years. But I had never seen him look as disconcerted as he did now. “Tanner, I hope to God . . . we got a warning ourselves, from one of Cahuella’s allies. A tip-off about Rodriguez.”
“Go on.”
“Rodriguez is dead! They found his body in Nueva Santiago. He’d been murdered, then dumped.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“We have his DNA on file. Our contact in Santiago ran an analysis on the body—it was a one-to-one match.”
“Then the Rodriguez who came back from Santiago must have been someone else, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. Not a clone, we think, but an assassin. He would have been surgically modified to look like Rodriguez; even his voice and smell must have been altered.”
I thought about that for a few moments before replying, “There’s no one on Sky’s Edge with the skill to do something like that. Especially not in the few days that Rodriguez was away from the Reptile House.”
“No, I agree. But the Ultras could have done it.”
That much I knew, Orcagna having practically rubbed our faces in his superior science. “It would have to be more than just cosmetic,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Rodriguez—the imposter—still behaved like himself. He knew things only Rodriguez really knew. I know—I talked to him often in the last few days.” Now that I considered those conversations, there had at times been something evasive about Rodriguez, but obviously nothing serious enough to rouse my suspicions at the time. There had been much that he had been perfectly willing to discuss.
“So they used his memories as well.”
“You think they trawled Rodriguez?”
Southey nodded. “It must have been done by experts, because there was no sign that it was the trawl itself that killed him. But again, they were Ultras.”
“And you think they have the means to implant the memories into their assassin?”
“I’ve heard of such things,” Southey said. “Tiny machines which swarm through the subject’s mind, laying down new neural connections. Eidetic imprinting, they call it. The NCs tried it for training purposes, but they never got it to work really well. But if Ultras were involved . . .”
“It would have been child’s play. It wasn’t just that the man had access to Rodriguez’s memories, though—it went deeper than that. Like he had almost become Rodriguez in the process.”
“Maybe that’s why he was so convincing. Those new memory structures would have been fragile, though—the assassin’s own personality would have begun to emerge sooner or later. But by then Rodriguez would have gained your confidence.”
Southey was right: it was only in the last day or so that Rodriguez had seemed more than usually evasive. Was that the point when the assassin’s buried mind began to shine through the veil of camouflaging memories?
“He gained it pretty well,” I said. “If it wasn’t for Vicuna warning us . . .” I told him about what had happened around the tree.
“Bring the bodies back,” Southey said. “I want to see how well they really disguised their man—whether it was cosmetic, or whether they tried to change his DNA as well.”
“You think they went to that much trouble?”
“That’s the point, Tanner. If they went to the right kind of people, it wouldn’t have been much trouble at all.”
“To the best of my knowledge, there’s only one group of Ultras in orbit around the planet at the moment.”
“Yes. I’m fairly sure that Orcagna’s people must have been involved in this. You met them, didn’t you? Did you think they could be trusted?”
“They were Ultras,” I said, as if that were answer enough. “I couldn’t read them like one of Cahuella’s usual contacts. That doesn’t mean they’d automatically betray us, though.”
“What would they have to gain by not betraying us?”
That, I realised, was the one question I had never really asked. I had made the error of treating Orcagna like any other of Cahuella’s business contacts—someone who would not want to exclude dealing with Cahuella again in the future. But what if Orcagna’s crew had no intention of returning to Sky’s Edge for decades, even centuries? They could burn all their bridges with impunity.
“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 imposter 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?”