Chasm City

TWENTY

In the midmorning, while the others struck camp, five of us walked back on foot until we had reached the point in the track where we had seen the hamadryad tree. From there it was an uncomfortable but short scramble through overgrowth until we reached the flared base. I led the party, sweeping the monofilament scythe ahead of me in an arc which cleared most of the vegetation.

“It’s even bigger than it looked from the trail,” Cahuella said. He was rosy-cheeked and jovial this morning, for his hunting last night had been successful, as we had discovered by the carcasses hung up outside the clearing. “How old do you think it is?”

“It definitely predates the landing,” said Dieterling. “Four hundred years old, perhaps. We’d need to cut it to know better.” He began to stroll around the tree’s circumference, tapping the bark lightly with the back of his knuckles.

With us were Gitta and Rodriguez. They looked up towards the tree’s upper reaches, craning their necks and squinting against the sunlight which filtered through the jungle canopy.

“I don’t like it,” Gitta said. “What if…”

He had appeared out of earshot, but Dieterling answered her. “The chances of another snake coming by here are pretty damn minimal. Especially as this one seems to have fused very recently.”

“Are you sure?” Cahuella said.

“Check it out for yourself.”

He was nearly round the back of the tree. We crunched through the overgrowth until we reached him.

The hamadryad trees were a mystery to the first explorers, in those dreamlike years before the war began. They had swept through this part of the Peninsula at haste, eyes wide for the wonders of a new world, searching for marvels, knowing that everything would be studied in greater detail in the future. They were like children ripping open presents, scarcely glancing at the contents of each wrapper before beginning to unpeel another gift. There was just too much to be seen.

If they had been methodical, they would have discovered the trees and decided that they were worthy of immediate further study, rather than simply consigning them to the growing list of planetary anomalies. Had they done so, they would only have needed to place a few trees under study for a few years before the secret would have been revealed to them. But it was many decades into the war before the proper nature of the trees was established.

They were rare, but distributed across a large area of the Peninsula. It was that very rarity which had made them the focus of early attention, for the trees were conspicuously different to the other forest species. Each rose to the height of the canopy and no higher—forty or fifty metres above the forest floor, depending on the surrounding growth. Each was shaped like a spiral candlestick, thickening towards the base. Near the top, the trees flared into a wide, flattened structure like a dark green mushroom, tens of metres across. It was these mushrooms which had made the hamadryad trees so obvious to the first explorers, overflying the jungle in one of the Santiago’s shuttles.

Now and then they found a clearing near a tree and set down to investigate on foot. The biologists amongst them had struggled to find an explanation for the trees’ shapes, or the strange differentiation in cell types which occurred around the tree’s perimeter and along radial lines through it. What was clear was that the wood at the heart of the trees was dead growth, with the living matter existing in a relatively thin layer around the husk.

The spiral candlestick analogy was accurate up to a point, but a better description, I felt, was of an enormously tall and thin helter-skelter, like the dilapidated old one I remembered from an abandoned fairground in Nueva Iquique, its pastel blue paint peeling away a little more with each summer. The tree’s underlying shape was more or less a tapering cylindrical trunk, but wrapped around this, ascending to the summit, was a helical structure whose spirals did not quite lie in contact with each other. The helix was smooth, patterned in geometric brown and green shapes which shimmered like beaten metal. In the gaps where the underlying trunk was visible, there was often evidence for a similar structure which had been worn down or absorbed into the tree, and perhaps levels of structure behind that too, though only a skilled botanist really had the eye to read those subtleties of tree growth.

Dieterling had identified the major spiral around this tree. At the base, just where it looked as if the spiral ought to plunge into the ground like a root, it terminated in a hollow opening.

He pointed it out to me. “It’s hollow almost all the way to the top, bro.”

“Meaning what?” Rodriguez said. He knew how to handle the juvenile, but he was no expert on the creatures’ biological cycle.

“Meaning it’s already hatched,” Cahuella said. “The juveniles from this one have already left home.”

“They eat their way out of their mother,” I said. We still had no idea whether there were distinct hamadryad sexes, so it was entirely possible that they had eaten their way out of their father as well—or neither. When the war was over, probing hamadryad biology would fuel a thousand academic careers.

“How big would they have been?” Gitta asked.

“As big as our own juve,” I said, kicking the maw at the base of the spiral. “Maybe a touch smaller. But nothing you’d want to meet without some heavy firepower.”

“I thought they moved too slowly to pose us any threat.”

“That’s the near-adults,” Dieterling said. “And even then, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to out-run it—not through overgrowth like this.”

“Would it want to eat us—I mean, would it even recognise us as something to be eaten?”

“Probably not,” Dieterling said. “Which might not be much consolation as it slithers over you.”

“Ease off it,” Cahuella said, putting a hand round Gitta. “They’re like any wild animal—only dangerous if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. And we do know, don’t we?”

Something crashed through the overgrowth behind us. Startled, we all turned around, half expecting to see the eyeless head of a near-adult bearing down on us like a slow-moving freight train, crunching through the jungle which impeded its implacable slithering progress about as efficiently as fog.

Instead, what we saw was Doctor Vicuna.

The doctor had shown no inclination to follow us when we had left camp, and I wondered what had made him change his mind. Not that I was in any way glad of the ghoul’s company.

“What is it, Doctor?”

“I became bored, Cahuella.” The doctor high-stepped through what remained of the overgrowth I had scythed. His clothes, as usual, were impeccable, even as ours picked up cuts and stains from the time in the field. He wore a knee-length dun field jacket, unzipped at the front. Around his neck dangled a pair of dainty image-amp goggles. His hair was kiss-curled, lending him the sordid air of a malnourished cherub. “Ah—and this is the tree!”

I stepped out of his path, my hand sweating around the haft of the monofilament scythe, imagining what it would do to the ghoul if I were to accidentally extend the cutting arc and flick it through him. Whatever pain he suffered in the process, I thought, could not be measured against the cumulative dose he had inflicted in his career.

“Quite a specimen, isn’t it,” Cahuella said.

“The most recent fusion probably only happened a few weeks ago,” Dieterling said, as comfortable with the ghoul as his master. “Take a look at the cell-type gradient here.”

The doctor ambled forward to see what Dieterling was talking about.

Dieterling had unpacked a slim grey device from the waist pocket of his hunting jacket. Of Ultra manufacture, it was the size of an unopened Bible, set with a screen and a few cryptically marked controls. Dieterling pressed one side of the device to the helix and thumbed one of the buttons. In shades of pale blue, vastly magnified cells appeared on the screen. They were hazy cylindrical shapes, packed together haphazardly like body bags in a morgue.

“These are essentially epithelial cells,” Dieterling said, sketching a finger across the image. “Note the soft, lipid structure of the cell membrane—very characteristic.”

“Of what?” Gitta said.

“Of an animal. If I took a sample of your liver lining, it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to this.”

He moved the device to another part of the helix, a little closer to the trunk. “Now look. Totally different cells—arranged much more regularly, with geometric boundaries locked together for structural rigidity. See how the cell membrane is surrounded by an additional layer? That’s basically cellulose.” He touched another control and the cells became glassy, filled with phantom shapes. “See those podlike organelles? Nascent chloroplasts. And those labyrinthine structures are part of the endoplasmic reticulum. All these things are defining characteristics of plant cells.”

Gitta tapped the bark where Dieterling had made the first scan. “So the tree is more like an animal here, and more like a plant—here?”

“It’s a morphological gradient, of course. The cells in the trunk are pure plant cells—a cylinder of xylem around a core of old growth. When the snake first attaches itself to the tree, wrapping around it, it’s still an animal. But where the snake comes into contact with the tree, its own cells begin to change. We don’t know what makes that happen—whether the triggering cue comes from something in the snake’s own lymphatic system, or whether the tree itself supplies the chemical signal to begin fusion.” Dieterling indicated where the helix merged seamlessly with the trunk. “This process of cellular unification would have taken a few days. When it was over, the snake was inseparably attached to the tree—had, in fact, become part of the tree itself. But most of the snake was still an animal at that point.”

“What happens to its brain?” Gitta asked.

“It doesn’t need one anymore. Doesn’t even need anything we’d exactly recognise as a nervous system, to be frank.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Dieterling smiled at her. “The mother’s brain is the first thing that the juveniles eat.”

“They eat their mother?” Gitta said, horrified.

The snakes merged with their host trees, becoming plants themselves. It only happened when the snakes were in their near-adult phase, large enough to spiral around the tree all the way from the ground to the canopy. By then young hamadryads were already developing in what passed for the creature’s womb.

The host tree had almost certainly already seen several fusions. Perhaps the original, true tree had long since rotted away, and what remained were only the locked spirals of dead hamadryads. It was likely, however, that the last snake to attach itself to the tree was still technically alive, having spread its photosynthetic cowl wide from the top of the tree, drinking sunlight. No one knew how long the snakes could have lived in that final brainless plant-phase. What was known was that another near-adult would arrive sooner or later and claim the tree for itself. It would slither up the tree and force its head through the cowl of its predecessor, then spread its own cowl over the old. Deprived of sunlight, the shadowed cowl would wither away quickly. The newcomer would fuse with the tree, becoming mostly plant. What little animal tissue remaining was there only to supply the young with food, born within a few months of the fusion. Some chemical trigger would cause them to eat their way out of the womb, digesting their mother as they went. Once they had eaten her brain, they would chew their way down the spiral length of her body, until they emerged at ground-level as fully formed, rapacious juvenile hamadryads.

“You think it’s vile,” Cahuella said, reading Gitta’s thoughts expertly. “But there are life-cycles amongst terrestrial animals which are just as unpleasant, if not more so. The Australian social spider turns to mush as her spiderlings mature. You have to admit it has a kind of Darwinian purity to it. Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage. Normally adult animals have to stick around long enough to raise their young and safeguard them from predators, but hamadryads aren’t constrained by those factors. Even juveniles are nastier than any other indigenous animals, which means there’s nothing to protect them against. And they don’t need to learn anything they don’t already have hardwired into them. There’s almost no selection pressure to prevent the adults from dying the instant they’ve given birth. It makes perfect sense for the juveniles to gorge themselves on their mothers.”

It was my turn to smile. “You almost sound like you admire it.”

“I do. The purity of it—who couldn’t admire that?”

I am not sure quite what happened then. I was looking at Cahuella, with half an eye on Gitta, when Vicuna did something. But the first flash of movement seemed to have come not from Vicuna but from my own man Rodriguez.

Vicuna had reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.

“Rodriguez,” he said. “Step away from the tree.”

I had no idea what was happening, but I saw now that Rodriguez’s own hand was buried in his pocket, as if he had been on the point of reaching for something. Vicuna waggled the end of his gun emphatically.

“I said step away.”

“Doctor,” I said, “would you mind explaining why you are threatening one of my men?”

“Gladly, Mirabel. After I’ve dealt with him.”

Rodriguez looked at me, eyes wide in what looked like confusion. “Tanner, I don’t know what he’s on about. I was just going for my rations pack…”

I looked at Rodriguez, then at the ghoul.

“Well, doctor?”

“He has no rations pack in that pocket. He was reaching for a weapon.”

It made no sense. Rodriguez was already armed—he had a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder, just like Cahuella.

The two of them faced each other, frozen.

I needed to make a decision. I nodded at Cahuella. “Let me handle this. Get yourself and Gitta away from here; away from any possible line of fire. I’ll meet you back at the camp.”

“Yes!” Vicuna hissed. “Get away from here, before Rodriguez kills you.”

Cahuella took his wife and stepped hesitantly away from the tableau. “Are you serious, doctor?”

“He seems adequately serious to me,” Dieterling murmured. He was already edging away himself.

“Well?” I said, towards the ghoul.

Vicuna’s hand was trembling. He was no gunman—but no kind of marksmanship would have been necessary to take out Rodriguez at the distance that spaced them. He spoke slowly and with forced calm. “Rodriguez is an impostor, Tanner. I received a message from the Reptile House while you were here.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “I don’t need to listen to this!”

I realised that it was entirely possible that he had received some kind of message from the Reptile House. Normally I snapped on a comms bracelet before I left camp, but I had forgotten it in my haste this morning. Someone calling from the House would only have been able to get as far as the camp.

I turned to Rodriguez. “Then take your hand slowly out of your pocket.”

“Don’t tell me you believe the bastard!”

“I don’t know what I believe. But if you’re telling the truth, all you’ve got in there is a rations pack.”

“Tanner, this is—”

I raised my voice. “Just do it, damn you!”

“Careful,” Vicuna hissed.

Rodriguez drew his hand from the pocket with magisterial slowness, glancing to myself and then Vicuna all the while. What came out, gripped between thumb and forefinger, was slim and black. The way he held it, in the perpetual gloom of the forest floor, it was almost possible to believe it was a rations pack. For a moment I did.

Until I saw that it was a gun, small and elegant and vicious; engineered for assassination.

Vicuna fired. Perhaps I had underestimated the skill that it would take to seriously incapacitate someone even when they stood so close, for the doctor’s slug only hit Rodriguez in the shoulder of his other arm, causing him to stagger back and grunt, but no more than that. Rodriguez’s gun flashed and the doctor fell backwards into the mulch.

On the edge of the clearing, Cahuella shrugged off his rifle and was on the point of bringing it to bear.

“No!” I started to shout, willing my master to save himself by getting as far away as possible from Rodriguez, but—as I belatedly realised—Cahuella was not the kind to walk away from a fight, even one in which his own life might be contested.

Gitta screamed for her husband to follow her.

Rodriguez levelled the gun towards Cahuella and fired…

And missed, his slug slicing through the bark of a nearby tree.

I tried to find some sense in what was happening, but there was no time. Vicuna appeared to have been correct. Everything that Rodriguez had done in the last few moments was consistent with the ghoul’s statement… which meant that Rodriguez was—what?

An impostor?

“This is for Argent Reivich,” Rodriguez said, drawing his aim again.

This time, I knew, he would not miss.

I raised the monofilament scythe, thumbed the invisibly fine cutting thread to its maximum, piezo-electrically maintained length: a hyper-rigid mono-molecular line extending fifteen metres ahead of me.

Rodriguez, out of the corner of his eye, caught what I was about to do, and made the one mistake which marked him as an amateur, rather than a professional assassin.

He hesitated.

I swung the scythe through him.

As the realisation of what had happened dawned on him—there could have been no immediate pain, for the cut was surgically clean—he dropped the gun. There was a terrible frozen moment, one in which I wondered if I had not made a mistake as grave as his hesitation, and that I had somehow failed to extend the scythe’s invisible line as far as I had imagined.

But there had been no mistake.

Rodriguez toppled to the ground, twice.

“He’s dead,” Dieterling said, when we were back in the one tent in the camp which had not been deflated. Three hours had passed since the incident by the tree, and now Dieterling was leaning over the body of Doctor Vicuna. “If only I had understood how these tools of his worked…” Dieterling had spread a pile of the ghoul’s advanced surgical toys next to him, but their subtle secrets had refused to yield to him. The normal medical supplies had not been sufficient to save him from Rodriguez’s shot, but we had hoped that the doctor’s own magic—gleaned at considerable expense from Ultra traders—would have been powerful enough. Perhaps, in the right hands, it would have been—but the one man who could have used those tools profitably had been the one who most needed them.

“You did your best,” I said, a hand on Dieterling’s shoulder.

Cahuella looked down at the body of Vicuna with unconcealed fury. “Typical of that bastard to die on us before we could use him properly. How the hell are any of us going to be able to put those implants into a snake?”

“Maybe catching the snake isn’t our absolute top priority now,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that, Tanner?”

“Then try acting like it.” He glared at me for my insubordination, but I continued anyway, “I didn’t like Vicuna, but he risked his life for you.”

“And whose fucking fault was it that Rodriguez was an impostor? I thought you screened your recruits, Mirabel.”

“I did screen him,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“The man I killed couldn’t have been Rodriguez. Vicuna seemed to agree with me, too.”

Cahuella looked at me as if I was something he had found stuck to the bottom of his shoe, then stormed out, leaving me alone with Dieterling.

“Well?” he said. “I hope you have some idea what happened out there, Tanner.” He pulled a sheet over the dead Vicuna, then began to gather up the neatly glistening surgical tools.

“I don’t. Not yet. It was Rodriguez… at least it looked like him.”

“Try calling the Reptile House again.”

He was right; it was an hour since I had last tried, and I had not been able to get a call through then. As always, the girdle of comsats around Sky’s Edge was patchy and subject to constant military interference, elements mysteriously breaking down and coming back online for the nefarious purposes of other factions.

This time, however, the link worked.

“Tanner? You’re all okay?”

“More or less.” I would elaborate on our loss later; for now I need to know what Doctor Vicuna had been told. “What was the warning you relayed to us about Rodriguez?”

The man I was dealing with was called Southey; someone I had known for years. But I had never seen him look as disconcerted as he did now. “Tanner, I hope to God… we got a warning ourselves, from one of Cahuella’s allies. A tip-off about Rodriguez.”

“Go on.”

“Rodriguez is dead! They found his body in Nueva Santiago. He’d been murdered, then dumped.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“We have his DNA on file. Our contact in Santiago ran an analysis on the body—it was a one-to-one match.”

“Then the Rodriguez who came back from Santiago must have been someone else, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. Not a clone, we think, but an assassin. He would have been surgically modified to look like Rodriguez; even his voice and smell must have been altered.”

I thought about that for a few moments before replying, “There’s no one on Sky’s Edge with the skill to do something like that. Especially Dot in the few days that Rodriguez was away from the Reptile House.”

“No, I agree. But the Ultras could have done it.”

That much I knew, Orcagna having practically rubbed our faces in his superior science. “It would have to be more than just cosmetic,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rodriguez—the impostor—still behaved like himself. He knew things only Rodriguez really knew. I know—I talked to him often in the last few days.” Now that I considered those conversations, there had at times been something evasive about Rodriguez, but obviously nothing serious enough to rouse my suspicions at the time. There had been much that he had been perfectly willing to discuss.

“So they used his memories as well.”

“You think they trawled Rodriguez?”

Southey nodded. “It must have been done by experts, because there was no sign that it was the trawl itself that killed him. But again, they were Ultras.”

“And you think they have the means to implant the memories into their assassin?”

“I’ve heard of such things,” Southey said. “Tiny machines which swarm through the subject’s mind, laying down new neural connections. Eidetic imprinting, they call it. The NCs tried it for training purposes, but they never got it to work really well. But if Ultras were involved…”

“It would have been child’s play. It wasn’t just that the man had access to Rodriguez’s memories, though—it went deeper than that. Like he had almost become Rodriguez in the process.”

“Maybe that’s why he was so convincing. Those new memory structures would have been fragile, though—the assassin’s own personality would have begun to emerge sooner or later. But by then Rodriguez would have gained your confidence.”

Southey was right: it was only in the last day or so that Rodriguez had seemed more than usually evasive. Was that the point when the assassin’s buried mind began to shine through the veil of camouflaging memories?

“He gained it pretty well,” I said. “If it wasn’t for Vicuna warning us…” I told him about what had happened around the tree.

“Bring the bodies back,” Southey said. “I want to see how well they really disguised their man—whether it was cosmetic, or whether they tried to change his DNA as well.”

“You think they went to that much trouble?”

“That’s the point, Tanner. If they went to the right kind of people, it wouldn’t have been much trouble at all.”

“To the best of my knowledge, there’s only one group of Ultras in orbit around the planet at the moment.”

“Yes. I’m fairly sure that Orcagna’s people must have been involved in this. You met them, didn’t you? Did you think they could be trusted?”

“They were Ultras,” I said, as if that were answer enough. “I couldn’t read them like one of Cahuella’s usual contacts. That doesn’t mean they’d automatically betray us, though.”

“What would they have to gain by not betraying us?”

That, I realised, was the one question I had never really asked. I had made the error of treating Orcagna like any other of Cahuella’s business contacts—someone who would not want to exclude dealing with Cahuella again in the future. But what if Orcagna’s crew had no intention of returning to Sky’s Edge for decades, even centuries? They could burn all their bridges with impunity.

“Orcagna might not have known that the assassin was aimed at us,” I said. “Someone affiliated to Reivich just presented them with a man who needed his appearance changed; another man who needed his memories transferred into the first…”

“And you think it didn’t even occur to Orcagna to ask questions?”

“I don’t know,” I said, even my own argument sounding weak.

Southey sighed. I knew what he was thinking. It was what I was thinking myself. “Tanner, I think we need to play it very carefully from here on in.”

“At least one good thing’s come out of it,” I said. “Now that the doctor’s dead, Cahuella’s had to abandon his snake quest. He just hasn’t realised it yet.”

Southey forced a thin smile. “We’ve already dug half the new pit.”

“I wouldn’t worry about finishing the rest by the time we get back.” I paused and checked the map again, the blinking dot which represented Reivich’s progress. “We’ll camp again tonight, about sixty klicks north of here. Tomorrow we’ll be on our way home.”

“Tonight’s the night?”

With Rodriguez and the doctor dead, we would be undermanned when it came to the ambush. But there would be still be enough of us to make victory a near-mathematical certainty.

“Tomorrow morning. Reivich should enter our trap two hours before noon, if he maintains his progress.”

“Good luck, Tanner.”

I nodded and closed the connection with the Reptile House. Outside, I found Cahuella and told him what I had learned from Southey. Cahuella had calmed down a little since our last conversation, while his men worked around us packing up the rest of the camp. He was strapping a black leather bandolier from waist to shoulder, with numerous little leather pockets for cartridges, clips, ammo-cells and other paraphernalia.

“They can do that kind of shit as well? Memory transfer?”

“I’m not sure how permanent it would have been, but—yes—I’m reasonably sure they could have trawled Rodriguez so that Reivich’s man had enough of his knowledge not to arouse our suspicions. You’re less surprised that they could change his shape so convincingly?”

He seemed unwilling to answer me immediately. “I know they can… change things, Tanner.”

There were times when I felt I knew Cahuella as well as anyone; that at times we were as close as brothers. I knew him to be capable of a cruelty more imaginative and instinctive than anything I could devise. I had to work at being cruel, like a hard-working musician who lacked the easy, virtuoso flair of the true-born genius. But we saw things similarly, judged people with the same jaundiced eye and were both possessed of an innate skill with weapons. Yet there were times, like now, that it was as if Cahuella and I had never met; that there were infinite secrets he would never share with me. I thought back to what Gitta had told me the night before; her implication that what I knew about him was only the tip of the iceberg.

An hour later and we were on our way, with the two bodies—Vicuna and the bipartite Rodriguez—in refrigerated coffins, stowed in the last vehicle. The hard-shelled coffins had doubled as rations stores until now. Predictably enough, the hunting trip no longer felt like much of a holiday. I had never seen it like that, of course, but Cahuella certainly had, and I could read the tension in the muscles of his neck as he strained to look forward along the trail. Reivich had been a step ahead of us.

Later, when we stopped to fix a turbine, he said, “I’m sorry I blamed you back there, Tanner.”

“I’d have done the same.”

“That’s not the point, is it? I trust you like a brother. I did and I still do. You saved us all when you killed Rodriguez.”

Something green and leathery flapped over the road. “I prefer not to think of that impostor as Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a good man.”

“Of course… it was just verbal shorthand. You—um—don’t think there are likely to be any more of them, do you?”

I had given the matter some thought. “We can’t rule it out, but I don’t think it’s very likely. Rodriguez had come back from a trip, whereas everyone else on the expedition hasn’t left the Reptile House for weeks—apart from you and me, of course, when we visited Orcagna. I think we can remove ourselves from suspicion. Vicuna might have been a possibility, but he’s neatly removed himself as well.”

“All right. One other thing.” He paused, casting a wary eye over his men as they hammered at something under an engine cowling with what looked like less than professional care. “You don’t think that might have actually been Reivich, do you?”

“Disguised as Rodriguez?”

Cahuella nodded. “He did say he was going to get me.”

“Yes… but my guess is he’s with the main party. That’s what Orcagna told us. The impostor might even have planned to lie low with us, not compromising his cover until the rest of the party came through.”

“It could have been him, though.”

“I don’t think so; not unless the Ultras are even cleverer than we thought. Reivich and Rodriguez were nowhere near the same size. I can believe they altered his face, but I can’t see them having the time to change his entire skeleton and musculature—not in a few days. Then they’d still have to adjust his body-image so he didn’t keep bumping into ceilings. No; their assassin must have been a man of similar build to Rodriguez.”

“It’s possible he got a warning through to Reivich, though?”

“Possible, yes—but if he did, Reivich isn’t acting on it. The weapons traces are still moving at the normal rate towards us.”

“Then—essentially—nothing’s changed, right?”

“Essentially nothing,” I said, but we both knew that neither of us felt it.

Shortly afterwards his men made the turbine sing again and we were on our way. I had always taken the security of the expedition seriously, but now I had redoubled my efforts and rethought all my arrangements. No one was leaving camp unless they were armed, and no one was to leave alone—except, of course, for Cahuella himself, who would still insist on his nocturnal prowls.

The camp we set tonight would form the basis of our ambush, so I was determined to spend more than the usual amount of time searching for the best place to pitch the bubbletents. The camp had to be nearly invisible from the road, but close enough that we could mount an attack on Reivich’s group. I did not want us to become too separated from our munitions stores, which meant placing the tents no more than fifty or sixty metres into the trees. Before nightfall, we could scythe out strategic lines of fire through the wood and arrange fall-back routes for ourselves in case Reivich’s men laid down a heavy suppressing fire. If time allowed we would set deadfalls or mines along other, more obvious paths.

I was drawing a map in my mind, crisscrossing it with intersecting lines of death, when the snake began to cross our path.

My attention had wandered slightly from the route ahead, so it was Cahuella shouting “Stop!” which first alerted me that something was happening.

Turbines cut; our vehicles bellied down.

Two or three hundred metres down the trail, just where the trail began to curve out of sight, the hamadryad had poked its head out of the curtain of greenery which marked the edge of the jungle. The head was a pale, sickly green, under the olive folds of its photosensitive cowl, retracted like a cobra’s hood. It was crossing from right to left; towards the sea.

“Near-adult,” Dieterling said, as if what we were looking at was a bug stuck to the windshield.

The head was nearly as big as one of our vehicles. Behind it came the first few metres of the creature’s snakelike body. The patterning was the same as I had seen on the helical structure wrapped around the hamadryad tree, very snakelike.

“How big do you think it is?” I asked.

“Thirty, thirty-five metres. Not the biggest I’ve ever seen—that has to be a sixty-metre snake I saw back in “71—but this isn’t any juvenile. If it can find a tree which reaches the canopy and isn’t much higher than its length, it’ll probably begin fusion.”

The head had reached the other side of the road. It moved slowly, creeping past us.

“Take us closer,” Cahuella said.

“Wait,” I said. “Are you sure? We’re safe here. It’ll pass soon. I know they don’t have any deeply wired defensive instincts, but it might still decide we look like something worth eating. Are you sure you want to risk that?”

“Take us closer.”

I fired up the turbine, gunning it to the minimum number of revs sufficient to give us lift, and crept the vehicle forward. Hamadryads were thought to have no sense of sound, but seismic vibrations were another thing entirely. I wondered whether the air-cushion of our car, drumming against the ground, sounded exactly like part of the snake’s diet coming closer.

The snake had arced itself so that the length of two-metre-thick body spanning the road was always elevated. It continued to move slowly and smoothly, betraying absolutely no sign that it had even registered our presence. Perhaps Dieterling was right. Perhaps all the snake was interested in was finding a nice tall tree to curl itself around, so that it could give up this tedious business of having a brain and having to move around.

We were fifty metres from it now.

“Stop,” Cahuella said again.

This time I obeyed unquestioningly. I turned to look at him, but he was already hopping out of the car. We could hear the snake now: a constant low rumble as it pushed itself through foliage. It was not an animal sound at all. What it sounded like was the continuous crunching progress of a tank.

Cahuella reappeared at the side of the vehicle. He had gone round the back to where the weapons were stored and had drawn out his crossbow.

“Oh, no…” I started to say, but it was too late.

He was already racking a tranquilliser dart into the bow, coded for use against a thirty-metre adult. The weapon, on the face of it, seemed like an affectation, but it made a kind of sense. A huge quantity of tranquilliser would have to be delivered to an adult to dope it as we had the juvenile. Our normal hunting rifles were just not up to the job. A crossbow, on the other hand, could fire a much larger dart—and the apparent drawbacks of limited range and accuracy were hardly relevant when one was dealing with a deaf and blind thirty-metre snake which took a minute to move its body length.

“Shut up, Tanner,” Cahuella said. “I didn’t come out here to see one of these bastards and turn away from it.”

“Vicuna’s dead. That means we have no one to implant those control electrodes.”

It was as if I had not spoken. He set off down the trail, the crossbow in one hand, the muscles in his muscular back defined against the sweat-sodden shirt he wore under his bandolier.

“Tanner,” Gitta said. “Stop him, before he gets hurt.”

“He’s not in any real danger…” I started to say.

But it was a lie, and I knew it. He might have been safer than if he had been this close to a juvenile, but the behaviour of near-adults was only poorly understood. Swearing, I opened the door on my side, jogged round to the back of the vehicle and unracked a laser-rifle for myself. I checked the ammo-cell’s charge, then loped after him. Hearing my footfalls against the dirt, Cahuella looked back irritatedly.

“Mirabel! Get the hell back into the car! I don’t want anyone ruining this kill for me!”

“I’ll keep my distance,” I called.

The hamadryad’s head had vanished into the other side of the forest, leaving an arc of body spanning the road with the elegant bowstring curve of a bridge. The sound, now that I came closer, was immense. I could hear branches snapping along the snake’s length, and a relentless susurration of dry skin against bark.

And another noise—identical in timbre, but coming from another direction completely. For a moment my brain sluggishly refused to reach the obvious conclusion, trying to work out how the acoustic properties of the jungle could echo the hamadryad’s progress so effectively. I was still wondering about it when the second snake burst through the treeline to my right. It moved as slowly as the first, but it was very much closer, which made the thing’s half-metre per second progress seem a lot swifter. It was smaller than the first one we had seen, but still monstrous by any standards. And I remembered an uncomfortable fact about hamadryad biology. The smaller they were, the faster they were capable of moving…

But the snake brought its hooded, deltoid head to a stop, metres from me and metres above my own. Eyeless, it seemed to float against the sky like a malign, thick-tailed kite.

In all my years of soldiering, I had never been paralysed by fear. I knew that it happened to some people, but I wondered how it was possible and what kind of people they had really been. Now, belatedly, I was coming to an intimate understanding of just how it could happen. The flight reflex was not completely decoupled from volition: part of me knew that to run could be just as hazardous as to remain fixed to the spot, motionless. Snakes were blind until they located a target, but their infra-red and olfactory sensitivity was acute. There was no doubt that it knew I was standing beneath it, or else it would not have stopped.

I had no idea what to do.

Shoot it, I thought… but the laser-rifle was, in hindsight, not the best weapon I could have selected. A few pencil-thin holes right through its body were not going to massively impede this creature. No point aiming for specific areas of brain function, either: it hardly had a brain to begin with, even before giving birth to the young that would eat that tiny knot of neurones. The laser was a pulse-weapon, the beam too transient to be used as a blade. I would have been better off with the scythe I had used against the impostor…

“Tanner. Stay still. It has a lock on you.”

Out of the corner of my eye—I didn’t dare move my head—I saw Cahuella, approaching in a near-crouch. He had the crossbow against his shoulder, squinting along the weapon’s long haft.

“That won’t do much more than piss it off,” I said, in not much more than a hiss.

Cahuella answered in a stage whisper, “Yeah. Big time. The dose was for the first one. This one’s no more than fifteen metres… that’s twelve per cent of the body volume, which means the dose’ll be eight times too strong…” He paused and halted. “Or thereabouts.”

He was within range now.

Above me, the head swayed from side to side, tasting the wind. Perhaps, following the other, larger, adult, it was impatient to be moving on. But it could not let this possibility of prey pass without investigation. Perhaps it had not eaten in months. Dieterling had said that they always had one last meal before fusion. Maybe this one was too small to be ready to bind with a tree, but there was no reason to assume it was not hungry.

Moving my hands as slowly and smoothly as I dared, I slipped off the rifle’s safety-catch, feeling the subliminal shiver as the discharge cells powered up, accompanied by a faint rising whine.

The head bowed toward me, drawn by the rifle.

“This weapon is now ready for use,” the rifle said brightly.

The snake lunged, its wide mouth opening, the two attack-phase eyes gleaming at me from the mouth’s red roof, triangulating.

I fired, straight into the mouth.

The head smashed into the dirt next to me, its lunge confused by the laser pulses. Angered, the snake reared up, its mouth wide, emitting a terrible roar and a smell like a field of butchered corpses. I had squeezed off ten rapid pulses, a stroboscopic volley which had punched ten black craters into the roof of the mouth. I could see the exit wounds peppering the back of the head, each finger-wide. I’d blinded it.

But it had enough memory to remember roughly where I was. I stumbled back as the head daggered down again—and then there was a glint of bright metal cleaving the air, and the thunk of Cahuella’s crossbow.

His dart had buried itself in the neck of the snake, instantly discharging its payload of tranquilliser.

“Tanner! Get the fuck away!”

He reached into his bandolier and extracted another dart, then cranked back the bow and slipped the second dart into place. A moment later it joined the other in the snake’s neck. That was, if he had done his sums correctly, and the darts were both coded for large adults, something like sixteen times the dose necessary to put this specimen to sleep.

I was out of harm’s way now, but I kept firing. And now I realised that we had another problem…

“Cahuella…” I said.

He must have seen that I was looking beyond rather than at him, for he stopped and looked over his shoulder, frozen in the action of reaching for another dart.

The other snake had curved round in a loop, and now its head was emerging from the left side of the trail, only twenty metres from Cahuella.

“The distress call…” he said.

Until now we had not even known they had any calls. But he was right: my wounding the smaller snake had drawn the interest of the first, and now Cahuella was trapped between two hamadryads.

But then the smaller snake began to die.

There was nothing sudden about it. It was more like an airship going down, as the head sunk towards the ground, no longer capable of being carried by the neck, which was itself sagging inexorably lower.

Something touched me on the shoulder.

“Stand aside, bro,” said Dieterling.

It seemed like an age since I had left the car, but it could only have been half a minute. Dieterling could never have been far behind me, yet for most of that time Cahuella and I felt completely alone.

I looked at what Dieterling was carrying, comparing it to the weapon I had imagined suitable for the task at hand.

“Nice one,” I said.

“The right tools for the job, that’s all.”

He brushed past me, shouldering the matte-black bazooka he had retrieved from the weapons rack. There was a bas-relief Scorpion down the side of it and a huge semi-circular magazine jutting asymmetrically from one side. A targeting screen whirred into place in front of his eyes, churning with scrolling data and bullseye overlays. Dieterling brushed it aside, glanced behind to make sure I was out of range of the recoil blast, and squeezed the trigger.

The first thing he did was blow a hole through the first snake, like a tunnel. Through this he walked, his boots squelching through the unspeakable red carpet.

Cahuella pumped the last dart into the larger snake, but by then he was limited to doses calibrated for much smaller animals. It appeared not to notice that it had even been shot. They had, I knew, few pain receptors anywhere along their bodies.

Dieterling reached him, his boots red to the knee. The adult was coming closer, its head no more than ten metres from both of them.

The two men shook hands and exchanged weapons.

Dieterling turned his back on Cahuella and began to walk calmly back towards me. He carried the crossbow in the crook of his arm, for it was useless now.

Cahuella hefted the bazooka and began to inflict grievous harm on the snake.

It was not pretty. He had the bazooka set to rapid fire, mini-rockets streaking from its muzzle twice a second. What he did to the snake was more akin to pruning back a plant snip by snip. First he took the head off, so that the truncated neck hung in the air, red-rimmed. But the creature kept on moving. Losing its brain was obviously not really much of a handicap to it. The slithering roar of its progress had not abated at all.

So Cahuella kept shooting.

He stood his ground, feet apart, squeezing rocket after rocket into the wound, blood and gore plastering the trees on either side of him. Still the snake kept coming, but now there was less and less of it to come, the body tapering towards the tail. When only ten metres were left, the body finally flopped to the ground, twitching. Cahuella put a last rocket in it for good measure and then turned round and walked back towards me with the same laconic stroll Dieterling had used.

When he got close to me I saw that his shirt was filmed in red now, his face slick with a fine film of rouge. He handed me the bazooka. I safed it, but it was hardly necessary: the last shot he had fired, I saw, had been the last in the magazine.

Back at the vehicle, I opened the case which held replacement magazines and slotted a fresh one onto the bazooka, then racked it with the other weapons. Cahuella was looking at me, as if expecting me to say something to him. But what could I say? I could hardly compliment him on his hunting expertise. Apart from the nerve it took, and the physical strength to hold the bazooka, a child could have killed the snake in exactly the same manner.

Instead, I looked to the two brutally butchered animals which lay across our path, practically unrecognisable for what they had been.

“I don’t think Vicuna could have helped us very much,” I said.

He looked at me, then shook his head, as much in disgust at my own mistake—that I had forced him to save my own life and lose his chance to capture his prey—as acknowledging the truth of what I said.

“Just drive, Tanner,” he said.

That night we established the ambush camp.

Orcagna’s trace showed that Reivich’s party was thirty kilometres north of our position and moving south at the same steady rate he had maintained for days. They did not appear to be resting overnight as we did, but as their average rate was somewhat slower than what we were managing, they were not covering much more ground in a day. Between us and them was a river that would need to be forded, but if Reivich made no serious mistakes—or decided against pattern to stop for the night—he would still be five kilometres up the road by dawn.

We set up the bubbletents, this time shrouding each in an outer skin of chameleoflage fabric. We were deep in hamadryad country now, so I took care to sweep the area with deep-look thermal and acoustic sensors. They would pick up the crunching movement of any moderately large adults. Juveniles were another thing entirely, but at least juveniles would not crush our entire camp. Dieterling examined the trees in the area and confirmed that none of them had released juveniles any time recently.

“So worry about the dozen other local predators,” he said, meeting Cahuella and I outside one of the bubbletents.

“Maybe it’s seasonal,” Cahuella said. “The time when they give birth, I mean. That could influence our next hunting trip. We should plan it properly.”

I looked at him with a jaundiced eye. “You still want to use Vicuna’s toys?”

“It’d be a tribute to the good doctor, wouldn’t it? It’s what he would have wanted.”

“Maybe.” I thought back to the two snakes which had crossed our path. “I also know we almost got ourselves killed back there.”

He shrugged. “The textbooks say they don’t travel in pairs.”

“So you did your homework. It didn’t help, did it?”

“We got out of it. No thanks to you, either, Tanner…” He looked at me hard, then nodded at Dieterling. “At least he knew what kind of weapon was needed.”

“A bazooka?” I said. “Yes. It worked, didn’t it? But I don’t call that sport.”

“It wasn’t sport by then,” Cahuella said. His mood shifted capriciously and he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Still, you did your best with that laser. And we learned valuable lessons that will stand us in good stead when we come back next season.”

He was deadly serious, I saw. He really wanted that near-adult. “Fine,” I said, wriggling free of his hand. “But next time I’ll let Dieterling run the whole expedition. I’ll stay back at the Reptile House and do the job you pay me for.”

“I’m paying you to be here,” Cahuella said.

“Yes. To take down Reivich. But hunting giant snakes doesn’t figure in my terms of employment, the last time I checked.”

He sighed. “Reivich is still our priority, Tanner.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Everything else is just… scenery.” He nodded and vanished into his bubbletent.

Dieterling opened his mouth. “Listen, bro…”

“I know. You don’t have to apologise. You were right to pick the bazooka, and I made a mistake.”

Dieterling nodded and then went to the weapons rack to select another rifle. He sighted along it and then slung it over his shoulder on its strap.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to check the area again.”

I noticed that he was not carrying any image-amp goggles. “It’s getting dark now, Miguel…” I nodded to my own pair, resting on a table next to the map which showed Reivich’s progress.

But Miguel Dieterling just smiled and turned away.

Later, much later, after I had set up about half the deadfalls and ambushes (I would rig the others at sunrise; if I did it now there would be too much of a danger of tripping them ourselves), Cahuella invited me into his tent.

“Yes?” I said, expecting another order.

Cahuella indicated a chessboard, bathed in the insipid green light of the bubbletent’s glowlamps.

“I need an opponent.”

The chessboard was set up on a folding card table, with folding, canvas-backed seats stationed either side of it. I shrugged. I played chess, and even played it well, but the game held few enticements for me. I approached the game like any other duty, knowing I could not allow myself to win.

Cahuella leaned over the chessboard. He wore fatigues crossed by webbing; various daggers and throwing implements were attached to his belt, with the dolphin pendant hanging under his neck. When his hands moved across the board, I thought of an oldtime general positioning little penanted tanks and infantrymen on a vast sandtable. All the while, his face remained placid and imperturbable, the green radiance of the glowlamps reflected oddly in his eyes, as if some part of that radiance came from within. And all the while Gitta sat next to us, occasionally pouring her husband another thimble of pisco; seldom speaking.

I played a difficult game—difficult, because of the tactical contortions I forced myself through. I was a superior chess player to Cahuella, but he wasn’t very fond of losing. On the other hand, he was shrewd enough to guess if an opponent was not giving the game his all, so I had to satisfy his ego on both fronts. I played hard, forcing Cahuella into a corner, but incorporated a weakness into my position—something exceedingly subtle, but also potentially fatal. Then, just when it looked like I would put him in check, I arranged for my weakness to reveal itself, like the sudden opening of a hairline fracture. Sometimes, though, he failed to spot my weaknesses, and there was nothing to do but let him lose. The best I could do under those circumstances was contrive to make the margin of my own victory as narrow as possible.

“You’ve beaten me again, Tanner…”

“You played well, though. You have to allow me the occasional victory.”

Gitta appeared at her husband’s side and poured another centimetre of pisco into his glass.

“Tanner always plays well,” she said, eyeing me. “That’s why he’s a worthy opponent for you.”

I shrugged. “I do my best.”

Cahuella brushed the pieces from the table, as if in a tantrum, but his voice remained placid. “Another game?”

“Why not,” I said, knowing with weary certainty that this time I had to fail.

We finished the chess game. Cahuella and I finished a few drops of pisco, then reviewed our plan for the ambush, even though we had already been through it dozens of times and there was nothing we had left uncovered. But it was the kind of ritual we had to endure. Afterwards, we made one final check on the weapons, and then Cahuella took his and spoke quietly in my ear.

“I’m stepping outside for a moment, Tanner. I want some final practice. I’d rather not be disturbed until I’m done.”

“Reivich might see the flashes.”

“There’s bad weather coming in,” Cahuella said. “He’ll just assume it’s lightning.”

I nodded, insisted that I check the settings on the gun for him, then let him slip out into the night. Torchless, with the little miniature laser strapped diagonally across his back, he was quickly lost from sight. It was a dark night and I hoped he knew his way through the part of the jungle immediately surrounding the clearing. Like Dieterling, he was confident of his ability to see well enough in the dark.

A few minutes passed before I heard the pulse of his weapon: regular discharges every few seconds, followed by longer pauses which suggested he was checking his fire pattern or selecting new targets. Each pulse strobed the tree-tops with a sharp flash of light, disturbing wildlife from the canopy; black shadows which cut across the stars. Then I saw that something else—equally black, but far vaster—was obstructing a whole swathe of stars towards the west. It was a storm, as Cahuella had predicted, creeping in from the ocean, ready to engulf the Peninsula in monsoon. As if acknowledging my diagnosis, the night’s previously calm and warm air began to stir, a breeze toying with the tops of the trees. I returned to the tent, found a torch and began to follow the path Cahuella had taken, guided by the intermittent pulses of his gun, like a lighthouse beacon. The undergrowth became treacherous and it took me several minutes to find my way to the patch of ground—a small clearing—where he stood shooting. I doused my torch across his body, announcing my arrival.

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.