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 paintings 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?’