Chasm City Page 13

  I hadn't long been in his employment on that hunting trip, and that was the first time I had seen his wife. Once or twice she had handled one of Cahuella's hunting rifles, but with no sign that she had ever touched a weapon before that trip. Cahuella had asked me to give her a few impromptu shooting lessons while we were in-country, which I had, and while she had improved, it was clear that Gitta was never going to be any kind of expert shot. It hardly mattered; she had no interest in hunting and while she had endured the trip with quiet stoicism, she could not share Cahuella's primal enthusiasm for killing.

  Soon even Cahuella realised that he was wasting his time trying to turn Gitta into another hunter. But he still wanted her to know how to use a gun-something smaller now, for the purposes of self-defence.

  "Why?" I said. "You hire people like me so people like Gitta won't have to worry about their own safety."

  We had been alone at the time, down in one of the empty vivarium chambers. "Because I've got enemies, Tanner. You're good, and the men under you are good as well-but they're not infallible. A single assassin could still break through our defences."

  "Yes," I said. "But anyone that good would also be good enough to take out either of you without you even knowing it was about to happen."

  "Someone as good as you, Tanner?"

  I thought about the defences I had arranged around and within the Reptile House. "No," I answered. "They'd need to be a hell of a lot better than me, Cahuella."

  "And are there people like that out there?"

  "There's always someone better than you. It's just a question of whether anyone's prepared to pay them for their services."

  He rested a hand on one of the empty amphibian cases. "Then she needs this more than ever. A chance at self-defence is better than none at all."

  I had to concede there was a kind of logic there. "I'll show her, then . . . if you insist."

  "Why are you so reluctant?"

  "Guns are dangerous things."

  Cahuella smiled in the wan yellow light spilling from the tubes set into the empty cases.

  "That's the idea, I think."

  We began soon after. Gitta was a perfectly willing student, but nowhere near as quick as Amelia. It was nothing to do with her intelligence; just a fundamental deficit in her motor skills; a basic weakness in hand-to-eye coordination which would never have manifested itself had not Cahuella insisted on this tuition. Which was not to say that she was beyond hope, but what Amelia could have mastered in an hour, it took Gitta all day to just stumble through at the most basic level of competence. Had she been a trainee soldier back in my old unit, I would never have been forced through this rigmarole. It would have been someone else's problem to find a task better suited to her skills-intelligence-gathering, or something.

  But Cahuella wanted Gitta to know how to use a gun.

  So I followed orders. I had no problem with this. It was up to Cahuella how he used me. And spending time with Gitta was not exactly the most onerous of tasks. Cahuella's wife was a lovely woman: a striking high-cheekboned beauty of Northern ancestry, lithe and lissom, with a dancer's musculature. I had never touched her until this shooting lesson, had hardly had good cause to speak to her, though I had fantasised often enough.

  Now, whenever I had to straighten her posture by applying gentle pressure to her arm or her shoulders or the small of her back, I felt my heart race ridiculously. When I spoke, I tried to keep my voice as soft and calm as I felt the situation demanded, but to my ears what came out sounded strained and adolescent. If Gitta noticed anything in my behaviour, she gave no sign of it. Her attention was focused tightly on the lesson at hand.

  I had installed a radio-frequency field-generator around this part of the terrace which addressed a processor in the anti-flash goggles Gitta wore. It was standard military training equipment; part of the vast cache of stolen or blackmarket equipment Cahuella had hoarded over the years. Ghosts would appear in the goggles, mapped into Gitta's field of view as if they were moving around the terrace. Not all of the ghosts would be hostile, but Gitta would have only a fraction of a second to decide for herself who needed shooting.

  It was a joke, really. Only a very skilled assassin would stand any chance of getting inside the Reptile House to begin with, and anyone that good would never give Gitta those precious moments to make her mind up.

  But Gitta wasn't doing too badly by her fifth lesson. She was at least pointing and firing the gun at the right targets ninety per cent of the time, a margin of error I could live with for now, hoping that I would never have the misfortune to be the one victim in ten who was not planning to kill her.

  But she was still not taking down her targets with any kind of efficiency. We were using live projectile ammo since the beam-weapons we had access to were just too bulky and heavy for self-defence. For the sake of safety, I could have arranged matters so that the gun would only fire when either Gitta or myself was out of the line of fire, not to mention any of Cahuella's valuable hamadryad statues. But I felt that the instants when the gun was disabled would have rendered the session too inauthentic to be much use. Instead, I'd loaded the gun with smart ammo, each slug holding a buried processor addressed by the same training field which spoke to Gitta's goggles. The processor controlled tiny spurts of gas which would shove the bullet off-course if the trajectory was deemed dangerous. If the required deflection angle was too sharp, the bullet would self-destruct into a speeding cloud of hot metal vapour-not exactly harmless, but a lot better than a small-calibre slug if it happened to be headed straight for your face.

  "How am I doing?" Gitta asked, when we had to reload the gun.

  "Your target acquisition's improving. You still need to aim lower-go for the chest rather than the head."

  "Why the chest? My husband said you could kill a man with a single shot to the head, Tanner."

  "I've had more practice than you."

  "But it's true, though-what they say about you? That when you shot someone, you . . ."

  I finished it for her. "Took out specific areas of brain function, yeah. You shouldn't believe everything they tell you, Gitta. I could probably put a slug into one hemisphere rather than the other, but beyond that . . ."

  "Still, it isn't a bad reputation to live with."

  "I suppose not, no. But that's all it is."

  "If it was my husband they were saying that about, he'd milk it for all it was worth." She cast a wary eye back to the upper storey of the house. "But you always try and play it down. That makes it seem more likely to me, Tanner."

  "I try and play it down because I don't want you to think I'm something I'm not."

  She looked at me. "I don't think there's any danger of that, Tanner. I think I know exactly who you are. A man with a good conscience who happens to work for someone who doesn't sleep quite so well at night."

  "My conscience isn't exactly pristine, believe me."

  "You should see Cahuella's." She locked eyes with me for a few moments; I broke it and looked down at the gun. Gitta raised her voice an octave. "Oh; speak of the devil."

  "Talking about me again?" He was stepping onto the terrace from the upper storey of the building. Something glinted in his hand: a glass of pisco sour. "Well, I can't blame you for that, can I? So. How are the lessons coming along?"

  "I think we're making reasonable progress," I said.

  "Oh, don't believe a word he says," Gitta said. "I'm absymal, and Tanner's too polite to say so."

  "Nothing worthwhile's ever easy," I answered. To Cahuella, I said, "Gitta can fire a gun now and discriminate between friend and foe most of the time. There isn't anything magical about it, though she's worked hard to achieve what she has and deserves credit. But if you want more than that, it might not be so easy."

  "She can always keep learning. You're the master teacher, after all." He nodded down at the gun, into which I'd just slipped a fresh clip. "Hey. Show her that trick you do."

  "Which one would that be?" I said, trying to keep my tempe
r under control. Normally Cahuella knew better than to label my painfully acquired skills as tricks.

  Cahuella took a sip of his drink. "You know the one I mean."

  "Fine; I'll take a guess."

  I reprogrammed the gun so that the bullets would no longer be deflected if they were on hazardous trajectories. If he wanted a trick, he was going to get one-whether it cost him or not.

  Normally when I shot a small weapon, I adopted the classic marksman's stance: legs slightly spread for balance, gun's grip held in one hand, supported by the other hand from beneath; arms outstretched at eye-level, locked against recoil if the gun fired slugs rather than energy. Now I held the gun singlehanded at waist-height, like an oldtime quick-draw gunfighter with a six-shooter. I was looking down on the gun, not sighting along it. But I had practised this position so thoroughly that I knew exactly where the bullet would go.

  I squeezed the trigger and put a slug into one of his hamadryad statues.

  Then walked to inspect the damage.

  The statue's gold had flowed like butter under the impact of the bullet, but it had flowed with beautiful symmetry around the entrance point, like a yellow lotus. And I had placed the shot with beautiful symmetry as well-mathematically centred on the hamadryad's brow; between the eyes if the creature's eyes had not been situated inside its jaw.

  "Very good," Cahuella said. "I think. Have you any idea what that snake cost?"

  "Less than you pay me for my services," I said, programming the gun back into safe mode before I forgot.

  He looked at the ruined statue for a moment before shaking his head, chuckling. "You're probably right. And I guess you've still got the edge, right, Tanner?" He clicked his fingers at his wife. "Okay; end of lesson, Gitta. Tanner and I need to talk about something-that's why I came out here."

  "But we've only just begun."

  "There'll be other times. You wouldn't want to learn everything right away, would you?"

  No; I thought-I hoped that never happened, because then I would have no reason to be around her. The thought was dangerous-was I seriously thinking about trying something on with her, while Cahuella was no further away than another room in the Reptile House? Crazy too, because until tonight nothing Gitta had done had indicated any kind of reciprocal attraction towards me. But some of the things she'd said had made me wonder. Maybe she was just getting lonely, out here in the jungle.

  Dieterling came out behind Cahuella and escorted Gitta back into the building, while another man dismantled the field generator. Cahuella and I walked away towards the wall around the terrace. The air was warm and clammy, with no hint of a breeze. During the day it could be almost unbearably humid; nothing like Nuevo Iquique's balmy coastal climate where I had spent my childhood. Cahuella's tall, broad-shouldered frame was wrapped in a black kimono patterned with interlocked dolphins, his feet bare against the terrace's chevroned tiles. His face was broad, with what always struck me as a touch of petulance around the lips. It was the look of a man who would never accept defeat gracefully. His thick black hair was permanently slicked back from his brow; brilliant grooves like beaten gold in the light from the hamadryad flames. He fingered the damaged statue, then bent down to pick up a few shards of gold from the floor. The shards were leaf-thin, like the foil which illuminators once used to decorate sacred texts. He rubbed them sadly between his fingers, then tried to place the gold back into the statue's wound. The snake was depicted curling around its tree, in its last phase of motility before the arboreal fusion-phase.

  "I'm sorry about the damage," I said. "But you did ask for a demonstration."

  He shook his head. "It doesn't matter; I've got dozens of them in the basement. Maybe I'll even leave it as a feature, right?"

  "Deterrence?"

  "Has to be worth something, hasn't it?" Then his voice lowered. "Tanner, something's come up. I need you to come with me tonight."

  "Tonight?" It was already late, but then Cahuella tended to keep unusual hours. "What are you planning-a late-night hunting trip?"

  "I'm in the mood, but this is something else entirely. We've got visitors coming in. We need to go and meet them. There's a clearing about twenty klicks up the old jungle road. I want you to drive me there."

  I thought about that carefully before answering. "What kind of visitors are we talking about here?"

  He stroked the hamadryad's pierced head, almost lovingly. "Not the usual kind."

  Cahuella and I were on our way from the Reptile House within half an hour, driving one of the ground-effect vehicles. It had just been enough time for Cahuella to dress for the trip, donning khaki trousers and shirt, under an elaborately pocketed tan hunting jacket. I nosed the car between the shells of derelict, vine-enshrouded buildings around the Reptile House until I found the old trail, just before it plunged into the forest. In another few months the journey would not have been possible at all-the jungle was slowly healing the wound cut through the heart of it. It would take flame-throwers to scythe it clear again.

  The Reptile House and its environs had once been part of a zoological garden, built during one of the hopeful ceasefires. That particular ceasefire had only lasted a decade or so-but at the time it must have seemed that there was a good chance of peace enduring; enough for people to build something as militarily valueless and as civically improving as a zoo. The idea had been to house Terran and native specimens in similar exhibits, emphasising the similarities and differences between Earth and Sky's Edge. But the zoo had never been properly completed, and now the only intact part of it was the Reptile House, which Cahuella had made into his personal residence. It served him well: isolated and easily fortified. He had ambitions to restock its basement vivaria with a private collection of captured animals, prime amongst which would be the preadult hamadryad he had yet to catch. The juvenile took up a large volume already; he would need a whole new basement for a large one-not to mention extensive new expertise in the care of a creature with a substantially different biochemistry than its younger phase. Elsewhere, the House was already filled with the skins and teeth and bones of animals he had brought home as dead prizes. He had no love for living things, and the only reason that he wanted live specimens was because it would be obvious to his visitors that greater skill had been required in their capture than if they had been killed in the field.

  Branches and vines slapped against the car's bodywork as I gunned it down the track, the howl of the turbines out-screeching every other living thing for miles around.

  "Tell me about these visitors," I said, my throat-mike relaying my words to Cahuella through the headphones which clamped his skull.

  "You'll see them soon enough."

  "Did they suggest this clearing as a meeting place?"

  "No-that was my idea."

  "And they know which clearing you were talking about?"

  "They don't have to." He nodded upwards. I risked a glance towards the forest canopy, and when the canopy thinned for a moment-revealing sky-I saw something painfully bright loitering above us, like a triangular wedge cut out of the firmament. "They've been following us ever since we left the House."

  "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."