Still squeezing off pulses, he said, ‘I told you not to disturb me, Tanner.’
‘I know, but there’s a storm coming in. I was worried you wouldn’t notice until it began to rain, and then you might have trouble finding your way back to the camp.’
‘I’m the one who told you there was a storm coming,’ he said, not turning to face me, still engrossed in his target practice. I could barely see what he was shooting at; his laser pulses knifed into a void of darkness devoid of detail. But I noticed that the pulses followed each other very precisely, even after he adjusted his stance, or unshouldered the rifle to slip in another ammo-cell.
‘It’s late, anyway. We should get some sleep. If Reivich is delayed it could be a long day tomorrow, and we’ll need to be sharp for it.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, after due consideration. ‘I just want to make sure I can maim the bastard, if I choose.’
‘Maim him? I thought we were setting him up for a clean kill.’
‘What would be the point of that?’
I stepped toward him. ‘Killing him’s one thing. You can bet he wants to kill you, so there’s a kind of sense to it. But he hasn’t done anything to earn that kind of hatred, has he?’
He sighted along the gun and squeezed off a pulse. ‘Who said he has to, Tanner?’
Then he snapped the gun’s stock and sight into their stowage modes, slipping the gun on to his back, where it looked like a piece of frail rigging lashed to the side of a whale.
We walked in silence to the camp, the storm rising overhead like a cliff of obsidian, pregnant with lightning. The first drops of rain were falling through the tree-tops when we reached the camp. We checked the guns were protected from the elements, triggered our perimeter infringement detectors and then sealed ourselves into the tents. The rain began to drum against the fabric, like impatient fingers on a tabletop, and thunder roared somewhere to the south. But we were ready, and returned to our bunks to snatch what sleep we could before we had to rise to catch our man.
‘Sleep well tonight,’ Cahuella said, his head peering through the gash in my tent. ‘For tomorrow we fight.’
It was still dark. The storm was still raging. I woke and listened to the rain’s fusillade against the fabric of the bubbletent.
Something had troubled me enough to bring me from sleep. It happened, sometimes. My mind would work away at a problem, which had seemed clear-cut in daylight, until it found a catch. It was how I had filled in some of the more subtle security loopholes at the Reptile House; imagining myself as an intruder and then devising a way to penetrate some screen that I had imagined until then to be absolutely foolproof. That was what it felt like when I woke: that something unobvious had suddenly been revealed to me. And that I had been making a terrible error of assumption. But for a moment I could not quite recall the details of the dream; what had been vouchsafed to me by my own diligent subconscious processes.
And then I realised that we were being attacked.
‘No…’ I started to say.
But it was much too late for that.
One of the most pragmatic truths about war, and the way it affected us, was that many of the clichés were not very far removed from reality. War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory. That was how it was, especially during something as compressed and violent as an ambush.
There was no warning. Perhaps something had reached down into my dreams and alerted me, so that it was both the ambush and the realisation of my error that brought me from sleep, but by the time I awoke I had no conscious memory of what it was. A sound, perhaps, as they disabled the perimeter warning system — or maybe nothing more than a foot crunching through undergrowth, or the alarm call of a startled animal.
It made no difference.
There were three of them against the eight of us, and yet they cut us down with merciless ease. The three were dressed in chameleoflage armour, shape-shifting, texture-shifting, colour-shifting garments which enveloped them from head to foot: full-body suits like that were more advanced than the kinds the average militia had access to; technology which could only be bought through the Ultras. That had to be it, then — Reivich was also dealing with the lighthugger crew. And maybe he had paid them to deceive Cahuella, supplying false positional information. There was another possibility, too, which was what my sleeping mind had come up with.
Perhaps there were two Reivich parties, one moving south thirty kilometres north of here, with the heavy armaments which Orcagna was monitoring. I had assumed that was the only party. But what if there had been a second squad, moving ahead of them? Perhaps they had lighter armaments which could not be traced by the Ultras. The element of surprise would more than compensate for the deficiency in fire-power.
It had, too.
Their weapons were no more advanced or lethal than our own, but they used them with pinpoint accuracy, gunning down first the guards stationed outside the camp, before the guards had had a chance to aim their own weapons. But I was barely aware of this part of the attack; still struggling out of sleep, thinking at first that the light pulses and cracks of energy-discharge outside were only the dying spasms of the storm as it passed into the deep Peninsula. Then I heard the screams, and I began to realise what was happening.
By then, of course, it was far too late to do anything about it.
TWENTY-ONE
Finally, I woke. For a long time, lying in the golden morning light which streamed into Zebra’s room, I replayed the dreams in my head, until at last I could put them to rest and start examining my injured leg.
Overnight the healer had worked wonders, utilising a medical science well in advance of anything we’d had on Sky’s Edge. The wound was now little more than a whitish star of new flesh, and what damage remained was mainly psychological — the refusal of my brain to accept that my leg was now fully capable of performing its intended role. I rose from the couch and took a few awkward, experimental steps, finally making my way over to the nearest window, navigating the stepped levels of the broken floor, furniture helpfully shuffling aside to ease my passage.
In the light of day, or what passed for day in Chasm City, the great hole at the city’s heart looked even closer, even more vertiginous. It was not difficult to imagine how it had lured the first explorers who had come to Yellowstone, whether birthed from robot wombs or riding the first, risky starships that had come afterwards. The blotch of warm atmosphere spilling from the chasm was visible from space when other atmospheric conditions were favourable.