I put down the gun and knelt closer to Gitta.
I had no need of the medical kit to tell she was dead and irretrievably so, but I did it anyway: running the pocket neural imager across her head, watching as the little embedded screen turned red with messages of fatal tissue damage; deep cerebral injury; extensive cortical trauma. Even if we had a trawl in the tent, it would not have been able to skim her memories and thereby capture a ghost of her personality. I had ensured that she was too severely harmed for that; that the very biochemical patterns themselves were lost. I kept her alive, anyway: strapped a life-support cuirass across her chest and watched as it gave lie to the notion she was dead, colour flowing back into her cheeks as blood circulation resumed. It would keep her body intact until we got back to the Reptile House. Cahuella would kill me if I did anything less than that.
I turned to him, finally. His injuries were almost trivial; the beam had cut through him, but the pulse had been extremely brief and the beam width at its narrowest focus. Most of the internal damage would have been caused not by the beam itself but by the explosive vaporisation of water trapped in his cells, a series of tiny scalding concussions tracing the beam path. Cahuella’s entrance and exit wounds were so small they were hard to find. There should not be any internal bleeding; not if the beam had cauterised as it gnawed through him, as I intended. There would be harm, yes… but I had no reason to suppose he would not survive, even if the best I could do for him here was maintain his current coma with another cuirass.
I strapped the device on, left him resting peacefully next to his wife, then grabbed the gun, palmed in a fresh ammo-cell and secured the perimeter again, supporting myself with the improvised crutch of another rifle, trying not to think about what had been done to my foot, while knowing — on a level of abstract detachment which was anything but reassuring — that it was nothing that could not be fixed, given time.
It took me five minutes to satisfy myself that the rest of Reivich’s men were dead; as were almost all of our own except for Cahuella and myself. Dieterling was the only lucky one of us; the only one who had taken a minor wound. It looked worse than it was, and because the head-grazing shot had put him into unconsciousness, the enemy had assumed he was dead.
An hour later, close to collapse myself, blackouts fogging my vision like the awesome thunderhead which had preluded the night’s storm, I managed to get Cahuella and his wife into the vehicle. Then I managed to get Dieterling awake, though he was weak and confused by blood loss. At times, I remember, I screamed aloud because of the pain.
I slumped into the control seat of the vehicle and started it moving. Every part of me was fighting an agonised war to drag me into sleep, but I knew I had to move now — and start moving south — before Reivich sent another attack squad; something he would surely consider if the last squad failed to return on time.
Dawn seemed an eternity away, and when finally pinkish daylight oozed over the now cloudless seaward horizon, I had already hallucinated its coming a dozen times. Somehow I got us back to the Reptile House.
But it would have been better for everyone if I had never made it.
THIRTY-NINE
We stopped at three snake sellers before we found one who knew who we were talking about: a stranger — evidently offworld — who had bought enough snakes for the keeper to be able to shut up shop for the rest of the day. That had been yesterday: the man had obviously planned Dominika’s murder long before her actual execution.
The man, the snake seller said, looked a lot like me. Not precisely, but the resemblance was strong if you squinted, and we both spoke with a similar accent, even though the man was far less loquacious.
Of course we spoke similarly. We were not just from the same planet. We were from the same Peninsula.
‘What about the woman who was with him?’ I asked.
He had not mentioned a woman, but there was something in the way he fingered the extremities of his waxed moustache which told me I was right to ask.
‘Now you’re beginning to take up my time,’ he said.
‘Is there anyone or anything in this city which can’t be bought?’ I said, slipping him a note.
‘Yeah,’ the man said, laughing quietly. ‘But I’m not it.’
‘What about the woman?’ I asked, eyeing a caged snake the colour of spearmint. ‘Describe her.’
‘Don’t have to, do I? Don’t they all look the same?’
‘Don’t who all look the same?’
He laughed, louder this time, as if he found my ignorance hysterical. ‘The Mendicants, of course. Seen one, seem ’em all.’
I looked at him in horror.
I had made a call to the Mendicants the day after I arrived in Chasm City. I was trying to reach Sister Amelia; to ask her what — if anything — she knew about Quirrenbach. I had not been able to get through to her; had instead spoken to Brother Alexei and his black eye. But I had been told that she was as interested in seeking me as I was her. The remark had not meant much at the time. But now it detonated in my skull like a starshell.
Sister Amelia was the woman with Tanner.
Zebra’s contacts had not even hinted that the woman was from the Mendicant order. The snake seller, on the other hand, was sure. Maybe I was wrong in assuming that the other woman was always Amelia. But I thought otherwise. I figured she had to be slipping in and out of disguise; either deliberately, or because she just wasn’t thorough enough in maintaining whatever new identity she had concocted.
What was her part in this?
I had trusted her implicitly after my revival. I had allowed her to help my mind heal after the identity-shattering processes of reefersleep. And in the whole time I had spent in the Mendicant habitat, nothing she had done had given any hint that my trust was anything other than well-placed.
But how much did she trust me?
Tanner — the real Tanner — might have come through Hospice Idlewild after me. He must have come through on the same ship from Sky’s Edge, his revival delayed a little after my own, just as my own had been delayed a little after that of Reivich. But I had already used the name Tanner Mirabel, which meant that Tanner had to be travelling under an identity other than his own. Unless he wanted to sound screamingly insane, his mind pulverised by adverse reefersleep trauma, he would not have advertised his real name too quickly. Better to keep up the lie and let the Mendicants think he was someone else.
It was getting confusing. Even I was getting confused. I tried not to think how this must look to Zebra, Chanterelle and the others.
I was not Tanner Mirabel.
I was… something else. Something hideous and reptilian and ancient which my mind recoiled from, but which I could not really continue to ignore. When Amelia and the other Mendicants had revived me, I had been travelling under Tanner’s name and I also carried what appeared to be his memories, skills and — more importantly — the knowledge of his immediate mission. I had never thought to question any of it; everything had seemed correct. Everything had seemed to fit in place.
But all of it had been false.
We were still talking to the snake seller when Zebra’s phone chimed again, a noise almost lost in the ceaseless susurration of rain and the hissing of caged reptiles. She took the phone from her jacket, staring at it suspiciously without actually answering it.
‘It’s coming in on your name, Pransky,’ Zebra said. ‘But you’re the only person who knows that number, and you’re standing right next to me.’
‘I think you should be very careful before answering that call,’ I said. ‘If it’s from who I think it is.’