‘It wasn’t that bad,’ I said. ‘The beam weapon cauterised the wound and stopped the bleeding.’
‘Oh yeah, right,’ Vasquez said. ‘Just a flesh wound, then. I can’t get enough of you guys, I really can’t.’
‘Fine, but can we talk about something else?’
My reticence was more than simply an unwillingness to discuss the incident with Red Hand Vasquez. That was part of it, but an equally important factor was that I just didn’t remember the details with any clarity. I might have before I was put under for the recuperative coma — the one in which my foot was regrown — but now the whole incident felt like it had happened in the remote past, rather than a few weeks ago.
I’d sincerely believed that Cahuella would make it, though. At first he seemed to have been the lucky one: the laser pulse had gone right through him without cleaving any vital organs, just as if its trajectory had been mapped in advance by a skilled thoracic surgeon. But complications had set in, and without the means to reach orbit — he would have been arrested and executed as soon as he left the atmosphere — he was forced to accept the best black market medicine he could afford. It had been good enough to repair my leg, but that was exactly the kind of injury the war made commonplace. Complex damage to internal organs required an additional level of expertise which could simply not be bought on the black market.
So he’d died.
And here I was, chasing the man who’d killed Cahuella and his wife; aiming to take him down with a single diamond flèchette from the clockwork gun.
Back before I became a security expert in the employment of Cahuella; back when I was still a soldier, they used to say that I was such a proficient sniper that I could put a slug into someone’s head and take out a specific area of brain function. It wasn’t true; never had been. But I’d always been good, and I did like to make it clean and quick and surgical.
I sincerely hoped Reivich wouldn’t let me down.
To my surprise, the secret passageway opened directly into the heart of the anchorpoint terminal, emerging in a shadowed part of the main concourse. I looked back at the security barrier which we’d avoided; watching the guards scan people for concealed weapons; checking identities in case a war criminal was trying to get off the planet. The clockwork gun, still snug in my pocket, wouldn’t have shown up in those scans, which was one of the reasons why I’d opted for it. Now I felt a tinge of irritation that my careful planning had been partially wasted.
‘Gents,’ Vasquez said, lingering on the threshold, ‘this is as far as I go.’
‘I thought this place would be right up your street,’ Dieterling said, looking around. ‘What’s wrong? Scared you’d never want to leave again?’
‘Something like that, Snake.’ Vasquez patted the two of us on the back. ‘All right. Go and bring down that postmortal shit-smear, boys. Just don’t tell anyone I brought you here.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Dieterling said. ‘Your role in things won’t be overstated.’
‘Copacetic. And remember, Snake…’ He mimed firing a gun again. ‘That hunt we talked about… ?’
‘Consider yourself pencilled in, at least on a provisional basis.’
He vanished back into the tunnel, leaving Dieterling and me standing together in the terminal. For a few moments neither of us said anything, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place.
We were in the surface-level concourse, a ring-shaped hall which encircled the embarkation and disembarkation chamber at the base of the thread. The concourse’s ceiling was many levels above, the intervening space criss-crossed by suspended walkways and transit tubes, with what had once been luxury shops, boutiques and restaurants set into the outer wall. Most of them were closed now, or had been converted into minor shrines or places where religious material could be purchased. There were very few people moving around, with hardly anyone arriving from orbit and only a handful of people walking towards the elevators. The concourse was darker than its designers must have intended, the ceiling scarcely visible, and the whole place had the quality of a cathedral in which, unseen but sensed, some sacred ceremony was taking place; an atmosphere that invited neither haste nor raised voices. At the very edge of hearing was a constant low hum, like a basement full of generators. Or, I thought, like a room full of chanting monks holding the same sepulchral note.
‘Has it always been like this?’ I said.
‘No. I mean, it’s always been a shithole, but it’s definitely worse than the last time I was here. It must have been different a month or so ago. The place would have been heaving. Most of the people for the ship would have had to come through here.’
The arrival of a starship around Sky’s Edge was always something of an event. Being a poor and moderately backwards planet compared with many of the other settled worlds, we were not exactly a key player in the shifting spectrum of interstellar trade. We didn’t export much, except the experience of war itself and a few uninteresting bio-products culled from the jungles. We would have happily bought all manner of exotic technological goods and services from the Demarchist worlds, but only the very wealthiest people on Sky’s Edge could afford them. When ships paid us a visit, speculation usually had it that they had been been frozen out of the more lucrative markets — the Yellowstone-Sol run, or the Fand-Yellowstone-Grand Teton run — or they had to stop anyway to make repairs. It happened about once every ten standard years, on average, and they always screwed us.
‘Is this really where Haussmann died?’ I asked Dieterling.
‘It was somewhere near here,’ he said as we crossed the concourse’s great, echoing floor. ‘They’ll never know exactly where because they didn’t have accurate maps back then. But it must have been within a few kilometres of here; definitely within the outskirts of Nueva Valparaiso. At first they were going to burn the body, but then they decided to embalm him; make it easier to hold him up as an example to others.’
‘But there was no cult then?’
‘No. He had a few fruitcake sympathisers, of course — but there was nothing ecclesiastical about it. That came afterwards. The Santiago was largely secular, but they couldn’t engineer religion out of the human psyche that easily. They took what Sky had done and fused his deeds with what they chose to remember from home; saving this and discarding that as they saw fit. It took a few generations until they had all the details worked out, but then there was no stopping them.’
‘And after the bridge was built?’
‘By then one of the Haussmann cults had gained possession of the body. The Church of Sky, they called themselves. And — for reasons of convenience, if nothing else — they’d decided that he must have died not just near the bridge but right under it. And that the bridge was not really a space elevator at all — or if it was, that was just a superficial function — but really a sign from God: a ready-made shrine to the crime and glory of Sky Haussmann.’
‘But people designed and built the bridge.’
‘Under God’s will. Don’t you understand? It’s nothing you can argue with, Tanner. Give up now.’
We passed a few cultists moving in the opposite direction, two men and a woman. I felt a jolt of familiarity when I saw them, but I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen any in the flesh before. They wore ash-coloured smocks and both sexes tended to wear their hair long. One man had a kind of mechanical coronet fixed on his skull — maybe some kind of pain-inducing device — while the other man’s left sleeve was pinned flatly to his side. The woman had a small dolphin-shaped mark on her forehead, and I remembered the way in which Sky Haussmann had befriended the dolphins aboard the Santiago; spending time with the creatures that the other crew shunned.