‘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 staunch 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. ’
‘They started wondering if you were as razor-sharp as they’d heard,’ Dieterling said.
‘Yeah. Right.’ Vasquez looked at him suspiciously. ‘You build up a reputation like mine, it takes time.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Dieterling said.
‘Yeah. And a little thing like this, man, it can really hurt it.’
‘Can’t they flush out the virus?’ I said, before Dieterling pushed his luck.
‘Yeah, Mirabel. In orbit, they’ve got shit that can do it. But orbit’s not currently on my list of safe places to visit, you know?’
‘So you live with it. It can’t be that infectious any more, can it?’
‘No; you’re safe. Everyone’s safe. I’m barely infectious now.’ Now that he was smoking again he was calming down a little. The bleeding had stopped and he was able to slip his wounded hand back in his pocket. He took a sip from his pisco sour. ‘Sometimes I wish it was still infectious, or that I’d saved some of my blood from back when I got infected. It would have made a nice going-away present, a little shot of that in someone’s vein.’
‘Except you’d be doing what the cultists always wanted you to do,’ Dieterling said. ‘Spreading their creed.’
‘Yeah, when instead I should be spreading the creed that if I ever catch the sick fuck who did this to me…’ He trailed off, distracted by something. He stared into the middle distance, like a man undergoing some kind of paralytic seizure, then spoke. ‘No. No way, man. I don’t believe it.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
Vasquez’s voice dropped subvocal, though I could see the way his neck muscles kept on moving. He must have been wired for communication with one of his people.
‘It’s Reivich,’ he said finally.
‘What about him?’ I asked.
‘The fucker’s outsmarted me.’
TWO
A maze of dark, damp passages connected Red Hand’s establishment to the interior of the bridge terminal, threading right through the structure’s black wall. He led us through the labyrinth with a torch, kicking rats out of the way.
‘A decoy,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I never figured he’d set up a decoy. I mean, we’ve been following this fucker for days.’ He said the last word as if it should have been months at the very least; implying superhuman foresight and planning.
‘The lengths some people’ll go to,’ I said.
‘Hey, ease off, Mirabel. It was your idea not to waste the guy the instant we saw him, which could easily have been arranged.’ He shouldered through a set of doors into another passageway.
‘It still wouldn’t have been Reivich, would it?’
‘No, but when we examined the body we might have figured out it wasn’t him, and then we could have started looking around for the real one.’
‘Guy’s got a point,’ Dieterling said. ‘Much as it pains me to admit it.’
‘One I owe you, Snake.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t let it go to your head.’
Vasquez sent another rat scurrying for the shadows. ‘So what really did happen out there, that made you want to get into this vendetta shit in the first place?’
I said, ‘You seemed reasonably well informed already.’
‘Well, word gets around, that’s all. Especially when someone like Cahuella buys the big one. Talk of a power-vacuum, that kind of shit. Thing is, I’m surprised either of you two made it out alive. I heard some extreme shit went down in that ambush.’
‘I wasn’t badly injured,’ Dieterling said. ‘Tanner was a lot worse off than me. He’d lost a foot.’