The aircraft was hovering above them, veering to and fro as it scouted landing sites. Sylveste recognised it immediately as one of Cuvier’s; Mantell had nothing as large. Aircraft were in short supply on Resurgam: the only means of crossing distances more than a few hundred kilometres. All the aircraft in existence now had been manufactured during the early days of the colony by servitors working from local raw materials. But the constructional servitors had been destroyed or stolen during the mutiny, and consequently the artefacts they had left behind were of incalculable value to the colony. The aircraft regenerated themselves if they were involved in minor accidents, and never needed maintainance - but they could still be ruined by sabotage or recklessness. Over the years the colony had steadily depleted its supply of flying machines.
The deltoid hurt his eyes. The underside of the plane’s wing was sewn with thousands of heat elements which glowed white-hot, generating lift thermally. The contrast was too much for Calvin’s algorithms.
‘Who are they?’ one of his students asked.
‘I wish I knew,’ Sylveste said. But the fact that this plane had originated in Cuvier entirely failed to cheer him. He watched it lower, casting actinic shadows across the ground before the heat elements slid down the spectrum and the plane settled onto skids. After a moment a ramp folded out and a cluster of figures trooped from the plane. His eyes snapped to infrared - he could see the figures clearly now, even as they moved away from the plane towards him. Clad in dark clothes, they wore breather masks, helmets and what looked like strap-on armour, flashed with the Administration insignia: the closest the colony came to a fully-fledged militia. And they were carrying things - long, evil-looking rifles held in double-grips, with a torch slung under each barrel.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ Pascale said, accurately.
The squad halted a few metres from them. ‘Doctor Sylveste?’ called a voice, attenuated by the wind, which was still considerable. ‘I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid, sir.’
He had been expecting nothing else. ‘What is it?’
‘The other crawler, sir - the one that left earlier tonight?’
‘What about it?’
‘They never made it back to Mantell, sir. We found them. There’d been a landslide - dust had built up on the ridge. They didn’t have a chance, sir.’
‘Sluka?’
‘They’re all dead, sir.’ The Administration man’s heavy breather mask made him look like an elephantine god. ‘I’m sorry. It’s lucky not all of you tried to get back at the same time.’
‘It’s more than luck,’ Sylveste said.
‘Sir? There’s one other thing.’ The guard tightened his grip on his rifle, emphasising its presence rather than aiming it. ‘You’re under arrest, sir.’
K. C. Ng’s rasp of a voice filled the cable-car’s cockpit like a trapped wasp. ‘You developing a taste for it yet? Our fair city, I mean.’
‘What would you know?’ Khouri said. ‘I mean, when was the last time you set foot outside of that damned box, Case? It can’t have been in living memory.’
He was not with her, of course - there was nowhere near enough room for a palanquin aboard her cable-car. The car was necessarily small; nothing that would attract attention so close to the conclusion of a hunt. Parked on the roof, the vehicle had looked like a tailless helicopter which had partially furled its rotors. But rather than blades, the cable-car’s arms were slender telescopic appendages, each terminating in a hook as viciously curved as a sloth’s foreclaw.
Khouri had entered the car, and the door had slumped shut, barriering the rain and the low background noise of the city. She had stated her destination, which was the Monument to the Eighty, down in the deep Mulch. The car had paused momentarily, undoubtedly calculating the optimum route based on current traffic conditions and the generally shifting topology of the cableways which would carry it there. The process took a moment because the car’s computer brain was not especially smart.
Then Khouri had felt the car’s centre of gravity shift slightly. Through the upper window of the gullwing door, she had seen one of the car’s three arms extend to more than twice its previous length, until the clawed end was able to grasp one of the cables which overran the top of the building. Now one of the other arms found a similar grasping point on an adjacent cable, and with a sudden heave they were, in a manner, airborne. For a moment the car slid down the two cables to which it had attached itself, but after a few seconds the latter of the two cables had diverged too far for the car to reach. Smoothly, it released its grasp, but before it could fall the car’s third arm swooped out and grabbed another handy cable which happened to cross their approximate path. And then they slid for another second or so, and then fell again, and then rose again, and Khouri began to recognise a too-familiar feeling in her gut. What failed to assist matters was that the car’s pendulous progress felt arbitrary, as if it was just making up its trajectory as it proceeded, luckily finding cables when it needed them. To compensate, Khouri ran through breathing exercises, restlessly tightening each finger of her black leather gloves in sequence.
‘I admit,’ Case said, ‘that I haven’t exposed myself to the city’s native fragrances for some time now. But you shouldn’t knock it. The air isn’t quite as filthy as it seems. The purifiers were one of the few things still running after the plague.’
Now that the cable-car had lofted itself past the huddle of buildings which defined her neighbourhood, a much greater expanse of Chasm City was coming slowly into view. It was strange to think that this twisted forest of malformed structures had once been the most prosperous city in human history; the place from which - for nearly two centuries - a welter of artistic and scientific innovations had sprung. Now even the locals were admitting that the place had seen better days. With little in the way of irony they were calling it the City That Never Wakes Up, because so many thousands of its one-time rich were now frozen in cryocrypts, skipping centuries in the hope that this period was only an aberration in the city’s fortunes.
Chasm City’s border was the natural crater which hemmed the city, sixty kilometres from edge to edge. Within the crater the city was ring-shaped, encircling the central maw of the chasm itself. The city sheltered under eighteen domes which spanned the crater wall and reached inwards to the chasm’s rim. Linked at their edges, supported here and there by reinforcing towers, the domes resembled sagging drapery covering the furniture of the recently deceased. In local parlance it was the Mosquito Net, though there were at least a dozen other names, in as many languages. The domes were vital to the city’s existence. Yellowstone’s atmosphere - a cold, chaotic mix of nitrogen and methane, spiced with long-chain hydrocarbons - would have been instantly deadly. Fortunately the crater sheltered the city from the worst of the winds and liquid methane flash-floods, and the broth of hot gases belching from the chasm itself could be cracked for breathable air with relatively cheap and rugged atmospheric processing technology. There were a few other settlements elsewhere on Yellowstone, much smaller than Chasm City, and they all had to go to much more trouble to keep their biospheres running.
Sometimes, in her early days on Yellowstone, Khouri had asked a few of the locals why anyone had ever bothered settling the planet in the first place if it was so inhospitable. Sky’s Edge might have its wars, but at least you could live there without domes and atmosphere-cracking systems. She had quickly learned not to expect anything resembling a consistent answer, if the question itself was not deemed an outsider’s impudence. Evidently, though, this much was clear: the chasm had drawn the first explorers and around them had accreted a permanent outpost, and then something like a frontier town. Lunatics, chancers and wild-eyed visionaries had come, driven by vague rumours of riches deep within the chasm. Some had gone home disillusioned. Some had died in the chasm’s hot, toxic depths. But a few had elected to stay because something about the nascent city’s perilous location actually appealed to them. Fast forward two hundred years and that huddle of
structures had become . . . this.
The city stretched away infinitely in all directions, it seemed, a dense wood of gnarled interlaced buildings gradually lost in murk. The very oldest structures were still more or less intact: boxlike buildings which had retained their shapes during the plague because they had never contained any systems of self-repair or redesign. The modern structures, by contrast, now resembled odd, up-ended pieces of driftwood or wizened old trees in the last stages of rot. Once those skyscrapers had looked linear and symmetrical, until the plague made them grow madly, sprouting bulbous protrusions and tangled, leprous appendages. The buildings were all dead now, frozen into the shapes which seemed calculated to induce disquiet. Slums adhered to their sides, lower levels lost in a scaffolded maze of shanty towns and ramshackle bazaars, aglow with naked fires. Tiny figures were moving in the slums, walking or rickshawing to business along haphazard roadways laid down over old ruins. There were very few powered vehicles, and most of the contraptions Khouri saw looked like they were steam-driven.
The slums never reached more than ten levels up the sides of the buildings before collapsing under their own weight, so for two or three hundred further metres the buildings rose smoothly, relatively unscathed by plague transformations. There was no evidence of occupation in these mid-city levels. It was only near the very tops that human presence again re-asserted itself: tiered structures perched like cranes’ nests among the branches of the malformed buildings. These new additions were aglow with conspicuous wealth and power; bright apartment windows and neon advertisements. Searchlights swept down from the eaves, sometimes picking out the tiny forms of other cable-cars, navigating between districts. The cable-cars picked their way through a network of fine branches, lacing the buildings like synaptic threads. The locals had a name for this high-level city-within-a-city: the Canopy.
It was never quite daytime, Khouri had noticed. She could never feel fully awake in this place, not while the city seemed caught in an eternal twilight gloom.
‘Case, when are they going to get around to scraping the muck off the Mosquito Net?’
Ng chuckled, a sound like gravel being stirred around in a bucket. ‘Never, probably. Unless someone figures a way of making some money out of it.’
‘Now who’s bad-mouthing the city?’
‘We can afford to. When we finish our business we can hightail it back to the carousels with all the other beautiful people.’
‘In their boxes. Sorry, Case, count me out of that particular party. The excitement might kill me.’ She could see the chasm now, since the car was skirting close to the sloping inner rim of the toroidal dome. The chasm was a deep gully in the bedrock, weathered sides curving lazily over from horizontal before plunging vertically down, veined by pipes which reached down into belching vapour, towards the atmospheric cracking station which supplied air and heat to the city. ‘Talking of which . . . being killed, I mean - what’s the deal with the weapon?’
‘Think you can handle it?’
‘You pay me to, I’ll handle it. But I’d like to know what I’m dealing with.’
‘If you have a problem with that you’d better talk to Taraschi.’
‘He specified this thing?’
‘In excruciating detail.’
The car was over the Monument to the Eighty now. Khouri had never seen it from this precise angle. In truth, without the grandeur that it attained from street level, it looked weatherworn and sad. It was a tetrahedral pyramid, slatted so that it resembled a stepped temple, its lower levels barnacled in slums and reinforcements. Near the apex the marble cladding gave way to stained-glass windows, but portions of glass were shattered or sheeted-over in metal; damage one never saw from the street. This was to be the venue for the kill, apparently. It was unusual to know that in advance, unless it was another thing that Taraschi had actually had written into his contract. Contracting to be hunted by a Shadowplay assassin was only usually done if the client thought that they stood a good chance of evading the pursuer over the period determined by the contract. It was the way the virtually immortal rich kept ennui at bay, forcing their behaviour patterns out of predictable ruts - and ending up with something to brag about when they outlived the contract, as the majority did.
Khouri could date her involvement in Shadowplay very precisely; it was the day she was revived in Yellowstone orbit in a carousel run by an order of Ice Mendicants. Although there had been no Ice Mendicants around Sky’s Edge, she had heard stories of them and knew something of their function. They were a voluntary religious organisation who dedicated themselves to assisting those who had suffered some form of trauma while crossing interstellar space, such as the revival amnesia which was a common side-effect of reefersleep.
That in itself was very bad news. Perhaps her amnesia was so bad that it had erased years of her previous life, but Khouri had no recollection even of embarking on an interstellar journey. Her last memories were quite specific, in fact. She had been in a medical tent on the surface of Sky’s Edge, lying in a bed next to her husband Fazil. They had both been wounded in a firefight; injuries which - while not actually life-threatening - could best be treated in one of the orbital hospitals. An orderly had come around and prepped them both for a short immersion in reefersleep. They would be cooled, carried to orbit in a shuttle, then stacked up in a cryogenic holding facility until surgical slots were available in the hospital. The process might take months, but - as the orderly smilingly assured them - there was every chance that the war would still be going on when they were again fit for duty. Khouri and Fazil had trusted the orderly. They were both professional soldiers, after all.
Later, she was revived. But instead of coming around in the recuperation ward in the orbital hospital, Khouri was confronted by Ice Mendicants with Yellowstone accents. No, they explained, she was not amnesiac. Nor had she suffered any kind of injury in the reefersleep process. It was considerably worse than that.
There had been what the lead Mendicant chose to call a clerical error. It had happened around Sky’s Edge, after the cryogenic holding facility was hit by a missile. Khouri and Fazil had been among the lucky few not to have been killed by the missile, but the attack had still wiped all the data records in the facility. The locals had done their best to identify the frozen, but inevitably they had made mistakes. In Khouri’s case they had confused her with a Demarchist observer who had come to Sky’s Edge to study the war and who had been ready to return home to Yellowstone when she was caught in the same missile attack. Khouri had been fast-tracked for surgery and then placed aboard a starship scheduled for immediate departure. They had, unfortunately, not made the same mistake in Fazil’s case. While Khouri was asleep, winging her way across the light-years to Epsilon Eridani, Fazil was growing older, one year for every year that she flew. Of course, said the Mendicants, the error was discovered quickly - but by then it was much too late. There were no other ships due to follow that route for decades. And even if Khouri had immediately returned to Sky’s Edge (which was again impossible given the stated destinations of all the ships now parked around Yellowstone), the best part of forty years would have passed before she met Fazil again. And during most of that time Fazil could have no knowledge that she was coming home; nothing to prevent him picking up the pieces of his life, remarrying, having children and perhaps even grand-children before she returned, a ghost from a part of his life he might have nearly consigned to oblivion by then. Assuming, of course, that he had not died as soon as he returned to combat.
Until that moment when the Ice Mendicant explained the situation to her, Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster . . . but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. In one instant of cruel clarity, she understood that it was nothing less than the underlying structure of the universe, its physical laws, which had conspired to bring her to this moment of horror and loss. It would have been so mu
ch easier, infinitely easier, if she had known he was dead. Instead, there was this terrible gulf of separation, as much in time as in space. Her anger had become something sharp inside her, something that needed release if it was not going to kill her from within.
Later that day, when the man came to offer her a job as a contract assassin, she found it surprisingly easy to accept.
The man’s name was Tanner Mirabel; like her he was an ex-soldier from the Edge. He was a kind of talent scout for potential new assassins. His network taps had flagged her soldiering skills as soon as she was defrosted. Mirabel gave her a business contact: a Mr Ng, a prominent hermetic. An interview with Ng swiftly followed, then a spread of psychometric tests. Assassins, it turned out, had to be among the sanest, most analytic people on the planet. They had to know exactly when a kill would be legal - and when it would cross the sometimes blurred line into murder and send a company’s stocks crashing into the Mulch.
She passed all these tests with ease.
There were other kinds of tests, too. The contractees sometimes specified arcane modes of execution for themselves, while secretly assuring themselves that it would never actually come to that, because they imagined themselves clever and resourceful enough to outrun the assassin, even over weeks or months. But Khouri had to learn an easy familiarity with all manner of weapons, and that turned out to be a talent she had never even suspected in herself.
But she had never seen anything quite like the weapon which the tooth fairy had left.
It had only taken her a minute or so to figure out how the gun’s precision parts fitted together. Assembled, it had the form of a sniper’s rifle with a ridiculously fat perforated barrel. The clip contained a number of dartlike slugs: black swordfishes. Near the snout of each slug was a tiny biohazard symbol. It was that holographic death’s head which had set her wondering. She had never used toxins against a target before.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 6
