It was a time of horror.
It is not yet over.
And yet, like any truly efficient plague, our parasite was careful not to kill its host population entirely. Tens of millions died — but tens of millions more reached some kind of sanctuary, hiding within hermetically sealed enclaves in the city or orbit. Their medichines were given emergency destruct orders, converting themselves to dust which was flushed harmlessly out of the body. Surgeons worked furiously to tear implants from heads before traces of the plague reached them. Other citizens, too strongly wedded to their machines to give them up, sought a kind of escape in reefersleep. They elected to be buried in sealed community cryocrypts… or to leave the system entirely. Meanwhile, tens of millions more poured into Chasm City from orbit, fleeing the destruction of the Glitter Band. Some of those people had been amongst the wealthiest in the system, yet now they were as poor as any historical refugees. What they found in Chasm City could hardly have comforted them…
— Excerpt from an introductory document for newcomers, freely available in circum-Yellowstone space, 2517
ONE
Darkness was falling as Dieterling and I arrived at the base of the bridge.
‘There’s one thing you need to know about Red Hand Vasquez,’ Dieterling said. ‘Don’t ever call him that to his face.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it pisses him off.’
‘And that’s a problem?’ I brought our wheeler to near-halt, then parked it amongst a motley row of vehicles lining one side of the street. I dropped the stabilisers, the overheated turbine smelling like a hot gun barrel. ‘It’s not like we usually worry about the feelings of low-lives,’ I said.
‘No, but this time it might be best to err on the side of caution. Vasquez may not be the brightest star in the criminal firmament, but he’s got friends and a nice little line in extreme sadism. So be on your best behaviour.’
‘I’ll give it my best shot.’
‘Yeah — and do your best not to leave too much blood on the floor in the process, will you?’
We got out of the wheeler, both of us craning our necks to take in the bridge. I’d never seen it before today — this was my first time in the Demilitarised Zone, let alone Nueva Valparaiso — and it had looked absurdly large even when we’d been fifteen or twenty kilometres out of town. Swan had been sinking towards the horizon, bloated and red except for the hot glint near its heart, but there’d still been enough light to catch the bridge’s thread and occasionally pick out the tiny ascending and descending beads of elevators riding it to and from space. Even then I’d wondered if we were too late — if Reivich had already made it aboard one of the elevators — but Vasquez had assured us that the man we were hunting was still in town, simplifying his web of assets on Sky’s Edge and moving funds into long-term accounts.
Dieterling strolled round to the back of our wheeler — with its overlapping armour segments the mono-wheeled car looked like a rolled-up armadillo — and popped open a tiny luggage compartment.
‘Shit. Almost forgot the coats, bro.’
‘Actually, I was sort of hoping you would.’
He threw me one. ‘Put it on and stop complaining.’
I slipped on the coat, easing it over the layers of clothing I already wore. The coat hems skimmed the street’s puddles of muddy rainwater, but that was the way aristocrats liked to wear them, as if daring others to tread on their coat-tails. Dieterling shrugged on his own coat and began tapping through the patterning options embossed around the sleeve, frowning in distaste at each sartorial offering. ‘No. No… No. Christ no. No again. And this won’t do either.’
I reached over and thumbed one of the tabs. ‘There. You look stunning. Now shut up and pass me the gun.’
I’d already selected a shade of pearl for my own coat, a colour which I hoped would provide a low-contrast background for the gun. Dieterling retrieved the little weapon from a jacket pocket and offered it to me, just as if he were passing me a packet of cigarettes.
The gun was tiny and semi-translucent, a haze of tiny components visible beneath its smooth, lucite surfaces.
It was a clockwork gun. It was made completely out of carbon — diamond, mostly — but with some fullerenes for lubrication and energy-storage. There were no metals or explosives in it; no circuitry. Only intricate levers and ratchets, greased by fullerene spheres. It fired spin-stabilised diamond flèchettes, drawing its power from the relaxation of fullerene springs coiled almost to breaking point. You wound it up with a key, like a clockwork mouse. There were no aiming devices, stabilising systems or target acquisition aids.
None of which would matter.
I slipped the gun into my coat pocket, certain that none of the pedestrians had witnessed the handover.
‘I told you I’d sort you out with something tasty,’ Dieterling said.
‘It’ll do.’
‘Do? Tanner; you disappoint me. It’s a thing of intense, evil beauty. I’m even thinking it might have distinct hunting possibilities.’
Typical Miguel Dieterling, I thought; always seeing the hunting angle in any given situation.
I made an effort at smiling. ‘I’ll give it back to you in one piece. Failing that, I know what to get you for Christmas.’
We started walking towards the bridge. Neither of us had been in Nueva Valparaiso before, but that didn’t matter. Like a good many of the larger towns on the planet, there was something deeply familiar about its basic layout, even down to the street names. Most of our settlements were organised around a deltoid street pattern, with three main thoroughfares stretching away from the apexes of a central triangle about one hundred metres along each side. Surrounding that core would typically be a series of successively larger triangles, until the geometric order was eroded in a tangle of random suburbs and redeveloped zones. What they did with the central triangle was up to the settlement in question, and usually depended on how many times the town had been occupied or bombed during the war. Only very rarely would there be any trace of the delta-winged shuttle around which the settlement had sprung.
Nueva Valparaiso had started out like that, and it had all the usual street names: Omdurman, Norquinco, Armesto and so on — but the central triangle was smothered beneath the terminal structure of the bridge, which had managed to be enough of an asset to both sides to have survived unscathed. Three hundred metres along each side, it rose sheer and black like the hull of a ship, but encrusted and scabbed along its lower levels by hotels, restaurants, casinos and brothels. But even if the bridge hadn’t been visible, it was obvious from the street itself that we were in an old neighbourhood, close to the landing site. Some of the buildings had been made by stacking freight pods on top of each other, each pod punctured with windows and doors and then filigreed by two and a half centuries of architectural whimsy.
‘Hey,’ a voice said. ‘Tanner fucking Mirabel.’