‘That’s not a native aircraft,’ I said.
‘It’s not an aircraft, Tanner. It’s a spaceship.’
We reached the clearing after an hour’s drive through thickening forest. Something must have burned the clearing away a few years earlier — a seriously rogue missile, probably. It might even have been intended for the Reptile House; Cahuella had enough enemies to make that a reasonable possibility. Fortunately, most of them had no idea where he lived. Now the clearing was beginning to grow back, but the ground was still level enough to permit a landing.
The spacecraft stopped above us, silent as a bat. It was delta-shaped, and now that it had sunk lower, I saw that the underside was quilted by thousands of glaringly bright heat elements. It was fifty metres wide; half the width of the clearing. I felt the first slap of warmth, and then — at the edge of audibility — the first trace of an almost subsonic humming.
The jungle around us fell into silence.
The deltoid came in lower, three inverted hemispheres puckering gracefully from the apex points. Now it was below the treeline. The heat was making me sweat. I held up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun-bright glare.
Then the glare shut down, dimming to a dull brick-red, and the vehicle dropped the last few metres under its own weight, settling down on the hemispheres which cushioned the impact with muscle-like smoothness. For a few moments, silence, and then a ramp slid down like a tongue from the front. Blue-white glare from the doorway at the top of the ramp threw the surrounding vegetation into stark relief. In my peripheral vision I saw things scurrying and slithering for shadow.
Two spindly, elongated figures stepped into the light at the top of the ramp.
Cahuella stepped ahead of me, towards the ramp.
‘You’re going aboard that thing?’
He looked back, silhouetted by the light. ‘Damn right I am. And I want you with me.’
‘I’ve never dealt with Ultras before.’
‘Well, now’s your big chance.’
I left the car and followed him. I had a gun with me, but it felt ridiculous just to be holding it. I slipped it into my belt and never touched it again the whole time we were away. The two Ultras at the top of the ramp waited silently, standing in faintly bored postures, one leaning against the doorway’s surround. When Cahuella was halfway to the parked ship he knelt down and fingered the ground, brushing aside undergrowth. I glanced down and thought I saw something exposed, like a sheet of battered metal — but before I could pay it any more attention, or wonder what it had been, Cahuella was urging me on.
‘C’mon. They’re not known for their immense reserves of patience. ’
‘I didn’t even know there was an Ultra ship in orbit,’ I said, keeping my voice low.
‘Not many people do.’ Cahuella started up the ramp. ‘They’re keeping very dark for now, so they can conduct certain types of business which wouldn’t be possible if everyone knew they were here.’
The two Ultras were a man and a woman. They were both very thin, their near-skeletal frames encased in looms of exo-support machinery and prosthetics. They were both pale and high-cheekboned, with black lips and eyes that appeared to be outlined in kohl, lending them a doll-like, cadaverous look. Both had elaborate dark hair worked in a viper’s nest of stiff locks. The man’s arms were smoked glass, inlaid with glowing machines and luminous pulsing feedlines, while the woman had an oblong hole right through her abdomen.
‘Don’t let them freak you out,’ Cahuella whispered. ‘Freaking people out is part of their armoury of business techniques. You can bet the Captain sent down the two weirdest specimens he had, just to put us ill at ease.’
‘He did a good job, in that case.’
‘Trust me; I’ve dealt with Ultras. They’re pussies, really.’
We ambled up the ramp. The woman, the one leaning against the doorframe, pulled herself upright and studied us with impassively pursed lips. ‘You’re Cahuella?’ she said.
‘Yeah, and this is Tanner. Tanner goes with me. That’s not open to negotiation.’
She looked me over. ‘You’re armed.’
‘Yes,’ I said, only slightly unnerved that she had seen the gun through my clothes. ‘You’re telling me you’re not?’
‘We have our means. Step aboard, please.’
‘The gun isn’t a problem?’
The woman’s smirk was the first emotional response she had shown. ‘I don’t seriously think so, no.’
Once we were aboard they retracted the ramp and closed the door. The ship had a cool medical ambience, all pale pastels and glassy machines. Two other Ultras waited aboard it, reclined in a pair of enormous command couches, nearly buried under readouts and delicate control stalks. The pilot and co-pilot were both naked, purple-skinned beings with impossibly dexterous fingers. They had the same stiff dreadlocks as the other two, but rather more per head.
The woman with a hole in her gut said, ‘Take us up nice and easy, Pellegrino. We don’t want our guests blacking out on us.’
I mouthed in Cahuella’s direction, ‘We’re going up?’
He nodded back.
‘Enjoy it, Tanner. I’m going to. Word is I won’t be able to leave the surface before too long — even the Ultras won’t want to touch me.’
We were shown to a pair of vacant couches. Almost as soon as we were buckled in, the ship pulled itself aloft. Through transparent patches arranged around the walls I saw the jungle clearing dropping below until it looked like a single footprint, bathed in a smudge of light. There, far off towards one horizon, was a single spot of light which had to be the Reptile House. The rest of the jungle was ocean-black.
‘Why did you pick that clearing for our meeting?’ asked the Ultra woman.
‘You’d have looked pretty stupid parking on top of a tree.’
‘That’s not what I mean. We could have provided our own landing space with minimal effort. But that clearing was significant, wasn’t it?’ The woman sounded as if the resolution to this line of enquiry could be of only passing interest to her. ‘We scanned it on our approach. There was something buried beneath it; a regularly-sided hollow space. Some kind of chamber, filled with machines.’
‘We all have our little secrets,’ Cahuella said.
The woman looked at him carefully, then flicked her wrist, dismissing the matter.
Then the ship surged higher, the gee-force crushing me into my seat. I made a stoic effort not to show any kind of discomfort, but there was nothing pleasant about it. The Ultras all looked cool as ice, softly mouthing technical jargon at each other; airspeed and ascent vectors. The two who had met us had plugged themselves into their seats with thick silver umbilicals which presumably assisted their breathing and circulation during the ascent phase. We shrugged off the planet’s atmosphere and kept climbing. By then we were over dayside. Sky’s Edge looked blue-green and fragile; deceptively serene, just as it must have looked the day the Santiago first made orbit. From here there was no sign of war at all, until I saw the featherlike black trails of burning oilfields near the horizon.
It was the first time I had ever seen such a view. I’d never been in space before now.
‘On finals for the Orvieto,’ reported the pilot called Pellegrino.
Their main ship came up fast. It was as dark and massive as a sleeping volcano; a chiselled cone four kilometres long. A lighthugger; that was what Ultras called their ships — sleek engines of night, capable of slicing through the void at only the tiniest of fractions below the speed of light. It was hard not to be impressed. The mechanisms which made that ship fly were more advanced than almost anything I would ever have experienced on Sky’s Edge; more advanced than almost anything I could imagine.